My friend Bryan, who blogs at “that’s what I was going to say,” posted a piece commemorating the 80th anniversary of the release of King Kong, the original, classic adventure film directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoesdack. He asked that I weigh in on the film and his assessment of it, and so here goes.
I must at admit it’s been ages since I sat through the whole thing, possibly not since childhood. Because WOR in New York owned the back catalog of all the great RKO films, the channel regularly broadcast that catalog on the weekends, and on their “8 O’Clock movie” almost every night (when they weren’t broadcasting Mets games). Kong was in regular rotation, more frequent than Citizen Kane or even the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films. By the time I was watching the film, it was already a classic deemed suitable for children, when in 1933, so legend has it, women fainted in the aisles at its premiere.
Of course the film thrilled me then. The Big Ape was an amazing, tragic figure: exploited by commercial opportunists and never fully understood. And as a kid, when most of your life is very much controlled and plotted out for you, it’s always fun to see a good deal of wholesale destruction: the attack on the elevated train is aesthetically remarkable and, for a child, psychically satisfying. Kong’s fall from the Empire State Building is perhaps less impressive, but given the narrative of Kong’s end, it delivers a real sense of tragedy.
In thinking about the conditions of my viewing the film, I realize that Kong was one of many monstrous animals who came across my tv screen in the seventies. Audiences in 1933 never heard of Godzilla, Mothra, Ghidorah the 3-headed monster, Gamara the giant turtle, etc. Nor had they seen the Americanized animal victims of nuclear activity: the Deadly Mantis, or the giant ants of Them! (which still terrorizes me). Audiences would soon of course get their fill of sequels like Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. But forty years after the original, I was watching Kong in that context: indeed one of the most hyped up films from the sixties was King Kong vs. Godzilla; watching it in the seventies, we couldn’t help draw analogies to the great heavyweight fighters of the era: Kong was Ali to Ken Norton or Joe Frazier’s Godzilla. ( I know, Ali called Frazier the “gorilla” before the thrillah in Manilla, but Ali was our hero, as Kong was in the fight against the Big Lizard.)
One way of looking at all the monster films coming from Japan in the fifties and sixties is to compare them to the original Kong. It’s an unfair comparison; most of the Japanese films were cheapies intended for that younger audience, while Kong was a prestige picture. The Japanese monster films did have allegory on their side: the relationship between the emergence of the monsters and the atomic bombings was obvious enough a theme. That doesn’t change the obvious fact that Kong is a beautiful film, with special effects that far outpaced the Japanese competitors and a narrative with a real emotional core. Carl Denham may be a greedy impresario, but his characterization of Kong and Ann Darrow is dead-on: it’s a love story. Except that it’s a pretty obsessive love story of a guy who, forgive me, goes ape over a pretty girl. I think Bryan’s assessment is on target.
That said, when I think of the way we did compare the monsters to those great fighters in the boxing ring, another discourse opens up, one that has been articulated by scholars and critics alike: that of race.
Legend has it that Fay Wray was asked by the producers, “how would you like to work with the tallest darkest leading man in Hollywood?” Now, in those days, to refer to a man as tall and dark did not necessarily refer to his ethnicity. But the producers were obviously talking about Kong, who in reality was an 18-inch miniature brought to amazing life by Willis O’Brien’s special effects. It really isn’t much of a stretch to see the giant Kong as a metaphor for the white people’s anxieties about black masculinity; that racist stereotype goes back to the antebellum south and was spreading to northern cities, as the Black population increased. An interesting essay from the Journal of American Culture relates Kong to Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son, published seven years after Kong. The allegory of slavery is also obvious: Kong is captured in a faraway land and brought to America in chains. (Is it coincidence that less than a year after the 1976 remake of Kong, ABC produces its adaptation of Alex Haley’s Roots?)
It’s also worth noting that the film was made just a few years after the famous “Monkey Trial” in Tennessee, where the ACLU challenged state law by getting a volunteer teacher, John Scopes, to teach evolution in a biology classroom for the purpose of his getting arrested for violating a law prohibiting teaching Darwin. The notion of man’s descending from apes was a popular one, the subject of debate and also of ridicule. One of the more nefarious aspects of the popularization of Darwin’s theory was to give fuel for racists who saw Africans as closer to the ape and chimp end of the simian spectrum than Caucasians. The reference to Blacks as apes and monkeys has become a politically incorrect rhetoric.
It’s also fair to point out that while Kong may subconsciously reflect those white anxieties, Kong himself is the most complex character in the film. As most critics point out, he is in many ways more human than the rest of the characters around him. His love of Ann Darrow is intense, but it’s not the stereotype of the Black man shouting, “hey where are the white women at?” The stereotypes can be found in the portrayal of the “primitives” on Skull Island, grass-skirt-wearing “darkies” who chant and dance and pay homage to King Kong. They are the subjects of the kind of documentary Carl Denham might otherwise make were it not for Kong, and they would be represented in a condescending manner.
Yes, it’s “only a movie.” But I know better than that. Movies don’t exist in a vacuum. We bring to them our own histories to them, and society brings its. I don’t think it’s possible for me to watch King Kong without that awareness. But I ought to try soon, and then follow it up by watching Django Unchained.
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