Civilizational Discontents in “Planet of the Apes” (1968) – Part 2

Taylor insists he isn’t running from humanity but seeking something better than man—a “world elsewhere,” like the one Coriolanus finds when he turns his back on Rome, or the heaven Milton’s Satan thinks the mind can make of hell. Can such a world exist, if every psyche carries civilization’s problems along with it? Wes & Erin take up the ape tribunal that tries scientific heresy while denying Taylor any rights under ape law, Rousseau’s case that violence turns moral only once we can take offense, and the imitative roots of culture, from joint attention to a generation gap among the apes. Upcoming Episodes: Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Planet of the Apes. We spent most of the first part talking about Taylor's misanthropy and the way this little fantasy world that he enters is a counterpoint to his misanthropy and meant to challenge it. But, Erin, you in particular were making a point. Did you want to elaborate on that or say, just remind us of what that is from the end of part one? 0:38 Erin: Yeah, just that Taylor's misanthropy seems to deny, even in a way, his own humanity, any attachments to humanity, including his own history, ancestry, parentage, whatever that may be. And it strikes me in the quote that you mentioned at the end of part one, about when Taylor gives Landon a sort of endless dressing down and says, you wanted to live forever, didn't you? Well, you damn near made it. Except for me and Dodge, you've lived longer than anyone ever born. It just strikes me that this is a really weird idea of immortality. Right? It's immortality in a vacuum. And in a way, Taylor is sort of a man in a vacuum. I mean, he is. He's the last man on Earth. But I don't know, just thinking about it a little bit, one would want immortality for lots of reasons. Maybe acquiring wisdom, experiencing everything that Earth has to offer, not having to face the possibility of death so that in theory, one could continue to learn and create and see, you know, specifically see generations and generations of one's own Family, continue on. And none of these properties of immortality, even just the feeling of being alive for a really long time, apply to Landon. So, yeah, there's something skipped. There's something missing in Taylor. There's something right. This is a conceptual idea of immortality. It's not the, forgive me, the lived experience of immortality. Do you know what I'm saying? Like he's missing something. He doesn't get what it is really to be a human. And part of that, of course, is having human entanglements. 2:12 Wes: Oh, there were women. There was plenty of lovemaking, but not much love. I don't remember how that speech goes. 2:20 Erin: That's probably the most disturbing speech in the film. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to talk about, you know, no woman, like a mute woman, but there's a lot going on there. 2:32 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because Landon says to him, you thought life on Earth was meaningless. You despised people. So what did you do? You ran out. And Taylor responds, no, no, I'm not like that, Landon. I'm a seeker, too, but my dreams aren't like yours. I can't help thinking somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man has to be. Normally, an aspiration like that plays out in political terms in the direction of some imagined utopia. What's got to change? Well, we've got to change our political system. We perhaps have to change our character as human beings. This is a big subject, especially in the wake of the French Revolution, right. Schiller's letters on aesthetic education. The worry was, well, we can't just change the institutions and the political systems. Human character has to be ready for that. There has to be some sort of fertile soil in which to implant those political systems. But someone like Taylor has given up on that possibility at all, Right? The evolution, you know, small E of human character is replaced with something that has to be superhuman. It's a little bit more like Nietzsche. Right? We have to radically change or have to develop into the. Into the Ubermensch, which, of course, in his arrogance, he seems to think he already is that to some extent. But I think Landon's accusation lands because he's fled. And in that sense, this fleeing to other worlds, it reminds me of two characters. One of them is Coriolanus and the other is Milton's Satan. I might be reading a little bit into it because these are just two lines I always remember, but for Coriolanus, right? He's another very arrogant character. There's actually a lot in common with a character like Taylor. But he turns his back right on the Romans when he does that. He says, for you, the city. Thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere, and I love that way of putting it. It's not just that he's gonna