Tomorrow the silly soda ban begins in New York City: restaurants will not be allowed to sell sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces. Customers will be allowed to refill their drinks, or have their drinks refilled. (Yes, since normally a 32-ounce drink is cheaper than 16-ounce ones, then customers who like their soda are going to pay more.) Deliveries will be affected, since restaurants will not be allowed to sell large sized bottles of soda. (Domino's is really really torqued off by this thing.)
But the real idiocy will happen at your local barista. If you want a coffee larger than 16 ounces, be aware that if you like it very sweet, that server at Dunkin' Donuts will only be able to put a certain number of sugar packets in that coffee of yours. Of course, you can put as much sugar as you want, but the restaurant can't do it, or face fines up to $2,000 bucks.
Simple question:
Are. You. Kidding. Me?
This is just plain silly. There's a whole set of guidelines as to what kind of drink is allowed a certain amount of sugar. Lattes are not held to this standard because they have lots of milk, which is still nutritious (until we start letting aspartame in the milk and still call it milk). Zero-calorie sweeteners of course are exempt, so you can have your barista put in all the sweet and low and splenda and the aforementioned aspartame you want. But why is the city making it so complicated for people?
There is a lawsuit against this ban, and who knows if the next mayor of the city will keep the ban, if it does survive the lawsuit. I tend to be supportive of the idea that government is actually a generally decent thing: I think it's good to have the food industry regulated to keep disease from my food; I like that drugs have to be federally approved before being sold on the marketplace; I like having roads; I think having authorities make sure the water is clean is pretty nice. (Worth noting: the Clean Air and Water Act was signed into law by Richard Nixon.) But this seems like a really ridiculous intrusion into consumer preferences. It treats the consumer like a child. Worse, my tax dollars are being spent to have people figure out how much sugar is supposed to be in this or that coffee, and health inspectors are going to have to spend extra time trying to make sure the Starbucks barista hasn't overdone it on the sugar instead of checking for botulism or rodents in the Dunkin' Donuts.
Let's face it; soda is really bad for you. Too much sugar is bad for you. If you want to tax the hell out of such products, and use those funds to help fund health care in the city, that's fine with me. (That's where a lot of the taxes on tobacco products go.) But simply to take the choices off the menu is petty and wasteful for everyone.
Monday, March 11, 2013
From the Archives: An Amusing Music Index Entry
A while back I posted an entry from an old Music Index blog I was constructing. Here's another one; I must admit, I liked this short entry:
Sypro Gyra is to jazz fusion what Gerber is to vegetables: crushed, pureed, mashed up product designed for a market that can't digest the real thing (only Gerber's is a tad more nutritous). Not really terrible, but not really engaging stuff. The kind of thing you hear at art gallery openings by people who don't know much about music (or for that matter, art).
Sypro Gyra is to jazz fusion what Gerber is to vegetables: crushed, pureed, mashed up product designed for a market that can't digest the real thing (only Gerber's is a tad more nutritous). Not really terrible, but not really engaging stuff. The kind of thing you hear at art gallery openings by people who don't know much about music (or for that matter, art).
Friday, March 8, 2013
Film Friday: An Old Movie Giant continues to "slim down"
One of the most amazing symbols of the enormous growth of the internet was the merger between America Online and Time Warner, which was really a case (Steve Case?) of AOL buying out Time Warner, though key Warner executives would remain in positions of authority. That an internet company had become so powerful that it could buy out one of the largest media conglomerates in the world was impressive enough. It was the first indicator of the ways that traditional and new media were being combined to create a new kind of mass media content.
But this wild diversification of Time Warner has created an unwieldy monster. Before the decade was over, AOL had been spun off From Time Warner, and after a deal with another publisher fell through, Time Inc, the magazine end of the media conglomerate, will be spun off into a new, publicly traded company. (Note that this also comes after Time Warner got rid of its interests in record labels.)
Let's face it: magazines are in deep trouble, even as Warner honchos insists that Time Inc will greatly benefit from the spinoff. (I'll talk about how the death of print may be a bit premature in some other post.) So by slimming down its peripheral assets, Time Warner is returning to a fundamental approach to entertainment provision; they are going to be a company that produces film and tv shows and also provides cable television service. Their primary purpose will remain as a distributor of audiovisual content, which is what they've been since almost the beginning.
