NEGATIVE DIALECTICS OF PROGRESS IN THE PLANET OF THE APES TRILOGY: FROM TECHNOPHILIA TO TECHNOPHOBIA

Abstract

The reboot Planet of the Apes Trilogy, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017), begins with a recognizably technophilic promise: scientific innovation will overcome biological vulnerability. Yet the attempt to cure Alzheimer’s disease produces the Simian flu, resulting in the acceleration of ape cognition and precipitating human civilisational collapse. This article argues that the trilogy stages a negative dialectic of progress in which the rational instruments designed to extend human life and our mastery over disease and nonhuman nature generate new forms of vulnerability, domination, and regression. By reading the films through the Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason and William Leiss’s account of the domination of nature, the article aims to trace a movement from technological confidence to technological fear. It focuses on Gen-Sys, animal experimentation, the pandemic, the persistence of weaponry after social collapse, as well as the visual reclamation of San Francisco by the growing vegetation. The trilogy does not simply condemn technology, nor is that the aim of this paper; rather, the paper aims to show how the trilogy questions a model of progress in which scientific capacity is detached from any ethical responsibility and organized around total domination and control. The trilogy’s dystopian force lies mainly in demonstrating how humanity’s attempt to control nature through science and technology ultimately contributes to its own downfall.