leave the Romans and go to their enemies. It's a whole world. This isn't my world anymore. There's a new world. Same thing with Satan, right? Space may produce new worlds. Satan himself says, the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven, which Milton is highlighting how comically delusional Satan's state of mind is, which he does in many, many different places, right? There is only one universe, and it's controlled by God. There are no new worlds outside of it. But Taylor, I think, is subject to this kind of illusion that he's going to find some sort of world which he thinks it's just outside of the human psyche. There's something way more advanced than human psyche, but there are no such worlds, because to have a psyche is to have these problems implicit in it and in one's culture and one's civilization. So you dream of a world which cannot possibly exist. So is he fleeing away? You know, is he just running away, as Landon says, Or is he actually a dreamer who's pursuing something? Well, if he is a dreamer, what he's pursuing cannot possibly be. 5:59 Erin: I love this comparison, specifically to Milton's Satan, though I love the Coriolanus reference as well. But the Satanic parallel in particular, I think resonates because, of course, when Taylor and the others come upon the humans, they're eating of the fruit of a tree, right? And Taylor will. Obviously, the others won't be so effective at this, but Taylor will come in and shake things up with a new form of defiant knowledge. An old, new form of defiant knowledge. The thing I really love. I just. I would be remiss if I didn't mention about Taylor's whole superior speechifying is that it's. The entire sequence of this conversation between Taylor and Landon is shot so that their rear ends are right in the center of the screen. It really highlights the visible panty line that Charlton Heston has going on beneath his space suit. 6:51 Wes: Okay, I didn't notice this. 6:54 Erin: You also see him lift his hands over his head at several points and his spacesuit separates. You could see this, like, undershirt or sweatshirt underneath. Just, like, really shoddy construction overall. So I'm like, is this. Is this a joke? Like, are they. You know, are they punking Charlton Heston, Are they highlighting the fact that Heston is an ass? I mean, I don't know what. What that's about, but it really made me. It really made me laugh. I also, you know, I like what you point out about the fact that this kind of dissension between Landon and Taylor doesn't really indicate that they went through training together in a similar way. Their whole sort of plan for populating some new planets, that also betrays, it really betrays a lack of understanding of human reproduction. Like why. Why would they bring one woman for 7:45 Wes: three women and one man? Not. 7:48 Erin: Or at least two and two. 7:50 Wes: Yeah, you know, but. 7:52 Erin: Yeah, just utterly bizarre. 7:54 Wes: We have to accept that none of it makes sense in the end, but. 7:57 Erin: Well, it made me want to. 7:58 Wes: English speaking apes and all that. Or maybe, maybe we could make sense of that. But that he's not, you know, cued in by that, of course, as you pointed out. 8:07 Erin: Right, right. It made me want to place this, whatever, if we want to call, according to the Ubermensch standards, this, this blonde, delicate astronaut as being something like the height of civilization, then, you know, her immediate death obviously is a harbinger of what is to come. And it also seems to me to be highly symbolic. And the death specifically in the spaceship, the sinking of the spaceship, the similarity of the, you know, again, I saw all of these things on a axis plotting out Stewart, the spaceship flight, the paper airplane, the talking doll, and then speech itself, at least human speech. All these things reflecting something like the height of human civilization, which, you know, the film is critiquing. And I don't, you know, it's uncomfortable to say this, but I suppose I'll have to go there because the movie goes there. But it seems to me that part of what the film is saying by the end is, hey, you know, forget Stewart and the refinement or whatever that she represents and go find hardier stock to start over with because he needs some middle way. So this woman halfway, this mute Nova, who is halfway between a cave woman and some kind of a hippie figure like, you know, who doesn't need SPF 1000. She seems like a better deal and won't nag you. And it seems like there's this. The movie is saying something about the need for a vital infusion, a halfway point for Taylor and for humanity to move forward. So in other words, giving some credit to the apes and taking some of humanity with you forward as well. Right. But something a little more down to earth. Something that. Something like the halfway point that the Humans in the tree represent not all the way off the ground, but somewhere close to the ground. I don't know. It seemed to me that this is part of what the film is trying to. I always make much of blondes on film, especially icy blondes, in this case in more ways than one. They always seem to represent something, right. Aristocratic, hyper, civilizational. And the fact that she just doesn't even speak and immediately dies, just that can't not be suggestive to me on some symbolic level. 