I have just been to watch "War for the Planet of the Apes" with a friend. Even though I haven't seen any of the other movies of the franchise so I am not even sure how much it connects with them, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. I think it's one of the best movies of the year so far. But, perhaps more importantly, I felt it included so many interesting debates on disability, illness, disability, community, understanding and the essence of humanity, which I will proceed to discuss below. There will be spoilers, so be warned. Also since I am not familiar with the rest of the franchise, I don't know how and if these themes are explored in the rest of the movies, so I can't say anything about that.
For those who don't know what this movie is about, War for the Planet of the Apes revolves around a humanised species of intelligent apes who have evolved as part of a human experiment, have most of the characteristics of humans in their thinking, social structure, emotions and morality and have formed a tribe that tries to survive in a war against humans. The humans, on the other hand, have been affected by a virus that takes away their ability to speak and are fighting hard to avoid exposure to it.
There are many things in this movie that have created a snowball effect of thoughts in my mind. Here's a few that I will be talking about in this post:
- The character of "Nova"
- The character of the Colonel and his reaction to the virus
- The society of the Apes vs how humans are presented
The character of Nova
Nova is a young girl who the main group of Apes find abandoned in a house. Nova seems to not have the ability to speak, but is able to communicate through hand gestures and sign language. One Ape, Maurice, feels drawn to her, because he has lost his own children and sees her as a young orphan child and proceeds to adopt her, much to the (initial) resistance of the rest of the Ape group and Caesar, the group leader and main character of the show. Nova joins the group for the rest of the movie and plays a very important role in their later plans to rescue the captured Ape tribe from the tyrannical humans.
Nova seems to blend effortlessly with the ape group. She doesn't struggle to communicate with them and quickly adapts to their communication style of sign language and gestures. She forms a strong bond with Maurice and goes through an existential crisis of who she is. In a very touching scene in the movieasking him "Am I an Ape?" and he replies "No" "Am I a human", he continues. He then points to a necklace (which said "Nova") of sorts that she was given earlier in the film and, in a rare instance of Maurice speaking English he says to her "You. Nova" as a way to explain that she is a bit of both. Nova accepts Maurice's statement eagerly and seems to have resolved her dilemma. Nova stays with the apes until the end of the film and becomes part of their tribe.
Nova's character is very interesting to me for many reasons. First of all, she never seemed frustrated on bothered in any way that she did not talk. Even though we, as the audience, know that she cannot talk because she contracted the virus that the humans have been fighting against, she herself doesn't seem to know that and she is at peace with the way she is, at least in terms of communication. Furthermore, even though she cannot talk, she can still communicate with the other apes via gestures and the sign language they use which she learns very quickly and easily by mimicking them. Although we are not given much of anything regarding Nova's backstory, the way she behaves in the film seems to suggest that either she hasn't been talking for years, or she never was able to talk, or she doesn't remember a time where she was able to talk or at the very least even if she does, she doesn't mind the fact that she can't talk anymore. What is even more interesting is that her inability to talk makes it even easier for her to blend with the rest of the Apes, as they mostly don't talk either. At the same time, the fact that there are a couple of them who do, like Caesar and Bad Ape, and Nova not only does not attempt to talk to them but barely interacts with them during the entire film and instead stays attached to Maurice, who uses sign language and grunts almost exclusively, seems to reinforce the notion that she is not interested in regaining the ability to talk or thinks that she is lacking in any way for being unable to talk (which is very much the opposite of the Colonel, as you will see below).
What is also very interesting about Nova, is her position on her "illness" and her humanity. The world thinks that she is sick and should be eliminated (as you will see below) whereas she herself doesn't seem to care or be bothered by the fact that she can't talk in any way. She doesn't seem to suffer any other consequences from the virus that affected her, physical or mental. This is an interesting observation, because later on the Colonel goes to say that the virus "takes away the very thing that makes us human". But even if it were so, Nova doesn't seem to mind if she is human or not. If anything, it seems that she'd rather be an Ape (a species who communicates primarily through grunts and sign language). That could of course be that she, by a combination of choice partly and necessity, ends up living with the tribe of the Apes but she never showed any interest in living with the humans, or even getting to know them better. She quickly shares the perception of the Apes that the humans are the enemy, those who enslave and kill the Apes and her dilemma of whether she is an Ape or a human seems to come from the fact that she suspects that she is of human decent, but does not want to associate with the humans in any way, she would much rather stay with her adopted father, Maurice and the Ape tribe. It is very interesting to see in this character (and in the movie in general) how being part of the human species and obeying its conventions seems to be a bad thing, a scary thing and something to rebel against. But it is also very interesting that Maurice doesn't try to hide the fact that she is of human decent from her but instead re-contextualises it for her in the nature-nurture framework, giving her a name and a category that makes her both. Essentially at the end of the film Nova is someone who may be biologically "human" (though not according to the rest of the humans), but is environmentally and socially an Ape. As a "new species", a combination of both, Nova seems to be the only non-Ape person surviving at the end of the film.