The Warner Brothers -- Jack, Sam, Harry, and Albert -- opened their first movie theater in 1903, and a year late began distributing films and opening more theaters. Eventually they became involved in production, ultimately buying out First National pictures and releasing some of the earliest sound films in Hollywood, most famously The Jazz Singer. This move vaulted them into being one of the five major studios in the old Studio System: they had facilities to produce films, they could distribute them and show them in theaters that they owned.
Eventually, the Supreme Court decided that this vertically integrated practice violated Constitutional law, forcing the major studios to sell their theater chains. (Think of movie screens the same way you'd look at all the other screens in your life: they're all part of the package.) But since deregulation, Time Warner is able to devour other media sources and get involved in cable tv. That era has already become part of the history, alongside the original names. One veteran executive, speaking in the 1970s of the difference between the "new Hollywood" and the classical Hollywood era, said, in those days we made pictures; today we make deals. With the spinoff, Time Warner is going to be back to what it knows what to do: make and sell movies.
But this wild diversification of Time Warner has created an unwieldy monster. Before the decade was over, AOL had been spun off From Time Warner, and after a deal with another publisher fell through, Time Inc, the magazine end of the media conglomerate, will be spun off into a new, publicly traded company. (Note that this also comes after Time Warner got rid of its interests in record labels.)
Let's face it: magazines are in deep trouble, even as Warner honchos insists that Time Inc will greatly benefit from the spinoff. (I'll talk about how the death of print may be a bit premature in some other post.) So by slimming down its peripheral assets, Time Warner is returning to a fundamental approach to entertainment provision; they are going to be a company that produces film and tv shows and also provides cable television service. Their primary purpose will remain as a distributor of audiovisual content, which is what they've been since almost the beginning.
The Warner Brothers -- Jack, Sam, Harry, and Albert -- opened their first movie theater in 1903, and a year late began distributing films and opening more theaters. Eventually they became involved in production, ultimately buying out First National pictures and releasing some of the earliest sound films in Hollywood, most famously The Jazz Singer. This move vaulted them into being one of the five major studios in the old Studio System: they had facilities to produce films, they could distribute them and show them in theaters that they owned.
Eventually, the Supreme Court decided that this vertically integrated practice violated Constitutional law, forcing the major studios to sell their theater chains. (Think of movie screens the same way you'd look at all the other screens in your life: they're all part of the package.) But since deregulation, Time Warner is able to devour other media sources and get involved in cable tv. That era has already become part of the history, alongside the original names. One veteran executive, speaking in the 1970s of the difference between the "new Hollywood" and the classical Hollywood era, said, in those days we made pictures; today we make deals. With the spinoff, Time Warner is going to be back to what it knows what to do: make and sell movies.
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Holy UK Joker! Man Dressed as Batman brings in his crook friend!
My dad used to tell me about the old Batman movie serials of the forties: silly stuff, and because they hadn't yet developed the kind of tights that emphasized the musculature, Batman looks fat in those serials! Seriously, take a look and you'll see that this serial makes Adam West look like the Terminator.
Well, apparently someone decided to pay homage to the old serial films, as this story tells it:
Who's this joker?
The British media is going batty over footage of a chubby crime-fighter bringing a wanted crook to justice while dressed in an old-school Batman costume.
The Caped Crusader stunned cops at the police station in Bradford, West Yorkshire, on Feb. 25 when he showed up with a track suit-wearing thug in tow.
"I've caught this one for you," the masked vigalente told cops, The Telegraph newspaper reported.
The 27-year-old suspect was a two-bit thief wanted for burglary. He's due in court on Friday, according to reports.
Meanwhile, the vigilante -- whose baggy gray getup and yellow emblem recalled Adam West's TV Batman from the 1960’s -- "promptly vanished into the night," a police spokesman said.
The costume is the Adam West era, but it's worth noting that West's costume is similar to, if better fitting than, the serial Batman's costume.
