To me, Charlton Heston became a kind of tragic figure. He had amazing strengths, did an immense amount of good for many people, but, ultimately, like some of the Shakespearean characters he loved to play, he had hubris. The strong ethical orientation that allowed him to help so many people and to completely avoid any type of scandal in Hollywood, also seemed to lead him to pompously and excessively defend a principle that failed to catch ethical nuances and demands.
His hubris, perhaps, caused him to become too unyielding ethically, too wedded to one aspect of a moral issue to the point of losing proper perspective and, perhaps, even some of his humanity.
There can be no doubt that Charlton Heston was a very principled man. According to Marc Eliot’s biography Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon, it was Heston who first publicly criticized Hollywood for its racist portrayals of indigenous folks after his film The Savage, in which he played a character who was half-White and half-Native American (who chooses to embrace and fight for his indigenous culture). He learned a great deal from Sioux technical advisors which sensitized him to the real history and plight of Native Americans.
During the early days of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. actively sought Heston out to participate in marches. Heston was happy to support that cause and eagerly marched with King. One of King’s followers apparently quipped, “Well, if we have Moses on our side, who can stop us!?”
The stories of Heston helping other people in the film industry are legendary and I can cite two quite easily. When Hollywood had banned Orson Welles from ever directing again, Heston successfully pressed for Welles to direct the film Touch of Evil. When Sam Peckinpah ran out of money for Major Dundee, Heston took a huge pay cut so that the film could be finished (he was soundly attacked for doing this by many of his fellow actors, who worried they might be expected to do this someday as well for a director).
Charlton Heston also served as the President of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) from 1965 to 1971. During his tenure, he was actively involved in advocating for actors’ rights and working conditions. He recalled his own hardscrabble life in New York as a struggling actor and took measures to provide assistance for young actors as well as the big stars. Heston negotiated improved contracts for actors, ensuring better wages, benefits, and working conditions for SAG members.
He was asked by both the Republican and Democratic parties to run for Senate and he refused. He did not think it was right for him to use his fame to launch a political career.
As for Hollywood scandals – there were zero. The only criticisms of Heston were that he was too straight-laced. Richard Harris famously said that Heston was the only person he had met who was probably born of a square womb.
His son loved him deeply and the daughter he and his wife adopted, after his wife became incapable of giving birth again, had nothing but kind words about him. All indications were that he was a truly loyal, supportive and loving dad/husband. As a college student he fell in love with a female student at Northwestern University, they married, they struggled together, they supported each other in their successful acting careers, and they remained married and in love until Heston passed on.
It is the 2nd Amendment stance that bothers lots of us. Heston had a tough childhood emotionally, as his mother wished to separate him from his biological father after a divorce. Heston always fondly remembered the legal hunting trips his dad had taken him on as a young man, and this was one of the reasons he ultimately supported the 2nd Amendment so much, although he did support gun control for some time after the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
Heston could be and perhaps enjoyed being a contrarian. After he changed his opinion on gun control, perhaps he became more hardcore and unyielding in his advocacy of the 2nd Amendment when he sensed his opponents were becoming more aggressive regarding him. The 2nd Amendment fight would probably have been better observed in the breach, but Heston apparently felt he had to double down on this issue when more pressure was applied to opposing him.
He believed in fighting for his principles and this, unfortunately, became a battle that led to him saying that if the government wanted to take away guns from Americans, they would have to take his from his “cold, dead hands”.
My argument is that he became a victim of his own pride and overarching morality on this issue. The central issue for him became preserving the integrity of the Constitution, but this led to a type of tunnel vision that excluded the suffering caused by gun violence. He did not make this mistake because he was a bad man, he made it because he believed he was being a good man. When asked about the victims of gun violence he would call for harsher penalties for the bad guys with a gun (yet, there is no compelling evidence that stronger forms of deterrence curtail gun violence or mass shootings).
Of course, complicating this issue is the fact that he ultimately died of Alzheimer’s disease. In Charlton Heston: Hollywood’s Last Icon Marc Eliot wondered whether Heston might have become so overbearing and morally hardcore about the gun issue during a period of time when, perhaps, his cognitive faculties were deteriorating. He made his “cold, dead hands” comment at the age of 76 and died at 84.
There’s a Chinese saying “千好万好, 一错万错”, which translates to “A thousand good deeds may be undone by one mistake.” or “Do a thousand good deeds, but one mistake will spoil everything.” This would seem to apply to the life and legacy of Heston.