Nova is in many ways like an autistic child. Unaware of the world's perception of her condition, she has accepted who she is and uses her unique (unique to us as humans who communicate through speech, not to her or the Apes) traits to bond with other individuals she perceives to be like her and is eager to become a part of their society. Nova feels at home with the other Apes, because they all seem to have the same communication needs. In that she appears to be lucky; she stumbled upon a community of loving and caring individuals who have the same communication style as her. But she also seems to have made her own luck, by accepting who she is and seeking to live in accordance to her nature (instead of fighting it, for example, or mourning the way she is or trying to fix herself). Many autistic people feel the similarly for their own autism. They do not want to fix it, they do not mourn for it, they instead look for a community where they can be who they are, they seek to create a society that fits their needs and abilities.
The character of the Colonel
Contrasting the character of Nova, we have the character of the Colonel, the only other main human in the show. Colonel is the leader of a group who is obsessed with erasing the existence of Caesar and his tribe from the face of the Earth. The group acts in ways reminiscent of the army of Nazi Germany with their choreographed walks almost identical to those of Nazi soldiers, their slogans and even the hymn (which was the national anthem of the United States, a touch I must say I thoroughly enjoyed). Consequently, the Colonel himself takes the role of Hitler, a tyrannic dictator who addresses his troops every morning from his balcony only to radicalise them even more each time and to remind them of their "holy" purpose, which the Colonel himself very firmly believes in as well. The Colonel enslaves the Apes and makes them work for him. This work does not seem to be anything productive or to serve any particular purpose other than simply to torture the enslaved Apes as much as possible (perhaps it did and I missed it I don't know, either way it doesn't matter too much). He gives them very little food and water and tortures each and every one who seems to disobey him in front of the others, as an example.
Later in the film the Colonel introduces the concept of the virus. We have priorly been introduced to Nova and as we did Maurice said "she seems unable to speak, like us" and it is only after the Colonel reveals the existence of the virus to the enslaved Caesar that we understand why Nova can't talk (which only reinforces the fact that Nova doesn't know or care about the existence of the virus). After a series of events, the Colonel's soldiers capture Caesar and lead him in front of the Colonel. After being challenged by Caesar in a dialogue that I won't pretend to remember (but it had to do with sacrifice and the importance of family), the Colonel reveals the nature of the virus and what it does to humans. In his words, "humans lose the ability to speak first, then the ability to think and then they eventually die". Consequently, he believes that this virus strips humans of "the very essence that makes them human". He then proceeds to tell Caesar that his own son contracted the virus, as did the people who cared for him, as did the physicians who tried to cure him. As a result, he shot his own son, who, in his words, looked at him scared and confused and then directed his soldiers to do the same thing to every other person who contracted the virus, thus having to kill many close friends and mates and learning the meaning of sacrifice that he himself first demonstrated. As the movie goes on, Caesar and the rest of the Apes escape his capture and when he returns to kill him, we find out that the Colonel himself had contracted the virus from a doll Nova dropped in Caesar's cage earlier in the film and is, as a result, unable to talk. Caesar tries to kill him and the Colonel encourages him to do it by loading the gun he is holding and pointing it to his head. Caesar can't bring himself to kill him, however, at which point the Colonel takes the gun and kills himself as Caesar walks away.
