King Kong

Something needs to be said about this movie. I mean, the whole premise just defies imagination. I've never seen the original black and white version, but I've seen the Jessica Lange one from the 70's and the new Peter Jackson interpretation, and I have to tell you, there's just something weird about the whole King Kong universe.

Perhaps it's just me, but everytime I've dipped my finger into the King Kong pool it's made me feel a bit uneasy. First of all, there's that weird sexual tension dynamic that is always present between King Kong and his leading lady. For the first half of the movie, the woman runs around screaming that King Kong is going to get her. For the second, she's running around screaming for King Kong to come and save her. What's the name for that? Helsinki syndrome? Look, if King Kong were so damn benevolent, the poor fucked up islanders wouldn't feel the need to sacrifice people to him on a regular basis now would they? Sure, we're supposed to feel all sad about King Kong lying there dead at the end of the film in a pathetic heap, but what about all those skeletons of innocent, chewed up natives that got spit out like a bunch of rotten bananas? What about them?

The whole "compassion for King Kong" bullshit comes from the fact that we get so many reaction shots from his leading lady. Those of us in the audience watch some hot girl looking at King Kong with longing and some primitive hormone kicks in to make us want to protect whatever it is that she's looking at. I suppose evolution stuck us with this response to alert us to when we had to run and save the primitive neanderthal children from whatever maurading pack of killer wolves was happening by. It's a little bit of a cheap trick, I think, to use this ancient instinctive response to condition us to feel sympathy for a giant, killer chimpanzee.

But let's get back to that whole creepy gorillia-girl love pyramid. It's pretty obvious that, metaphorically speaking, King Kong is meant as some kind of commentary about human male-female interactions. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, men are brutish and horrible and physically dominant and misunderstood by the whole world, and only a woman can tame them and understand them. The question is, why would you make a weird movie about this? The interpretation I have is undoubtedly present in the film, but it is just so strange that I hesitate to think it was really the intention of the original filmmakers. What I've come to suspect is that the original inspiration was just something along the lines of "wouldn't it be great to have a movie about a giant gorilla?" To which somebody responded "yeah, and we can have him swatting down planes like they were flys from the top of the Empire State Building!"

Look, the reality is that there are some super psychologically charged images in King Kong that drive right down to the most basic, primitive, primordial conditioning of the human essence. Just the way gorillas move around and bang themselves on the chest speaks to human beings in some weird way. Hell, all you have to do is turn on an NFL football game and wait for some overpaid jerk-off to make some mediocre play in order to get a modern sampling of the same phenomenon. The Empire State Building itself is a massive symbol, Freud himself couldn't have conceived of a more worthwhile penis surrogate, and to have the ultimately macho Gorilla standing upon the world's biggest penis and thumping his own chest while a beautiful woman cowers beneath him is...well, shit...that's just too much for me to comprehend.

The problem is, there's just too much going on there. What are the filmmakers really trying to SAY? You shouldn't just throw a bunch of super-charged images together at random and not have a point. That crap's dangerous. GAAAHHH!!

But anyway, I don't know. Is King Kong a good movie? I suppose so, but I'm more interested in seeing the original version than watching the modern one again. Should we feel bad for Kong? Well, hell, life on the island just seemed like a constant fight. If he wasn't being attacked by giant bats, it was giant cockroaches or dinosaurs. When you think about it, New York city wasn't anything worse than what Kong had seen before. Does Kong's life represent the eternal thankless struggle that all men must undergo as they constantly protect the delicate damsels who can only weep at their deaths in return? Probably. Is King Kong sexist? Somebody's probably going to say this eventually, let me be the first to cordially invite anybody who was thinking this to go off somewhere quiet and fuck themselves.

If you have any answers to any of this, please let me know.

By the way, my favorite part of the movie was when they were chatting idly about "Heart of Darkness." I'd never liked that book all that much, but after hearing their brief comments about how some people have to continue on the path that compells them even though they think it's leading them to ruin...well, that just reminded me of the shit-hole of a life I wake up to every day.

Chau my mangey friends. Don't let the giant killer cockroaches tear your head off while you sleep.

The End