Of course, a huge irony is that the actor who was vilified by liberals for his stance on the 2nd Amendment made three of the most liberal, progressive and thoughtful sci-fi films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Each of these films has held up well and is still relevant to contemporary concerns.
Planet of the Apes (1968)
There are two big issues in this film. First, Taylor (played by Heston) is happy to leave the Earth of the late 1960s because it is too messy for him. His response to the moral conflicts and protests and demands for social justice is to get into a spaceship and flee in the name of science. The irony is that he flees into the collective social consequences of his own type of moral cowardice – a planet where all humans have been rendered speechless and powerless and are now slaves to apes.
So the first message is that moral cowardice has severe implications and can only lead to negative social outcomes. Despite how messy things may seem to be, we must stay engaged in our pursuit of positive individual and social change, or we are actively contributing to evil.
Secondly, the apes are religious fundamentalists. There is a battle between religion and science in the film that still resonates with us. The admin apes want to keep the other apes in religious darkness and actively try to suppress scientific discoveries. They seem to have learned some lesson from the fall of humans and do not want to replicate it.
It is essential to the Orangutan leadership that the theory of evolution – apes came from humans – must never be promulgated. The rejection of scientific truths based on a sense of religious or conservative denial has become commonplace in our contemporary culture.
Omega Man (1971)
I would contend this was the best of the three films based on Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. The real innovation in this script is that the mutants can communicate. The film seems to be, in part, a cautionary tale about a toxic ideology that breeds unthinking orthodoxy and a need for violence.
Heston is a scientist (Robert Neville) who seems to be the only survivor of a world war involving germ warfare, due to a type of vaccine he creates just before the conflagration. He goes on search and destroy missions daily to kill the mutant survivors of the war, who besiege his apartment building each night trying to kill him.
The germs spread during the war seem to affect cognition and make people overly ideological and predisposed to a type of Luddite, anti-technology belief system. For example, the mutants can use guns against Chuck’s character, but won’t, so they try to kill Heston with pre-industrial technological weapons.
The film cautions that ideology can turn to orthodoxy, hate and violence and betray its own principles. Most unforgettable moment: Chuck as Neville has been captured by the mutants who are now lecturing him on the evils of science and technology. Chuck looks at the leader, squints his eyes, and says, “You’re fulla crap.”
Other progressive elements? Chuck has a bi-racial love affair with another non-mutant survivor.
Soylent Green (1973)
Heston, himself, found this story and lobbied to have it turned into a film as he had concerns about the rising world population and the negative effects it might be having on the environment. It is a cautionary tale in regard to a few issues.
First, the film serves as a warning about women possibly losing hard-earned rights. In the film, women have lost most of their rights and many exist as “furniture” for wealthy and powerful men. This might have seemed overly unrealistic, but we can see a conservative pushback against women, especially in the Supreme Court decision against abortion.
Also, Naomi Wolf’s book of 1990 The Beauty Myth was concerned with how women were suffering due to continued pressure for them to be pleasing, sexualized objects for men, regardless of how much legal equality they had. The MeToo movement showed how exploited and harassed women had become.
Secondly, the oceans have died in the film. Indeed, our oceans will die of “acidification” if stronger worldwide measures are not taken. As it is, our oceans are becoming more acidic and are filled with plastics so that all of the fish we eat probably contain microplastics. The water we drink from plastic containers certainly contains microplastics, while our tap water may contain industrial pollutants. In the film, only the rich and powerful have clean water.
Third, a massive betrayal of the government and industry toward the people is shown in this film. The people are told that even though the environment is dying, there is still some plankton that can be harvested and it can be produced in the form of green crackers. Of course, we know what the green crackers really are. Public trust in government and industry has never been lower in US history. The Pew Research Center recently reported that fewer than two in ten Americans believe their government will do what is right most of the time.
Fourth, when the film was made, world population was 3.6 billion. It is currently 8.1 billion, 50 years later. Efforts in resource management have made it possible for people to survive this surge, but unchecked growth may subvert further attempts at sustainability.
Should we be surprised that Heston did these films? No. He always considered himself a political independent and formed his own opinions about issues. Although he was criticized for his ultra-conservative stance on the 2nd Amendment, he was broad-minded enough to leave us with these quite liberal warnings.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Wikimedia