Interestingly, this caped crusader has taken off his cowl to reveal the truth! Seems that he went to a football match in the costume -- which actually makes perfect sense -- and while at the match he got a call from a friend who was wanted for burglary and wanted to turn himself in. Our hero -- in real life a 39-year-old Chinese food delivery guy -- agreed to turn him in after he came home from the match, at about one in the morning. (His drive home from the stadium is a long one, about three and a half hours.) Rather than change out of the costume -- or, quite sensibly, simply take the suit off and wear the tracksuit that he had on underneath it for warmth -- this guy, Stan Worby (a great alter ego for a costumed superhero, doncha think?), kept it on, and I guess he and his burglar friend thought it'd be funny if he brought him in as Batman.
As it turns out, they were right. It's very funny.
Worby blames the "fatman" look on that tracksuit, which he wore to keep himself warm at the football match. He's not very amused at all the jokes the video of his "heroics" has inspired. I hope Adam West sends him a note. I hafta check twitter, see if he's already said something about this!
Well, apparently someone decided to pay homage to the old serial films, as this story tells it:
Who's this joker?
The British media is going batty over footage of a chubby crime-fighter bringing a wanted crook to justice while dressed in an old-school Batman costume.
The Caped Crusader stunned cops at the police station in Bradford, West Yorkshire, on Feb. 25 when he showed up with a track suit-wearing thug in tow.
"I've caught this one for you," the masked vigalente told cops, The Telegraph newspaper reported.
The 27-year-old suspect was a two-bit thief wanted for burglary. He's due in court on Friday, according to reports.
Meanwhile, the vigilante -- whose baggy gray getup and yellow emblem recalled Adam West's TV Batman from the 1960’s -- "promptly vanished into the night," a police spokesman said.
The costume is the Adam West era, but it's worth noting that West's costume is similar to, if better fitting than, the serial Batman's costume.
Interestingly, this caped crusader has taken off his cowl to reveal the truth! Seems that he went to a football match in the costume -- which actually makes perfect sense -- and while at the match he got a call from a friend who was wanted for burglary and wanted to turn himself in. Our hero -- in real life a 39-year-old Chinese food delivery guy -- agreed to turn him in after he came home from the match, at about one in the morning. (His drive home from the stadium is a long one, about three and a half hours.) Rather than change out of the costume -- or, quite sensibly, simply take the suit off and wear the tracksuit that he had on underneath it for warmth -- this guy, Stan Worby (a great alter ego for a costumed superhero, doncha think?), kept it on, and I guess he and his burglar friend thought it'd be funny if he brought him in as Batman.
As it turns out, they were right. It's very funny.
Worby blames the "fatman" look on that tracksuit, which he wore to keep himself warm at the football match. He's not very amused at all the jokes the video of his "heroics" has inspired. I hope Adam West sends him a note. I hafta check twitter, see if he's already said something about this!
William Carlos Williams and some French "Portraits"
In 1920, William Carlos Williams published a poem called "Portrait of a Lady." It has nothing to do with the Henry James novel of the same name. Its central theme is the efforts of the speaker to describe his passion for a lady with references to the French rococo painter Jean Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), but fumbling over himself and also referring to another, late-rococo painter Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806). Here is the poem:
Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze -- or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
-- As if that answered
anything. -- Ah, yes. Below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore --
Which shore? --
the sand clings to my lips --
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
-- the petals from some hidden
appletree -- Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.
My first advice: Ladies, if a guy compares your thighs to appletrees, run the other way.
In very general terms, we might imagine that this poem is either a dialogue between the speaker and his "lady love," or it's the speaker trying out lines of praise and correcting/sabotaging himself. The questions being asked throughout -- "which sky?" "what sort of man was Fragonard?" "Which shore?" "How should I know?" -- undermine the speaker's efforts.
One way of understanding the poem is to look at two paintings, one by Watteau, one by Fragonard, whose titles are both usually translated the same into English: The Swing. Here's the Watteau:
It's a crappy image, but you can see the kind of pastoral texture: the soft, "perfect" sunlight, the bucolic setting. It's an image of innocent love.
Now for the Fragonard:
It's a bit naughtier, eh? First you have a "threesome"! The man on the left has, shall we say, a rather interesting view. So, interestingly do the cherubs in statuette, from behind the woman's, er, behind. This is no idyll: it's a very bawdy parody of the Watteau.
