Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Planet of the Apes
1968 · Franklin J. Schaffner · Planet of the Apes on Sightlines
Three orangutans sit on a high bench. One covers his eyes, one his ears, one his mouth. The man they are judging stands below them, and nothing he says can reach them. It's a schoolyard gag staged with full courtroom solemnity, and it's a good key to Planet of the Apes. The joke works only because the film has already taught us to read faces we were told would be laughable.
So start with the faces. The producer Arthur P. Jacobs spent years trying and failing to persuade a studio to make a picture full of talking apes. Executives assumed audiences would giggle. A screen test changed their minds, and what made the test work was John Chambers, who had learned his trade building prosthetics for wounded servicemen. His foam-latex appliances moved. Brows lifted, lips tightened, cheeks gave. Watch Kim Hunter's Zira and Roddy McDowall's Cornelius and notice where the warmth comes from: the eyes, the voice, and a hundred small motions under the latex.
Deleuze has a name for what happens in those close-ups. He calls it the affection-image: a face held close so that a feeling registers before it turns into action. He divides such faces in two. Some are still and reflective, one quality resting on a smooth surface. Others are intensive. They are built from micro-movements that climb toward a threshold, and he calls this kind the potisign, the face of power. Zira's face is a potisign. It is always working, curiosity tipping into alarm and then into stubborn sympathy, and Chambers's invention is what lets those small shifts reach us at all. King Kong had taught audiences in 1933 to find pathos on an ape's face. This film takes that grammar and gives it a laboratory, a political order and a tribunal.
Why bring Deleuze to a Fox adventure picture? Because the film puts what he called the action-image under strain, and it's exciting to watch the machine buckle. In the action-image's "large form," a character perceives a situation, the situation presses on him, and he acts to change it. Situation, action, new situation. Studio cinema was built on that circuit, and Charlton Heston's marquee weight was exactly what the studio wanted from its star. Schaffner casts him as Taylor, a misanthrope with a snarl, and then takes away everything the large form needs.
Look at the hunt. Mounted gorillas drive fleeing humans through cornfields and into nets. Hugh S. Fowler cuts it fast and disorienting, with freeze-like trophy images, while Leon Shamroy shoots from low, canted angles. This is what Deleuze calls the binomial: force against force, hunter against quarry, the duel at the heart of the action-image. But the duel runs the wrong way. Deleuze also talks about the mark, an image whose meaning comes from habit: when you see a man with a gun and an animal running, you know who falls. The hunt flips that habit, and its shock is the shock of a broken mark. We know these images. We've just never been on this side of them.
Then Taylor is caught, muzzled, caged. This is the film's quiet radicalism: its hero can perceive everything and do almost nothing. Deleuze describes a crisis of the action-image, when characters can no longer respond adequately to what they see. It's the hinge where postwar cinema began to turn from acting toward watching and enduring. Planet of the Apes doesn't cross that hinge. It's too committed to momentum. But it stands right on it. For long stretches Heston performs entirely with a body that has lost its power to act: hunted, held down, gagged. The circuit is still there, only jammed, and the frustration you feel watching him is the film's argument, felt in the gut.
Around him the ape city works as what Deleuze calls a synsign, an encompassing milieu that calls for action and, here, smothers it. Costume color makes the caste order readable at a glance. Chimpanzees are the intellectuals, orangutans the political and religious authorities, gorillas the soldiers and laborers. That stratified, theocratic society is usually credited to Michael Wilson, the blacklisted writer brought in to rework Rod Serling's drafts. Serling had imagined a technologically advanced ape world that would have cost too much to build. Wilson made it quasi-agrarian and devout, which was cheaper and also sharper. Historians still argue over who wrote what, but Wilson's hand has a history. In Salt of the Earth he turned social hierarchy into political allegory. On The Bridge on the River Kwai he secretly adapted Pierre Boulle, the author of this film's source novel.
That's why the see-no-evil judges matter. Deleuze describes a reflection-image, in which action turns into figure: the film stops fighting and stages a picture that comments on what's happening. The tribunal halts the plot to make an emblem of willful blindness. It's satire in the old sense, and the film trusts us to read it.
Two more threads. Shamroy had composed vast sets and crowds in anamorphic widescreen for Cleopatra. Here he gives the astronauts' desert crossing an emptiness that feels truly otherworldly. The film keeps alternating those huge vistas with the taut line of a chase or an escape, and Deleuze calls that rhythm a respiration-space: the milieu breathes out, the action pulls tight. Then there's Jerry Goldsmith's score, percussive and atonal, with no melody to lean on. It descends from the Barrons' electronic tonalities in Forbidden Planet, which made dissonance science fiction's native sound, and from Goldsmith's own twelve-tone-influenced writing for Freud: The Secret Passion. It never lets us settle.
What did the film change? It proved that intelligent science fiction could be a mass-audience event: a widescreen studio spectacle that carried ideas about race, faith and human vanity without apologizing for them. It launched a franchise. Chambers received an honorary Oscar because no competitive makeup category existed yet, and his work is routinely cited as a catalyst for the one that eventually did. Every film that asks us to find a soul behind a built face owes something to those moving brows.
So watch the faces, and watch Heston's mouth. Notice how often the hero is the one who can't act, while the apes argue, hesitate and feel in close-up. Then take up the question the tribunal is daring you to answer: in this courtroom, which side of the bench are you on?
Concepts in play
- icon of power (intensive face) — John Chambers's articulated foam-latex prosthetics let brows, lips and cheeks move, so Zira and Cornelius build feeling through micro-movements, eyes and voice in close-up
- binomial — The ape hunt: mounted gorillas drive fleeing humans through cornfields and into nets, a force-against-force duel with the hunter/hunted roles reversed, cut fast by Hugh S. Fowler
- mark (broken habit-chain) — The hunt's freeze-like trophy imagery reverses the customary human-hunter image, so a familiar chain of expectation is overturned
- crisis of the action-image — Taylor, played by the film's action star, is captured, muzzled, caged and denied speech, so he perceives everything and can act on almost nothing; the performance is carried by a constrained body
- the encompasser — The ape society as an encompassing caste milieu (chimpanzee intellectuals, orangutan authorities, gorilla soldiers and laborers), legible through costume color and staging
- the Figure — The tribunal's formal staging and the three orangutan judges' see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil gesture turn the action into a satirical emblem of institutional dogma
- respiration-space — Leon Shamroy's Panavision desert vistas and the astronauts' crossing of barren terrain alternate with the tight action of the hunt and captivity