by Herbert H. Stein
When the new blockbuster remake of King Kong came to theaters a few years ago, I thought I would take a closer look at the original film. Most of the monster pictures of the past are relatively forgotten, but somehow Kong has held its place in our imagination. I remember reading many years ago that it outrated nearly all other old films on New York City television. How many of us associate to Kong when we think of the Empire State Building? Without Kong, Fay Wray would be known only to movie trivia buffs. In fact, a few years later, the “blockbuster” has faded into the lists of films we can scroll through on television while the clumsy, grainy original still holds an iconic spot in many of our minds. What I found when I examined the classic Kong was that that is not an accident.
Over the years, there have been a number of interpretations of the story. The film, itself portrays it as a modern day “Beauty and the Beast,” opening with a quote across the screen, attributed to an Arabian proverb. “And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as dead.” The allusion is repeated several times in the film by Carl Denham, an adventurous film maker who sets the action of the film in motion, culminating in the final line, “It was beauty killed the beast.” Like all of the interpretations, it rings true. This is clearly a story of a powerful, proud beast who comes to a mighty fall (from a great height) because of his obsession with a beautiful woman.
Browsing the websites about Kong, I learned that there was a socio-political interpretation in the film theory literature that the abduction of Kong from his home island, where he reigned, bringing him in chains to New York, was a representation of slavery. Kong represents white peoples’ fears of African Americans, brought here by duress from a different culture, imagined to be primitive and violent. Kong’s pursuit of Ann Darrow fits the cultural myth of the oversexed primitive man pursuing the chaste blonde beauty. At one point, the native chief wants to trade six of his women for “the woman of gold” and Denham comments, “Blondes are scarce around here.” In effect, this is a fantasy that displaces lust and violence to the stranger. From this viewpoint, Kong is a 40 year precursor of Sweet Sweetback and the “Blacksploitation” films.
Then there is the commonly held view—I don’t know to whom to attribute it—that Kong is a metaphor for our struggle with increased industrialization and technology. In this view, Kong is a sympathetic figure, torn from the natural world in which he was a monarch and ultimately brought down by modern technology in the form of airplanes and machine guns. He dies in the modern jungle of New York City, a tragic hero who encapsulates our frustration with an ever changing, more complicated, man made world that pulls us out of nature.
Mark Rubenstein in a beautifully written paper in American Imago (1977), sees Kong as a totem animal, symbolic of the primal father as depicted by Freud in “Totem and Taboo”. Kong is worshipped by the natives on Skull Island, who dance in ritual gorilla costumes and sacrifice a woman from the tribe to be his bride. The people on Skull Island and the people on Manhattan Island represent the primal horde that eventually kills this powerful father. With Kong’s death, we experience complicit guilt in his murder.
What is immediately striking is that every one of these interpretations is very plausible. This film is evocative of multiple interpretations on multiple levels. This should not surprise us, since the film has had enduring appeal for over seventy years.
I have seen the film a few times over the years, and have the impression that it affected me differently each time. I don’t have a distinct memory of seeing it for the first time, but my recollection is that I was quite young and that I was very frightened of Kong. As a small child, I recall being relieved when the planes finally shot him down. I was terrified that this powerful monster could destroy the world I knew. This is our reaction to most monster films. I don’t think many people are cheering for a giant T Rex rampaging through the city, eating people haphazardly, but Kong, in a humanoid form, does evoke our sympathy, a sympathy I was able to experience more as I matured.
The film begins with a promise of the primitive and exotic. Before we see anything, we read the Arabian proverb, already suggestive of unknown mysteries and different cultures, followed by the pounding of a large metallic gong that brings the title to the screen. As the story opens, we are quickly told about an adventurous and reckless film maker, Carl Denham, who is secretive about his cargo as his ship sits on a New York dock. We quckly learn that this will be a voyage to an unexplored island inhabited by primitive natives and foreboding denizens. Clearly, a sense of adventure, curiosity and danger is evoked.
The second theme that is introduced is the vulnerability of women and the need to protect them from danger. The first self proclaimed protector is a theatrical agent who refuses to provide Denham with an actress to join the voyage as a star for his next film. Denham wants a woman to add a love interest to his wildlife adventures, but the agent tells him that he would not put a woman into such danger, “the only woman on a ship with the toughest mugs I ever looked at.”
Denham argues, “Why, there are dozens of girls in this town tonight in more danger than they’d ever see with me.”
The ship’s mate, Jack Driscoll, counters, “Sure, but they know that kind of danger.”
In the comment about “this town” and the allusion to the crew, we are reminded that the primary danger to a woman comes not from wild animals that will kill them, but from wild, lustful men. This is reinforced in the next scene, when Denham, desperate to find a woman to take with him by the morning (before the authorities find out they have explosives on board), wanders into the poorer areas of the city in search of his star. He rescues Ann Darrow, close to starvation and accused of theft by a fruit peddler. After giving her a meal, which she eats with gusto, he proposes to take her for an adventure. “It’s money, and adventure, and fame. It’s the thrill of a lifetime. And a long sea-voyage that starts at six tomorrow morning.” Seeing that she is scared about what he wants her for, he reassures her that “this is strictly business. I’m no chaser.” He is not one of those unconscionable lustful men who prey on poor girls. (No, he is a filmmaker who would expose her to any danger to foster his creativity and his ambition.)
