As Dawn of the Planet of the Apes leaps and bounds onto humanity’s big screens, captivating audiences with its 3D “motion capture” CGI and eye-popping FX, putting us in touch with our inner ape and making a ton of cash for its producers (debuting at a whopping $73 million), it is dangerously misleading about bonobos.
What’s the big deal about bonobos? The rare and marvelous “Make-Love-Not-War” great apes, bonobos are, like common chimpanzees, incredibly close to us; in fact, they are almost 99% genetically similar to humans. Unlike common chimps, humans and all other Great Apes, bonobos have never been seen killing each other in the wild or captivity. Their remarkable, mostly matriarchal culture seems to use sex, erotic play and physical affection to prevent murder and war. This may sound fantastical enough to be science fiction, but it is primatological fact.
The most recently discovered of the Great Apes, bonobos are also highly endangered, thanks to humanity’s decimation of their native habitat in the Congolese rainforest and the illegal but all too common practice of “bushmeat” poaching. However, strong conservation efforts are underway to save our “kissing cousins” from extinction, and a vital part of that effort involves teaching humans just how special and worth saving bonobos are. These efforts are just starting to pay off, and a few groups, including our dedicated friends at Lola ya Bonobo and the Bonobo Conservation Initiative, are now making great strides in the extremely uphill battle against bonobo extinction.
Now galloping into this battle on the wrong side, with ... blazing, is this behemoth blockbuster sequel to another blockbuster remake. Both Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes defame the good name “bonobo” by calling the most violent, vicious, murderous, warmongering—not to mention the ugliest and scariest-looking—ape in the film a “bonobo.”
Excuse me? This is like calling the Dalai Lama a Nazi or a dolphin a shark. Anyone with a passing familiarity with bonobos—including screenwriters who bother to do a modicum of research—knows how preposterous it is to villainize these extraordinarily peaceful primates as mass murderers. But most people aren’t very familiar with bonobos, and many are getting their first impressions of them from this movie. That is the crux of the problem, the reason why Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is more than “just” a movie, and why it should be taken to task for this egregious misrepresentation.
Yes, we all know that Hollywood typically takes broad cinematic liberties with reality in order to tell its stories, often getting the facts somewhat wrong in an effort to make a film more dramatic, entertaining or to keep it within the typical two hour running time. Filmmakers frequently stretch the truth, exaggerating, minimizing or leaving out complexities, and that’s understandable. What Hollywood doesn’t usually do is give us a character that is the exact 180 degree opposite of the reality of that character’s species. But that’s just what Dawn of the Planet of the Apes does with the character of “Koba,” the brutal “bonobo” (a CGI based on the motion-capture performance by Toby Kebell) who kills without remorse and bullies the other apes into forming a fighting ... that almost destroys the human race.
Not that Koba is called a “bonobo” during the actual film, but neither are any of the apes called anything but “apes,” whether they resemble common chimps, gorillas or orangutans. Indeed, the only apes that are not simply referred to as “apes” are the humans. But theRise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes PR materials and the movies’ websites all call Koba a “bonobo,” and fans of the film plus many others are going to those websites. Most of these folks probably don’t know much about bonobos to begin with, so what else are they to think but that bonobos are the most murderous apes on earth instead of being the most peaceful?
Years ago, I protested that the old Planet of the Apes, and even Tim Burton’s 2001 half-baked remake, didn’t represent bonobos in their mix of apes. Now I wish the franchise had stayed that way. Silly me, I assumed that any bonobo character they might concoct would be some kind of swinging hippie ape, a boho bonobo. Maybe I should have known better. Imaginative and provocative as the original Planet of the Apes was, the series has never been strong on accuracy in its portrayal of apes. Nevertheless, this latest installment goes apeshit-crazy when it calls the worst warmonger in the series’ history a “bonobo.” This makes me and the rest of us here in Bonoboville so mad that we’ve formed the Bonobo Anti-Defamation League to speak out against misleading, defamatory portrayals of bonobos in media, starting with this one.
Sure, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is an entertainment-oriented sci-fi film, not an educational documentary with an obligation to be accurate. Our First Amendment gives the filmmakers the freedom of speech to say whatever they want about bonobos, and I wouldn’t dream of taking that away from them. But I also have the right and moral obligation to speak out and school these filmmakers as well as their innocent audiences in the truth about bonobos, which is really much more interesting than Dawn’s predictable, plodding script anyway. Though, of course, a Planet of the Bonobos couldn’t possibly get that coveted PG-13 rating that can’t abide showing a naked female breast in a remotely sexual context, though shooting a bullet into that same breast, if properly covered up, is just fine.
When NBC’s Keith Wagstaff asked Dawn director Matt Reeves why “Koba, the film’s villain… a bonobo… practice(s) ... instead of free love,” the director replied, “He is not just a bonobo, he is a bonobo that was kept captive by humans and experimented on, which is kind of a horrific thing if you imagine yourself as that ape.”
That excuse might sound reasonable, except it isn’t. First, bonobos have never been used for human medical experiments, as depicted in Rise and referenced in Dawn. Even if they had, it’s extremely doubtful that any bonobo, real or “genetically enhanced,” would react in any way close to the murderous fashion in which Koba responds. Real bonobos may not have been the subjects of medical experiments, but they often go through a similar kind of hell. The orphaned baby bonobos that wind up at Lola ya Bonobo have usually witnessed their mothers being brutally shot to death by poachers, often while they are riding on Mama’s back or nursing at her breast. These little bonobo refugees are often wounded or terribly mistreated by the hunters who capture them and vainly try to sell them as “pets” or smuggle them out of the country to nefarious “zoos.” Many are horribly traumatized by these experiences, some fail to rally and others develop psychological problems like depression and compulsivity. Still, no bonobo has been seen killing another bonobo, nor a human nor any other ape.
So no, Mr. Reeves, spouting psychobabble about Koba being tortured through medical experiments isn’t a valid excuse for calling this irredeemably evil murderer a “bonobo,” bulldozing so much of the good promotional work done by bonobo conservationists and further jeopardizing the real bonobos’ chances at survival. I don’t know if you and the film producers are selfishly exploiting the keyword “bonobo” as it is just becoming known to promote your film or you’re just breathtakingly insensitive, but the new Bonobo Anti-Defamation League is here to set you straight and defend the good reputation of the bonobo against your misrepresentations.
Not only does this misrepresentation defame the bonobo, it also helps this dystopian of dystopian films give the clear impression that murder and war are so deep within our DNA as apes that we can never possibly evolve beyond it. In that sense, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes appears to make a strong, stark, evolution-based case for an ever-expanding Military Industrial Complex (MIC), except that it’s based on a lie, like much support for the MIC is based on lies. In this case, the lie begins with calling Killer Koba a bonobo and ends in extinguishing any human hope for peace.
Though calling the bad guy a “bonobo” is its most heinous crime, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, commits a few other significant misrepresentations of our ape relatives. One is anatomical. In an effort to keep their ratings at PG-13 (which means more kids can learn to be scared of bonobos), the filmmakers have opted to simply and completely excise the genitalia from all the apes. As the great primatologist Dr. Frans de Waal puts it, “”They are a bit like teddy bears or something.” And as you might extrapolate from the fact that these apes have been fully castrated, there is no ape sex depicted in Dawn, not even so much as a French kiss. No wonder these apes are upset.
