I chopped up this Flash animation as part of a school project whose thesis was that, simply, and taking my cue from Ernie Cline, people are just a bunch of monkeys. And a bunch of fucked up monkeys at that: we think we amount to something more than monkeys, but we do not have anything that is uniquely human in its essence. Some of the things we might consider as human distinctions are language and technology, but animals have them as well--only on a lesser scale. If we really wanted to separate ourselves through the sheer degree of which we have these certain skills (and not just "either we have it or we don't"), we might as well consider our unbelievable ability to wage war. Animals kill each other all the time, but only the human monkey can achieve routine genocide.

But whether war is right or wrong is not my point. My point is that war is simply an extension of what the rest of the animal world do: kill each other. We are no more than monkeys in our core. In whatever we do, we still act like monkeys, because that's what we are made out of.

I try to expand on this thought on an essay that accompanies this project. Stress that again: I try. =D

--Paulo Ang (pbba13@hotmail.com)

Back to "Dance, Monkeys, Dance"