Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Kingship, Desperation, and the Inexorable Tide of Time

First point, and the essential content of a ‘review per se’: the newest planet of the apes movie is Astonishing, a towering achievement of technical excellence and a potent, audacious rumination on Deep Themes, all the while standing as the most purely exhilarating summer action tentpole of the year. See it. Then probably again; I’ve only seen it the once but I may have another go. Conveyed? Good. Alright then.

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One often sees films about The Apocalypse, or apocalyptic conditions, but those often end just as the grand symbol, whatever it may be, crumbles or fails to crumble, depending on whether our heroes have succeeded or not and the sort of film it is. And of course postapocalyptic wastelands are innumerable through cinematic history—though recurring more frequently and with greater unsettling familiarity and urgency of late; odd, that. But the precise Moment when humanity claws earnestly at the dying of the light, begging and fighting for some perceptually-promised miracle even while Knowing somewhere deep down that the ship has sailed and sunk, the balance has shifted, and that some metaphorical cosmic referee has just counted nine on our human experiment? That particular instant has more or less gone woefully unrecorded. In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, it is played by Gary Oldman.

By sheer minutes of screen time, Gary Oldman is probably in this movie about as much as Bryan Cranston was in the new Godzilla: about half an hour. But where the latter was a bright spot abandoned by a broadly nonsensical and clumsy plot, the former is essentially the representative of all humanity and its entire civilized history. And much of that falls to Oldman himself; his final line is the assertion that he is “saving the human race” by blowing up a building, and where even on the page it must have read as a pantomime lunatic’s misguided tragedy, through Oldman it reads as nothing short of Monumental: genuine and disingenuous and certain and hopeful and desperate and terrified all at once.

U WOT, APE?

That run of adjectives aptly describes his performance as a whole, really: The Last Ruler, a good but bereft man clawing his way back to some modicum of humanity, suddenly beset by Madness in the form of talking, heavily-armed apes. The fact that I have made it this far without mentioning apes is telling, but not in the way one might fear: to pick again on the new Godzilla movie, in that film the title creature is literally barely onscreen, and wholly irrelevant even when he is aside from literally one triumphant moment five minutes before the credits roll. This film is About the apes, make no mistake, but it creates in a few painful, pointed human lines—“didn’t you used to have a Daughter? What happened to Her?”—a very concrete world, and one in which Things Got Bad.

At base, though, this is a tale of two civilizations: one winking out without quite realizing it, and one triumphing without quite wanting to. And as is only right, more time and attention and love are spent on the winners: Caesar and his apes. Without gushing unnecessarily, this film is the effects equivalent of its predecessors—that is to say, it is astounding. Not for a single moment did I doubt the absolute existence and consistency of any ape onscreen, and the principal apes are far more memorable than any human performance in the film, bar one or two Gary Oldman moments. That the emotional core and almost all the content of the film are purely CG apes interacting with CG apes is made all the more remarkable by that the vast majority of ape dialogue is conveyed via gesture and subtitle. The first half hour or so of the movie is almost entirely without dialogue, and the confidence behind this gesture speaks volumes; this is Caesar and Koba and Bright Eyes and Maurice’s movie, not the humans’.

And in watching the birth of a new civilization, we the human audience feel ourselves the alternately bemused and horrified parents, seeing the echoes of our own collective past and those selfsame timeless folkloric tales that must have created Us. The diplomat and the warrior, the duty and right to rule and command, and the shadings between those concepts, the transition from childhood to adulthood, love and honor and hope and trust and fear and revenge: it is difficult not to feel a chill as one sees in action the symbols and legends of an era to come. Even references to the film’s predecessor—the symbol from the window in Caesar’s room, a clip of James Franco on a camcorder—come off as titanic; this movie swings a broad scythe. But of course the keenest images are the most familiar: in a fiery coup scapegoated on a convenient enemy one cannot but see the burning Reichstag, and former test subject Koba repeatedly slips into a ‘stupid monkey’ act so as to lull humans into a false sense of security, and the reference to the ‘step-n-fetchit’ House Negro archetype is inescapable.

