I unhinged from my device and headed for the bathroom to attempt a potty break. Before I reached the commode, a distant television blasted the image of President Donald J. Trump’s February 6 social media post displaying the faces of former First Lady Michelle Obama and her husband on the bodies of two apes.
After my lavatory break, I told the bot it’s probably important that this movie is set in Obama’s native homeland of Hawaii. The uppity chimp who’s lynched at the end, has a first name that starts with the letter “B” - just like President Trump’s allegedly Kenyan nemesis, Barack.
300 years of White pseudoscience, 100 years of the King King franchise (valued over $1.2 billion), 70 years of the Planet of the Apes franchise (valued over $2 billion), a 2009 Google apology for Michelle Obama search results yielding distorted images depicting a chimpanzee, and our current president’s social media suggests that the global White collective views a film like Primate and instantly envisions the naughty chimp as Obama, LeBron James, prizefighter Jack Johnson, and/or black people at large.
As such, Roberts did not concoct a mediocre slasher film that’s an ode to a 1980s Stephen King book-turned-movie featuring a rabid hound. He constructed a deliberate lynching fantasy for all who prayed to see the first black president slaughtered like Travis.
Bot said I should mention that Primate is based on medical deception. Animals with rabies do not become mass killers. If Ben’s a “crazy nigger” threatening White lives and power, the audience cheers on the White lynch mob. The “infection” is tissue paper camouflage using a biological lie to justify a racial execution.
This movie reveals itself in its character’s names. The chimp is old, reliable, faithful, black Ben. This name evokes such comfort and savoriness for White people, they branded Ben’s servile face to their denatured white rice for decades. It speaks to the monkey, and black people’s, subservient and minstrel existence as dictated by the System of White Supremacy. We serve their research goals with our bodies and their amusements with our suffering. When their experiments conclude or we’re no longer entertaining, we’re eliminated.
Which is exactly what White people wanted for Barack. They got their wish with Primate.
Counter-Racist scholars such as Dr. Carol Anderson and Dr. Frances Cress Welsing emphasized the historic number of death threats and venomous White rage targeting President Obama during his tenure in the White House. Dr. Welsing concluded that White Men felt especially anxious and threatened by a non-white male, even jokingly, being thought of as the most powerful man in the world.
A major component of Primate’s plot and gruesomeness is the decay of White manhood. Obama’s furry twin butchers all the White dudes first, leaving an opulent, Hawaiian “whore mansion” filled with unprotected, young, scantly clad White Women. Beyond being monkey casualties, the White guys on the screen are nearly effeminate.
In the first 5 minutes of the film, the one black character mocks his White pal for having “never talked to a real girl.” Before being snuffed, Ben straddles this White beau in a White girl’s bed, pens down his arms, and rips away half of his face. Before losing his jaw, the White boy’s last words are an idle threat to have animal control jab a needle deeply into Ben’s rectum. Sodomy and sexual violence are time-tested means of establishing and maintaining White Manhood.
The only White father of the film, Adam, is hearing impaired, habitually absent, and abandons his White daughters and adolescent house guests with a knowingly infected simian on the premises. The veterinarian interrupts dad’s book signing to inform him that Ben is rabid, yet he doubts her.
As opposed to herds of murderous White males, Race Soldiers with badges, and robed klansmen who’ve taken pride exterminating countless black males in the name of safeguarding White femininity, the White Men of Primate are an impotent indictment of “the man’s” failures to protect and manage his castle and non-white property.
The bot was initially resistant to this counter-racist interpretation, but Robert’s usage of the pool verified every Racist molecule of this project. Just like the negro apes, and Uncle Ben’s grains, prohibiting black people’s access to swimming pools is an ingrained aspect of White Culture.
When the White girls recognize that Ben’s revolt has begun, they instantly remember the chimp can’t swim, so their only sanctuary becomes the pool. Primate evokes generations of White violence that denied the existence of black swimmers and infinite Racist canards about burly Bens intent on ravaging sun-burned White chicks. The White girls are now manless and trapped in a pool with an insurrectionary beast denying their exit.
The failure of White Manhood, and White Power more broadly, is so widespread, no one has a charged, functioning phone. When the phones do work, the White girls can't give the 9-11 operator sufficient information to initiate a rescue. But the most glaring dereliction of White duty is that this household lacks a firearm. Primate spits in the "cold, dead" face of Charlton Heston, the former spokesperson for the National Rifle Association and lead actor for the first two installments of Planet of the Apes. These White people abandoned all sense of protection, adopted a jungle beast, dressed him in an “aloha” t-shirt, and thought of him as “family.”
White people did accuse Barack of taking their guns.
Without pistols or White penises, the White girls are left groping for shovels, bottles, and other primitive weapons to combat a substantially stronger Ben. They critically turn to the signature Race Soldier weapon: a rope. During a 2016 discussion of the film franchise The Purge, Admitted White Supremacist Dr. Martin Kevorkian described the symbolism of a White family requesting a rope to confine a black male who has a salivating, White gang begging to lynch him. Kevorkian said this mimics the long history of hanging black males for the maintenance of White Power - which necessitates black death.
