King
Kong (1933) commences
with a title card that recites an old Arabian proverb: “And
lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty.
And it stood its hand from killing.
And from that day it was as one dead.”
This
on-screen legend frames the famous monster movie as a beauty-and-the-beast story, though King Kong has been interpreted
quite frequently over the decades as a coded social critique as well.
No
less prominent a figure than director Quentin Tarantino has interpreted the
Merian C. Cooper (1893 – 1973)/Ernest Schoedsack (1893 -1979) film as an “allegory about the transatlantic slave trade and
America’s fear of the black male.”
I
recently re-watched the original King Kong in preparation for this
review, and can’t deny that the sub-textual material is present. Nor can I deny that the film is mindlessly
racist and sexist by today’s standards, at least at certain junctures.
But
I was struck by another intriguing aspect of this famous monster movie as well.
In
short, this 1933 fantasy film seems very world-weary,
and disappointed with the predictability, safety and even bureaucracy of modernity. Accordingly, the film positions itself as an escape from modernity.
The
modern world, represented by the gleaming skyscrapers and skyline of New York
Harbor in the film’s inaugural shot, is a place that -- especially during a
financial Great Depression -- can’t seem to provide much of anything to people
in terms of answers, or even sustenance.
Instead,
people like filmmaker Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) actively seek the “thrill of a lifetime” outside of
modernity, in places such as Africa or the West Indies. This desire for freedom and excitement is
contextualized as the thrill of something
new, or conversely, the thrill of something
very old, and very natural…but never-before-seen and recorded by modern
eyes or cameras.
Denham
sees it as his mission to show “something new” to a depression-weary
people. The first such “new” thing he
finds, for example, is the untested screen presence of Ann Darrow (Fay
Wray). Denham’s bosses want a female to
appear in his latest motion picture to ramp up the box office grosses, and
Denham must kowtow to their wishes. But
the “reckless” Denham goes out and
finds a female star on his own, in his own way. He discovers the young woman,
Ann, attempting to steal an apple from a fruit stand, on the verge of
starvation.
He
essentially offers her an escape from modernity too.
Denham
then goes in search of that elusive “something new” on Skull Island, far beyond
the well-populated waters of New York Harbor….beyond the horizon itself. An old legend in the South Seas tells of an “island held in the grip of fear…”
Kong’s
island stands in unexplored, mysterious waters, beyond a gateway made of natural
reefs. And Kong himself -- the ultimate
unknown or something new -- exists behind yet another barrier, a large perimeter wall built
by an ancient society of natives.
To
find Kong -- to find something new and
natural, then -- one must pierce all the various “gates” of modernity, and
head straight back into the less-calculated, less buttoned-down past…even to prehistoric
times.
The
sea voyage of the Venture (a name meaning “risky
or daring journey”) is accordingly one that escorts audiences and the film’s dramatis personae through a series of
doorways leading from staid modernity to unfettered antiquity, and “freedom.”
This
freedom is first expressed in terms of the rigidity of New York’s bureaucracy,
where Denham learns that an insurance company plans to halt his voyage because
of the dangerous explosives he is transporting.
Denham orders an early departure to assure there are no such further impediments
to his…entrepreneurship.
Once
en route, Ann and Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) let down their guards and fall in
love. This is a big deal for Jack, who
finds that women are a “bother,” but comes to change his mind. Something about the open air of the sea makes
them connect, and come to love one another.
In modernity... |
...the search for new faces and new things begins... |
Beyond the reefs... |
...and behind the wall... |
...lives Kong. |
King
Kong’s final
act -- with Kong returned to New York City as Denham’s captive -- reverses the
film’s conceits regarding freedom.
Once
found by Denham, “freedom” (represented by Kong himself) becomes a commodity
not to discover and enjoy, but to exploit, and share (at a price) with those
dwelling in modernity. People will pay
good money to vicariously experience the danger of Kong Island, the expedition, and Kong
himself. The giant ape is billed as “The Eighth Wonder of the World,”
something human eyes have never seen before.
To
put a fine point on it, Kong -- the thing
beyond modernity, the thing with the capacity to thrill a jaded modern audience
-- is brought back and caged, but Denham quickly learns that no chains and
no bars can hold him for long. Instead,
Kong runs free and, by nearly reaching the clouds atop the Empire State
Building, eludes modernity again.
Modernity and nature, or freedom, cannot exist side-by-side, the film
suggests.
If
one considers the biography of the film’s producer/co-director, Merian
Cooper, one can see how these ideas of escaping adventure-crushing modernity
and pinpointing thrills in incorruptible nature fit in well with his career and
biography. An air force pilot during
World War I and a founding member of Pan Am Airways, Cooper directed several
early films such as Chang (1927) which were, essentially, travelogues set in
far-flung, wild locales. That film, for
instance, famously featured an elephant stampede.
