Playing with Feu: Quest for Fire

The real Planet of the Apes, Neanderthalensis style.

For four months, I've been at a loss for someone or something to procrastacriticize, until last night, not feeling like doing anything, even sleeping, I found myself watching the answer on netflicks. A movie I saw when it came out and I was a teenager, not paying attention sufficiently for it's lessons about prehistory and evolution to sink in. But I did remember Rae Dawn Chong, that all the dialogue was in a cave-man language invented for the movie, all the scenery natural, and that it was not a musical. Any two of those are enough to make me watch, even if it were not such a contender for Archaeological Training Film status (others of the ilk appear here).

There's not much to complain about with Quest For Fire, even the weird translation of the original Guerre to Quest. Yes, instead of to deserving and starving grad students, the jobs of developing the languages verbal and non for multiple hominid bands went to a celebrity linguist and celebrity ethologist (yes indeed, such creatures exist), but what other feature films even make the effort? Same goes for anthropological inaccuracies.

Now QFF (yeah, I'm gonna start acronymizing it,...makes me feel nerd-cool), for a movie that has high standards for acting and cinematography (for starters), does also have some glaring lapses. The fight with the Wuggaboo tribe, for example, comes off like a farce (the first of many appearances of some of the fakest and poorly deployed "blood" in the 1980s occurs in this scene), complete with the old Batman Show knock-down-three-guys-with-one-log maneuver and platice clubs that are exact replicas of the one wielded by Bam-bam Rubble. Then, lots of close-ups of wolves with rasberry jam (or maybe blood?) on their snarling faces, shot on various film stocks before two huskies finally enter the real scene, chowing on a dish of kibble put right behind a beteljuice-smeared (or, possibly, bloody?) "corpse." These lobos are not only not Dire, they're probably not even a match for the "saber-toothed tigers" (you guessed it, a pair of lassitudinous lions with spray-on stripes and plastic fangs). 

Apparently, fake blood is not considered make-up, because QFF took home the academy award for make-up that year.  Maybe body paint on the more advanced tribe (which caused the guy having to rub it on Ms. Chong every day,  a latent heterosexual, to feel conflicted and uncomfortable) counts as make-up. And I guess the girl with part of her arm cut off ("You don't eat a long-pig that good all at once," as they say) was frighteningly realistic.

What is the most stunning about the make-up Oscar is the little-known fact that the principal actors did not require make-up, having been cast for their browlines. Both were at the beginning of their film careers, and both did a fine job fighting and walking and yelling and grabbing females from behind. The lead was none other than Everett McGill, who was in TV show Twin Peaks as Ed, the guy pining for his high school sweetheart and almost getting her before (as will sometimes happen in a David Lynch story) the spell wears off.

Of course this shot is low-res. It was 80,000 years ago, so I had to do a capture from VHS.

McGill may have been the lead then, but his second-banana turns out to be Ron Perlman. I looked up Mr. Perlman, and that guy has been in more things than any other actor I've seen. And he's not just cast for his Beastly beauty, Neanderthalish brow, and Hellboyish charms, either, he's in video games, and does voice work. Hey Arnold, even. Now, he is best known for being the thug-in-chief emeritus in Sons of Anarchy, however, and brooding beneath that brow didn't hurt his chances landing the role of what is basically a modern cave-man character (Ugh...kill now). The main difference is that his QFF character is repulsed by cannibalism and only does it accidentally. 

One thing about this movie is that only a few people play roles amounting to more than Nameless Tribe Member. In the contrasts between these groups, QFF's vintage betrays itself most clearly. The most primitive group are the Wuggaboos (yeah, another spelling seems to be the "official" way, but transcribing an 80,000-year-old fake language is not as exact as you may think, and my spelling comes closer to the slur-like character the name was bound to have had). And guess what? The most primitive hominids also turn out to be the black ones. Oh, and they're hairy, too. It's becoming less common these days to be so overtly and clumsily racist, but making fun of the hirsute in their hairsuits is just as accepted now as it was then. Alas.

Then there's the cannibal tribe, who appear to be more or less Scottish, or maybe Irish,...some kind of violent redheaded stereotype. One rung up from African, in 20th Century "Reason," but not up to par with the heroes' tribe, which the internet seems to agree were Neanderthals. QFF manages, within the Neanderthals, to bring in an element of hair-snobbery by reversing the Wuggaboo effect: the guy whose character arc goes from nerd-we-will-trust-with-fire to buffoon to scapegoat is the only bald guy in the movie. Only losers go bald, as we all know.

Then there are the more advanced Cro-Mags, with their body paint, variety of sexual positions (including one the women might even enjoy!?), intoxicants, and out of control laughter. In fact, if it weren't for the advanced weaponry and monochrome body paint pallette, they would appear to be hippies. And in the spirit of love and acceptance, they're the only multi-racial group of the movie. Oh, and they know how to make fire. 

Fire will dawn (as soon as he let's her handle the stick properly).

So the Quest meets with success. And we all learn something. Mammoths respond to little gestures of kindness. Australopithecenes and Neanderthals may fall into racist stereotypes, but modern humans are diverse (beneath their uniformly black and grey paint). Living with fire is better than living without it, especially on tiny bog islands (and the corrolary: if fire is that important, maybe you should get the hell out of the swamp). People with too much or too little hair are bad. Technology makes life better (or at least it did until the atlatl set of an arms race that is not yet done, but I think  that's more my opinion than QFF's). Getting hit in the head with a rock is funny. And, to step outside the story for a moment, that good actors keep their real names (Chong, McGill, Perlman, I salute you all) and can still have a decent career.

I am glad I learned so much watching Quest For Fire this time around. I feel like it has made me a better archaeologist, and just maybe a better fake critic. Maybe in another 30 years or so I can watch it again, and learn something new. I'll post if I do.

