More Human Than Human: Of Apes and Enneagrams
Welcome to a series where FoG Staff and Horror Enneagrammarian, Asia (whose own work can be found here), will guide us all into the tragic psyches and wounded souls of the characters we know and love, using the Enneagram as a lens. Unfamiliar with the Enneagram? Asia’s got you covered. She’s written her own take on the “types” here and also recommends The Enneagram Institute as an online resource. Lastly, FoG favorite author Richard Rohr uses the Enneagram in much of his work and co-wrote this book on it. Our goal as ever is finding the holy in the horrific and the Enneagram is a helpful tool to do just that…
I saw War for the Planet of the Apes in theaters three times. And each of those three times, I not only cried, I wept. I mean, we’re talking, put-your face in your hands, sobbing, other-people-in-your-row-wonder-if you’re okay, embarrass-your-friends weep.
At least I was pretty quiet.
The character of Caesar moved me more deeply than any character in any film I had ever seen. However, it’s not unusual for me to react in such a way at the misfortune of good people. I can think of only three other films that have elicited the same response from me.
The first was The Elephant Man directed by David Lynch.
The second was Calvary already covered by the FoG.
And the third was War for the Planet of the Apes.
Now, I’m the FoG resident Enneagramarian, so even I’m sitting here wondering how the actual hell I am going to be able to type a character like Caesar, who, while the most incredible example of a humane character I may have perhaps ever encountered, is not technically (or even remotely) human.
How can I try to type someone whose experience of living is so drastically different from anything any of us could ever fathom? But then, I have to ask myself, isn’t that exactly the audacity I am willing to have with any other person? While I may have some general understanding of what can make a person tick to a point, I am still just as experientially clueless and ignorant to the lived experiences, joys, pains, cultures, and needs of people within my own species. And with that portion of humble pie crunching between my teeth, I endeavor to tackle a character that has shattered my own notion of what it means to be good. I will try to talk about the other character’s types, but as Caesar is the most verbal of all of them, he is the character that gives me as an ignorant onlooker the most to work with, for the hopes of a more accurate outcome. So, I will largely stick to Caesar and the Colonel. The antithesis of each other: one, the pinnacle of humanity, and the other, the very essence of an animal – I’ll allow you to figure out which one is which.
This unique situation also allows me to explore a very active debate within the Enneagram community: Are our types the result of an almost genetic tie to ourselves that we are innately born with, or do they develop as a result of the environments in which we have been raised.
Admittedly, I fall into the camp of the former, however, that is not to say that the level of health that our types carry or the wing into which we may disproportionately lean is not influenced by our childhoods and traumas.
Caesar is an example of a dynamic character. Over the course of the trilogy, we are able to watch him grow from a secure, trusting, bright-eyed (pun absolutely intended) ape-ling, to a very traumatized adult who must make choices that not only affect himself but the wellbeing of his entire species. We watch him evolve from a baby into a king.
And king he is, at the beginning of this last film.
The apes love him. Most of the apes trust him. He has proven beyond doubt to them that he is not only worthy to lead them, but is savvy enough and deadly enough to keep them safe – but only after a serious lapse in judgement towards one of his nearest and dearest in the second film. Koba has destroyed their sense of real security, and it is now up to Caesar to try to hold together some semblance of consistency post-revolution.
Which already begins to display a few directing traits. He is willing to do what must be done in order to accomplish the necessary goals. He does not shirk from any difficult task. However, he does not want conflict and only engages with it out of necessity and with a growing sense of weariness. Unlike any of his compatriots, he desperately wants to trust humans, even though he knows not all of them are safe. Just as he desperately wanted to trust Koba.
People handle betrayal differently – the more cynical, 3’s, 4’s, and 5’s, while still deeply injured, may not be all that surprised once it actually arrives.
The Hopeful, 2’s, 7’s, and 9’s, often take it as a deep wound, but tend (if the offenses are not part of a reoccurring pattern) to forgive and forget quickly.