HAHA YES YOU CAN TELL I AM HARMLESS BY THE WAY I AM STARING AT YOUR THROAT

SPOILERS OR WHATEVER BUT SHUT UP IT’S MY LAST PARAGRAPH & P GENERAL ANYWAY

At base, Koba is the apes’ version of Gary Oldman: a relic of the old world. Where Oldman is rebuilding whatever he can in honor of what he lost, Koba would destroy all that remains just to assuage his own pain and rage at the dead world now gone. In the end of course, everyone is right and no one is: Oldman saved his human race time and again, only to be swept away by the amnesia of the inescapable future; Koba destroys the last vestige of human civilization but also the apes’ world as it had been in the process; even Caesar ends the film as a triumphant conqueror with no homeland and only ever-more-brutal wars his prize. Well, that and a sizable chunk of prime downtown San Francisco real estate. Let’s just say you can count me in for Part 3: Gentrification of the Planet of the Apes.

Wolf of Wall Street is American Hustle’s Evil Twin

Much has been made of the Scorsese-esque elements of David O. Russell’s necessarily-oscar-snubbed (via 12 Years a Slave/Gravity) American Hustle—pop songs integrated both diagetically and non, convoluted morality, a certain quirky, slightly off tone—and undeniably the comparison is apt; it even has a De Niro cameo! But Martin Scorsese also put out a movie last year, and The Wolf of Wall Street is something of a manic masterpiece, capturing perfectly the man’s own giddy fascination with its repugnant-yet-charismatic protagonist. It is the youngest movie I’ve seen him make in at least a decade, lean and surprising and vicious for every moment of its three hours.

Where The Wolf of Wall Street breezes through 180 minutes, however, American Hustle feels every minute of its 138. This is not a criticism per se, but an assertion: though these two films treat similar themes—selfish amorality, image obsession, audacious hucksterism and The American Dream—and employ period settings, they are tonally mirror images of one another, the worlds established in each polar opposites. David O. Russell’s film asserts that at their core people basically want to be with the people they love and that their machinations and pretences are more coping mechanisms for wounded psyches than ends in themselves. Scorsese on the other hand is just along for the ride, lauding with hallucinatory, mythological glory the unexamined, unchallenged persona of Jordan Belfort; it is as though he is saying “look, audience, here is one of those rarer monsters of our history, a being of pure id and appetite. Observe him in his natural habitat with no further comment.” That is, where the former is a nervous, sideways affirmation of humanity, the latter is a paean to excess in all things: an antihero’s journey.

The first thing a film shows you is always important. American Hustle begins with several minutes of Christian Bale futzing with his elaborate hairstyle, a thatched mountain of toupee and hairspray, only for Bradley ‘Frightwig’ Cooper to immediately bluster into the room and muss it up, Bale accusing Amy Adams of dressing Cooper like him in the ensuing argument, intimating that she’s replacing one with the other. In an instant, then, one perceives what this movie is about: the intricate façades of life, the layered duplicities of ‘a life of crime,’ and the fragility of both.

Whereas, of course, Wolf of Wall Street opens with a blowjob in a magical Ferrari. No, really. The first scene, pre-credits even, is Jordan Belfort (it bears noting that the performance is such that it never occurred to me to refer to him as DiCaprio, as with Bale and co.) telling the film itself that his car “wasn’t red; it was white, like Don Johnson’s in Miami Vice” while receiving fellatio from his “Duchess” wife. Again, the title he bestows upon his first-adulterous-girlfriend-then-second-wife is the film: an honor bestowed on a whim, maintained for its implication as much as affectation and affection, even as Belfort himself assumes only the title of Wolf. More on that later. The Ferrari, as well as reality, obliges Belfort, and the color changes. This is not a man who compromises his vision, one could infer.