10:27 Wes: Well, yeah, you said a lot. And I mean, one of the things that you reminded me of was that if there's one benefit to the sort of ape civilization that's developed, it's the fact that there are limits on technology, which kind of gets at. I think your point about a vital infusion, this is a very real problem with civilization is that they. Technological advancements, which can make life so much better, also have social consequences. They can put a barrier in between us and nature and our natural side, between us and reality. Even language as a technology does that. And then of course they can also be used. Technology can also be used very destructively. And we today, of course, are facing that more, more than ever with AI. Our own artifacts could end up swallowing us. Technology could be the end of us. So there might be an argument, and people often make this argument for restraints on this sort of technological advancement or trying to do something to put us more in touch with, to remediate, to undo the alienating consequences of technology, including the ways in which they separate us from attachments to tradition, for instance, or to more down to earth ways of, ways of life. Yeah, so I think I see what you're saying about ape culture being in that position, but it is very creepy. You know, you also reminded me of just that whole doll scene when I was younger. I just think all of it was just so, you know, kind of made my hair stand on end type of thing. Like, you know, especially the Statue of Liberty at the end, but just this kind of post apocalyptic vision looking back on a human society that has to an end, that's been destroyed. And then there's this, what might as well be an alien race of archaeologists looking at us from the distant future. So I don't know what else to say about that, how to describe the creepiness of that. 12:29 Erin: Yeah, I mean, I think the 2000 years is such an interesting and significant stretch of time. Right. Especially because there's obviously been some sort of new prophet figure that the apes are propping up the presentism that we all suffer from. And then the realization that one day, if we're lucky, and any humans survive for another 2,000 years, they're going to look back at us and go, wow, look at these, like, quaint little people. It's creepy. Or we're going to go into a dark age. And then. Yeah. And it's going to be like ancient Greek and Roman civilization, where they're going to be like, wow, they had better than basic cable. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, the other major plot hole for me is simply the fact that if this society is so effective at quelling uprisings from humanity, at quelling efforts to rise above the ground in any literal or metaphorical sense, then why are scientists allowed in this civilization at all? Why are the chimpanzees allowed to do any sort of experimentation? It all seems to be based around brain surgery, which they're, like, weird. Weirdly into. Maybe not advanced at, though they significantly, successfully lobotomize. Yeah. But I don't know how much skill that takes as a brain surgeon. If we're talking about just, you know, taking a chunk out would pretty much do anybody in. Yeah. So there's an interest in brain surgery other than that, you know, they're shocked by paper airplane. They have this, of course, interesting construction of scientific heresy, dual strand term that comes up again and again in the film, and they have very strict limits on what science one can or cannot engage in. I don't know. It just seems like if the orangutans have this incredible stranglehold on the culture, they wouldn't allow any of these types of experiments to go on at all. And they wouldn't allow Dr. Zira to do her work or anything like that. But then I guess you wouldn't have a film and you wouldn't have some of these. The whole flipping on its head of the monkey lab concept, which is obviously very effective. 14:36 Wes: What do you think of Dr. Zaius and this whole courtroom drama and all that stuff? 