The White Women make two attempts to lasso Ben, and they both fail. The second attempt is a protracted tug of war, where the noose does go around Ben’s head. The bot and I think this display, as well as Ben’s eventual double empaling, serve as reminders and nostalgia for the primitive White violence used to control black people a century past. The resurrection of White Power and White Manhood demands a black blood letting. Unreliable mobile phones and 21st century gadgetry are not the necessary tools to stop “woke” beasts and extract black blood.
When Ben is finally “put down” - twice, his blood drains into the same pool where nearly nude White Women were just held captive. Bot emphasized the “double” execution of Ben mirrors the spectacles of extreme violence enacted during lynchings. It’s insufficient to merely kill a black dude. White Men require his testicles. White People demand negro knuckles, fingers and teeth as souvenirs of the time they quieted Ben.
This is what hoards of White people, maybe even our current President, dreamed for Barack.
In fact, Ben got the same death as King Kong a century earlier, both are tossed from a building and plunge dozens of feet to obliteration. Both “falls” represent the restoration of White People to the supreme position, on top, with the beastly ape/negro at the very, bottom - meaning the grave.
Bot also emphasized Ben is not rabid. Rather, he’s engaged in "guerrilla warfare" because he talks back. We’re told Ben was a research animal to help White people communicate with chimps. Ben has an elaborate speech pad, where he can strike different keys to play audible words. He can even conjure rudimentary sentences. Roberts’ Primate is aping Planet of the Apes, where those gorillas’ acquisition of language is a key component of their overthrow of White people.
Primate’s most important and repeated line is: “Bad Lucy.”
White Lucy is one of the main characters, and she does survive the chimp revolt. In the context of this film, and the horror genre more broadly, White Lucy is “bad” for shacking up at “Whore Mansion,” doing drugs, underage drinking, and being a neglectful big sister. In the context of Ben’s uprising, White Lucy and her White family are “bad”/Racist because they stole/enslaved this chimp and brought him half way around the world to their man-made “Eden” on a colonized non-white island.
Barack’s homeland has no native chimps. In fact, Hawaii is one of the most sensitive and isolated archipelagos in the world. Consequently, they have very strict biosecurity prohibitions on admitting non-native species like Ben. As with lynching, there is a long history of invading, “bad” White people - like Barack’s White mother, bringing species and things to the islands with disastrous consequences.
Ben has been stolen from his family, used as a lab subject, and stuffed in a Hawaiian dungeon for the entertainment and intellectual gains of White people. Bot say it’s important that Ben dons a red t-shirt for the whole rebellion, signifying the history of circus and “street grinder” monkeys, which wore similar colors, and minstrel mockeries that equated chimps to black people. Ben’s a “house nigger” while White Lucy, and the rest of Ben’s White wardens in general, are very “bad”/Racist. Because the final line of the film is “Lucy bad,” Ben’s verbal indictment of White people is a massive aspect of why this film is considered “scary.”
Victims of Racism are not supposed to sass White people.
Not even to expose White lies. And White Lucy is critical lie in this flick.
“On November 24, 1974, paleoanthropologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discovered the 3.2-million-year-old fossilized remains of Australopithecus afarensis in Hadar, Ethiopia.” They named her Lucy. The bot thought about this and concluded, “‘Lucy’ is the ‘Mother of Mankind,’ proving that all human life originated in Africa.” “By naming the White daughter Lucy, the film ‘reclaims’ that name for White womanhood.”
Similar to Pres. Trump’s ongoing lies that he won the 2020 presidential election, many White people seem unwilling to except that human life began with melanated hue-mans in Africa. Filmmaker Roberts doubles down on the names of White characters relating to the origins of mankind by christening the delinquent White father “Adam,” suggesting he and White Eve were the first to walk the planet in Eden.
Despite Roberts structuring this film so that audiences relax and relish dead Ben’s blood staining the pool red, I cheered for my upstart guerilla brother. Ben may have been smuggled for all we know. Sissified White boys threaten to anally violate him - which may have already happened at the research laboratory, and he’s the property of White adults who neglect their own offspring. How much joy is in Ben’s life being caged by Whites on an island where he never sees another chimp?
“Like one White man said in the late 1950s. He said he doesn’t care what kind of car a negro has. He’s said he’s still a nigger. And when he rides by in a shiny car, to him, it’s just a monkey in a car. White people built the care. Put a monkey in it. Train the monkey to drive the car, so now, you’re looking at a monkey in a car. See, but black people don’t see themselves that way. But this is how the White Supremacists see us, and they are the ones who run our business. And we have to know that. That when they look at us, that’s what they see. That that’s what they see. And at a subliminal level, what they see begins to spill over into our brain. So that we see at a subliminal level see each other that way and indirectly see ourselves that way.” Neely Fuller Jr. 2008 (months before the election of Barack Obama)
Pres. Trump probably watched Primate before posting his Racist image of the Obamas. I bet he at least saw the trailer. And I’m for certain he remembers Travis, who, like countless black people, was put down by White officers’ bullets. Roberts, who is British, confessed to remembering and being influenced by the chimp's 2009 escape and shooting death.
Travis. Barack. Ben. They are one and the same according to our president and Whites writ large. The trio are at least close relatives.