Shallow Space Travel: Planet of the Apes

The other day I subjected my older child to Planet of the Apes, the original (1967 or 68, depending on your source), the Hestonian dystopia (Hestopia?), the ... uh, movie. Yeah. I'm film illiterate.

The point is that the kid needs some education regarding the crazy culture I grew up in, totally alien to this 21st century progeny. I mean, when I was a kid people were racist and new technological frontiers kept expanding and the US was mired in a war that dragged on nearly as far as this IED-laced road to Nowhere, Afghanistan we're on now and uh...

Yeah, completely different.

Sarcasm is not taught in schools, except by often ill-disciplined student prodegies and wannabes. So I have to home school, but I'm not really turned on at the prospect of the religious curricula, which I consider to be merely snide, sarcasm turned weak and mean, like an aged chihuahua from a bad home. Besides, who wants to pay their prices?

Kindof with Mystery Science Theater in mind, I pulled up a couple comfy chairs and started the flick. Heston in a suaved-out swagger on the bridge of a Spaceship, a cynical antihero who doesn't let some pinhead back at Command tell him he cannot smoke a cigar in a pure Oxygen environment. Then he shoots up and the movie begins.

But before that, think back to when I was talking about having the teach Sarcasm 201 (she placed out of Intro without batting an eye, just those slack lids and the teeniest of eyebrow lifts). One great technique is the Training Film, liberally basted with audience comments. There were some Archaeology Training Films that shaped who I am. Platoon (imparting the proper sense of doom, leavened with the fun of stalking through the jungle and giving hand signals), Indiana Jones (learning to say "That belongs in a Museum!" with conviction, and at other times a series upon which sarcasm is to be heaped), Predator (cannot remember why, probably because of swampy jungles and the dude's cool dreadlocks), and so on.

To Planet of the Apes, featuring Cornelius, an archaeologist-hero who clearly knows his methodology better than Indy and has respect for human remains. Not only that, but he's a staunch evolutionist and is romantically involved with Dr. Zira; together, they defend science from the ruling cadre of light-skinned religious bigots. They seek Truth, and my beef is not with them.

It's with Heston. Always with Heston. And maybe too it's just fun to make fun of decades-old effects and stuff like the sudden pointless zooms that punctuate the movie (I kept expecting it to cut to commercial). Oh, and of course the Ape technology. They can do brain surgery and make functional guns, but their means of capturing humans is the Crudely Woven Net, available in sizes large enough to be effective (the trip-wired net fences that I'm pretty sure they stole from Marlin Perkins), but usually deployed awkwardly between two horse-riding Gestape-o, invariably in a size too small to entangle a large biped.

The Planet of the Apes is geographically interesting, too. They land in a lake ringed by the telltale white stains of a drawdown, evidence that the lake is impounded behind a major hydroelectric dam, yet there are no power lines in the whole movie.

What there are are footprints, on the sands before them in several Forbidden Zone scenes. Because nobody has been there in 1200 years or so, they must be fossils, remnants of the last people stupid enough to abandon a lake full of water to strike out aimlessly through the desert in white patent leather boots with back packs full of useful things like test tubes containing pink sand. More sand. In a desert where you banished yourself. Sarcasm.

On the more local scale, there's the big boulder inexplicably rolling down a hill at them, after which they rest, beneath another precariously balanced boulder! Heston is the best captain ever. Yeah.

History lessons can be drawn from this flick as well. The casting is a window on the 1960's that era of upheaval and promise, change and retrenchment. I'm sure that including among the astronauts a woman and what were then called Negroes (one of the sequels has a character by that name, in case you have doubts) gave the writers a warm fuzzy feeling, but consider what their roles were. The woman has been brought because the uterus would die witrhout her. Cap'n Heston briefly mourns the passing with the creepy "She was to be our Eve," although the idea of repopulating with 3 guys and one girl instead of the other way around is a recipe for at least one murder. Then of course the female lead for the rest of the movie is the perfect woman in Hollywood terms: enamored with the hero, mute, and scantily clad sexy body topped by a great head of hair (legs and armpits shaved, though she acts amazed that Heston can shave).

The one black guy in the movie, although clearly the smartest of the survivors, is given every bit of work that happens. Need someone to climb up and flip an important switch inexplicably located at the other end of the sinking ship? He'll do it. Test the new planet's soil, or run ahead and find the path while everyone else jawbones about their egos? Call on the Negro. Somebody need to get killed to establish the apes' disregard for human life (only to later appear as a museum specimen, suggesting that they have some scientific curiosity)? Perfect job for a Negro in 1967. Or 1968.

And through it all, Hestonian machismo. The derision for his lesser crew. The violent attempts to grab paper from Dr. Zira instead of just pantomiming or gently reaching out. The insults hurled at his captors. The only break in his mindless macho posturing is his obvious homosexuality. That's pretty much the only explanation for why he would order his man-crew to strip naked and cavort in the water (check out the scene where they stand together looking at each others peni), then indulges in a diva-ish strip of his own under the gushing white waterfall. I have it on good authority that Chuck got so deep into this aspect of the role that he insisted the film be the first to show several naked men, but no naked women. Groundbreaking. And if you doubt my conclusions about his gender, consider this: even if the ape scientists only gave me a mate because they are horny voyeurs, I'd have started repopulating immediately, but Chuck barely touches her, even when he hears he's about to be gelded. Maybe he'd planned on ordering the Negro to start breeding the new human race, but in 1967 (or 1968) even science fiction frowned on interracial relationships. Ergo our current president's childhood diaspora.

So, having looped around to the present again, I should consider stopping, or surrender to another gyre over that ridiculous planet. Rich grounds for smartassery and sarcasm, but I think I'll just have to step away for now...