14:42 Erin: There was flab to the film for me, watching it as an adult. You know, there's a lot of back and forth that, you know, like I said, it just. It goes in some weird directions, this film. And it's like, okay, so now it's Inherit the Wind. You know, there's just a. 14:56 Wes: Well, the midpoint of the film is him speaking, Taylor speaking for the first time. And it's a climactic moment that's hard to top. And I think that the Statue of Liberty successfully does that at the end. But as usual, I mean, often Things in film start lagging in Act 2. So it's the second part of Act 2, where. Yes. Now it's like, okay, what are we gonna do with the rest of this film after he's spoken, right. Obviously, he's gotta escape, but then where is he gonna escape to? How do you create a satisfying ending to this film? He can't fly, you know, where he came from, or defeat ape civilization or something like that. He's a stranger in a strange land and he's just one person. Him and Nova are gonna go off on the. On the horse, on the beach and do what? So. So you know what we get. 15:44 Erin: I think we know what they're gonna do, but yeah, yeah, of course. 15:48 Wes: But yeah, you know what we get in the end, right? As far as a climax, it doesn't really resolve action. You know, seeing the Statue of Liberty, it doesn't. You know, it's not like he. There's some resolution to an arc of external action. It's completely internal and psychological and thematic. That's it. So it's powerful in that sense. But as far as the external line of action goes for the, you know, after that midpoint, it's uneven, you know, the same way with a lot of these movies, like Jaws, I thought too, you know, once they go out to chase the shark, it's gonna lag. And the same thing after the plot of the movie becomes him having to escape, then it's just okay. But I suppose this point, you know, that's really. I guess most of the act three is the escape. And in this interim, we get this tribunal and the tribunal denying Taylor's rights, I guess we're supposed to. It's supposed to be a mirror of our own society in some sense. So do these tribunals and these institutions, they're manifestations of civilization. We can always ask, are they doing something constructive? Are they just. Do they just protect power or protect prejudice or something like that? So is the tribunal really serving the interests of justice, or does it serve the interests of power? There's a conflation of those two things in this particular ape society, just as there is in our own. 17:16 Erin: You know, I liked some of the points being really cleverly made, obviously alongside the laugh out loud lines like the proper study of apes is apes and God made ape in his own image. Right. To me, it just went on for a long time. But I did like the. I guess the idea that one of the bases on which they're trying, Taylor, even though he's called the accused, and yet he has no rights under ape law, so he can't really be tried under ape law, that stuff. Anyway, is the idea that they have to quiz him. His right to exist in ape society is based on knowledge of ape society. 17:50 Wes: Right. 17:50 Erin: Knowing these articles of faith. Yeah, there's a lot that's kind of packed in there. It's a little bit. 17:55 Wes: The creature's not being tried, he's being disposed of. Scientific heresy that is being tried here. 18:01 Erin: Right, right. 18:02 Wes: Just shoot one corner with Dr. Zaius. But, yeah, he has no rights under ape law. So there's always a scope problem. To any question of justice, you can say we all have inalienable rights, but who's we? Does it include slaves and minorities and fetuses and, you know, there's times when it didn't, of course, in human history when it comes to slaves, especially, for instance. Right. And does it include people in other societies when we're going to war with them? In the background of any claim to universal. Or does it include animals. Right. And animal cruelty? And the background to any talk of justice is this scope problem. Who's included in those principles and who's not? 18:46 Erin: Oh, scope problem. Yeah. I was thinking Scopes. No, it's like the Scopes monkey trial. 18:53 Wes: Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Sorry. Yeah, that's my bad. 18:58 Erin: Well, there were also a lot of 19:00 Wes: first association with it. 19:01 Erin: There are also a lot of visual parallels, of course, that are really resonant in light of, you know, there are spaces in which the humans are housed in the film resemble concentration camps. And obviously there's also, I thought, particularly resonant in 68 with, you know, the assassination of Martin Luther King and the use of the fire hoses, also really visually resonant. 