The Square (2017)

Monkey status: There is one chimpanzee-bonobo hybrid and one very convincing human portrayal of chimpdom

Ruben Östland’s 2022 tour de force Triangle of Sadness has an island-set third act that may have had keen monkey-spotting cinephiles keeping their eyes and bananas peeled for a simian cousin or two swinging through the palm trees in the background.

But with production of this section actually taking place on the Greek island of Euboea, any background extras of the furrier variety would have had to have been shipped in from abroad. The only wild monkeys on the European continent is a small population of Barbary macaques in Gibraltar.

A quick eye down Östland’s filmography doesn’t inspire much confidence that he casts many non-human primates. Force Majeure (2014)  is set in the French Alps, a locale notoriously unloved by monkeys. Meanwhile, 2017’s The Square is set in Stockholm, a city of frigid temperatures and a stiflingly-long commute to any of the jungle environs favoured by apekind.

So it’s with some satisfying surprise to find that not only does The Square feature a chimpanzee character living inexplicably in a central Stockholm (but Berlin-filmed) apartment, but also a lengthy scene spotlighting the ability of Planet of the Apes performer Terry Notary to all-but-literally transform himself into an ape in front of an unwitting audience.

First and foremost, the film is a cutting satire of the contemporary art scene, focused on the day-to-day curatorial travails of Claes Bang’s Christian.

As the head of one of Sweden’s foremost art institutions, Christian finds himself pulled in multiple directions at once – aging playboy, failing father, steward of the gallery’s reputation and shepherd to a flock of elderly art patrons.

During a night-time tryst with an arts journalist played by Elisabeth Moss, Christian comes face to face with an unexpected room-mate of hers, played by a chimpanzee.

Speaking with IndieWire, Claes Bang minced no words on his disdain for his simian co-star.

“Shooting with that monkey was terrible. That’s a wild animal. In a flat. In Berlin. On a rainy day in October,” he said. “I was terrified of that monkey. I hated that monkey.”

Swedish director Ruben Östlund with Tiby, the chimpanzee from The Square (© Tobias Henriksson)

According to reports, handlers were on set stationed in every corner of the room in case something went wrong, but it was not enough to calm Bang.

Perhaps he was thinking of Travis – the chimpanzee star of The Man Show and The Maury Povich Show, who viciously attacked a woman in 2009 for handling his favorite Tickle Me Elmo toy.

The victim – 55-year-old Charla Nash – went on to need a face transplant and became a likely influence for the Gordy scene in Jordan Peele’s Nope.

The room-mate Bang was so afraid of was played by Tiby, a female bonobo-chimpanzee hybrid with a small handful of French and German film credits. The Square is probably her highest-profile work, although she did play the titular character in a 2005 French TV movie named Carmen.

Nowadays, Tiby lives with her owner in Salbris, France, and appears to have retired from the silver screen.

Nevertheless, her appearance in The Square has enshrined her permanently in the canon of great movie ape surprises, right alongside the inhuman antics of Terry Notary.

Beyond the Peel: The story of Shiloh

Here at ITAMII, we spend most of our time enrapt in the dazzling performances of the non-human primate stars on screen. After all, who doesn’t? However, it has come to our attention that we fail to devote anywhere near enough ink to those doing the hard yards.

Today, that changes. In this new series, we hope you enjoy learning more about simians who hit the big time behind the scenes.

Shiloh

It was 1999, and a young Shiloh stepped out of her crate and onto the scorched tarmac of LAX with a suitcase full of bananas and a head full of dreams.

Like many of her kind in the jungles of Borneo, Shiloh grew up watching the silver screen stars of yesteryear, longing for her chance to flaunt her stuff along the storied boulevards of Tinseltown.

Thanks to a chancy win at a local wildlife relocation centre talent quest, and at the tender age of 7, Shiloh landed herself a plane ticket to Hollywood.

There was no turning back.