For
long stretches, King Kong plays like a travelogue or documentary, with hearty
men of adventurous spirit witnessing beasts never-before-seen. In short, the
film is a safari into the wildest jungle ever, with the most spectacular beasts
in cinema history. “Safari” is a Swahili
word meaning “long journey,” and a safari usually involves explorers or other
adventurous-types going where no man has gone before for the express purpose of
seeing new wild life.
Yet,
what remains so interesting about this juxtaposition of a fantasy setting with
the safari motif is that Cooper has utilized a tool of modernity -- film -- to bring this story back to
his audience. In fact, it’s not only
modernity on display in King Kong’s creation, but pioneering technical innovation as
well. The Willis O’Brien stop-motion
effects and optical composites look staggeringly good even to this day, particularly in
black-and-white, a schema which hides seams beautifully.
Thus,
one can gaze upon King Kong as the work of a man who looked at the world,
couldn’t see any new kingdoms to conquer, and so utilized technology to create
something from whole-cloth that his audience had never before witnessed: a prehistoric
world populated by the “dinosaur family”
of Skull Island. He uses special effects to bring to life creatures people have
read about, but never seen “alive.”
This
travelogue or safari approach to the film
precludes, to some degree, much in terms of humanity or characterization. After Ann is taken by Kong to the interior of
Skull Island, the film descends into a series of (still) harrowing fight
sequences and battles, but always with a new animal on display,
front-and-center in the frame.
In
short order the audience “discovers” Kong, a stegosaurus, an apatosaurus, a
T-Rex, a giant snake, and a pterodactyl.
The film’s soundtrack, largely, is a sustained scream from Fay Wray,
from about the forty-five minute point on. People don’t talk or relate as
people, they just delve deeper and deeper into the prehistoric jungle, and
attempt to survive each new animal featured on the safari.
The Skull Island Safari #1 |
The Skull Island Safari #2 |
The Skull Island Safari #3 |
The Skull Island Safari #4 |
I
also noted on this viewing that more than ever, King Kong boasts a strong
reflexive quality. Carl Denham takes a camera and a girl, Ann,
into the jungle to make an adventure movie, a new kind of safari in a different
kind of habitat.
But the movie that the audience is watching -- King
Kong -- is also a safari…with a
pretty girl fronting it. When Denham
complains about having to kowtow to studio bosses, one feels that the comment
originates from Cooper himself. Denham is clearly his surrogate figure.
While we watch a safari film, Denham is also making a safari film. |
A girl is needed front both films. Hence the presence of lovely Fay Wray. |
Fans
of later generations of King Kong – in 1976 and 2005 – will be surprised upon returning to this 1933 classic
that there is almost no reciprocal
relationship between Kong and his bride, Ann. He may love her, but here it’s an unrequited
love. She never moves beyond terror for
the “beast,” whatever he may feel for her.
By Son of Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949), a sympathy
or love for “the beast” is added as a crucial element of the equation, but it is
definitively not present in this film.
Certainly,
one can look at King Kong today and consider it a beauty and the beast story,
though beauty has but distaste and fear for her groom.
And
certainly, one can see how Kong himself is a stand-in figure for a proud African
slave, dragged from his country in chains to provide the entertainment for an
elitist society that is both fearful and envious of him. But the quality that makes King
Kong so great is its sense or spirit of adventure.
The film steadfastly takes us through the gates of a real world lacking magic,
happiness, and perhaps even romance, and reminds us that there are places and
things on this Earth yet unseen by man.
And those things, fierce or beautiful, still have the capacity to
surprise us, and perhaps change us for the better if we don’t abuse or exploit
them.
I
suspect one reason that King Kong has survived for roughly
eighty years at this juncture, and translated ably from one generation to
another, is that many of us still want to believe in our own capacity to be surprised
and delighted by nature. The film is a non-stop
safari of vicarious thrills and terrors, a spectacle in the truest sense of the
word (meaning that it shows the audience things never before captured on film).
Even
today, King Kong exists to show bored and world-weary audiences that
there is more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamed of in "safe" modernity.
And even today, the film’s spirit of adventure -- if not divine -- is at least as “royal” as its title indicates.
And even today, the film’s spirit of adventure -- if not divine -- is at least as “royal” as its title indicates.
Classic and timeless in ever sense. I know those two words get used all too often, but Kong epitomizes classic and timeless.
ReplyDeleteAnother reason Kong survives so well today: attempts to remake it have never managed to capture the same magic, or tell the story as well from a script point of view.
ReplyDelete