19:24 Wes: I'm inclined to just kind of beat this dead horse that I love to beat about. It's not animality that's the problem. It's civilization that's the problem, which I think this movie is getting at. So that's, of course, an argument that we've seen many times before, most famously in Rousseau, who in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality among Men. I think others, for someone like Hobbes, the kind of person he's responding to, there's a state of nature in which men are primitive, and then we form a society and we overcome some of that primitiveness. Right. We suppress our instincts and the negative side of ourselves for the sake of the benefits of being in a society, society. Hobbes calls us giving up rights. Right. So in the state of nature, you have a right to do anything you want. You could kill someone. That's your right. We lose that right in civil society. Rousseau says, au contraire. The problem is not the state of nature. He imagines actually people with a much more natural, instinctive compassion for each other in a state of nature. Rousseau's noble savage. And it's actually self consciousness and the ability to reason and the ability to use language, according to Rousseau, that is a big cause of all our problems. And one of the big problems is that we become capable of being offended. So as soon as we become creatures who can think about morality and say what right and wrong is, we can become worried about others violating our rights and doing wrong things. And then there's an impulse towards retaliation and cruelty. So violence becomes this moralized civilized phenomenon. It's not like we were just violent in the state of nature. And now civilization stamps it out, but it rears its ugly head because civilization hasn't advanced far enough. Civilization is the cause of this particular type of violence, on this view. And there are related types of critiques in Nietzsche and Freud, similar sorts of ideas. So this is the aspect of the movie that I've always, you know, once I started thinking about it, that I found quite attractive and I thought it portrayed it quite well, this counter thesis to Taylor's optimism about civilization. 21:43 Erin: You know, one of the things that I think it's. Dr. Honorius, the prosecutor says, is something like, you know, when he talks about the Almighty making the ape in his own image, gave him a soul and a mind and set him apart from the beasts of the jungle and made him the lord of the planet. These sacred truths are self evident. It's funny, but it's also true. They are self evident. The apes have won this particular thunderdome. And so there's also just the element of violence that comes from dominance and you know, these things which are related not to civilization, right. But to one's own animal instincts, survival instincts, desire for resources. 22:21 Wes: You're pointing to the ways in which violence arises out of. 22:25 Erin: Out of. Not offense, out of just simply competition. These Darwinian, you know, if it's like 22:30 Wes: Agamemnon with the trade routes, he's not. Because they have that one or that 22:36 Erin: his brother was or I don't know, two. Two apes fighting over a female ape. You know, one of them is going to be successful and the other will probably be dead, depending on how virulent the instance of this kind of competition is. In other words, there are violences that don't arise out of civilization. The world is animals are violent. You know, there's not murder, but there's still people or animals killing other animals. 23:04 Wes: So now that once you start calling animals people, we really know that this movie has affected you. 23:10 Erin: I know, I know. 23:13 Wes: Yeah. Well, so there are different types of violence that involve some of it. Right. So animal to prey, it's almost. It seems indifferent. Right. The lion's not angry at the. What is it they eat the deer or whatever equivalent of that is. 23:30 Erin: Zebra, let's say zebra. 23:31 Wes: Zebra, yeah. They're not angry at the zebra. They seem to maybe get a little more angry at the hyenas, which they should be. But. But no, there's a certain, certain of aggression between animals that don't have that same quality that there is in conspecific. I think they call it violence. Right. So if you have two lions in competition for female or that's really for the whole. I think it's for the whole harem, basically, then yes, that type of aggression and violence, conspecific violence has a whole different quality to it. Violence between members of the same species. It's reminiscent of what will become human violence. But of course it's not yet become moralized and it doesn't yet have to do with what I would say is the human capacity for recognition. But it's on the way to that. It's social. It's a violence that has already become social in some sense. So yeah, among human beings you could say, well, some forms of violence are really just about resources or about. That's more animal in a way. It's just about competition for things that have no social, necessarily social significance. And so you could read wars in the history of England. Is it about land? Right. You could say, oh, it's just, you know, they wanted the English, wanted the French land and you know, the rest is history. Or is it they didn't really need the land. It's just all about glory. It's all about, you know, I own that. I'm supposed to have inherited that. That which is more about honor and recognition and all of that stuff. And so I would say the latter is usually the case. Even. Even in cases where it seems like it's just more about material resources. It's often about recognition and honor and offense. And that includes day to day everyday violence where it's often second degree murder, for instance, is typically set off by someone feeling humiliated or disrespected or something like that. And then it's always, well, you shouldn't have done that to me. And I'm retaliating So violence is moralized, in other words, for human beings. 