Plumbline Author: Charles Adams
Date: October 10, 2001
Topic: Entertainment and the Present Age (re-run)

It was a Thursday night during spring break of my senior year in college-April 4, 1968. My young wife-who would remain a teenager for 6 more months-had passed her driving test that morning. We were celebrating by going to the movies as escapism was the theatrical therapy against the political turmoil of those days. On January 23 of that year North Koreans had seized the USS Pueblo and its 83-man crew in the Sea of Japan. Shortly thereafter the Vietcong had launched their "Tet offensive," attacking Saigon and greatly escalating the war in Vietnam. Eugene McCarthy, the anti-war senator from Minnesota, had entered the New Hampshire primary, announcing that he could not support the president's war policies. His strong showing and the unabated anti-war protests drove President Lyndon Johnson to decide not to run for re-election.

But my wife and I were escaping all that by going to see the new Charlton Heston film-Planet of the Apes. Science fiction defined for us quality media that year. A new, hour-long series had debuted the previous fall; and almost every Friday night found us hustling through the grocery shopping so as to make it back to our apartment by 7:30 to watch the latest episode of Star Trek. It had intelligence, passion, and angst-personified respectively by Science Officer Spock, Captain James Kirk, and Chief Medical Officer McCoy. And the tension between Spock's pure rationalism and Kirk's humanist romanticism echoed tensions that were being played out in real life on college campuses across the country. So while the title of the film-Planet of the Apes-sounded a little silly, my wife and I had hopes that it would measure up to the high standard set by Star Trek.

And we were not disappointed. Charlton Heston's character in the film is a bitter, pessimistic, and self-centered astronaut. Much of the film is devoted to his expressions of anger: anger at what he considers the foolish idealism of his two fellow astronauts, anger at being treated like an animal by a culture of intelligent apes, and anger at-well, let me save that for the end of this Plumbline. What we didn't appreciate about the film was it's clear anti-religion message. Actually, being 1968, the message was really more anti-authoritarian than anti-religion-a message we would have embraced had it taken a different form. But in this film the authority figures are those aged apes that hold to and defend ancient, religious truths. The heroes-if there can be said to be heroes in this dystopian tale-are a trio of younger apes representing the scientific mind of their society. They are astounded at the discovery of a human-Charlton Heston-that has the capacity of speech. Questioning the ancient religious dogma, they heretically postulate that perhaps apes were descendants of an ancient race of humans, a theory suggested by one of the young ape's recent archeological discoveries in what is called "the forbidden zone." The appearance of this talking human seems to confirm the theory.

Near the end of the film the young apes help Charlton Heston to escape. What looks to be the last scene has this angry astronaut riding off on a horse-with a female human he has picked up along the way, of course-and into the sunset. But that's not quite the last scene. Instead of riding off into the sunset, our astronaut rides around the bend of a great river in what seems to be a desolate land.

Now remember, this is April of 1968. The civil rights movement is still young. The war in Vietnam is tearing the nation apart. And, of course, we were still in the midst of the cold war: less than five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also consider that, while in the beginning of the film there was a lot of talk about Einstein's theory of relativity and of how these astronauts would have aged more slowly and arrived at an earth hundreds of years in the future from the time they left it, none-the-less, most of us in the theater audience simply assumed that the astronauts had crash-landed on a different planet in a different solar system. You see, the main part of the film focused on discussions of evolution rather than relativity.

So, when the last scene arrives, when Charlton Heston rides his horse around that bend in the great river and looks up, most of us in the audience responded with a huge communal gasp. For there was the leaning wreck of the Statue of Liberty. And there was the realization that our astronaut was not on another planet but was back home on Earth-thousands of years later-after 20th century humanity had destroyed itself as a civilization. Charlton Heston's last angry words express the communal grief, anguish, and fear of a generation when he curses his fellow humanity and cries, "You did it! You really, finally did it!"

Now, I'm moved to tell this story because just a couple of weeks ago my wife and I went to the movies to see the new version of Planet of the Apes. What a disappointment! The story, if there can be said to have been one, was incoherent and trivial. What we experienced was two hours of violence and special effects, with a few absurd references to animal rights thrown in. I think that tells us something about our present age, starkly contrasting it with the age in which we lived a third of a century ago. I'm not suggesting that 1968 was somehow better. What I will suggest is that we-particularly we Christians-were more aware of the forces of evil that threatened to tear our world apart back then. Today those forces, no less evil, are more insidious. They lull us into the complacency of spiritual defenselessness by the narcotic effects of mindless entertainment.

So if you cannot resist going to see the new version of Planet of the Apes in the near future, or if you have already seen it, I urge you to view the video of the 1968 version as well. And then reflect on what the differences tell you about the society in which you live.

But wait! Don't go. I have not quite finished my story. Come back with me for just a moment to April 4 of 1968 as we exit the movie theatre, saying to ourselves, "Wow, that was quite an ending." With our aesthetically nurtured mixed feelings of awe, satisfaction, and angst, my wife and I walked to the parking lot, unlocked our car, and prepared for the short drive back to our apartment. As was my habit, I clicked on the radio. On every station was the same news announcement: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. And for the second time that evening we saw the Statue of Liberty leaning violently toward a decadent demise.

For Plumbline, I'm Charles Adams, Dean of the Natural Sciences, Dordt College