Rise of the Planet of the Apes

785 words

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is, as the title suggests, a prequel to the classic film Planet Of The Apes. It’s a departure from the chronology established in the original prequel, tapping into the contemporary Zeitgeist and leveraging the latest special effects. In this improvement on the original story line, gene research spirals out of control, with our technological reach exceeding our ethical grasp. It’s created by and for contemporary leftists, with bleeding-heart protagonists, but the villains are more deviant (if predictably blonde) than traditional.

Modernity’s Faustian quest for more money, power, and respect hits a wall in this film. Our selfish, sentimental, and altogether atrophied ethics prove unfit for the moral challenge we create for ourselves. The film taps into a growing anxiety in our culture, a creeping realization of how vulnerable we’ve become. The forces of nature, forces we’ve become too effete to fathom—much less anticipate or rise to meet—are encroaching on our McMansions and tugging at the doors of our late-model cars.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28Z_D9Grh18

The movie begins with a simian Kunta Kinte‘s kidnapping from his idyllic jungle homeland. Once in America, the apes are hardened by our cruelty and empowered by our greed and gullibility to rise against us. Driven by a sentimental impulse to keep our captives as pets, we eschew protocol and common sense in favor of simple self-sacrificing mercy. But they’ll only be our pets until they’re powerful enough to forcefully overwhelm us. Eventually, the pets turn on their owners, as the instinctive will to power prevails over the need for comfort, love, or even food. As demonstrated in Mugabe and the White African, they would rather starve and struggle while socially dominant than feast and frolic under the aegis of benevolent overlords.

Of course, Black people are the metaphorical apes, the socially inferior “other” who are ripping us out of our cars and savagely beating us. The horrific anti-White mob attacks in Wisconsin occurred the evening immediately before the release of this film, mob attacks which eerily paralleled its action scenes. In the film, the institutional resources come down hard on the side of the humans, deploying a swarm of armed officers to quell the uprising. In reality, the humans being dragged out of their cars and brutally torn apart by swarms of Black “youths” are simply ignored.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqV-dGSh4h8

Our own very real pets are revolting against their masters, both in America and throughout the rest of the White West. It starts out innocently enough, with a baby chimpanzee named Caesar who’s beloved by the family. Fez amuses the White cast of That 70’s Show with his cultural peculiarities while never challenging the Whiteness pervading the neighborhood. Erika D. Smith charms the Indianapolis Star’s newsroom full of middle-aged White guys with her Black perspective, without actually threatening its White liberal hegemony. Carlton Banks, Bryant Gumbel, and Barack Obama all know how to comport themselves in a non-threatening way, aping White mannerisms, dialects, and patterns of thinking. But they’re not actually the docile pets White Americans presume them to be. None of them are content with White America’s continued social and cultural dominance.

Caesar, the chimp who’s infected with the smartness gene and driven to overthrow his human overlords, knows humans better than they know themselves. He knows the comforts of captivity and would rather risk his life to lead his own to liberation. Despite being raised by humans, he knows that he’s an ape first. He, like Obama, rejected the identity he was nurtured with in favor of his true identity. He rejected sentimentality, liberalism, diversity, and inclusion in favor of blood. Caesar’s story is one of race and inheritance, and his struggle against and triumph over his overlords is a damning indictment of multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism, in a nutshell, is the notion that we Whites can keep minorities as pets. If history isn’t lesson enough, then perhaps this movie could serve as an allegory to help awaken Americans to its folly. While the writers and the studio doubtlessly see their film as an inspiring civil rights and animal rights allegory, the majority of White Americans will see it in a far different light. While it won’t jolt them into explicit White Nationalism, it is second only to District 9in its ability to serve as a reminder of the horrors in store for us if we don’t recognize and defend our collective interests. Ideally, it will remind us that we, like Caesar, also possess an identity and community in desperate need of leadership. It will remind us that we, like Caesar, also have a right to abandon our unnatural and unsustainable situation in pursuit of a home where we can live and thrive among our own.