25:39 Erin: I want to tie this somehow this idea of offense or humiliation to the idea of something like learned behavior or the elements of civilization which teach us what to do and also what to want, what to be offended by, what to desire that somebody else has or something like that. That's one of the things I really loved about the film and thought that the film was maybe at times winking at, especially through the use of these cliches. The most obvious one being human. See, human. Do you know the idea that Taylor is just, has just merely learned to imitate or indeed to ape the apes. Again, like there's an equalizing factor to this in the same sense that it's arbitrary which species is doing the talking and functioning and making the rules and exerting power over the other quote, unquote animals. It also seems to me to be an equalizing realization somehow that, you know, we have this word for imitation related to the ape. And we all learn through imitation, through aping each other as we grow and develop. And we also of course, learn through mistakes, which is one of the, one of the reasons why I just wanted to give a little hat tip to, to, to the, the ape civilization for evidently learning from the humans mistakes. 26:57 Wes: Wait, what did they, what did they. 26:59 Erin: They're trying to keep everybody from knowing about the truth of humanity. I mean, again, I'm, I'm, I'm. 27:05 Wes: They're learning that certain things need to be kept secret. 27:08 Erin: Yeah, yeah. 27:08 Wes: For the sake of society. 27:09 Erin: Okay, right. And the forbidden zone and all that. I mean, again, I'm only saying this. 27:14 Wes: We need. 27:15 Erin: Winkingly. Yes, yeah, sure, yeah. That's a good way of putting it. 27:19 Wes: We do need to have this point that. That's probably true. Yeah, we need to. 27:22 Erin: Right, right. The listeners know that I'm not advocating for this. You know, I don't wish that I was living in that ape society, nor do, nor do I believe in the suppression of knowledge and history. I'm sorry, I just. I've been attacked for some weird things in my time. The way that you've already described that this civilization returns Taylor to his origins or to a confrontation with his origins. That suggestion that there's something. It returns him not only to the bottom of a kind of pecking order, but to a childlike state because he can't express himself, he can't make his needs understood. And this inability to do so, which seems partly based on the fact that he just can't really gesture properly. I mean, why doesn't he just. Anyway, it frustrates me to watch him try to make himself understood. 28:14 Wes: Yeah, it is frustrating, but. 28:15 Erin: Yeah. But anyway, it just seems to me another point of commonality that's being emphasized here. We are all like little monkeys at some, you know, at some level. On many, many levels. Right. But. But even insofar as we've associated apes with imitation, we are an imitative people. We learn as children through imitation. And much of our civilizational structure seems to me to be based off of some kind of sense of looking around and seeing what other people are doing and then doing that thing, whether we're children or adults. It just seemed a funny and apt thing to emphasize. Yeah. 28:50 Wes: This thing that I've called identification. Right. It's. It's a more sophisticated version of imitation. Imitation is a big part of this. We just naturally imitate. But also we are creatures with a theory of mind. And part of what's happening is. And this is very important to the learning to use language as well, is that we are imagining another. And their point of view and the view that they have of us. And so even in the case of language, for instance, this is. Michael Tomasello is the linguist who emphasizes all of this. But language begins with pointing. And it's something no other animal can really do, although this is disputed in some border cases. But when you point at something, the dog just may stare at your hand if you try to point at something. Because pointing involves this. And it's an activity where the technical phrase is joint attention, the capacity for joint attention. So you point at an object, you know, that you're communicating to me your state of mind, your interest in that object. And you have the expectation that I can share your attention to that object. That's a very advanced capacity, and it's a basis for the