There are many things that are interesting about the Colonel (many of which I won't be talking about here, for example I won't be going much into his militant group and his resemblance to Hitler unless it relates to the virus), but I am only going to talk about his position on the virus. First of all, the way he talks about the virus is interesting. He describes it as something that takes away a humans ability to talk (aka communicate verbally) and then think and then die. He makes it out to be a debilitating condition that eventually destroys the human brain. Yet we have no evidence of this from Nova, the human who is effected by this virus. The only thing she seems to be lacking is the ability to talk. It can be argued that the virus might kill Nova in a long enough period of time, but the film gave no such indication and as it appears (from the ending) to be the last film of the franchise, it safe to assume that the virus won't evolve in this way. The only thing, therefore, that the virus seems to affect is a human's ability to communicate verbally. And yet this seemed such a big deal to the Colonel that went as far as to call it "what makes us human", go on a long rant to Caesar about how the humans created the Apes, which are now smarter than the humans, and the virus is Nature's way to punish them for that mistake. Indeed the virus is so terrifying to him that he kills his own son for having contracted it, as well as other, at times very valuable, members of his staff.
If we were to continue the Hitler analogy, which the film very carefully weaves into its plot, the Apes can be compared to the Jewish people and those who contracted the virus to the millions of disabled people Hitler also assassinated. The first need to be punished for being born who they are and are clearly presented as a group whose abilities and talents he perceived as a threat to humanity, the second ones had to die because they were so significantly altered that they did not seem humans to him anymore. Hitler murdered million of disabled people just for being disabled and, although I am not directly aware of any stories about the fate of autistic people in Nazi Germany (after all autism was barely recognised then) we do know that Hans Asperger, who was a practitioner in Austria, had to hide his research out of fear of the harm it would have brought upon his subjects.
But what is perhaps more interesting is that the only "impairment" those affected by the virus seemed to demonstrate is the ability to speak verbally. They were still able to communicate with alternative systems (as seen in Nova's case) but that seemed so unacceptable to the Colonel that not only did he try to cure it, but upon failing to do that he murdered his own son, multiple, potentially invaluable, members of his army (like physicians) as well as himself upon contracting the virus. In other words, he refused to change his little society to accommodate those who cannot communicate verbally and was terrified that eventually they all might end up losing the ability to communicate verbally and thus, according to him, lose their humanity. Because in this world (much like our own?) those who cannot communicate verbally are not human. And even though it was relatively simple to create a society in which both could coexist (as demonstrated by the Apes), the Colonel didn't even entertain such an option, presumably wanting to maintain the purity of his superior species by maintaining its ability to speak verbally.
The society of the Apes vs how humans are presented
To conclude the comparison and the impression the movie left on me, we have to talk about the society of the Apes. Within the Ape society it doesn't seem to matter what style of communication you use, as long as the others understand you. Some use sign language and gestures, some grunt and some are able to speak English. They are all equally understood and neither is considered more or less intelligent based on their means of communications. Many use two or even three of those options (even though the first two are the most common). Yes Caesar, the leader of the tribe, is the most fluent one (which makes sense from a pacing standpoint as he has the most lines and is the only one who converses with humans), but the fact he is not the leader of the tribe because he can speak and nowhere in the movie are those who do not speak English presented as less intelligent. They are just as capable, just require more subtitles (which as someone who always watched subtitled movies because of my nationality, I find it so funny that it bothers English speaking audiences). I enjoyed the emotions and complexities the Apes' grunts and gestures were communicating so much. If it were up to me, the movie wouldn't have subtitles at all. The most important parts were communicated in English anyway and in many cases the subtitles seemed redundant (like when Maurice singes "thirsty" then Nova singes "thirsty" and then Caesar proceeds to give her a flask of water - we could have deduced that ourselves without the subtitles, they seemed to have existed to appease insecure audiences who might have felt that they didn't know what was going on). What I found interesting though is that when, at the end, Caesar lies dying and Maurice starts grunting at him, clearly upset (and tearful) my friend (who has little relationship to autism and does not know that I am autistic) because somewhat upset because she couldn't understand him and kept asking where the subtitles are. Which helped me realised just how dependent on verbal speech most (allistic) people are. It was clear by so many signs that Maurice was very upset and of course it was also easily deduced from an entire movie's worth of him being Caesar's best friend and close adviser. Why did she need him to SAY how upset he was? And yet we are the ones who are blamed for not reading body language... Anyway.
At the end humans got eliminated and Apes were the dominant species on Earth, a turn that the audience celebrates because humans were evil. Having drawn the parallels that I did throughout the film, I can only hope that it also is a bit prophetic. I hope that in the not so distant future, ones ability and means of communication will have as much bearing on their status in the world as the colour of their hair and eyes. In a phrase I never thought I'd say before today, may we all become one day a society of Apes.
