The
connection between monkeys and men is full of meaning. This is true not only for the scientific age
in which we live, in which Darwin’s theory of evolution still has a great deal
of influence, but also for the religious stories of the distant past. The 2011 movie Rise of the Planet of the
Apes, a re-boot of the 1960s film series about primates that have surpassed
humans in intelligence, morality, etc., is a modern elaboration of this
connection, adding its own layers of meaning to this age-old link.
I. The Re-Telling of an Old Myth
Jay Dyer and
others have been telling us for years that Hollywood, through its movies, is
giving mankind a new mythology to believe in.
Rise is an exceptionally good illustration of this. It follows closely the
Chinese myth of the Monkey King, whose name is Sun Wukong, but changes it
in some small but significant ways.
In both
stories, no reference is made to any kind of divinity (except for dishonorable
use in Rise); it is due purely to natural forces that super intelligent
apes appear. Sun Wukong is birthed from
Yin and Yang:
According to Journey to the West, the Monkey King is
born from a strong magic stone that sits atop the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit. This
stone is no ordinary stone, however, because it receives the nurture of heaven
(yang),
which possesses a positive nature, and earth (yin),
which possesses a negative nature, and thus is able to produce living beings
(according to Taoist
philosophies). The stone develops a magic womb, which bursts open one day to
produce a stone egg about the size of a ball. When the wind blows on the egg,
it turns into a stone monkey that can already crawl and walk.
In Rise,
the gifted chimp Caesar is born in a similar manner. The heavenly yang is represented by an
experimental Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-112, given to Caesar’s mother, Bright
Eyes. Bright Eyes herself represents the
earthly yin element (mother = matter = earth).
Sun Wukong’s
eyes draw attention to him in the old myth:
‘As his eyes move, two beams of golden light shoot toward the Jade
palace and startle the Jade Emperor.’
In the new story, Caesar’s eyes are also evidence of his advancement – his
irises turn green after treatment with the drug, as noticed by this story’s
Jade Emperor, the young, wise, and virtuous Dr. Will Rodman.
Sun Wukong
has a marked effect on other monkeys when he associates with them: ‘On the mountain, the monkey joins a group of
other wild monkeys. After playing, the monkeys regularly bathe in a stream.’ The same happens when Caesar is placed with
other primates in a shelter after a mishap with Rodman’s neighbor: He not only teaches those in captivity with
him, but exposes them to an upgraded version of the Alzheimer’s drug, ALZ-113,
which grants them the same super intelligence that he has.
There is an
antagonist in both stories that must be confronted. In the old legend this is the Demon
King: ‘After the Monkey King returns, he
learns that a demon called the Demon King of Confusion is kidnapping the
monkeys of the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit to use as slaves. He subsequently
kills the demon and his minions, saving the kidnapped monkeys.’ In Rise, the Demon King is Steven
Jacobs, one of the supervisors of Gen-Sys, the maker of the Alzheimer’s drugs
and other pharmaceuticals, who brings chimps and other primates to the Gen-Sys
lab to test experimental medicines on them.
At the end of the film, Jacobs and the police team he calls upon to
exterminate the gifted monkeys meet their demise at the hands of Caesar and his
companions.
The Monkey
King and his followers find a home in the Chinese myth: ‘He finds a large iron bridge over rushing
water, across which is a cave. He persuades the other monkeys to jump in also,
and they make it into their home.’
Likewise, Caesar and his host make their home in a dense forest that
they can only enter by crossing a similar large metal bridge, the Golden Gate
Bridge in San Francisco, upon which they have their battle with Jacobs and the
police.
After these
events, the stories of Sun Wukong and Caesar unfold further in other myths and
movies.
It is
noteworthy that Hollywood is continually operating in the regions of myth,
attempting to mold the human soul into a particular, usually un-Christian,
shape. Thomas Millary describes what we
are exposing ourselves to in typical Hollywood films in his essay for The
Ludwell Review, ‘Divining the
Dream Machine: Science-Fiction, Hollywood, & the Technology of Antichrist’:
Hollywood-driven pop-culture
is a series of artificially constructed dream worlds, a dissociative prison
built by sadists, psychopaths, sexual deviants, criminals, and spies. A false
and tortured form of immortality is as much the goal of Hollywood dissociation
as it is of the Machine at large. “The creation of a surrogate reality to
escape into and rule over, a matrix-womb that is a simulation of the lost
maternal body, is achieved through the meticulous and painstaking assemblage of
a mosaic of eidetic memory images, a celluloid (and cellular?) panopticon made
up of copies of reality. A matrix.”30
II. Revelation of the Method
Michael
Hoffman II continues this line of thinking.
He describes modern films as ‘ceremonial psychodrama,’ a way, as we have
said, for the evil, globalist Elite to condition the mind of the deracinated,
de-Christianized masses to suit their own ends.
. . .
The rest is
at https://thehayride.com/2023/11/garlington-layers-of-meaning-in-rise-of-the-planet-of-the-apes/.
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us
sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
No comments:
Post a Comment