primal

Let's begin with a dream.

It occurred some time in April, 1968, the same month that Martin Luther King was killed and Planet of the Apes opened. I was ten years old, and I'd seen Charlton Heston appear on The Ed Sullivan Show to talk up his new movie. A clip ran. It was, as I very dimly recall, a minute or two from the cornfield chase sequence, in which Heston's astronaut Taylor and his fellow crash-landees first glimpse what's caused such screeching panic among the loin-clothed tribe of humanoids the spacemen have stumbled upon.

Gorillas. On horseback. With guns. All dressed in leather. Like, holy cow.

I made my father promise to take me as soon as it opened. Which he did. I don't recall exactly when the movie finally made it to a theatre near me -- we lived, at the time, in London, Ontario -- but I do know that Planet of the Apes literally debuted the day before King was shot in Memphis. This I mention for two reasons. First, because the news was in no way as impressive to me as the fact that the apes would soon be riding right into my neighbourhood bijou. And second because, in hindsight, Planet of the Apes is a movie that's all about race, violence, bigotry and revolt.

At the time, it was simply cool. Maybe the coolest movie I'd ever seen. And I'd already seen a lot of movies. By ten, my destiny as a pop cultural obsessive was already paved and locked in. On TV, The Monkees were cool and Batman was cool, and god knew Paul Newman was cool in Cool Hand Luke.

But Planet of the Apes? It was a whole new level of cool. It was cool from the ground up, cool from beginning to end, cool from the inside out. As soon as I'd seen it once, I began conniving to see it again.

Which I did, maybe four times in the next year. (Movies would kick around that way in those days. POTA had its first run as a stand-alone, came around later on a drive-in double bill, returned to theatres hitched oddly to Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, and yet again as part of a two-fer with its sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Quickly, it not only became my ten year-old standard by which all movies were judged, but according to which all experience was judged. It was simply the greatest event that had ever occurred in human history. Nothing else even came close.

But here's the thing. The night after I'd seen it the first time, after I'd recounted my favourite scenes ad nauseum with my dad, after I'd asked him somewhere around 468 questions I had -- "Why were the chimps good?" "Why didn't the apes drive cars?" "Did the apes rule the whole world?" "Will they becoming after Taylor?", etc., etc. -- I went to sleep to find myself in that cornfield with Chuck Heston.

We were running like crazy, Chuck and I, both dressed in loincloths and pounding our way furiously through the dense foliage. The gorillas were behind us. It seems to me we actually had our own heart-pumping soundtrack in the dream, but maybe not. But what I do remember is that at one point we burst through a wall of cornstalks only to be met by an ape whose horse reared up right in front of us.

That's pretty much all I remember, but I remember that as vividly as just about any dream I've ever had. (These days, I dream like crazy, but the details fade almost as quickly as my eyelids open.) Funny thing is, it wasn't the first time I'd dreamed myself into a movie I'd liked -- I remember as especially heartbreaking experience dreaming that I lived in a wooded glen with The Nine Lives of Thomasina's good witch Susan Hampshire -- and it definitely wouldn't be the last.

But it tells me something not only about insinuating power of movies, but about my own susceptibility to insinuation. I remember other kids talking about POTA, and they thought it was cool all right, but I was simply crazed. I drew the apes all over my schoolbooks, collected all the cards, tracked down a copy of Pierre Boulle's source-novel in the library. (It was kind of cool, but in a very different way. In a George Orwell-ish, political satire kind of way. Cool in a way I didn't really get, in other words.) I'd lie in bed thinking about the movie and what I'd do if I had crash-landed there, and waited in vain for the dream to resume itself.

It never did, of course. You can't order dreams around, and you certainly can't order them delivered on demand. At least I can't. That's one of the reasons why you have to go back, over and over. If the dream means anything to me now, it's as a symbol of just how deeply a movie -- or a song, or a TV show, or a comic, or a book -- could embed itself in the little humming engine of  my existence, mingle with the raw materials lying around therein and, ultimately and quickly, take the form of a full-blown obsession. It's pretty much the relationship of pop culture I've had ever since: all or nothing. Total passion or complete indifference. Death before disinterest.

One final thing, a kind of coda, I suppose. Over twenty years later, I found myself attending a reception at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax when in walked Chuck Heston. He was there to help promote a Disney-produced little movie he'd appeared in called -- I think -- The Little Criminals. Like a pro, he began making his way around the room to with outstretched hand, leaving a little of his old-school Hollywood stardust on moist Canadian palms. As he came my way -- and he was stooped as a result of back surgery -- I pondered giving him the line the instant he took my hand. You know the one: "Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!"

I didn't. I figured it would be more awkward than funny, and I also figured Chuck had probably heard that one at least fifty thousand times since April, 1968. But it was cool to meet him and see him up close once again. First time since that dream.