Hollywood has found its newest animal bogeyman – but why is chimp-related violence a particularly American fascination? You’ve stumbled across the Film Stories Newsletter! To get this sort of thing in your inbox every Friday, subscribe here. Hello! Primate swings into UK cinemas this week, and we’ve been talking to its director, Johannes Roberts. But why ... The American nightmare of the homicidal ape
Hollywood has found its newest animal bogeyman – but why is chimp-related violence a particularly American fascination?
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Primate swings into UK cinemas this week, and we’ve been talking to its director, Johannes Roberts. But why are Hollywood studios suddenly obsessed with deadly chimps? We’ve been taking a look at a uniquely American phenomenon below.
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When 1951 comedy Bedtime For Bonzo entered production, it would have been reasonable to assume its potential geopolitical footprint was small. A throwaway comedy about a psychology professor teaching manners to a chimp, its filming had largely flummoxed the “don’t work with children or animals” adage when the chimpanzee, Peggy, grabbed co-star (and future President) Ronald Reagan by the tie. By the time the would-be leader of the free world escaped her grasp, the tie’s knot was “as small as [his] fingernail”; the crew had to cut him out of it with scissors. Peggy, in an accident struggling under the weight of its own symbolism, died in a fire a month before Bonzo opened.
But though Peggy’s attempt on the future leader of the free world’s life was unsuccessful, the event – and a series of high-profile chimp attacks in the 2000s – would have an unexpected cultural resurgence in the 2020s. The intervening years have transformed American chimp-human relations from Hollywood circus acts (The Tiffany Talking Chimps were a band of short-lived novelty acts making human-dubbed comedy shorts in the 1930s) to celebrity curios (see the menageries of both Elvis and Michael Jackson, whose famous chimpanzee, Bubbles, is remarkably still alive) and infantilised pets with a penchant for extreme violence.
Now though, with their curiously prominent place in Hollywood and celebrity history, the lives of American chimps are ripe for introspection. As the Planet Of The Apes series taught us, we’re not the only primates built for revenge.
Jordan Peele fired the starting peanut popgun with 2022’s Nope; the story of a UFO on a California ranch inexplicably concerned with the time a chimp went on a killing spree on a sitcom set thirty years earlier. Incidental to the plot but thematically essential, it’s still the most eloquent reckoning with the unique state of America’s chimpanzee relations in years.
Since then, Ridley Scott (not American, but has spent enough time in the Hollywood ecosystem that he may as well be) spent the majority of the Gladiator II press tour warning against the danger of baboon attacks. The team behind lockdown smash Tiger King followed it up with the HBO doc, Chimp Crazy, looking at the phenomenon of pet chimps in the US. Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey used a more symbolic (but curiously not cymbal-ic) simian to link the animals with sudden explosions of extreme violence. Paramount creature-feature Primate, co-written by its British director Johannes Roberts and in UK cinemas this week, fills a cheeky chimp with rabies with predictably understated results.
And though other filmmakers have dabbled with similar simian themes – last year’s unusual Robbie Williams biopic, Better Man, being a prime example – there’s still a sense that filmmakers are reckoning with vengeful chimps as a uniquely American problem. Legal in 27 states, the US ranks third globally in the ease of obtaining a pet primate, while a bipartisan bill banning the practice has been shuffled between House and Senate since 2005. The state of chimp relations in America, tied up with notions of celebrity, spectacle and dystopian levels of prosperity, makes it the perfect breeding ground for some kind of biblical reckoning.
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Ever since 1933’s King Kong, monkey business has proved an adept metaphor for the most American story of all: showbusiness. “Performing monkeys” exploited and humiliated against their will, it’s not difficult to draw comparisons with the innumerable tragedies involving young stars caught in the Hollywood machine throughout its history. As animal rights have become more cemented in the public consciousness, the practice of using them on film has mostly (though not entirely) fallen out of fashion, with filmmakers more often making use of CGI (or, in Primate’s case, people in suits) to more ethical effect.
But with that awareness has come a certain amount of guilt. As American cinema enters another of its more introspective phases, filmmakers have found plenty of material in the entertainer-to-killer pipeline. There’s a sense that making a film about a killer chimp lets them make movies about moviemaking on the sly. Squint hard enough and Primate could even serve as an exceptionally avant-garde Judy Garland biopic – it’s only the moment a frat boy’s face is torn in half that the metaphor more-or-less completely collapses.
More widely, though, these tales of chimp-enabled murder help us examine traditional American stories of exploitation and divine judgement. Unlike the post-Jaws shark craze, Hollywood’s newest animal bogeyman stems completely from its own hubris. You put a monkey in a tee-shirt, Mr Reagan; what did you think was going to happen?
