It’s hard enough to believe we as humans share evolutionary DNA with monkeys, but my God—what was the whole meme of returning to a monkey state all about?
“YOU THINK I’M A LOSER IN INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, BUT IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY YOU’RE THE LOSER,”
– An early progenitor for what is collectively better known and abbreviated as “return to monke.”
Perhaps fittingly, the KnowYourMeme page dedicated to the meme was created in 2020—in the first pandemic year, the idea of abandoning all that for caveman simplicity felt seductive. But the meme has, evolutionarily speaking, been around since 2018 and primarily used by meme boards. Man, evolved from monkey, returns to monke—one that mostly emotes and rationalizes little. Brute force and alpha shit, no more social games. Banana makes happy and no banana makes mad. Or maybe he’s just not capable of evolving to man, has always been, in some way, monke.
Planet of the Apes aside, two new movies posit monkey-ness as a sort of emotional, violent state—or even residue—that separates our leading men from proper men. Based on the short story by the same name but stripped of virtually all elements besides, Osgood Perkins’ 2025 film The Monkey turns a monkey-shaped wind-up toy into a Rube-Goldberg machine of murderous intent. This monkey, described on the tin “like life,” kills twins Bill and Hal’s mother, uncle, and aunt. Even when the brothers decide to throw the monkey into a well, it comes back years later. Adult Hal (Theo James), who works a grocery store job, has become a deadbeat to his own son, Petey, all for his own safety, as Hal claims. Meanwhile Bill (also Theo James), having been deeply traumatized by the death of his mother, has totally stunted his manhood and is on a mission to find the Monkey, and to kill Hal for causing the death of his mother—or so Bill’s convinced. To make this happen, Petey must turn the key. If Hal cursed Petey with deadbeat fatherdom, then Bill gives him the weapon to act on it. Hijinks ensue. Final Destination: Return to Monke plays its last Rube-Goldberg machine.
The monkey is powerful, almost god-like; the men, meanwhile, are incapable of resolving trauma. (Women here are cartoonishly laid-back or chipper.) Its murder machination helps Bill to act on his emotions, which have never developed after his teenage years. Bill speaks of the monkey reverently: “In your infinite wisdom, I trust your flaming sword of righteousness will cut the foul air and strike the right person and only the right person.” (The monkey takes no requests.) Though Bill’s trauma gets quickly resolved after talking it through with his twin brother, it’s not that Hal is any better: having repressed his fears in order to really function, his fears burst out into anger that he lashes out onto Petey. Having internalized the notion that everything is an accident, he bursts out to Petey at some point: “You were an accident!” If you hold no control over your life and your actions, can you really call yourself human? He survives the horrors, the movie suggests, by being a present father to his son. The less said about his childhood home, the better, though. They returned… somewhere, alright.
The sense of not having control over yourself and acting on stunted emotions also guides Michael Gracey’s 2024 film Better Man (the monkey here rendered by Wētā FX, the same team that brought Planet of the Apes to life). This biopic depicts the life of Robbie Williams… as a chimpanzee… The decision came about because Williams described himself as a “performing monkey,” though you would never hear this expressed in the film. Williams, in a voiceover, says: “I wanna show you how I really see myself.” The movie begins in Stoke-on-Trent, where young Robbie (Monke?) is picked on by other children, abandoned by his father, and flunking out of school all in the pursuit of fame. Fame makes one relevant, and you either have it or you don’t: we learn early on that Robbie had this instilled in him, and he will become somebody, come hell or high water. And that’s a lot of hell—sex, drugs, boyband mom ‘n’ pop—and a lot of high water. As in, Monke Williams crashes his car into water with fans chasing him and being unable to climb to the surface, which has frozen over. Better Man is unafraid to get really messy with its subject, and Robbie Williams as the narrator of his own story makes for a biopic very eager to get into the gritty details—maybe only possible because there is no human face.
Nobody else sees Robbie as a monkey, nobody but Robbie and the viewer. This has two great advantages: he screeches like a chimp when he’s particularly distressed, and by contrast, everybody else becomes a little more human as a result, even Liam Gallagher (Leo Harvey-Elledge). He is an asshole, but he is still human. Everybody has figured it out but Monke Williams, who, even when he has his fat sucked out of him, is still less evolved than the rest. (The movie unfortunately makes this literal, when Monke Williams speaks of fame freezing him at age fifteen permanently.) And it isn’t that Monke Williams has to emote more because he is the protagonist—although that helps—but because he is less evolved, and therefore has to rely on emoting to get his point across. Who, it’s suggested, almost has to drink and do drugs to keep up with the rest and the dream of his, aka going to Knebworth. Even his deadbeat, asshole father (Steve Pemberton) is more human than him. Or, alternatively: Monke Williams considers everybody else better than him because he hates himself that much. Anyway, at some point his demons catch up with him. That point is Knebworth, which ends up an action scene that could dub the whole movie Fight at the Festival on the Planet of the Apes. (The song? Let Me Entertain You!) At the very end, it is Monke Williams by himself. And that man he decides to kill, too. Monke Williams checks himself into rehab after this stint. In a montage, he becomes a ‘better man’ like the movie’s title promises. But I love that he doesn’t become a human during or after that. There is too little time in the movie to mature, and anyway, there is always the little brat, the mischievous chimpanzee that has gotten him the record deal and all that fame.
Just like how The Monkey is always there in The Monkey. At the very end, when Petey asks what they’ll do with it, Hal says: “We accept that it’s ours and hold on tight.” And if everybody they know and love is dead, they’ll dance to it. This isn’t too different from where Monke Williams finds himself in the end. He lives his lowest lows but finds himself in Royal Albert Hall, a night with Monke Williams, singing and dancing Frank Sinatra’s My Way with his dad, like they did all those years ago in front of the TV. Brute force and alpha shit makes no sense in our world, and it’s mostly irrelevant, whether it’s monkey or man resorting to it. But it does seem like life is a little more entertaining to retort to emotions and base impulses. Why not laugh and cry and dance in the face of all that is difficult?