Then there is Jack, the first mate, who tells Ann that it is bad to have a woman on a ship. He is uncomfortable, with a movie cowboy innocence, trying to explain that a woman is a distraction on a long voyage. He even accidentally slaps her, displaying inadvertently (unconsciously) that men can be rough with women.
So that even before we reach Skull Island, we have been titillated with a promise of unknown excitement, while also reminded that we must control our sexual desires. Ann is an object of desire that must be protected, ostensibly from the desire of others, but clearly also from our own passion. As the ship approaches the supposed coordinates of the uncharted island, it moves in a thick fog, increasing our sense of foreboding, as well as curiosity and a desire to see. Finally, the fog lifts and we see the island at a distance and hear the beating of drums.
Sexuality and aggression, bound tightly in conflict to this point, is displaced to the island natives. As the boarding party begins to hear native chanting, Jack Driscoll, the mate, distances himself from them, saying that they are “Up to some of their heathen tricks.” The natives, with their relative nudity and gyrations as they engage in a ritual dance evoke in us a sense of relatively unrestrained sexuality and aggression. They are less protective of women. A young woman is tied down in a kneeling posture with a flower wreath on her head. We learn that she has been chosen to be the bride of Kong. Unlike the civilized Denham, these people do not need to disguise or disown their willingness to sacrifice the woman for their own needs, in this case to placate the God-like Kong and, as Rubinstein points out in his paper, to ask for his protection. Like Sendak’s “Wild Things”, the island’s natives represent the repressed impulses of the “civilized” characters and audience. Through them we get a somewhat frightening sense of what would happen if we did not control the id. In fact, they, too, desire Ann, the “woman of gold”, wishing to trade six of their women for her so that she can be presented to Kong.
Even the natives displace the full expression of their drives. The native chief does not want Ann for himself, but for the deified Kong. Even before we have seen him, Kong has become the ultimate expression of unbridled sexuality and aggression. As an object of fear and worship, Kong has the exaggerated power of a father imbued with all the brimming sexuality and aggression of a child.
The encounter with the natives seems to gently lift some of Jack Driscoll’s repression. Back on ship, Jack is able to express his love for Ann, after a coy shipboard flirtation, and to propose marriage to her. We might think that he is responding to the rivalry brought up by the chief’s desire to acquire Ann to be the bride of Kong. That rivalry heats up immediately. After Jack makes his proposal and kisses Ann, a party of natives sneak aboard the ship and abducts Ann.
Jack’s approach to Ann is gentle and respectful. He is somewhat diffident, even as he kisses her. He behaves the way a man should behave in a 1933 film. His rival, Kong, is a true “monster from the id.” He is huge and his face is ferocious, with sharp teeth and a face caught in perpetual grimace. With one huge paw he grabs the screaming Ann and pulls her free of the ropes with which the natives have tethered her between two poles. This is the sexualized assault that we have been warned about since the start of the film.
What impresses us most about Kong is his size. In fact, the entire interior of the island is designed to make us feel small. The rescue party from the ship, led by Denham and Jack Driscoll, looks Lilliputian as it enters the jungle of Skull Island. Even the trees are huge. Before they ever see Kong, the sailors are attacked by a series of massive dinosaurs. (One of the remarkable features of King Kong is that “Jurassic Park” is the second billing. The animator for Kong developed his technique working on the silent film, The Lost World, a few years before and simply used the same flexible manikins for this film.)
As we identify with the human characters, we are awed and frightened at feeling so small. That experience itself returns us to a sense of childhood, of having to navigate in a world in which we are seemingly the smallest objects. We see the men overthrown from a raft, knocked off a tree and eaten by a dinosaur, shaken off a huge log by Kong, who grabs it with one paw. A scene in which men are killed by giant spiders was edited from the film and never seen as part of it to my knowledge. Size is always the key element in this particular genre of monster film. It reduces grown men and women to the helplessness of childhood and beyond. In this film, there is an added element that reinforces a sense of reversal.
The film makers gave the giant gorilla traits that we would associate with monkeys. He displays a primitive curiosity. It also gives him a child-like quality. Kong is continually prodding and sniffing with a look of wonderment as if he is still learning his world. At one point, he reaches down over a cliff edge to try to get to Jack Driscoll who has survived attacks in which most of his fellow rescuers had perished. Jack pulls out a knife and stabs the finger reaching for him. Kong pulls back his paw and then examines it as if curious and baffled as well as hurt.
Most infant like is Kong’s tendency to examine objects by putting them into his mouth. At various times we see him grab a terrified man and put him into his mouth. He invariably spits him back out. Unlike other cinematic predatory monsters, Kong is not eating his victims, he is using a very typical infantile method of exploration. This quality is part of what makes Kong so evocative for us. He is like a giant, powerful toddler on the loose, every young parent’s worst nightmare.