But for Shiloh, it wasn’t to be. Despite oozing charm, audition after audition came to nothing. The grind was getting to her and she felt the wind gone from her sails. One day, a sympathetic casting director confessed to Shiloh that she just didn’t have the look.

Her nose wasn’t befitting of a leading lass. Distraught, Shiloh contemplated rhinoplasty, but saving the thousands of dollars needed for the op felt a lifetime away at a time when she could barely scrape enough dough together to put a plantain on the table.

What was she to do?

Like all good rags to riches stories, Shiloh caught a break just when she needed it.

The looming threat of Y2K had the big cheeses at the studios panicking. With the distinct possibility that Xerox machines would be offline, how would they get last-minute script revisions to their crews filming on location?

The only answer was to revert to the outdated practices of early cinema where teams of workers would hand-write fresh scripts each morning and deliver them to the sets. But there was another headache for the studios.

The economy was booming and cheap labour was hard to come by; at least among the human labour market… To save up for her return ticket to the jungle, Shiloh picked up a job as a script re-printer – not an occupation you will see listed in the credits of your favourite blockbusters today.

In the last few months of 1999, over 10,000 non-human primate script re-printers were hired in California alone in anticipation of the Y2K event.

Monkeys’ opposable thumbs and lack of access to adequate legal representation made them ripe for the picking to shrewd Hollywood execs.

Shiloh went straight into training. Like most of her fellow recruits, Shiloh didn’t know how to write. Once she got the hang of it, she was let loose re-printing scripts for early episodes of Friends as part of her vocational placement.

Facing the realisation her Hollywood dream was close to over, Shiloh decided to make a last ditch attempt at success. Whilst re-printing a scene where Ross enlists the help of his friends to carry a new sofa up to his apartment, Shiloh slipped in a revision of her own. The original script called for Ross to yell “Turn!” repeatedly at Chandler and Rachel who were helping him lift the sofa up the stairs. Sensing that the gag wouldn’t quite land, Shiloh revised the exclamation to “Pivot!”.

The unwitting cast performed the scene as written to rapturous laughter, and the rest is history. The Friends writing team hired Shiloh as a script adviser for the next season, before she was fully instated to the team for the remainder of the show’s run.

After Friends ended, Shiloh returned with her riches to Borneo where she runs an after-school writing programme for under-privileged forest dwellers. Recent interviews report she keeps in touch with her Hollywood pals, and rumour has it, she and Marta Kauffman could be starting a podcast together.

Keep your ears ‘peeled’…

Shiloh at home with her family.

The Fabelmans (2022)

Monkey status: There is a monkey featured in this film

With more than 30 films over 50 years, nobody has a more wide-reaching or storied career behind the camera than Stephen Spielberg. And while it saw little love at this year’s Oscars, his latest outing The Fabelmans was perhaps his most personal and self-reflective picture yet.

The film follows a relatively prosaic and suburban set of events for a director who has taken us to as exotic and varied locales as dinosaur-infested tropical islands, war-ravaged mid-century Europe and dystopic visions of a future yet to pass.

It’s essentially a retelling of the man himself’s early years. His budding love affair with the camera and his grappling with an eccentric mother and a stern, driven father. His own personal manifest destiny, moving westward throughout his youth and butting up against anti-semitism in high school as he came to terms with his dream of being a film-maker.

But while there’s plenty of pathos and scene-chewing to go around in The Fabelmans, it certainly doesn’t sound like much of a monkey movie on paper.

So it was to our reporters’ glee that Michelle Williams’ depiction of Spielberg’s mother shows the audience the depths of her raging disquiet and loosening grip on the day-to-day by having her go out and buy a monkey.

Bennie the monkey is played by Crystal the Capuchin, one of the most famous non-human primates on the planet. Crystal’s career spans over almost 25 years, beginning with an appearance as a baby in 1997’s George of the Jungle.

We’ve covered her appearances in films like American Pie and The Hangover: Part 2, and her appearances in the Night at the Museum series and on Community will surely see her appear again.

The Fabelmans was perhaps her star turn. Like stars Brendan Fraser and Ke Huy Quan, who leapt from the ghetto of nostalgia and low culture into the Oscar winners lounge this year, Crystal has shown us that there’s more than just a knack for comedies and family films in this monkey’s wheelhouse.

And although Spielberg is no stranger to monkey actors in his stable – look no further than Raiders of the Lost Ark – it appears that like much of the film, this monkey was taken directly from his early life.

Spielberg told The Hollywood Reporter that his mother, Leah Adler, actually did bring home a monkey at some point in his childhood, which he says he and his siblings were scare of.

Perhaps that planted the seed for the villainous turn the Raiders monkey takes.

Steven Spielberg with his monkey-owning mother, Leah Adler.

Spielberg wasn’t the only auteur on set with a history with monkeys.

Cult director David Lynch shows up behind an eyepatch in a scene-stealing moment as a late-career John Ford.

Lynch had previously appeared alongside a capuchin named Jack in the 2017 short film You Don’t Know Jack, where he interviewed the monkey on suspicion of murder.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

There are no monkeys in this film.

Hotly anticipated by most for the return of legendary character actors like Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina, to me Spider-Man: No Way Home represented a chance for the criminally under-represented Marvel alternative universe Earth-8101 to make its first cinematic appearance.

While most people filed out of the theatre happy to have seen Willem Dafoe and his teeth been given another chance to chew to on the scenery and throw some more pumpkin bombs, I couldn’t help but feel resigned to the fate that the Marvel Apes universe will never make it to the silver screen.

Most people go to the movies to see a super-hero (or at least the Rock) narrowly avoid some kind of spectacular death and then make a pithy quip. I wish that could be enough for me – then I could be satisfied by whatever choice I made with my popcorn.

Instead I am doomed to watch out for furred yet unmuzzled faces and prehensile tails or else make my way home with the gnawing void north of my guts unanswered to – as was the case as the credits rolled on the latest instalment in the Tom Holland series of your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man.

The cutting edge of my disappointment was only sharpened by how close we came to a proper Monkey-Marvel cross-over mash-up. With the arrival of the best-ofs from other universes’ gallery of rogues due to a botched spell by Doctor Strange and his real American accent, Spider-Man and his real American accent is forced to swing into action alongside several other versions of himself.

Tobey MacGuire from the heart-on-its-sleeve Raimi outings is now a veteran, on his way to grizzled, and Andrew Garfield does his best to retcon the forgettable glossiness of the Amazing series which was captained by the definitely not coincidentally named Marc Webb.

Spiders-Men and Drs Octopus and Osborn from different worlds, alongside Lizard and Electro, who was given a makeover by the trip through the reality wormhole – something the film forgets to go back and explain.

So the gates of reality are wide-open for a moment and anything could happen. Unfortunately, what does happen is a bunch of characters we have already seen appear and try to take over the world or something.

Somewhere out there spinning on its own resplendent arm of the multiverse is the world of Marvel Apes – a world where apes and monkeys take the place of all main characters.

Dr Otto Ooktavius, the mad scientist orangutan with a penchant for flamboyantly-dressed terrorism.

Its the world of Spider-Monkey, web-swinging simian, who joins the Apevengers to keep Monkhattan safe from the dastardly plots of the likes of Doctor Ooktopus.

The films has plenty of anthropomorphised reptile representation, with Rhys Ifans appearing in scaled form for most of the film’s length.

But where – I ask once more – are the monkeys.

The films ends with a trailer for another Marvel joint – a promise that the waterfall of content will never turn off. Coming soon is Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. The plot is still largely under wraps, but if we are going back to the multiverse, there is time for a course correction.

Perhaps in his journeying across the different lives across the reality divide he may encounter the likes of Iron Mandrill – a perfect excuse for Disney to bring Robert Downey Jr back, as they presumably would kill to do.

As always, I keep holding onto hope.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

How he’s grown.

There is a large gorilla-like ape in this film.

Almost a century after he first appeared on our screens, the big ape is back. This time he’s sizing up the star of another of cinema’s longest running franchises.

From the first trailer, Kong took starring role. It’s his journey we follow, from being tied up and drugged on the back of a navy gunship to popping his dislocated shoulder back into place while resting his back on the ruins of Hong Kong – it’s his movie. Makes you wonder why they put his name second in the title. So is there a monkey in it? And then some.

But our job here is to make it especially clear if the viewer can expect some non-human primate action before they shell out their hard-earned clams. So despite how obvious it may have seemed, we sent our cub reporter down to the bioscope to make sure we maintain our cutting edge when it comes to simian reporting.

He returned to the bullpen with wild eyes and a suit soaked through with sweat. He also had a large gash across his forehead, but it eventuated that the wound had nothing to do with his King Kong experience. His agitated state, however, surely did.

He had never seen a monkey that big.

At one point he E.T fingered a little girl and her entire body was dwarfed by the shallow edge of his fingernail. Wait, Doris, read that back to me. We need to change that last sentence. I mean he did the E.T finger gesture with a little girl. Strike that, change that for me. Wait, you aren’t still typing every word I’ve been saying, are you?

OK.

Never fear, I have seized the reigns of the typewriter from my dreadfully literal receptionist Doris. Ordinarily she’s the best in the business. She saw the film, too, and had some thoughts, so I guess I’ll type them down as she tells them to me. Excuse the typos, this isn’t exactly my job.

King Kong went on an adventure in this film and we, along with his human companions, got to stay at his side the whole way. They invented an entirely new type of vehicle in order to be able to hover alongside him as he leapt and rolled across the landscape in the middle of the Earth that was fully lit by some unseen subterranean sun that was never mentioned.

Doris, please slow down, I can’t – oh wait, I’m still typing. You’re right. It’s hard to stop once you really get going. I understand your behaviour a little better now.

So, anyway – King Kong acted out the plot of a Jules Verne novel and then found a massive axe made from a Godzilla spike and then he sat on a throne.

Where can we go from here?

Legendary’s MonsterVerse films were one of Warner Bros answers to the box office juggernaut that is the MCU. Having two big names on the title will surely drag plenty of folks in, but where to from here?

Marvel’s strategy was to team everybody up. They’d spend a few years introducing new characters and then bring them all together to awkwardly meet and that would be the cathartic apogee of the entire narrative cycle, flooding viewers brains with an unexpected monsoon of dopamine that would have them returning to the next phase of superhero movies like junkies.

Maybe that’s the answer. The biggest missed opportunity is the lack of post-credits scenes. We could have ended with Gamera appearing as Kong goes about his daily routine in the Hollow Earth and telling him he’s forming a team.

Alas, it seems we will have to wait until the next reboot to see monsters assemble.

Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)

Monkey status: There is one monkey and the potential for 6 billion more

In the mid-90s, Space Jam was everywhere. Kids all over the world were wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with a basketball spinning Bugs Bunny. Action figures of Charles Barkley and Wile E. Coyote were packaged together. Dolls, figures and plushies of the Tune Squad and the Monstars were coveted by children worldwide. 

You could even get a Talking Michael, which would deliver such pearls as “I really enjoyed playing with you guys!” Presumably this last quote was not meant to be delivered to the Monstars, who were quite upfront about their intentions to kidnap and enslave him for the rest of eternity on a distant alien planet. Either that or MJ is simply quite a forgiving guy.

Space Jam became the highest-grossing basketball film of all time, and although it is really just a kid-aimed commercial stretched out to 88 minutes, it is a part of the cultural canon of every 90s kid.

So when the final whistle blew, Warner Bros were greedy for more of that Space Jam cash. There was one problem – did Space Jam blow up because of Michael or Bugs?