But the Innocent, 1’s, 6’s, and 8’s, (even if expecting a betrayal) can feel it so deeply
in their core. It’s not just a question of being hopeful that a person won’t hurt them, it’s the absolute lack of any notion that someone would want to hurt them at all.
We may think of these types as either overly honest or critical, but to gain a point towards the nurture element, those traits only tend to start emerging at the moment of deep, unexpected disappointment.
And from the very beginning, Caesar was always an innocent, whose notion of trust and safety keeps getting worn thinner and thinner after every instance of betrayal. It’s a wonder that by WftPotA he had any innocence left.
And as is typical with an innocent whose innocence has been stolen, forgiveness may come, but forgetfulness is more of a challenge. Once Koba has destroyed Caesar’s trust, it is over for him. There is no redemption. There is no second chance.
We watch the final remnants of Caesar’s innocence break away at the murder of his wife and eldest child by a human invader. We see the light fade from his eyes almost completely as the cruelty of man reaches a new pitch that he never imagined possible. Yet, he does not stop looking after his people.
Whether the mission to pursue the man who killed his family is for the safety of the clan or for his own personal revenge is murky, which is why it is so important that some of his most trusted, Maurice (2), Rocket (7), and Luca (8) go with him.
At this point, Caesar is stoic. He does not want to waste time, which is why it is also a very telling factor that, when they stumble upon a mysteriously ill child, Caesar allows his heart to be softened enough by Maurice to let her come. I’ve said in previous articles that it’s important to notice what wings are displayed as well as what level of health when ultimately determining a type. At this moment, Caesar is initially uncharacteristically cold towards her, and it takes the 2 in the room to melt him, but he is quickly melted.
Now, let’s take a detour for a moment and talk about our counterpoint storyline of The Colonel.
The Colonel remains a mystery for most of this film, even when he takes his villain moment to monologue his evil motivations to Caesar, it’s almost impossible for a compassionate audience to really understand this man. We may cognitively accept his reasoning, but emotionally, most hearts rebel – largely because we already hate him.
He states that his reasoning is to protect humanity from losing their… humanity – their sentience, their autonomy, their higher intelligence – all the while being completely unable to see that he gave up his own emotional humanity in order to preserve the rest.
This man has found a way to twist his own belief systems into supporting his genocidal plan supposedly in the name of his own species.
But it really isn’t, is it?
He isn’t angry at Caesar. He calmly admires him.
He isn’t resentful of the apes. He simply views them as a threat to be dealt with.
He isn’t wounded by their personal attacks. There have been none.
He calls Caesar “So emotional!” at an outburst of rage, but refuses to acknowledge the one underlying emotional motivation that steadily currents below his own frozen humanity.
Fear.
He is afraid of losing himself. And therefore gives himself away in order to try to preserve what is left. And I think we all have heard at least once about how “…he who tries to save his life shall lose it.”
Back to Caesar.
Caesar is captured and imprisoned. Confronted with the man who murdered his family. While he is deeply hurt and still grieving, we know that Caesar is in a wildly different state than that of The Colonel. He is hard-pressed, but refuses to be crushed. Yet, while he has not let his humanity go, he is handling it carelessly in the name of his supposedly righteous anger.
And that is perhaps the strongest motivation we are confronted with in Caesar for the majority of this film. Anger. His people have been mistreated, and he has been personally shattered. However, his anger is rarely un-checked. While he can outburst, he is largely self-cooling when he needs to be – in control – or at least at a surface level.
Even in prison, Caesar is still his comrades’ king, and he does not lay that role down; protesting the treatment of the apes, he is perhaps the reason many of them remained alive during their grueling imprisonment. And it is most definitely because of the compassion of a tiny girl, now more like him than her own kind, that Caesar survived the camp.
And that same compassion that restored Caesar is what brought down The Colonel.
The same love that built up someone willing to receiving it, is what laid low a man who had rejected it a long time ago.
