Monkeys aren’t meant to wear roller skates

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/11/2011 (5054 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the years I spent watching and reviewing movies, people sometimes asked me how I dealt with movie genres I didn’t like. My answer was always that there are no bad movie genres, just bad movies.

I had one exception to this rule, though. I loathed Monkey Movies.

To be clear, I’m not talking about Gorillas in the Mist. I’m talking about films where chimpanzees drive sports cars or wear top hats or play musical instruments or provide wacky comic relief.

I didn’t mind the original Planet of the Apes movies, because it seemed so clear to me that these were people in chimp suits, especially that adorably prim Roddy McDowall. But generally speaking, simian cinema made me shudder. Even seeing baby chimps in kids’ pyjamas was enough to set me off.

There’s a pop-culture credo that “everything’s better with monkeys.” Really? Not Friends episodes, like The Ones with the Creepy Capuchin Monkey. Not Clint Eastwood movies, like those “comedies” with the orangutan sidekick. Not anything, at least not for me.

I trace this reaction back to traumatic childhood viewings of Lancelot Link, a live-action children’s show about a secret-agent chimp. In this insane bit of ’70s psychedelia, actual chimpanzees wearing wigs and hats and leisure suits foiled plots for world domination, all the time staring out of the Saturday morning TV screen with sad, infinitely weary chimp eyes. As a kid I found the program disturbing without quite knowing why. When I recently looked at clips on YouTube, just to confirm my nightmarish memories, the footage gave me the jim-jams.

My Monkey Movie hatred was so deep and so violent that I never even stopped to examine it. Then I watched Project Nim, an absolutely revelatory documentary that plays this week at Cinematheque. The film is a meticulous reconstruction of a 1970s experiment in which a team of linguists and psychologists tried to teach a chimpanzee called Nim how to communicate using sign language. As a science project, it was pretty much a dud: Nim developed an impressive vocabulary but nothing like the syntax of human language. On every other level — especially the emotional and moral ones — it was a disaster. Stranded between the human and animal worlds, dressed pathetically in denim cut-offs and a Sesame Street T-shirt, Nim became a tragic exile.

Project Nim is like a non-fiction version of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a recent Monkey Movie that I at first found baroque and outlandish. In hindsight its plot twists are no wilder than the real-life turns of Project Nim.

In Project Nim, we have a lot of well-educated people thinking, well, why not take an infant chimp away from its mother and raise it in an Upper West Side brownstone as part of a human family? Why not have hippie grad students smoking joints and getting a chimp high, so that three of Nim’s signs — presumably not mentioned in grant applications — were “stone” “smoke” and “now.”

The 96 per cent identical DNA we share with chimps produces a fatal confusion about our relationship. Chimps are close to us but they are not the same, and we forget that human needs and animal needs are often in conflict.

Nim’s earnest caregivers make numerous emergency room visits, for arm gashes and gaping face wounds inflicted by an increasingly powerful and unpredictable creature. Less bloody but just as deep are Nim’s injuries, as his living situation deteriorates and he is demoted from being a favoured child to being just another chimp. Sometimes the abuse is obvious — electric prods, confining cages. Sometimes it’s more subtle. It turns out that one of the cruellest things you can do to an animal is treat it like a human.

Project Nim is intelligent, honest and utterly heartrending. Finally, here is a Monkey Movie I can like, because it explains why I hate all those other Monkey Movies.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca