Planet of the Apes and Philosophy

by Huss, John

  In contrast, actors, directors, and fans tend to look at the raw footage and see in it the emotional essentials of the final product already present. They’re astonished to see how chimp-like Serkis’s movements are. They attribute the bulk of the portrayal to the actor himself. All the rest is just “digital makeup.” To many animators (and their friends and admirers), this term “digital makeup” is practically an insult. What animators do is far more involved than “touching up” the captured image.

  Is Believing Seeing?

  How can people look at the same footage and see something so different? I guess we shouldn’t be all that surprised. Everyone’s familiar with the idea that background beliefs and prior experiences influence what we see. Or is it that they influence what we think we see? Can these two things be kept straight? In my field, philosophy of science, it was once fashionable to draw a distinction between “seeing as” and just plain “seeing.” This discussion seems to pop up every time we start comparing the perceptions of people who hold radically different beliefs (especially before and after a major scientific revolution). For example, we can imagine two people in the seventeenth century watching the sun set. Person A has read Copernicus and Galileo, and “knows” that the Earth spins on its axis once a day and is just one of several planets orbiting the sun. Person B is a little out of touch, but “knows” the Earth is stationary and that the sun orbits it once a day. So A and B believe very different things. But here’s the question: when A and B watch the sunset, do they see the same thing or do they see different things? Perhaps they do see the same thing (the sun on the horizon), but each sees it as something else (a stationary and an orbiting body, respectively). Likewise, when Dr. Zira and Dr. Honorius watch Taylor’s gestures at trial, Zira sees an attempt to communicate, whereas Honorius sees an animal’s mimicry. This makes it sound as if they see two different things, but perhaps they see the same thing (Taylor’s gestures); each just sees it as an instance of something else (communication and mimicry, respectively).

  It’s tempting to say that two people with different beliefs may see the same thing and interpret it differently. Sometimes this is true. If I write out “tomatoes, trout, potatoes, Shout” on a piece of paper, two people may see the same thing (a list of words) and interpret it differently (a grocery list and a poem). But it seems that most cases of seeing—and perception in general—are all-at-once processes. This almost must be true of everyday perception. Imagine if all of our perception involved taking in sensory input, followed by a separate process of interpretation. It’s tough to operate in the real world in real time with that kind of two-step perceptual set-up. In a world governed by natural selection, I doubt the human race would have made it to this point.

  Yet a one-step perceptual process leads to another worry. If what we already believe so strongly colors what we see, what point is there in even consulting the Serkis footage to resolve the dispute? We encounter a serious problem if we simply accept that what we perceive depends on our prior beliefs. It seems that if we went too far in this direction, we would never be able to use observations to change our minds. We’d be sentenced to a life of dogmatically held beliefs.

  Use Your Illusion

  Can we be trained to see things differently than we currently do? This would be a way out of the difficulty. I find optical illusions to be illuminating on this point. They can teach us an interesting lesson regarding the influence of belief on perception.

  A famous optical illusion is the Müller-Lyer illusion. It involves two horizontal lines:

  The top line looks longer than the bottom line, but in fact, they’re the same length. If you don’t believe me, measure them. After measuring, you should now believe that they are. But do they look it? No, the top line still looks longer. We still fall prey to the illusion despite our beliefs. In fact, as philosopher Jerry Fodor has pointed out in “Observation Reconsidered,” what we believe does not dictate what we see.

  Great! So improvements to our knowledge don’t dispel illusions. This is supposed to help us trust our perceptions? How can we have any hope of figuring out whom to credit for the emotional and aesthetic hold Caesar has on us: Serkis or Engel?

  Here’s the problem. Throughout this discussion we have been awash in false dichotomies: either our perceptions depend on our beliefs or they don’t; either the viewer’s emotional connection to Caesar is due to acting or to animation. In fact, we can determine (through measurement) that the two lines are the same length, and we can learn (through discussion, through having certain visual cues pointed out to us) how acting and animation both contribute to the emotional and aesthetic effect of Caesar. Sit down and watch the video clips with a CG animator and an actor and you will start to pick up on what they are picking up on.

  That said, I think we may be fixating on the wrong thing here. Is it really that important how much of what we see on screen was simply animated and how much was digitally processed data from Serkis’s performance? Two things worry me about this. The first is that film is the art of creating believable illusions: camera angles, editing, makeup, stunt doubles, special effects, and so on. Even though all these things contribute to our perception of the actor’s performance, we still give credit to the actor when it is due. The second worry is that we may be falling prey to the philosophical sin of reductionism, reducing acting performance to the image of the character on screen. Maybe there is more to it than that. Perhaps we should take a closer look at the phenomenon of acting from the actor’s point of view, especially since we are wondering whether Serkis should have been nominated for best supporting actor.

