Miracle Monday

I missed Miracle Monday, didn't I? Oh, well. I'll blame it on my son's tonsilectomy happening that day, my ghostwriting gig, my editing work, proofreading, and having  to index my Superman book. A while back I actually did write a post about Miracle Monday, so might as well  post it belatedly.

For whatever reason, nobody published novelizations of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies. However, Elliott S. Maggin wrote a couple of novels around the same timeframe, published by Warner Books, that were photographically, if not narratively, tied in with the movies. By that I mean that there are pictures of Reeve on the cover and a section of photos from Superman II in the middle.

The plot is fairly straightforward: A demon named C.W. Saturn is tasked with taking Superman's soul. He tries to get it--and it must be done in a fair manner, i.e., Superman has to agree or commit some heinous sin--by wearing down the hero to the point that Superman would commit murder just to make things stop. So Saturn takes over the body of a young woman (who just so happens to be a time traveler from the future who's trying to figure out exactly what happened on Miracle Monday) and causes all sorts of havoc all around the world, starting with revealing Superman's secret identity. Superman's got to stop him, which is both an act of will and a superheroic feat. He does stop Saturn, of course, by not giving in to exhaustion and despair.

It's a pretty good little novel. Maggin knows Superman better than just about everybody, and it's on display. Including Jimmy Olsen and Perry White seems almost perfunctory, but in a story about Superman's secret identity being exposed, it's also obligatory. I did like the conversation between Lois and Clark after she finds out.

Miracle Monday is an artifact of its time--back when Clark Kent was a television news anchor (which just doesn't seem to work for him, no matter the rationale behind it).

The time travel works as a framing device, with the travelers going back in time to find out why people started celebrating Miracle Monday in the first place. It's a holiday in which everybody is just happy to be alive, with Superman as it's patron saint. So as we learn about the holiday, the fact that everybody's memory of the events leading up to it will be erased becomes clear. As if it wasn't already obvious when Saturn exposes Superman's secret identity.

A Likely Story, part 2: Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle

I don't know why this never occurred to me before, but in Apes 68 Taylor really has no excuse for not knowing he's on Earth until he runs into the Statue of Liberty. I mean, it's hard to believe that in all the time he was there, he never looked up at the night sky and saw the moon.

For whatever reason, reading the novel version of Apes made me think that.

Planet of the Apes, as a complex of stories, reveals itself to be all about language as the defining characteristic of humanity. It's not the tools, or the opposable thumb; lots of other animals have those. I read Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee a while back, and one of the ideas I took away from that book is that pretty much everything unique about humanity comes down to degree, not kind. Other species have architecture, use tools, develop communication systems, and whatnot; we just have developed them in greater complexity.

Language, like species, evolves, and it does so virtually without artificial selection. Sure, people sometimes try to police the way we speak, and we've developed things like dictionaries that prescribe rather than just describe language, but most efforts are futile. We can more directly, if slowly, influence the course of certain species. Language, in the apes stories, signifies not merely sapience, but more importantly the capacity to transcend through defiance. The apes' first word is a defiant "no." Language also allows for classification--it's how Caesar, in Dawn, rationalizes killing Koba. Once you've got language, as the chimps in the novel demonstrate, you can keep secrets. It's also how people consolidate power.

The punchline to Boulle's novel is that the same thing that happened on the Betelgeuse planet (called Sorros in the novel--a name given by the humans but also, strangely, used by the apes as well) happens on Earth, too, while Ulysse's in space. There's a slight problem there: Ulysse's narrative ends with this arrival on earth and the realization that he's meeting apes instead of humans. The last line reveals that, then we jump straight to the vacationing couple. The narrative leaves unexplained how, then, Ulysse's manuscript got into space. If he left Earth again, why doesn't he write about what happened? If he didn't leave Earth, how'd it get into space?

The most plausible sequence of events, I think, puts him in space with apes in control (maybe going to visit Betelgeuse?). He smuggles his manuscript and, unable to write in it anymore, he jettisons it first chance he gets. This postulates an antagonistic relationship with the apes of Earth, but there's no reason to think it must be that way. What if they're excited to see him? They might have read of his space flight in history books or records and been waiting for him, wanting to see what he's like compared to the humans they know. That would make for the beginning of an interesting story.