This surreal wish-fulfillment echoes both the intentionally obscene displays of wealth Belfort favors—reality-distorting in their own way, as in the private plane he charters to rescue him from his doomed yacht, which is struck by lightning and explodes on approach nearly-unnoted in the background of one particularly hallucinatory sequence—and the potent narcotics he literally constantly consumes. A major laugh line, as well as perhaps the credo of the film, is Belfort, ordering Jonah Hill to go get the Quaaludes from the cabin of said sinking yacht, proclaiming “I will not die sober!” Beyond the rightly-gushed-over Lemmon 714 scene, reality distorts severely at key moments throughout Belfort’s story, often in conjunction with totemic snippets of Smokestack Lightning—Howlin’ Wolf, should the joke be lost—that act as a filmic version of the chest-pounding bestial hype-up chant Matthew McConaughey bequeaths the film and hero, denoting beyond all doubt that this is the shit, man! Personally, I found the key scene in establishing the association between beastliness and financial success and heavy drug use to be the one in which, having just quit his job on the strength of Belfort’s last paycheck, Jonah Hill smokes crack with him. Upon Jordan’s first puff, he exhales and screams that they must both immediately “run, like Lions and Tigers and Bears!” The which they both do, right out the restaurant and into the street.

It is Martin Scorsese at his absolute best, depicting these lunatic Capitalist cavemen, and we the audience are helpless but to share in his awe of the spectacle he has created. Indeed, in the thematically-key way Scorsese cameos always are, he appears as a voice on the phone, to whom Belfort sells thousands of dollars of worthless penny stocks while relentlessly and overwhelmingly stroking his ego. He throws money down the toilet to feed Jordan’s arrogance and rejuvenate his career, then happily says he’s “gonna go have a beer” to celebrate his surefire investment. We are Martin; we have been taken by Belfort, and are waiting only to see for how much.

But if Wolf the film is Belfort the character—grandiose, inebriated, seemingly-invincible—then American Hustle is Christian Bale’s Irv Rosenfeld: inherently cautious and conservative, with a sentimental streak even in his scams and a genuine desire to be decent and normal and loved. The glimpse we get of his childhood presents a strongly Goodfellas-esque image of a boy with a good heart and questionable ethics breaking neighborhood windows to help his father’s glass business, and his initial scams—selling fake art as real and offering fake loans as genuine—are clearly almost as satisfying for the moment in which the mark is genuinely overjoyed at his seeming luck as for the sheer take of it. Love and subtle deceit are intertwined for Irv, as he woos Amy Adams—and she assumes a British accent and false aristocracy to become his partner in crime as well as love—even as he remains married to a deeply unbalanced and unhinged Jennifer Lawrence and devoted to her young son.

The very madness that sustains The Wolf of Wall Street is presented as dangerous and destabilizing in American Hustle; overweening ambition and drug-addled intensity as monstrous and frightening, rather than the highest possible good. Bradley Cooper, for all the humanizing scenes of him with his curlers in at his mom’s apartment, ultimately falls prey to his own id, alienating Amy Adams from him forever with coked-up sexual aggression and ruining both his career and his own wildly-expanding plans for the case at hand by losing control of his emotions and aspirations. Likewise, Jennifer Lawrence is the only character in Hustle who could step into Wolf unaltered and seem at home, bristling with selfish, blind self-importance and greed in all things, holding onto Irv just because she can, because she has power over his feelings and therefore him. Rosenfeld is crippled, in her eyes, by his love, both for Adams and for his adopted son; the boy is just another weapon she can use to keep him. She is the ugly reminder that he has obligations beyond his desires, the truth that cannot be pushed aside for convenience’s sake. To borrow her own metaphor for herself, she is “that bit of rot in the sweetness that keeps you coming back.”

