The Simian That Screamed “No!”: Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the Speculative as Public Memory

Abstract

The cultural influence of Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) extends well beyond the film's reinvigoration of a cherished—and lucrative—Hollywood franchise. By at once making direct and intentional intertextual references to the franchise's 1968 original and taking significant departures from that template, the film forges a powerful transcendent argument about America's ongoing racial struggles while establishing the original as a collective memory. This ability to transform even a speculative vision of Earth's future into a public recollection of material reality hints at the power of media messages as highly visual forms to persistently reproduce and support hegemonic perceptions and ideologies.

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Phil Chidester

Phil Chidester is an associate professor in the School of Communication at Illinois State University, where he teaches courses on media and cultural theory, the rhetoric of popular culture, newswriting, and other topics in the undergraduate and graduate programs. He does research on identity and representation in popular cultural artifacts, on the theory of mediation, and on contemporary myth and myth systems. Email: [email protected]