"You must remember this / A kiss is just a kiss ..." [1]
I.
The kiss between Kirk (played by William Shatner) and Uhura (played by Nichelle Nichols) in an episode of Star Trek entitled 'Plato's Stepchildren' [2] - which was first broadcast 55 years ago this month - is often cited - incorrectly - as the first example of an interracial kiss on television [3].
Even if not actually true - and even if their lips do not actually touch [4] - it was a nice moment and (in a time of heightened racial tension) a significant one. Indeed, it is often ranked as one of the greatest romantic moments in Star Trek and one of the most culturally impactful.
For me, however, as the author of a series of papers on zoophilia [5], there is another on-screen kiss in 1968 which interests more; and that is the kiss shared between Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) and Zira (played by Kim Hunter) in the movie Planet of the Apes (dir. Franklin J. Shaffner) ...
II.
The original - and the best - Planet of the Apes movie (written by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, loosely based on the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle), is fondly remembered by many people for many scenes and many lines of dialogue.
That includes, obviously, the still-shocking end scene when Taylor realises where he is and what has happened: 'Oh, my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time ... We finally, really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you all to hell!' [Click here.]
But my favourite scene comes shortly before this, when Taylor is about to ride off, accompanied by Nova, in search of what Dr Zaius terms his destiny.
Wishing to express his gratitude to Cornelius and Zira for the help they have given him, he informs the latter he'd like to give her a kiss. She gives her consent and seems to enjoy the touch of his lips on hers, even if she finds Taylor so damned ugly. [Click here.]
Again, it's a very touching scene and, arguably, far more transgressive than the kiss in Star Trek, hinting as it does at the possibility of interspecies romantic relations - particularly human-chimp sexuality, something that I have previously discussed on Torpedo the Ark: click here.
III.
Amusingly, in her 1994 autobiography Beyond Uhura Nichelle Nichols recalls that one person describing himself as a proud white Southerner wrote the following in a letter to the studio after her kiss with Shatner was broadcast:
"'I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it.'" [6]
One can't help wondering if a similar letter was received by the producers of Planet of the Apes, that might possibly have read:
I am totally opposed to the mixing of species. However, any time an all-American hero like George Taylor gets rescued by a beautiful chimp scientist like Zira, he may as well take advantage of the fact.
Notes
[1] These lines (and the line used in the title of this post) are from the jazz song "As Time Goes By" written by Herman Hupfeld in 1931. It became famous when it featured in the 1942 film Casablanca, performed by Dooley Wilson as the piano player Sam. Click here.
[2] Star Trek, 'Plato's Stepchildren' [S3/E10], directed by David Alexander, written by Gene Roddenberry, Meyer Dolinsky, and Arthur H. Singer, was first broadcast on 22 November 1968. The scene in which Kirk kisses Uhura can be viewed on YouTube by clicking here.
[3] Although widely believed to be the first interracial kiss on TV, there are, in fact, several earlier incidents of such. For example, Shatner himself exchanged a kiss with France Nuyen - a French-American actress of Asian heritage - on an episode of The Ed
Sullivan Show back in 1958 (they were performing a scene from the Broadway production of The World of
Suzie Wong in which they starred).
Shatner, in his role as Captain Kirk, also kissed Lt. Marlena Moreau, played by BarBara Luna, an
actress of Filipino-European ancestry, on the lips in the second season episode of Star Trek entitled 'Mirrror, Mirror' (1967).
[4] Shatner would later reveal that concerned NBC executives had insisted their lips never
touch, using the technique of turning their heads away from the camera
to conceal what was (or was not) going on. However, writing in her 1994 autobiography,
Beyond Uhura, Nichols insists that in the take of the scene that was eventually broadcast the kiss was genuine. Despite the concerns expressed, the episode received no complaints - in fact the response from fans of the show was hugely positive.
[5] See The Treadwell's Papers, Vol. III, (Blind Cupid Press, 2010). The six papers in the Zoophilia series (also known as the Bodil Joensen Memorial Lectures) were first presented at Treadwell's Bookshop in Feb-March 2007.
[6] Nichelle Nichols, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories, (G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1994), pp. 196-197.
There are so many levels to those kisses related to the cultural messaging of America at the time but everyone declines to refer to one of the most obvious ones ... a commercial entity seeking to increase sales by marketing a scandal. Western culture as it became more consumerist changed a great deal simply because of this motivation - profit-seeking novelty to attract attention, This is perhaps one of the arguments in favour of capitalism as progressive force. However, what happens when you have reached the boundaries of shock or when there is push-back from the progressive culture you have created against attempts to introduce a new level of shock. I suspect we are going through a phase of the latter and we have seen these phases before - the introduction of the Hays Code in cinema pushing back against sexual shock in early cinema and the Comics Code in the 1950s pushing back against horror shock. Then, the profit-seekers start working with authority to stop new entrants into the market who might use their shock tactics. Art is most in a pickle at the moment - it tried everything and then sank into a sort of progressive political soup required to get public, foundation and private funding in order to meet a particular agenda and its shocks are now mere cartoons (e.g. the Banksy influence). Real shock has not gone away but is displaced into the social media which authority is now trying to regulate and censor or is reduced to the jump scare of the conventional horror film. Maybe there are sudden intrusions of genuine shock (Night of the Living Dead, Halloween, Saw) but sexual shock has gone and those moments of genuine shock get tamed and even turned into comedy (Zombieland, Scary Movie with Saw too recent yet to have found that niche) much as Dracula becomes Duckula. Even extremes like cannibalism and serial murder are now turned into docu-dramas that engage sentiment and political correctness (Dahmer on Netflix) rather than shift our mentalities. Perhaps all possible things have been thought, categorised, re-ordered into derivative hybrid forms and the profit-seekers dare cross no further boundaries or find that the public is no longer shocked by an old boundary or the public really has decided that the boundary exists for a purpose and there is no profit to be gained from crossing it. Interestingly, there is one boundary territory being played out before our eyes ... the 'necessity' of war or liberatory violence and this is causing huge (if probably temporary) cultural trauma and division (and confusion). Maybe the next one is the actual rather than theoretical loss of identity into the digital under the sway of artificial intelligence. Another associated one may be the irrelevance of the intellect in the face of AI and the problem of meaning. We can be nostalgic for those kisses because they 'moved us forward' ... and perhaps we are no longer moving forward in ways we believe are under our control. The red neck response was about right - sexual desire was always going to counter tribal loyalty (as it did when barbarian tribes took foreign slaves) and 'progress' seems to have required the show of the beautiful as excuse for change. Aesthetics becomes politics which makes the tawdry nature of contemporary art so tragic.
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