 

Genuine human connection and love are at the center of American Hustle’s worldview, and they are presented as redemptive of all things: they can transmute lies to truth, even as they break one’s heart. Falsehood is necessary only as a tool; it is one’s love that drives one’s life. Case in point, Jeremy Renner’s Mayor Carmine Polito, who enters the film as just another mark, but with whom Irv forges a true friendship, such that when the time comes to bring the hammer down, Rosenfeld cannot help but try to save him from the law, even at the cost of his based-in-falsehood relationship with the man. There is perhaps no symbol more densely loaded with meaning in the film than the microwave—or “science oven,” as it is consistently called—Polito gives Irv as a thank-you for being a good friend, which Jennifer Lawrence promptly destroys by putting tinfoil in it in a drunken, nihilistic stupor. Indeed, even the Mexican-American FBI agent who steps in to play “the sheik” for the principles’ meeting with De Niro’s mob boss is rescued by—for lack of a less-clichéd phrase—the power of friendship, suddenly remembering his few Arabic phrases just in time to avoid blowing their cover. Though this is of course not directly suggested, the symbolic implication is that his friendship with Bradley Cooper has ‘turned him into a real boy,’ so to speak.

It would stand to reason, then, that if love conquers all and earnest humanity can redeem anyone in American Hustle, then they must be pure weakness and self-destruction in Wolf of Wall Street. Belfort cannot distinguish between forms of affection, convincing himself that his Duchess’ aunt—brilliantly portrayed by Joanna Lumley—is coming onto him by being friendly and helpful, then proceeding to exploit his new relative by using her to launder money through Switzerland. Shoe designer Steve Madden, who is presented as a childhood friend of Jonah Hill’s character, comes across as ludicrous and pathetic in his grand address to Belfort’s firm, saved only by Jordan’s trademark grandiose rhetoric. Making something real is absurd and laughable, the film asserts: only artful deception is praiseworthy and powerful. 

 

Likewise, the Wolf is ultimately undone by his handful of true friendships: first when he refuses to seize the one safe way out of his wildly-illegal activities and resign before prosecutions begin because he feels a tribal connection to his employees, and ultimately and entirely when he cannot bring himself to incriminate Jonah Hill. The note he scribbles to warn his best, oldest friend is presented to him as evidence upon his arrest; there is no love on Wall Street. Nor off it: just as Belfort’s one true friendship is his downfall, his one inescapable human relationship is the one crack in the façade he uses the film to portray. During what turns out to be the last of many crazy arguments between the Wolf and his Duchess, we stay with our protagonist documentarily as he punches his wife full on in the stomach, then proceeds to give his young daughter whiplash by crashing his car into a wall while trying to kidnap her. Without shifting tone one iota, Scorsese has delivered an emotional hammer blow, as if to remind his audience that for all his Napoleonic drive and devilish charisma, this is not a nice man.

The ‘ever afters’ at the end of each film, as one might well assume, encapsulate the philosophy of each most cogently of all. Consistently throughout American Hustle Irv Rosenfeld repeats his credo: “have another move.” That is, know what you’re going to do when you have to get out of the hustle, because otherwise it will eventually bring you down with it. And he does: our last image of him is as the loving father and husband he always wanted to be, raising Jennifer Lawrence’s son with Amy Adams as his now-ex follows her manic bliss. He made his next move, and it was to turn legit, at long last.

Jordan Belfort, on the other hand, watches his world crumble around him and feels that icy fear for one brief moment, then remembers that he’s rich, and that nothing really bad ever happens to rich people in America. He serves his time at a correctional resort, then gets right back to bilking suckers to feed his immortal, omnipotent ego; the man himself even appears in the final scene to drive his smirking invulnerability home, giving DiCaprio’s version of him an appropriately overblown and self-congratulatory introduction at a motivational seminar. Which image one considers ‘The American Dream’ depends wholly on what one thinks of ‘America’ as a philosophy: are we a nation of moral hustlers who just want to be loved, or of sociopathic superhumans who bend reality to our whim?

ON THE STATES OF TWO NATIONS: Petty Lamentation and Monumental Dread

I speak to you today at the cusp; many things have begun, many are about to. Many are coming to an end. This new year of Twenty-Fourteen brings with it a palpable unease, the disconcerting sense that Dystopia is fading into being, the reality of not a future, but the future, the One that shall have been, shall be. The One that we will live our lives, all of us, within.