  He Came to Praise Caesar

  Whatever else acting is, it is a craft. Crafts have always received a great deal of respect within philosophy. Perhaps at some level, philosophy itself aspires to be a craft. Socrates himself spent much of his life looking for someone with craft knowledge of virtue, someone who actually understood what it meant to live an excellent life in the same way that craftsmen really understand what they do: shipwrights know ship-building, or physicians know healing. Can we take the leap of believing that actors know acting? The time has come to appeal to Serkis’s co-star, James Franco. Perhaps he can help us understand why Serkis deserved to be nominated for best supporting actor.

  In his Deadline.com blog post that pimps Serkis for the Oscar, Franco doesn’t focus very much on the “How much of Caesar is animation?” question. Rather, he emphasizes performance and especially the ensemble nature of acting. In the olden days, he points out, a human character playing opposite a computer-generated (CG) character would be interacting with a tennis ball. Due to evolution in CGI technology, actors portraying CG characters can now share a stage together. This is why in the raw footage Serkis is covered in polka dots (sensors) and a strap-on gizmo (camera). These contraptions are capturing data from his performance as he shares a stage with Franco and Freida Pinto. For actors to share a stage turns out to be crucial.

  According to Franco, the transcendent performances in movies come about not so much from acting, but from reacting to the other actors. This is the realm of spontaneity and artistic discovery. It’s unscripted. And it’s very different from digitally “penciling in” a character who wasn’t present on the set. The chemistry between actors is what we miss if we focus on the technical question of the origin of the image on the screen. Acting is an emergent property, dependent on individual performances, but not entirely reducible to them. If Franco is right, the whole here is truly greater than the sum of its parts.

  Franco also points out that the surface realism of Caesar would be empty without the “soul” provided by the performance of Andy Serkis. Now I am completely on board with the point about the ensemble nature of acting, but when I read this little bit about the soul I was a bit dubious. What else do we see on film but what we see on film? As Andy Warhol once said: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” C
ouldn’t a clever enough animator fool us into seeing soulfulness?

  As luck would have it, I recently met someone who can answer that question. He has done a lot of key frame animation, and I was surprised when he let on how limited he thought it was. His argument was that if it were possible to achieve an emotional connection using completely CG characters without performance capture, then actors would no longer be needed to play these characters. But in fact actors still are needed.

  I have to say that I’m still a little dubious. It may merely be a matter of time before clever animators can simulate “soulfulness.” Hell, it may have already happened. Did not Elmer J. Fudd possess a soul? For now, I am content to let the issue rest with the fact that performance capture allows human and CG characters to play off one another.

  What Belongs to Caesar

  In evaluating Serkis’s performance as Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, it is helpful to think back to the technological advance that made the original 1968 movie possible. Producer Arthur P. Jacobs had, for several years, pitched the idea for a movie adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel without success. The holdup at every stage was the ludicrousness of human actors playing chimps, gorillas, and orangutans. Before any studio would even touch it, they needed to be convinced that the film wouldn’t play as farce. It needed to be a credible work of science fiction. If the audience was too busy laughing at the “aping” on screen, the film would be a flop.

  The hurdle Jacobs faced was not one of getting humans to look like apes on screen. That much was accomplished quite credibly in the same year in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rather, the challenge was to create apes that looked like apes but acted, more or less, like humans (albeit with ape mannerisms). After a screen test in which Edgar G. Robinson—in rather primitive primate makeup—played Dr. Zaius, Twentieth Century Fox gave the go-ahead, and eventually makeup artist John Chambers was brought on board to create the rubberized masks that would be worn not only by stars Kim Hunter, Roddy McDowall, and Maurice Evans, but also by all of the ape extras. While the movie made quite an impact, it’s telling that its sole Oscar went to Chambers, who won an Honorary Academy Award for Outstanding Makeup Achievement. Incidentally, he had studied facial reconstructive surgery prior to going into the film industry.

  If you think about it, the challenges faced by the actors playing chimps, orangs, and gorillas in the 1968 movie were very different from those faced by Serkis in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. These actors got up early in the morning, endured four hours of being made up, and had to subsist on a liquid diet during the day, drinking through straws. The masks were somewhat porous, but were still stuffy, and the film was shot on a hot, dry set. If anything, what is praiseworthy in those performances is the portrayal of emotion while “trapped” behind a heavy rubber mask, achieving connection with the audience all the while being handicapped in these ways.

  Fast forward to Rise, and the actors are completely liberated. They can move and emote as each scene requires. Although some might fear that performance capture and CGI threaten the art of acting, you could argue instead that, compared to the prosthetic makeup that Chambers used, these new technologies enabled Serkis to perform, to emote, to ape, and yes, even to act.

  So should Serkis have been nominated? That one was up to the Academy, and who knows what criteria they use, anyway? But now that we have removed the barrier to the Oscar-worthiness of performance-capture acting, it’s time to give to Serkis what belongs to Serkis. And while it’s too late for Rise, we can get a jump on Dawn.

