King Kong




"Why do people call me a monkey? That hurts!"

I went to see Peter Jackson’s King Kong earlier this week and loved it – It really does work to recapture the feeling of adventure that the original film. You can read reviews of it anywhere, but I thought I’d make some of my patented random observations.

I think the best remakes are also critiques of the original, and King Kong certainly operates in this fashion. Here are some examples:

- Denham ’33 (Robert Armstrong) didn’t seem to be much a filmmaker, what with his having no script and no onscreen talent except Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). What kind of movie was he going to make, and what was with the costumes he brought? It’s much more obvious what kind of movie Denham ’05 (Jack Black) is trying to make, and besides Ann (Naomi Watts) there’s also a male actor on the ship. The role of Jack Driscoll (Adrian Brody) has been changed into a writer.

- With the inclusion of more movie-making detail, Jackson has opted for much more satire of the movie industry. Denham ’05 is an alternate version of Orson Welles gone to seed, Driscoll is forced to write Denham’s movie while occupying an animal cage in the ship’s hold, and the leading man is not nearly as heroic as the image he projects on screen.


Gun, camera, less successful relation of a movie superstar. Are they making a movie about Charlie Sheen?

- Denham ’33 practically came off as the hero of the movie. Even though he made numerous bad decisions that led to dozens of deaths no ever seemed to call him to account for what he’d done, nor did he show any remorse. Heck, at the end of the movie the cop practically pats him on the back as they look at Kong’s corpse. Denham ’05 is less ambiguously a scum bag, and at the end of the film it’s pretty obvious he realizes he needs to flee the country.

- Here’s a difficult topic, and I’m going to break it into two parts. It’s hard to avoid the fact that the original King Kong was a very racist movie. First, let's look at the natives of Skull Island. I '33 they were broad caricatures of how Americans at the time imagined African tribesmen. What African tribesmen were doing in Indonesia, I'm not sure. In any case, they had the whole "Oonga Boonga" thing going on, with bones through the noses of the men and cocoanut bras on the women. Obviously, Peter Jackson didn't want anything like that in his movie, so the Skull Islanders '05 are very different. Racially, they're all over the place, with whites, blacks and Asians all represented, though everyone is covered in ritual make-up. It's never stated, but we are given enough clues to get that the Islanders are the remainders of some advanced culture. This culture was so advanced that they built huge buildings all over the island. In fact, there's hardly a shot in the film where you don't see some evidence of megalithic buildings. It's possible that the lost civilization built the entire island. (Perhaps the lost continent of Mu?) So what happened to turn them into murderous zombies cowering behind the wall? The book World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island states that the island is sinking. Perhaps some ecological disaster made the high civilization unsustainable, and the island was overrun by the myriad native creatures. It's also pretty obvious that the sacrifices to Kong are mainly a way to keep him away, because he could climb over that wall in a few seconds.


"Uhhh... It was like this when I got here."

- The other half of the racism inherent in King Kong '33 was Kong's relationship with Ann. The subtext of Kong's lust for Ann was the then contemporary belief that black men naturally (or perhaps by the attitudes of the time, unnaturally) lusted after white women. Often this lust was cloaked beneath the ritual of sacrifice. If you look at the movies that came out around the time of Kong you'll see this motif repeated over and over again. To give a few examples, Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), which sees Jane threatened with sacrifice by the African natives, to a gorilla; White Zombie (1932), where a man uses the "black" (in both ways) art of magic to enslave a white woman; and Chloe, Love is Calling You (1934), where a black woman raises a white child as her own daughter, but when the deception is revealed the woman arranges to sacrifice the daughter in a voodoo ceremony. And yes, the other subtext here is that black people are explicitly associated with gorillas. Unacceptably offensive now, but not uncommon at the time the movie was made. On the other hand, Kong '33 is portrayed so sympathetically in the film that some of this racist subtext is subverted, though the ultimate fate of 1930's movie blacks who dare cross racial lines is still enforced; Kong dies. (To see a particularly bad example of this, I would point to the aforementioned Chloe. A perfectly nice black man falls in love with the crypto-white daughter; by the end of the film he's dead.) Obviously, Peter Jackson had to find some way to get around this. Most other Kong-style movies over the years have turned the sexual elements of the story into a joke, and King Kong '76 offered itself up as some sort of allegory for the modern dating scene, making what had been offensive still as offensive and creepy to boot. Peter Jackson's approach is to the strip sex out of the equation completely. Ann saves her life by being able to entertain Kong (with vaudeville, no less), and Kong responds because he is lonely, a point underscored by the giant gorilla skeletons (one quite recent) in Kong's mountain lair.

Enough with the critique. I watched the movie as closely as I could for cameos. In the ship's hold there's a cage labeled "Sumatran Rat Monkey," a creature captured on Skull Island in Jackson's film Dead Alive (1993). I suspected the creature itself might show up in the abyss sequence, but I didn't spot it. I take it that Peter Jackson and several other crew members appeared as pilots of the planes at the end of film, but I didn't really recognize anyone because of the goggles they're wearing. I guess that the whole Robin mask "you-can't-see-my-the-bridge-of-my-nose-so-you-can't-recognize-me" would work on me.


Looks like the tarpon are biting today.

There were some scenes in the teaser trailer that didn't make it into the movie. The most obvious is the scene on the beach where Carl coaches Ann on how to scream, only to have Kong's scream answer back (though a similar scenes takes place in the village), and there's a shot of the Venture crew crossing the swamp and being attacked by a monster, probably a Piranhadon. Hopefully we'll get these full sequences on the DVD.

You know, for a city allegedly so deep in the grip of the Great Depression that people were starving on the sidewalks, there were a hell of a lot of cars on the streets of New York City.

The highlight of the movie has to be the scene where Kong fights three V. Rex at the same time. The sequence is basically every damn thing that can happen with a large carnivorous dinosaur.

Posted: Sun - December 18, 2005 at      

©