Brief note: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Early on in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the apes go through a captured bag and discover a sketchbook that includes, among other things, a photograph of a woman who is probably the deceased mother of Alexander (teenage son of Malcolm, the human good guy).  Later, Dreyfus (the human not-so-good-guy) weeps over the electronic photographs of his own lost family.  Caesar, taking brief refuge in the house in which he grew up, sees a picture of himself with scientist Will Rodman, and later finds a brief video clip of them interacting.  These moments momentarily unite all the characters through the phenomenon of recorded memory, brief snippets of time captured on camera or video, but they also emphasize that all of these images are of the dead (Will presumably having died of simian flu between films).  Notably, these images are all easily lost or alienated from their owners: the sketchbook can be stolen (and returned), the electronic photos were obviously inaccessible for years, and Caesar's images of his life with humans remain in the human house.  The fragility and potential disappearance of these memory traces seem connected with the film's emphasis on moving on, dramatized in Alexander's changing relationship with his stepmother (who has herself moved on from the death of her daughter, Sarah) and, in general, its call for a kind of strategic forgetfulness that goes beyond forgiveness.  By contrast, Koba, the bonobo who tells Caesar's son Blue Eyes that "scars make you strong," carries his past experiences inscribed upon his body; it is no coincidence that suffering and rage constitute his identity.  During the assault on the city, Koba tells his human prisoners in their cage that now they'll get to have the same experiences as the apes did--in other words, he avenges his own tortures by reenacting history.  But the film offers a different lesson about scarring in the form of Blue Eyes, who is mauled by a bear at the beginning.  For Caesar, the scarring is the opportunity to learn about how to "think" before behaving impulsively, about how to avoid the same situation in the future.  For Koba, as I have suggested, scarring carves the past into the present.  In effect, the film leaves the humans scarred in Koba's sense, not Caesar's.