  A Weta Digital PETA Coda

  In the long run, how important will the embrace of performance capture acting really be? We need to look at this in a societal context. From its very origins in Boulle’s novel, the Planet of the Apes franchise has been concerned with ethical and political themes, chief among them being the oppression of “the other,” brought into sharp focus by the role reversal that is the series’ hallmark. Do performance capture technology and computer generated imagery have any bearing on this broader issue?

  Weta Digital, the New Zealand visual effects company that has had a hand in several of Peter Jackson’s movies including the Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong, as well as James Cameron’s Avatar (which, by the way, won an Oscar), has found a champion in the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). PETA sees that through advances in performance capture technology, computer generated imagery, and performances like that of Andy Serkis (who also played Tintin and King Kong in those films), there will come a day when the use of animal actors in film will be a thing of the past. Humans will be able to supply their own entertainment needs, and the closing credit, “No animals were harmed in the making of this film,” will seem oddly unnecessary.1

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  1 For helpful comments I thank Joanna Trzeciak, John Marston, Sharon Cebula, and George Reisch. For helpful discussion I thank Aaron Starr.

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  It’s a Madhouse! A Madhouse!

  TOM MCBRIDE

  If you’re reading this right now, you are a human, not a simian. Of that I am certain. But what is certainty? In some notes he made towards the end of his life, collected and published as On Certainty eighteen years after his death (the same year human beings went to the Moon, by the way), Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein contemplates the statement “It is certain that we did not arrive on this planet from another one a hundred years ago,” and comments, “Well, it is as certain as such things are.”

  And so Wittgenstein, like Rod Serling, who wrote the original Planet of the Apes screenplay, was interested in planets. Following Wittgenstein’s methods, if someone said she was certain we did arrive on this planet from another one a hundred years ago, we wouldn’t respond, “No, I think you’re mistaken. I think it was a hundred and two years ago.” You don’t correct such a person; you assume she’s either kidding or crazy or hallucinating. Or writing a sci-fi novel—the next great Planet of the Apes. In any event, she is not “mistaken.” Of that we can entertain no doubt.

  Here then is a link between insanity and certainty. If a person is sure that we arrived on Earth a mere hundred years back, one explanation is that she is loony. The reverse also works: If we confront apes who act like humans and are certain that humans (like us!) are lowly apes, then we ourselves may become insane, or think we are. Their certainty seems insane to us, but if their certainty has the backing of a powerful social apparatus, then it is we who are more likely to go nuts.

  In this way we forge a connection between certainty and sanity (or insanity): there are some things of which we’re so certain that their falsehood strikes us as completely impossible and nonsensical. Yet what if the utterly unheard of were actually to happen? One possibility is that we would come to doubt our sanity. This linkage is the philosophical explanation for Commander Taylor’s harrowing experience in Planet of the Apes.

  Are You Certain You’re in The Twilight Zone?

  Planet of the Apes was first a French novel, but it’s most famous as a 1968 movie. Rod Serling, of Twilight Zone fame, wrote the screenplay. He was a most appropriate choice, for by 1968 he had had well over a decade of experience in writing, for TV, precisely the sorts of episodes that are similar to those found in Planet of the Apes. Take the first two episodes of The Twilight Zone, a celebrated series on TV, radio, and comic books; the series specializes in bizarre situations that are sci-fi, or hallucinatory, or sometimes manifestly horrible.

  In the first episode of the series, a man goes to a psychiatrist to report that he has recurring dreams of being in Pearl Harbor just before the Japanese attack. The man feels the dreams are so vivid that he really is there. Moreover, he warns everyone, in vain, that the harbor is going to be bombed. No one will listen. He wonders if he is time traveling. The psychiatrist is dubious. But then the psychiatrist momentarily leaves his office and returns, only to find all traces of the man gone. He later discovers that he was killed at Pearl Harbor. So who was he? A ghost? A time
traveler who has come forward in time? A hallucination? Who is crazy here?

  Then there’s the second episode, about a man who finds himself all alone in a town where there is plenty of evidence of recent life and activity. He wanders all over, confused and disoriented, until he hits a WALK button. This turns out to be a panic button in an isolated space, for the man, it turns out, is an Air Force officer cooped up to see if he can stand such cramped quarters for a trip to the Moon. Apparently he can’t. His last words, as he is taken out, quite mad, on a stretcher, are to the Moon itself. He shouts to the Moon that Man will be coming eventually. Within ten years of this episode, he was shown to be right. In another version of the same episode, the man hallucinates that he has been to a movie. It’s just a crazy vision, but then the movie ticket falls out of his pocket. What are we to make of that?

  These two typical examples from The Twilight Zone show that the series turns on questions of certainty and uncertainty. We usually seem certain that when we’re sitting at a table writing essays on Planet of the Apes we’re not dreaming, or that if we dream we have seen Planet of the Apes while sitting in a movie theater on the Moon, we will not awake the next day and find a “Moon Theater” movie ticket falling out of our pockets. But the Twilight Zone is quite different. It is an altogether alternative form of life.