The Crest of the Wave

Obscurities, to be sure, but isn’t that one of the greatest losses of our age: Obscurity? Information is power, but confusion is life; nothing is clearer than Fascist Certainty, and that is precisely what ascends on the horizon here in Britain. Pearl-clutching in this vein has become such a leftist at-hand that I can hear eyes roll and tabs close at my first rhetorical gesture towards it, but I entreat patience; perhaps if nothing else my lyricism will hold your attention.

All things recycle themselves—often on a predictable timeline—and the manufactured terror of marauding hordes of BULGARIAN and ROMANIAN benefit sponges (to borrow the Daily Mail’s inexplicable capitalization) has the depressing familiarity of a bad film: I’ve seen that movie too, and cultural hatred and exclusion are Bathetic at best, Pathetic at worst—and in practice. Humans are humans; our desires to survive and succeed are true universals. Who, then—which line among the family of man—genuinely wants to perniciously defile an adopted homeland? Failure to treat people as people out of some misguided, misremembered tribute to a convenient myth—Cricket and cream on Village Greens—can only end badly, in one fashion or another. Ever-diminutizing Fortress Britain wasting away under some Farage-alike or literalization of the right’s masturbatory images of marauding hordes of unwashed undesired Others, neither is a fate to be actively pursued—though Literally Every Political Party, desperate for short-term populist support, would have you believe otherwise.

Populism is a deeply dangerous thing, when ‘the public’ seems to those in power to speak with the voice of pandering tabloid pseudo-journalists. I have already seen Cameron’s ‘auto-on family-safe content filters’ make access to content and information nigh-impossible—and if you believe they will remain optional indefinitely I have nothing but a derisive chuckle to reply with. Restricting access to knowledge and culture under the guise of ‘protecting children’s innocence’ is nothing new—I come from America, after all—but it is… lamentable, I suppose is the only word, as political change has become as surely beyond the public’s purview and interest as the anointation of a new Chinese President. There isn’t even a counterargument: to engage in a debate over censorship is nearly to acquiesce to it. It is wrong because it is: to become a parent is, by definition, to become the guardian of your offspring’s innocence. I was going to employ the cliché that the battle was lost before it was fought, but there was never going to be one; have ‘the cultured classes’ ever registered anything beyond pure apathy and impotence in the face of Puritanical nostalgia?

And yet, even as the (white, Christian, isolationist, faux-moralizing) Great British Public builds its bulwarks against foreigners and pictures of penises, that selfsame government actively and self-righteously starves them, to their own thunderous applause. More directly: Iain Duncan Smith is figuratively a monster. Patrician self-importance and crowd-pleasing “Make the buggers work for their money” posturing aside, the man and his Department have pushed nearly half a million honest, regular people into begging for food from literal food banks over the course of three years. No more need even be said: the Welfare State is already dead. The politicians are just fighting over how to most attractively embalm its corpse—shall it be clothed in the relics of its former self, or ‘evolved with our changing times?’

AUSTERITY

But enough of the Sceptered Isle; it is relevant primarily to itself, and my Benighted Homeland of America has never even particularly pretended to care for its poor, tired, huddled masses, finding it simpler—more Christian, more patriotic—to cast them as contemptible victims of self-inflicted damnation: “if they don’t want to be impoverished, they should have been born wealthy: Bootstraps.” Fortune is hereditary to the point of Feudal Lordship in the Land of the Free—only becoming more so, day by day—and the political class is literally, actually, unironically a Vaudevillian sideshow of gibbering, pratfalling morons. Recall, my friends, that for the better part of a month this past year—again, literally—There Was Not a Federal Government. It ceased to be; the United States was Ungoverned.

Not that that’s even particularly a bad thing, at this point: I wonder if the shutdown precluded Random Robot Murder in countries The American People are wholly incapable of 1) locating on a map, 2) conceiving of as being peopled by Human Beings functionally identical to them, 3) caring about one iota for one solitary second, or if Random Robot Murder was deemed ‘essential to National Security’? The question answers itself; we are wolves in wolves’ clothing. Such is the legacy of the Second Bush Administration: a nation so wracked with nameless, soul-deep terror of Elsewhere and its Brutish Inhabitants that it invents science-fiction technologies to kill them in droves for no reason whatsoever—without the political inconveniences and tangible realities of war.

