Essay Questions

One of the most famous quotes from Planet of the Apes is Taylor’s crying out while in captivity, “It’s a madhouse…a madhouse!” Explain how this outburst could be considered ironic.

A madhouse is a pejorative form for an institution to treat the mentally ill. It is commonly used in the vernacular to describe any place where things are taking place beyond reason or, in other instances, where events are at odds with one’s accepted perspective of reality and truth. Taylor’s outburst is stimulated by his being treated like an animal by creatures he is used to seeing as mere beasts existing on a plane beneath his own. The irony here is almost too obvious: Taylor also thinks all humans are beneath him. His oft-stated perspective is one that has the cumulative effective of revealing him to be an utter misanthrope. Therefore, it is irony of an almost paradoxical state that Taylor would consider being treated like an animal by creatures he considers to be little more than beasts the equivalent of living in a madhouse. Under the conditions of personality that Taylor exhibits throughout the film, his entire existence is a parallel to the conditions of his imprisonment by the apes. The whole universe is a madhouse for Taylor.

A common criticism of the film is that Nova represents the ideal submissive woman for a man like Taylor. Prove this critique wrong.

The criticism is based on the fact that she is mute and therefore represents the ideal woman for a man like Taylor because she can’t talk back and, by definition, question his authority. Taylor’s comments about the dead female astronaut Stewart being essentially a baby making machine for the male astronauts in her role as the “new Eve” had she survived further establishes that Taylor is not merely misanthropic, but deeply misogynistic as well. Furthermore, comments made to Nova from “imagine me needing someone” to “look at that…I taught you to smile” only further cements that Taylor has got some major league issues with women in general and probably would desire Nova to be a submissive hunk of women flesh. Her erasure of Taylor’s writing in the sand is an outright act of rebellion against his authority, however, so while Taylor may get back on that horse and ride away from Lady Liberty thinking he’s found the perfect submissive wife, the evidence hardily suggests that yet again Mr. Taylor is going to be disappointed when his perspective of reality does not quite mesh with the actual manifestation of reality.

Describe how film seem confirm Darwinian evolutionary theories on “natural selection” while at the same time denying the non-Darwinian term “survival of the fittest.”

That the apes have evolved as a matter of natural selection should go unrefuted. Following global nuclear annihilation, the forces of nature were essentially reset to even odds as there were bound to be more apes than men simply by virtue of mankind being the target of nuclear warheads. That apes—which are revealed in subsequent sequels but which is not touched upon in this film directly as being domesticated into daily human society—would find their species placed in an ideal circumstance for natural selection to take its natural evolutionary course seems a potentially like circumstance would fit in logically within theories outlined by Darwin. The concept of survival of fittest—not originally a Darwinian term, but rather a social construct appended to natural evolutionary mechanics—on the other hand is revealed to be just that: a social construct not capable of standing up to forces of nature.

By all standards of logical convention, the humans that Taylor meets on the planet of the apes would not have de-evolved if survival of the fittest applied, since natural selection would result not in their undergoing a regressive state, but merely being killed off, given the time frame involved. Extending the narrative into the future by hundreds of thousands and perhaps even millions of years would prove his to be true. Were survival of the fittest a natural state of affairs rather than a social abstraction of natural law, the humans would not have de-evolved into a more primitive state, but evolved into a state at the very least equal to that their eventual ape masters. On the other hand, natural selection can logically explain why ape evolution would lead to a social construct in which the smarter humans—like, for instance, Taylor—have been killed over time to create what is essentially a genetic pool of troglodytes.