Gasping for some semblance of speech in his bunk, Caesar watches the Colonel beg for death. Caesar refuses this request – as personally satisfying as it may have been. The Colonel crescendos the decay in his own bankrupt spirit by snuffing out the life he had sacrificed everything to preserve.
Even once he had lost, he could still justify death over a life simpler than the one to which he had so desperately clung.
I’ll fill you in here, it may seem too simple, but it’s really not simple at all. I believe The Colonel is a 5w4. And quite frankly, it had nothing to do with his “So emotional!” speech or his “logic” that got me there. 8’s disintegrate towards 5, so I considered that he could be an 8 for a while, but certain things did not add up.
What told me he was ultimately a 5 was his fear. Fear? Then why not a 6? Because it’s not that he fears – we are all afraid of something. It was what he feared. A 6’s ultimate fear is to be totally unsupported or without guidance or security. A 5’s basic fear is literally “Being useless, helpless, or incapable” – The Enneagram Institute. I give him a 4 wing because, even though he does not realize it, he absolutely romanticizes the notion of what it means to be a part of the human race.
He is nihilistic in general, which is a classic sticking point of a fairly unhealthy 5, but when he is at his lowest – his absolute abject depth, he begins to unravel. His behavior becomes erratic and not based in any kind of rational thought at all – he starts disintegrating towards the most scattered 7. High-risk taking behavior, un-tempered aggression, and finally a sense of hopelessness so strong that he is willing to take the ultimate risk into the unknown.
We watch a man so obsessed with reason give it all away once he feels that it has abandoned him.
And Caesar? We’re going to visit a type I’ve discussed before.
“The Challenger”, “The Protector”, Sometimes known as “The Bear”.
Caesar is an 8w9.
I considered a 2 for a good while, but Caesar is simply too innocent for that – especially when we have a classic 2 to contrast him against in Maurice. Maurice has been there since the beginning. He has witnessed the same tragedy, the same horrors, but he never carried the same innocence, which is why he never felt the same level of indignation at the loss of it.
Maurice loves because it is in his nature, regardless of whether or not he knows someone is trustworthy. Was Nova to be trusted? It didn’t matter, because what she needed was help.
Caesar trusted because it was in his nature. And once that trust was broken, it changed him.
And that is one of the most misunderstood, fundamental life-experiences of an 8. The loss of innocence that begins to callous the soul. We think of 8’s as very mean sometimes because they can be, but nine times out of ten, it’s because at some point in their life, their trusting innocence was shattered and no one could help them reconstruct it.
Yet, however calloused Caesar may have had to become to survive in this brutal world, he never lost that word I keep coming back to – Humanity.
I considered that perhaps he could be a 1 because while he struggles, Caesar’s character is still fundamentally “good”. However, I find Caesar to be too morally and relationally flexible to be a 1. And that relationality is another thing that steered me away. While he does have principles, Caesar is much more interested in people than in principles.
Once an adult, at his best, on top of being a strong leader, brave, courageous, and efficient, he is magnanimous, generous, and affectionate. A provider and a caretaker as much as a leader, which shows me that he integrates towards a 2, another evidence of 8-ness. I ascribe him a 9 wing because through the whole series he has a very foundational weariness with conflict. Oh, he will certainly engage with it when necessary, but he would much rather just be left alone.
One interesting thing about 8’s, though, is that they disintegrate towards 5’s – the Colonel. Which is why I think these characters were so brilliantly matched against each other. Caesar had every opportunity to lose his own humanity into a state of emotional numbness and cold-hearted manipulation, but he didn’t. While his anger did not serve him in the end, and eventually lead to his downfall, the fact that Caesar had enough of his heart left to feel that anger is a sign in 8’s that they have not sunk into the deepest depth yet.
But I hope that the tale of these two men – for equals they were – can remind us of what can be lost when we favor a goal (whether that be self-preservation or revenge) over people.
Because be it apes or humans, this is ultimately a story about people.