What followed was a slew of non-starters – Race Jam, with racecar driver Jeff Gordon, Spy Jam, with Jackie Chan. Skate Jam with Tony Hawk. Limp Jam, starring Fred Durst. Carrot Top was in talks to star in Carrot Jam. Mike Tyson’s Ear Jam. Quentin Tarantino’s Toe Jam. Tonya Harding’s Leg Jam. Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic Jam. The idea of Darryl Strawberry was floated but they just couldn’t think of what they would possibly call it. 

Some of those are even real, but needless to say, none of them happened. By the time a project actually came together, the world was a different place. Bill Clinton had got his rocks off in the Oval Office. Debris had rained over Manhattan on a September morning. The Spice Girls had broken up.

Looney Tunes: Back in Action made the big swing of believing that Space Jam’s success came from the duck and the rabbit. They were rewarded with a box office bomb, grossing $68.5 million worldwide against a budget of $80 million. 

It was the longest year and a half of beloved director Joe Dante’s life. Each scene had to be reshot three times – once with only human actors, once with a stand-in for the toons, and once with a mirrored ball to show where light would reflect. Fearing a potential critical failure, the studio brought in 25 extra writers to stuff the script with extra gags, even though the final product only credited Larry Doyle.

The studio asserted as much control as they could, and the difficult mixture of combining live action stars with animated characters was fiddly and time-consuming. Despite this, B-movie aficionado Joe Dante still managed to shoehorn as many pulpy references as he could into the film, from the gorilla spaceman suit from the work of Ed Wood (which is a non-human primate if you squint), to Roger Corman himself appearing as a director.

The gorilla spaceman of Ed Wood fame

It’s a film so light that it threatens to blow away in the breeze, and the performances of the live-action stars are generally more cartoony than that of the Looney Tunes themselves. Steve Martin in particular out-Mike Myers Mike Myers in the worst way.

 

Somehow, Joe Dante’s love of Hollywood and the ephemera of genre cinema shines through. And what would a love letter to the horror and sci-fi of yesteryear be without a monkey or two?

It’s right there in the synopsis. The ‘plot’ of the film features noted monkey co-star Brendan Fraser as DJ Drake, the son of faux-James Bond, played not at all confusingly by Timothy Dalton. Drake, along with Jenna Elfman’s Kate and Daffy and Bugs, must embark on a globe-trotting quest for the Blue Monkey diamond, which has the unexplained ability to turn people into monkeys. Chief among his concerns is keeping the diamond out of the hands of Steve Martin’s Acme corporation chairman, who seeks to turn the world’s population into monkeys for some reason.

When I heard this I started salivating.

Imagine the possibilities. The film was released in 2003, when the world’s population was 6.4 billion. If Steve Martin had his way, there would be upwards of 6 billion monkeys in the world, rendering the purpose of this site utterly useless – the answer to our central question would be yes, everytime, there is a monkey in it. What a world.

Of course, we never see the Acme plan come to fruition. We do get a few moments of a capuchin quite convincingly playing Brendan Fraser, and later what is presumably the same monkey actor dons some glasses to play a monkey-fied Steve Martin. The best part is when Timothy Dalton produces a tiny set of handcuffs to arrest the monkey. 

But the promise of a world full of monkeys is ultimately left unfulfilled, just like the promise of Bugs Bunny making a box office splash for Warner Bros. If they hadn’t hesitated and had pulled that Blue Monkey trigger, I’m sure everyone in the world would have turned up to see Looney Tunes: Back in Action, and it would be a sequel to this film that we could expect next year rather than Space Jam: A New Legacy, which I bet won’t even have any monkeys in it anyway.

They don’t know what they’re missing

There are more monkey questions that we need answers for, however. This film takes place in a universe not unlike that of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where animated stars are the actors in their own work, living and breathing alongside workaday 3-dimensional humans. That film explains a little bit about how it works – or at least mentions the fact that there are two distinct groups of sentient beings sharing the planet.

LT:BiA makes no such attempt. In our trip with Brendan Fraser around the world, we see that cartoons are just as widespread as humans and they do a variety of jobs. They aren’t just found in ToonTown or Hollywood or on the WB lot. Yosemite Sam owns a Vegas casino.

