JEFF ZERINGUE The Daily Iberian

Old movies tell us a lot about our past, especially old movies that use the future as a setting. Such was the case this week when my family watched the second movie of the “Planet of the Apes” series.

The messages left in that movie dealt with nuclear holocaust and what it displayed as mankind’s innate brutality.

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It started when my wife, Mary Kay, decided to rent “Planet of the Apes,” not the original made from Pierre Boulle’s 100-page book by the same name, but the 2001 remake. Of course in the remake there is more violence and special effects, so the children enjoyed it. When they were told that there were sequels, well, they just had to see them.

The second of the original movies, “Beneath The Planet of the Apes,” is about the destruction of the world.

For those of you who don’t remember, or aren’t old enough to know, the main characters in this 1970 sequel stumble upon a colony of humans living underground who are so advanced that they need not talk to communicate. They also can manipulate others by mental telepathy.

OK, for those who do remember, it is a really bad movie, not one of Charlton Heston’s best. But the colony of subterranean folks have long protected the Dooms Day Device, an atomic bomb so powerful that it can destroy the earth. Not only have they protected it, they worshiped it. The screen writers used St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York as a setting and Catholic prayers that exchanged the word bomb in lieu of God. The “Glory Be” prayer became “Glory be to the bomb ...”

The nuclear message of those days is foreign to us now.

It made sense for a dooms day device to be used in the movie, despite the absurdity that humans worshiped the bomb. Many of us grew up with nuclear fallout shelters marked on buildings and were told where to go in case nuclear bombs were used to attack our country.

The United States and the U.S.S.R. were in the middle of their Cold War and stockpiling nuclear weapons.

Talks between the Nixon administration and the Soviets to limit nuclear arms wouldn’t even start until 1971.

Some of the warnings of that time can still be conveyed to the generations since the fall of the Soviet Union.

More countries try to develop nuclear power and with it nuclear weapons, which expands the threat to more than just one or two nations.

Yet, we don’t have the fallout shelters anymore. I’m not sure if we’ve convinced ourselves that we don’t need them or that if nuclear war ever happened, those old shelters were insufficient. The generation of my children do not even know what fallout shelters are.

As more countries develop nuclear technology and as the United States considers a new era of nuclear power, we probably won’t see a return of a dooms day bomb in our culture. Maybe it will in movies because movies are just make-believe, not visionary, right?

 

JEFF ZERINGUE is managing editor of The Daily Iberian. He can be reached at iberianedit@bellsouth.net.