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Well, that brings us to the end of the apes...for now. I hear there's another movie in the works, called War for the Planet of the Apes, set to be released next July. I suppose it will be good to revisit this topic then.

A Likely Story: Planet of the Apes...the novel

I'd forgotten that Pierre Boulle's novel (in French: La Planete des Singes) has a framing device. It's a pretty good novel, I think. Boulle himself didn't much care for it. He also wrote Bridge over the River Kwai.

Planet of the Apes, 1963.

A couple is taking a pleasure cruise through the cosmos when they find a "message in a bottle" sort of thing. They read the manuscript inside, and it's the story of a man named Ulysse Merou, who was on the first manned interstellar flight. He and two other men went to a planet near Betelgeuse, on which they land. It's habitable for humans, and they soon find humans. Unfortunately, the people there are human in shape but not in mentality; they're animals, plain and simple--they can't talk. Soon, they're attacked by apes. Ulysse is captured and caged.

Soon he starts communicating with a receptive chimp named Zira, and eventually learns the apes' language. He demonstrates his intelligence before the apes at large, and is treated well for a while. We learn that Zira's fiance Cornelius is investigating ape origins, and the three go to an archaeological site that is older than anything apes have found. Ape history goes back about ten thousand years. At this site, they find evidence that ape civilization was preceded by a human civilization.

Cornelius eventually finds a way to make other humans talk through some weird brain science, and this somehow allows him to tap into racial memories through a woman. This reveals, luckily, exactly what they want to know about their history: namely, that human civilization did precede their own, and that humans began keeping apes as pets and servants, and that the apes slowly gained sapience, and eventually, over time, deposed humanity. Interestingly, when apes learned to talk, the first thing they did was refuse the humans' commands. It's easy to imagine this being Cornelius's story from Escape that the first ape word was "No" (dramatized in Rise).

Eventually the novelty of a talking man wears off among the apes--especially the orangutans. Ulysse has impregnated Nova, and she gives birth to a boy who shows all the signs of sapience. This of course poses a threat to the apes, and the orangutans and gorillas will certainly do something drastic in response. Zira and Cornelius conspire with some other chimps to get the new family off the planet, back to Ulysse's orbiting space craft, and back to earth.

Twist: Earth is now dominated by apes!

The novel ends with the couple finishing the manuscript, and commenting on how it's not plausible because of the intelligence it ascribes to humans. We learn what we've suspected all along: that the vacationing couple are chimps.

If a picture's worth a thousand words, how come there's so much more in a novel than in a film? A novel like Apes, which must be 80,000 words at the most, would only be worth 80 pictures. Film is thousands of frames--and each frame a picture--flickering at 24 per second, for, let's say 90 minutes. That's 7,776,000 pictures. Yet a novel feels richer. Without reducing things to raw data (pictures do take up a lot more space on a hard drive than the thousand words they allegedly represent) I have to say that we must call into question the meaning of "worth."

What I'm getting at is that the novel of Planet of the Apes feels so much denser than the film--any of the films. I love these movies; I'd go so far to say that I like them more than the book on which they're based. But they don't have a human mating dance (yep, that's something that happens in the novel), nor do they have the various speculations about the course of evolution. The narrator and characters in the novel assume a telos, a natural progression of evolution with a species dominating the planet even if they don't assume a specific end point. There's also a lot of discussion of the nature of ape as a verb--to imitate--and its relationship to the apes' sapience. The apes of the Betelgeuse planet are, strangely, stagnant when it comes to their culture, science, and development. It's implied that they haven't advanced since taking over for the humans ten thousand years before Ulysse's arrival. They can imitate, but not generate, if that makes sense. Some chimps are showing their intellect, but it's not many, and they're considered outliers by the orangutans and gorillas; they're not altogether trusted.

This stuff just doesn't fit in a movie very well.

I'm rambling on and on without end, so I think I'll continue this tomorrow.