How has this altered the history of the world? What conflicts have arisen between humans and toons in a world where they share the same space, the same resources, the same desire to fulfil their dreams with limited time and scope?

Cartoon characters frequently experience and inflict horrific violence upon one another while humans look on and laugh. Do these humans react the same way when a human gunman walks into a school? If not, what is the difference? Do Toon Lives Matter?

There’s more I need to know. What happens if you use the Blue Monkey Diamond on a toon? Do they turn into an animated monkey or a live-action one? Do humans transform into monkeys merely due to our relative genetic proximity? In that case, could we expect an animated Minorcan giant lagomorph if it is used on Bugs?

The Nuralagus Rex, the precursor to Bugs Bunny and Peter Rabbit

What about cartoon monkeys that have appeared in the Looney Tunes universe? There is no telling what would happen if you used the diamond on them.

Obviously, LT:BiA raises more monkey questions than it answers. We are currently seeking research funding for this line of enquiry. Upon its approval, we will go down the lagomorph hole and find what is waiting at the bottom. Maybe Joe Dante can answer some of these 

questions for us. Stay tuned. 

Oft overshadowed by rabbits, ducks, cats, canaries and mealy-mouthed hunters, here we can see the seldom spotted Looney Tunes monkey.

 

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Monkey status: There is a monkey in this movie

 

Powered by pig shit and swaggering sax solos, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome is an exercise in total audacity. Director George Miller’s tales of Max Rockatansky had increased in absurdity with each instalment, from the cop drama set in the last days of society that is Mad Max, to the diesel-soaked Acid Western influences of the second film.

 

So when he approached this outing, the question on everybody’s lips must have been the same – how can he up the ante? Last time, a muscled man in a hockey mask said a poem in Dutch while sadomasochist motorcyclists did fire dances around him. Surely weirdness is a finite resource?
There was an easy solution.

Give Max a monkey.

At the beginning of the film, we see Max tearing over the desert floor on a caravan led by a pack of camels. Sitting next to him is his unnamed pet and best friend, the monkey.

Somewhere in his travels, the Raggedy Man has picked up a capuchin that possesses quasi-human intelligence. It carries a water flask leagues over the desert to him and leaves him a trail of breadcrumbs so that he can track his stolen vehicle.

This Mensa candidate monkey was the sole charge of John Stark, monkey wrangler. According to IMDB, this was John Stark’s only film. There is little information to be found about the monkey aside from a commenter on the Mad Max Wikia, who claims that the monkey was named Sally and she was from Featherdale Wildlife Park, a zoo located in the suburbs of Sydney.

A December, 1981 issue of the Sun Special identifies John Stark as a part-time animal keeper at the park.

So not unlike the monkey we already covered in The Raiders of the Lost Ark, a monkey was brought out into the desert and made to ride around on a movie star’s shoulders. 

The Invisible Man (2020)

Monkey status: There are no monkeys in this movie

 

Leigh Whannell’s 2020 take on the Invisible Man character is a real prick. There is something inherent in making yourself invisible that seems to necessitate that. Maybe it’s the voyeuristic element – if nobody can see you, it becomes very difficult to not be a peeping tom, even if you are just walking down the street.

But people in pop culture who become invisible always seem to take the asshole prize. When Kevin Bacon went invisible he killed a dog. That girl from The Incredibles illegally stowed away on a plane and isn’t always very nice to her younger brother. When Abbott and Costello met the Invisible Man, all he could do was talk about himself.

Who’s on first?

Oliver Jackson-Cohen’s take on the character is no different. He is a megalomaniacal tech wunderkind who works in the auspicious field of optics. Are there actually very wealthy people whose start-ups were in this field? Ray Ban? Was he a person? Raymond Ban?

He lives in a slick modernist mansion with wall to wall windows perched on a cliff somewhere north of San Francisco. This is his reskinned Gothic castle, where in an older time he would have had to wait for a lightning bolt to power his next experiment to spit in the face of God. Now he just used the e-charger in his garage.