Do Predators Dream of Blowing Up Sheep?

The legacy of the Obama Administration, on the other hand, has already become one of fear of its own citizenry. Constant universalized surveillance and data collection of, from, and about citizens and luminaries in the US and ‘strategically vital’—that is, more or less random—countries all over the world is, now, ‘just another fact of modern life,’ to be tutted at, bemoaned, but never challenged. For what would that even look like? Who among our political classes really wants to give up one iota of power? There is a reason each Presidency is more powerful than the last, and I leave you to choose-your-own-aphorism to complete that thought.

Beyond the disgust and anger PRISM—and its certainly-infinite, yet-unknown sister programs—cannot but provoke, however, there is a dark sheen of absurdity and inexplicability that I have never been able to penetrate. To paraphrase the Christmas message from Edward Snowden, the truest hero of Two-Thousand-Thirteen: when a government wants to know what people think, the easiest way to find out is to ask them. But then, they don’t really want to know, do they? Information is power, and that is all those in charge really want: limitless, boundless power—over us all, in perpetuity, to whatever end some eventual ‘man of vision’ decides to apply it to.

To retrace my steps for a moment, I invite you to recall that the reason There Was No Federal Government, for the first time in the nation’s history, was that Barack Obama had the temerity—the audacity, if you will—to attempt to use it to help people, even a little, ever. The reforms that have been termed ‘Obamacare’ are, I grant, in many ways somehow worse than the predatory monstrosity they were intended to tackle—but that, of course, is down to the same set of mental defectives who won’t take free money their constituents and states desperately need out of some nonsensical, primordial sense of duty. Rather these, our elected representatives, have chosen to spend years of the time they were supposed to be governing stomping their little feet and holding their breath and courageously crying out “No! No No No! I hate you for trying to help the people who elected you to the Presidency! You are not one of us, in some indefinable way. You are not allowed to do this, because reasons!” But if their loyalty is not to their constituents, then who, exactly, is it to? Ayn Rand? Glenn Beck? Imaginary Ronald Reagan? As with so many things, one must laugh not to cry.

Pictured: Ron, Nancy, and the Present Republican National Committee

Beyond the obsessions and follies of the fleeting moment, this year marks the centenary of that truest fountainhead of bitter, nauseous laughter: the First World War. A few days hence, I had the misfortune, as did many, of being made aware of UK Secretary of Education Michael Gove’s nonsensical opinions on said conflict. In brief, he believes it was a time of patriotism, nobility, and heroes, of good men doing their grim duty out of selfless honor. Perhaps it was. But it was also, certainly and truly, the greatest tragedy of modernity and perhaps world history, a global farce whose punchline was death on an unimaginable scale for decades, defining the Twentieth Century as one of brutality, conflict and horror just as surely as one of progress and hope.

My sole true entreaty, my deepest and most heartfelt wish, such that one can wish on this scale, is thus: that this Century cannot, must not, will not be allowed to echo the last. The West may alternately cook in its own juices and freeze solid as the planet’s fever rises and our infrastructure crumbles like a concrete Rome, but my earnest prayer-to-Nothingness is that we at least be permitted our decline, that we be given the opportunity to decay rather then conflagrate in one last explosion of nonsensical rage and pain. The danger, such as it can be perceived, appears to be in the East: between Japan and China, between the Koreas, between India and Pakistan. Should this time be looked back upon, let it at least be said that we conceived of the spark that ignited us before it was struck—but then, that itself seems a myopia, an easy at-hand to Other the danger and preemptively deflect the blame.

In the last estimation, then, I find I have no hope to give you, only old cynicism for a new age. All must recur eternally, or else conclude utterly. Metaphorical God Bless Us, Metaphorical God Help Us. Amen.