While looking for something else I stumbled across this article by Gregory P. Kane, posted last December on Blackamericaweb (http://blackamericaweb.tomjoyner.com/?q=articles/news/baw_commentary_news/4551) commenting on the fortieth anniversary of the film Planet of the Apes (1968). He says it is “one of the most racist films ever made.”His first argument is there are no people of color in the vicinity of New York City circa 3978, where/when Charlton Heston’s spacecraft crash-lands. (In the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Kane notes that when a black person does appear (Don Pedro Colley), he’s listed in the movie’s credits as “Negro.” In fairness, Victor Buono (King Tut from Batman, Count Manzeppi from The Wild Wild West) was listed as “Fat Man.”)Then, there are the apes, not just the obvious analog but the very structure of ape society. The ruling class are the orangutans, who are the fairest-skinned, (uh, furred) apes. Then there are the middle-class apes, the chimpanzees, who are brownish. And then there are the apes of the lowest class, the gorillas… whose fur is black. (It’s been a l-o-n-g time since I read the book, but I believe this social structure came from the source material.)Planet’s screenplay was co written by Rod Serling, who as writer and producer explored controversial and “traditionally liberal” issues like racism and right wing paranoia in his television series The Twilight Zone. He was also a lifelong supporter of the ACLU and other liberal causes. Another genre-defining movie of the period released that same year-perhaps the genre-defining movie, period, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, featured a future with no minorities in evidence anywhere. Neither were there any minorities (human, anyway) a long time ago in that far away galaxy in the first Star Wars movie. So we must ask ourselves:*Is the omission of people of color indicative of endemic racism or just an artifact of the times?*Was Serling a misguided liberal who wanted to make a social comment but his execution was problematic, or*Are we just reading too much into a better than average B movie?A blogger, commenting on Kane’s analysis, likened it to Martin Lawrence’s analysis of pool in Boomerang (http://simmerdown3.wordpress.com/2008/12/29/were-planet-of-the-apes-movies-racist/). Our films and other commercial art forms can be Rorschach tests than reveal truths about the consumers as well as the creators. Sometimes a cigar can be representative of other things. But sometimes, most times… it’s just a cigar.
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