WTF! Who has a pet Gorilla? I'm curious if this was this supposed to mean something or represent something, as there is quite a lot of symbolism in the film, but this one went over my head. Other than the lesson: if you end up a woman's place and pet Gorilla comes out of nowhere and she doesn't explain why, you should probably leave...
shareNo, it wasn't supposed to mean anything. Keeping primates as household pets/servants is a widespread practice in Scandinavia.
shareIt's a bonobo.
I don't know the meaning, but I find it interesting that in this movie you see an ape behaving like a human (painting, and putting on make-up) and a human behaving like a monkey (best scene in the movie).
I could see that Ape Man representing primal urges, muteness, and even the exploitative nature of using a homeless man (wasn't the character supposed to be homeless?) as an art exhibition to illustrate ideas just to please the rich and feed their vanity.
The irony here is that the rich at that party, who observe with amusement this lowly specimen, may not have been that far off from him. Their own daily muteness comes in the form of ignoring panhandlers and those less fortunate. Their base urges and lusts have never really evolved, despite their formal outward appearance (Christian himself is a sex-obsessed womanizer who doesn't care about their feelings, and only seeks immediate pleasure). And a gathering of rich people chuckling at Ape Man's crude behavior becomes ironic again, when the rich start to pummel him at the very end.
Reminds me of a scene in Scorsese's Cape Fear, when he had Nick Nolte, previously a sharply-dressed and highly successful lawyer, look like an ape at the very end, squatting and muddied and bloodied, and forced to draw upon buried primal emotions just to survive. Perhaps the Ape Man is always there.