When Elisabeth Moss investigates his laboratory, she instead finds a pristine minimalist warehouse that reminds the viewer of a rebooted version of Seth Brundle’s lab.

The difference, of course, is that Seth Brundle, the ill-fated lead character of David Cronenberg’s The Fly, housed two hamadryas baboons in his lab.

What kind of self-respecting mad scientist commits their secret arcane acts without a simian audience? The test subject monkey is a staple of the Gothic mad science genre. The audience wants a warm-up to what it is going to be like when the thing is finally turned on a human. Monkeys provide the perfect test run.

Plus there is unlimited pathos in the shot of a monkey being put through some grotesque experiment against its will. Who can forget the gorilla with the invisible skin in The Hollow Man?

In case you did forget it

The Invisible Man needed an invisible monkey. If you thought it was scary that Adrian Griffin could have been anywhere at any time, imagine how much scarier it would be if that was a monkey.

Look around the room you are in now. Presumably it has corners, unless you live in a geodesic dome. If you do, imagine you live somewhere with corners, Buckminster Fuller. 

Now look into one of those corners and imagine that there is a fully grown male chimpanzee there, squatting on its haunches, baring its teeth at you.

Terrifying.

There it is.

Or you can imagine that there is an invisible pygmy marmoset perched on the edge of your chair. Aw, cute. Can things still be cute if they are invisible?

Why are my fingers so warm and cosy?

Either way, great film with one glaring omission.

When will film-makers realise that they aren’t cooking with gas until they get one of our primate cousins on the cast list.

Batman Returns (1992)

Monkey status: One spider monkey

The year is 1992. After 1989’s Batman took the world by storm, Tim Burton was coasting on a wave of unexpected Hollywood success that meant that he could tackle basically any project that he wanted. He has just made Edward Scissorhands, a film that combines both a personal story echoing his own self-perceived isolation as a youth with his unique visual style.

He could go on down this road, inflating quirky little Goth-lite scripts into star vehicles and Halloween costumes for years to come. But Warner Bros is hungry and the taste of blockbuster success that they savoured in 1989 has only set them salivating more.

Batman Returns is a film that Burton made on condition. He would return and helm the second instalment of Batman on the big screen so long as he could take the film and… well, do whatever the hell he wanted with it.

The result was a scene in which Danny DeVito, dressed in miserably tattered Victorian pyjamas and bedecked with flipper-like appendages for hands, an enormous raptor like nose and an almost perfectly spherical body, drools green and black goo onto his chin while he bellows the following to a battalion of penguins conducting a secret rendez-vous in an enormous underground chamber in the sewers beneath Gotham City: 

“My dear penguins, we stand on a great threshold! It’s okay to be scared; many of you won’t be coming back. Thanks to Batman, the time has come to punish all of God’s children! First, second, third and fourth-born! Why be biased?! Male and female! Hell, the sexes are equal, with their erogenous zones blown sky-high! Forward march! THE LIBERATION OF GOTHAM HAS BEGUN!”

What a time to be alive.

So in a film with a man dressed like a bat who has his own brand of blank CD-ROMs, an enormous rubber duckie villain vehicle, a horde of intelligent penguins, a Trumpian figure who is dressed up like a character from a Fritz Lang film, a woman who has an apartment with two separate spacious rooms and still feels the need to use a murphy bed, a group of political campaign staffers who barely bat an eye when their boss nearly bites somebody’s nose off – in the words of the Penguin, it’s not a little, it’s a LOT! – well surely in all of this bizarre chaos there must be a monkey.

This monkey is looking at Christopher Walken as Max Shreck and wondering how he gets his hair to stay like that.

And there is.

The Penguin’s lead henchman is a man with an organ grinder that conceals a tommy gun, played by Vincent Schiavelli. Schiavelli had previously appeared alongside DeVito in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. (Eds. note – must rewatch to check for monkey action). But this time it’s Martini giving the orders, but the Organ Grinder is not alone – he is accompanied throughout most of the film by his trained circus monkey.

