Relativity

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You can’t have brothers without being familiar with Planet of the Apes. I’m not talking about the “re-imaging” done by Tim Burton, apparently much ballyhooed in its day, but the Franklin J. Schaffner original—the one that’s stood the test of time, the one that, even a hundred years after it was made, boys still watch.

Of course, one of the reasons boys enjoy it is it’s very much a guy film. Oh, there had been a female astronaut along for the ride with Chuck Heston, but she died during the long space voyage, leaving just three macho men to meet the simians. The woman ended up a hideous corpse when her suspended-animation chamber failed, and even her name—“Stewart”—served to desexualize her.

Me, I liked the old Alien films better. Ellen Ripley was a survivor, a fighter. But, in a way, those movies were a cheat, too. When you got right down to it, Sigourney Weaver was playing a man—and you couldn’t even say, as one of my favorite (female) writers does, that she was playing “a man with tits and hips”—’cause ole Sigourney, she really didn’t have much of either. Me, I’ve got not enough of one and too much of the other.

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