theory of mind. And it also becomes a basis for morality where we come to grasp, right. What's expected of us. So when we internalize these norms as children and we begin to behave in certain ways, it's this more, you know, you're pointing to the imitation aspect of this. But beyond that, there's a conformity to what we understand is in others. Minds becomes a more advanced form of imitation. I think this movie is very much pointing to that sort of thing. Because that, of course, is what Rousseau says also leads in the end to violence. We expect others to live up to these norms, to behave in certain ways, to recognize us as having certain rights. For instance, the rights that under. How does Honorius put it? He has no Rights under ape law or something like that. We expect others to see that we have those rights and we become enraged if they treat us as if we don't. So yeah, I think this is a good point. There's a very. There's this mimetic m e M E T I c aping aspect to culture and it runs deep. And once we start articulating how all that works in its more advanced forms, we start to understand the roots of injustice as being not merely instinctual, but civilizational. 31:28 Erin: And that's interesting that the word conformity too because we also have this really annoying little character at the end. The nephew of Zira. What's his name? 31:38 Wes: Lucius. 31:39 Erin: Lucius. Gosh, that's a. That's an interesting name. And that I have a servant. 31:45 Wes: Right. And Julius Caesar. Isn't that the name of Julius? 31:49 Erin: Well, there are a bunch of resonances for Lucius. There's Lucius the Roman emperor, but the idea of conformity on the one hand and obviously Taylor's non conformist attitude or his desire to separate himself from humanity in accepting this post on this mission. But then we also have the non conformist Lucius and the idea of the generational divide which was really, really funny when. And Taylor says like don't trust anybody under 30. And I was, I was thinking to myself, like, is 30 as much a benchmark for. For apes in their lifespan as it is for humans? You know what I mean? Like does is this a meaningful. 32:32 Wes: But also why is like a, you know, adolescent 60s ape hippie culture. Right, right. And these squares don't just. These squares today don't understand us young apes, you know, know exactly. That line up so perfectly with where he came from. I know, I know it's all satire. It's all, you know, funny. 32:53 Erin: Well but. And I liked it because it punned on the concept as I think I said in part one. It puns on the concept of the man. So here it's the ape and the idea of the capital A ape is like keeping you down and the system. Yeah, Dad's always harshing my vibe, man. That in itself speaks to, I think what you. Or you know the flip side of this conformity thing, which is in itself also a form of conformity. But anyway. Yeah, yeah, you know, just Taylor really has a soft spot for little rebel apes and hippie women who know how to keep their thoughts to themselves just. 33:33 Wes: And if they had in the share their thoughts they not even capable of. 33:39 Erin: Yeah, exactly. So, so laid back. She just, you know, kind of goes with whatever and the ideal woman yeah. 33:48 Wes: People would get along a lot better in general if they just couldn't talk. I mean, I think it would solve a lot of problems anyway. All right, so we are. We're out of time. And next time, I guess we're going to do the Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. What do you think we're going to do after that for a movie? Any ideas? 34:06 Erin: Have to think about it. 34:07 Wes: All right. 34:07 Erin: All right. 34:08 Wes: Have you been watching east of Eden? 34:10 Erin: No, I haven't, but I. 34:12 Wes: Because I know that's on our list. I know you want us to do that as a novel. 34:16 Erin: Oh, I do. I reread it over the summer, so I'm surprised I didn't capitalize on that. Oh, I must have, because I was rereading it. 34:26 Wes: No, I did buy it. You did try to capitalize on it, and I wasn't able to get into it quickly enough. 34:32 Erin: Yeah, I forced myself to finish it, but I thought it was horrible. 34:35 Wes: Okay, so we're definitely gonna. We're definitely gonna do that then. 34:38 Erin: No, there are some elements of it that were great, and there were some elements of it that I just thought, wow, this is bad. It was disappointing. 34:46 Wes: Well, that's. That's the way Steinbeck felt about himself. So he thought he was a terrible writer? 34:52 Erin: Well, no, he thought east of Eden was his masterpiece and thought that it had everything in it and it demonstrated everything. That was the peak of his talent. Really great in certain ways, but really annoyed me in other ways. 35:07 Wes: All right, so scratch that. Find us a less annoying and shorter thing to read. 35:15 Erin: Yeah. 35:16 Wes: All right. Thank you. 35:18 Erin: Thank you.