• DOI:10.1080/15551393.2015.1026597
• Corpus ID: 142599451

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

@article{Chidester2015TheST,
  title={The Simian That Screamed “No!”: Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the Speculative as Public Memory},
  author={Phil Chidester},
  journal={Visual Communication Quarterly},
  year={2015},
  volume={22},
  pages={14 - 3}
}

• Phil Chidester
• Published 2 January 2015
• Art
• Visual Communication Quarterly

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.