There may be no more astonishing image in the history of modern science-fiction cinema than the severed torso of the Statue of Liberty strewn on the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes (1968): the torch that once welcomed the tired, poor, huddled masses reduced to the wretched refuse of the beach, with nobody left to hold it high. In the same year that Stanley Kubrick punctuated 2001: A Space Odyssey with a cosmic question mark, Planet of the Apes went with an exclamation point: Lady Liberty’s broken body was a perfectly pulpy avatar of Cold War anxieties about nuclear proliferation and shattered American democracy. It confirmed the worst fears of Charlton Heston’s wayward astronaut about what his countrymen were capable of, leaving him—and us—with a cruel variation on Thomas Wolfe’s truism: you can’t go home again if you never really left.
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