Williams first introduces the Watteau in answer to the "which sky" question: "The sky/Where Watteau hung a lady's/slipper." Except, the speaker is wrong: look at the Fragonard, and you'll see the lady's slipper hanging in the air, and evidently having just been kicked off her foot, in a suggestive manner. Later, the rhetorical question appears: "Agh!what" sort of man was Fragonard?/ --As if that answered anything." Again, is this another speaker? Is this the poem's speaker? By mentioning Fragonard, we can see that the speaker -- or perhaps Williams, though I doubt it -- is conflating the two paintings.
One way of reading the poem is that while the speaker may have as his spoken intentions the innocent romance of the Watteau, the poet's "true" intentions are those represented by the Fragonard. It's worth noting that all the imagery of the woman herself refers to her lower half: thighs compared to apple trees, knees to a southern breeze, the ankles to tall grass. The trope of comparing the female body parts to things found in nature is an old one; it was a popular convention during the Renaissance, for example. But the constant interruptions on the part of the lady -- or of the speaker himself, struggle to write a love poem -- completely undermine the attempt at romance, and place it squarely where the meaning lies: below the waist. The reference to the two paintings helps the reader to get to the heart of the matter...or rather, the thighs of the matter.
Your thighs are appletrees
whose blossoms touch the sky.
Which sky? The sky
where Watteau hung a lady's
slipper. Your knees
are a southern breeze -- or
a gust of snow. Agh! what
sort of man was Fragonard?
-- As if that answered
anything. -- Ah, yes. Below
the knees, since the tune
drops that way, it is
one of those white summer days,
the tall grass of your ankles
flickers upon the shore --
Which shore? --
the sand clings to my lips --
Which shore?
Agh, petals maybe. How
should I know?
Which shore? Which shore?
-- the petals from some hidden
appletree -- Which shore?
I said petals from an appletree.
My first advice: Ladies, if a guy compares your thighs to appletrees, run the other way.
In very general terms, we might imagine that this poem is either a dialogue between the speaker and his "lady love," or it's the speaker trying out lines of praise and correcting/sabotaging himself. The questions being asked throughout -- "which sky?" "what sort of man was Fragonard?" "Which shore?" "How should I know?" -- undermine the speaker's efforts.
One way of understanding the poem is to look at two paintings, one by Watteau, one by Fragonard, whose titles are both usually translated the same into English: The Swing. Here's the Watteau:
It's a crappy image, but you can see the kind of pastoral texture: the soft, "perfect" sunlight, the bucolic setting. It's an image of innocent love.
Now for the Fragonard:
It's a bit naughtier, eh? First you have a "threesome"! The man on the left has, shall we say, a rather interesting view. So, interestingly do the cherubs in statuette, from behind the woman's, er, behind. This is no idyll: it's a very bawdy parody of the Watteau.
Williams first introduces the Watteau in answer to the "which sky" question: "The sky/Where Watteau hung a lady's/slipper." Except, the speaker is wrong: look at the Fragonard, and you'll see the lady's slipper hanging in the air, and evidently having just been kicked off her foot, in a suggestive manner. Later, the rhetorical question appears: "Agh!what" sort of man was Fragonard?/ --As if that answered anything." Again, is this another speaker? Is this the poem's speaker? By mentioning Fragonard, we can see that the speaker -- or perhaps Williams, though I doubt it -- is conflating the two paintings.
One way of reading the poem is that while the speaker may have as his spoken intentions the innocent romance of the Watteau, the poet's "true" intentions are those represented by the Fragonard. It's worth noting that all the imagery of the woman herself refers to her lower half: thighs compared to apple trees, knees to a southern breeze, the ankles to tall grass. The trope of comparing the female body parts to things found in nature is an old one; it was a popular convention during the Renaissance, for example. But the constant interruptions on the part of the lady -- or of the speaker himself, struggle to write a love poem -- completely undermine the attempt at romance, and place it squarely where the meaning lies: below the waist. The reference to the two paintings helps the reader to get to the heart of the matter...or rather, the thighs of the matter.
Monday, March 4, 2013
The Beast that Killed Beauty
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.
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.
Friday, March 1, 2013
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