This spider monkey’s name seems to be lost to the annals of history, but it dominates the screen whenever it appears, dressed in its bellhop’s uniform, taking care of keys and delivering letters.

Apparently it was quite the personality on set, as well. below Check out Danny DeVito recounting the story on The Graham Norton Show in full grisly detail, but the cliff notes are: In a scene where the monkey was meant to hand a letter to DeVito, it instead decided to leap at him and sink its jaws into his general scrotal area. Apparently drooling purple slime and looking like a creepy homicidal mutant puts monkeys on their guard – who’d have thunk it.

Luckily, Danny DeVito can’t have held too much of a grudge against the non-human primate kingdom, as he is set to produce and star in The One and Only Ivan, next years premier gorilla picture which may or may not set the world aflame with a fresh bout of monkey fever. Only time will tell.

I mean, its not the first time that DeVito has changed life as we know it and revolved it in a more monkey-leaning direction just by appearing in an ape picture:

Stay tuned.

Ad Astra (2019)

Monkey status: There are two baboons featured in this film

Monkeys in space.

There’s something so striking about the idea of our simian counterparts doing airborne gymnastics in zero gravity. Sailing gracefully through the air after a misplaced banana, outfitted in specially crafted monkey-sized spacesuits. 

Everything about this scene seems to have grabbed the collective consciousness of our species by the tail and given us all a good shake. When it finally came time to launch a living breathing organism out of the stratosphere into God’s backyard, who did we allow to slide ahead of us on the list?

Albert, a rhesus macaque, who was flung out of the atmosphere in a V-2 rocket in 1948, only to promptly die of suffocation.

Maybe that’s why monkeys in space continue to plague our daydreams (and perhaps our nightmares). It’s all the heavy legacy of guilt. Once we had killed Laika, we turned our attention to Albert, and then Albert II, and then Albert III and Albert IV. We didn’t even have the courtesy to give these heroes their own distinct names.

So the monkey in the space shuttle has been an image that film-makers can’t let go of for more than half a century. Space Chimps (2008) imagines a world where a circus chimp takes the reigns of a NASA mission in order to save the world. Casting the monkeys as the saviours of mankind must ease some psychic burden that we have all carried together for so long.

This is not the case in James Gray’s Ad Astra. Ad Astra is a film preoccupied with the burdens that we carry, and Gray does not seem to believe that they should be shaken off so easily – not without a trip to Neptune and back.

His film tells the story of Major Roy McBride, played by Brad Pitt, who must travel to the ends of our solar system to reconnect with his estranged father. McBride’s journey mirrors other famous treks such as those in Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now and The Wizard of Oz – all long episodic odysseys through a range of locations, each deeper and deeper into the heart of isolation – until at the end waits an enigmatic figure who is equal parts fraud and messiah, depending which way the die roll for you.

But this isn’t an Oz pastiche just because McBride wants to go back to Kansas. This film faces him up against flying primates who mean him harm. Boarding an animal research vessel that has sent a distress signal out into the void of deep space, McBride encounters a pair of bloodthirsty baboons that have already viciously murdered a crew member.

These baboons barrel down the fuselage weightlessly, teeth gnashing, blood glistening on tawny fur, and McBride must use all of his wits to close a door before they can savage him.

It seems a strange payment to non-human primates that we cast them here in as such savage beasts, in a film out space travel. They were some of the first beings to ever leave this planet, and in essence – they took all of the risks for us in the early days.

This unexpected scene in what is otherwise a generally plodding and pondering film more about introspection than gnashing fangs seems to come out of the blue. I like to imagine that these baboons are the ghosts of Ham and Albert, two of the first of their kind to be sent up into lonely death.

Just as Roy McBride believes he has been – sent on a suicide mission out into the furthest reaches of knowledge, away from the grasp of any of his species. Into solitude. Exactly as we did to the unsuspecting monkey members of NASA back in the 20th century. 

But the soundtrack is very good.