Damned Dirty Apes
Frankly, my cultural and style icons are largely women and gay men, and I just don’t have a lot to say about Charlton Heston; I think Heston was the right guy in the right place to take advantage of a need for larger than life presence onscreen… but largely he wasn’t especially brilliant, nor was he an especially good actor.
My favorite moment to recall Heston is in the documentary version of The Celluloid Closet - any thinking
gay critic’s bible of gays on film from the beginning - when Gore Vidal describes making Ben-Hur, writing in gay subtext for Heston’s Hur and his best male friend. And the director (William Wyler) told Vidal to tell it to the actor playing opposite Heston (Stephen Boyd)… but not to Heston; and you can see, in the clip they play, how the one actor is playing unrequited love… and Heston is being Heston. As only he can.
I’m not someone who followed Heston closely, though; his body of work, stretched across the fifties, sixties and seventies, mainly, are not the period of filmmaking that most fascinates me. I leave to others the camp delights of The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur and the whole Sword Sandals genre. It’s not my thing (that part at the end of Blazing Saddles where the Western crashes into the Really Gay Musical… that’s my campground, for sure). Thus a post about Heston onscreen is a limited affair for me - though, frankly, I’ll happily stake myself as knowing enough, thanks.
And that’s not enough to sustain a post. What might be is noting the strange young lefty blogger love for Planet of the Apes, which people seem to see as a camp hoot. I’ve always a twisted relationship with P of A, because it embodied so much, to me, of what I hated about movies as a kid - the sets are lousy, the costumes are lame, and the acting, even in the original is largely atrocious. Planet, in many ways, was the harbinger of throwing semi-A list talent at purely B-movie suds, and it was name value, mainly, that got people into theaters.
But what kept them there, I’d argue was the subtext of Planet of the Apes, thinly veiled notions of what it would mean, if blacks were in charge and whites were subsevient. Thus for me, Heston’s "Get your hands off me, you damned dirty ape" line suddenly scorched me about 5 or 10 years ago, when I realized what he meant, and that he wasn’t just noting the difference in species. Suddenly, all of the tense racial politics of the early seventies came back to me, times I skated through on childhood innocence, but actually did take in.
I remember being concerned when the remake was announced that it, too would carry through - or worse, update - the catalog of racial tensions lurking in its subtext… but by utterly avoiding them, the film was essentially an enormous disappointment; denuded of such angry racial subtext, there’s blessed little to animate the dramas of Planet of the Apes, except a "can’t we all get along" vibe that was overwhelmed in Tim Burton’s attempts to wow things with computer graphics.
So here’s the thing - I think Heston’s passing will be a brief moment of respectful admiration, but not much more; his acting was never especially distinguished, his personal politics were at best, mildly distressing. I tend to be of the mind that actors should not serve, generally, as spokespeople for a cause; it tends to be about them, not the ideas. And as much as that may, these days, be embodied in Bono or Angelina Jolie, it also surely applied to Chuck Heston. And for the WASP who played Moses, and Michelangelo, and Ben-Hur… I think he was most himself playing the white man fighting to prove white people were best. I’m just not sure it speaks well of him… or us.
– weboy
(Crossposted at NYCWeboy)
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April 10, 2008 at 6:06 pm
[...] Weboy offers a contrarian view. [...]