Kong’s infantile nature also allows him to give innocent expression to sexual desire. Jack Driscoll kisses Ann as he proposes to her aboard the ship, but Kong moves the act forward by peeling off pieces of her dress as if they were flower petals, looking at each piece with a bewildered curiosity as if discovering for the first time that the clothing is not part of the woman. The censors apparently feared that the audience’s focus would be on the partially stripped young woman rather than the petals of the dress, keeping this scene out of the film for at least two decades.
It is not only his childlike behavior that enlists our sympathy for Kong. It is also the fact that in the world of Skull Island, he is the only one who can protect the helpless Ann Darrow. As he carries her through the jungle that he knows so well and she not at all, he is like a parent or nanny carrying a helpless child. Whenever he is distracted and must put her down, she seems to get into trouble.
At one point, he leaves her sitting on a tree limb high above the ground while he goes to check on his tiny pursuers. A Tyrannosaurus happens along and is blindly wandering towards Ann’s perch. Kong hears Ann’s screams, diverting him from his pursuit of Jack Driscoll, and returns to protect his new possession from this threat. In a later scene, after again leaving her alone on a ledge outside his mountain cave, Kong must rescue Ann from a pterodactyl that is attempting to fly off with her. In each case, we naturally hope that Kong will win the battle, implicitly accepting him in his role as her protector.
Kong looks infantile as he prods the limp head of the vanquished T. Rex, as if to make sure it is dead, but also with what seems a child-like curiosity about the mechanism. Moments later, he is protective (parental?) as he frees Ann from beneath a fallen tree trunk and gently scoops her up. We have a reversal of roles as the infantile Kong protects the adult Ann Darrow; but, the roles are also conflated in each of them. Kong is primitive, but capable and protective, while the mature Ann is naïve and helpless in this strange environment.
As Kong rescues Ann from the dinosaur and carries her to the safety of his mountain cave, Jack Driscoll is in pursuit, intent on saving her from Kong. These two rescuers present us not only with a rivalry for possession of the woman, but two objects for identification. Although we are rooting for Jack to save Ann and bring her back to the world she knows, we must also root for Kong to save her from the monsters of Skull Island, a feat beyond Jack’s capability.
Not only do we have multiple identifications, but also shifting roles for the characters in the Oedipal drama. Jack and Kong are rivals for Ann, but the role of father and son, if we think of it as an Oedipal rivalry, is ambiguous. The tiny Jack Driscoll is very much like the boy, Jack, in “Jack and the Beanstalk”, attempting to steal from the powerful giant who has killed and represents his father. But he is also in the role of the Oedipal father, the rightful and accepted possessor of Ann’s affection, who has had her taken from him by the child-like Kong.
The “Jack and the Beanstalk” association may have been intended. Jack Driscoll attempts to escape with Ann from Kong’s lair by climbing with her down a vine. Kong finds them and tries to pull them back up only to have them fall into a providentially placed lagoon below them.
I believe that much of the appeal of this film comes from the multiple shifting identifications it affords us. As we follow the rapid paced adventure and gape at the sheer enormity of its creatures, we rapidly and preconsciously identify with Jack, Kong and Ann. As we do, we can simultaneously experience the power of the Oedipal father, the envy and revenge of the child and the terrified excitement of the mother, being coveted and fought over, possessed and rescued. Through Kong and the primitively portrayed natives of the island, we can experience sexual and aggressive passions, while through Jack Driscoll, we gratify such desires in more muted form while gratifying our ego ideal.
All of this comes to its culmination back in New York. Like the giant in the fairy tale, Kong chases after Jack and his stolen bride only to be knocked out by a gas bomb thrown by Denham and brought in chains to captivity where he is displayed on the stage of a theater, shackled in a position much like the one Ann was in when he took her.
Ann and her fiancé, Jack are brought up to the stage, and when photographers start shooting off flashbulbs, Kong becomes enraged, thinking that they’re hurting Ann, according to Denham.
The rest is history. The enraged Kong tears through New York City, mindless of human life as he looks for Ann. In a scene which was censored out for many years, he pulls another woman out of her apartment and seeing she is not Ann, drops her to her death. He has the singlemindedness of a bonded infant. Finally, in what is the perhaps the least probable event in the film, he finds Ann in the middle of Manhattan. As he carries her to the highest spot on the island, the newly built Empire State Building (a huge object of our world), we have to be struck by the gentleness with which he treats her in contrast to his indifference to the destruction he creates to every other person and object. He places her down gently on a ledge atop the skyscraper to face the airplanes. Once again, Jack climbs the mountain, this time from the inside, to bring her to safety In a recapitulation of the scene with the pterodactyl, Kong swipes down one of the planes, but they are too numerous and finally shoot him down. We can see his pain as he sways atop the building, holding his wounded chest.
When Kong falls to the ground, someone says that the airplanes got him. Denham corrects them that “it was beauty killed the beast”, a phrase that at this point has added meaning for us. It represents for each of us both the moral lesson, learned in our identification with Kong, that left unfettered our passions will end in our destruction and the pleasure of Oedipal victory in our identification with the more mature and sublimated Jack. As for our identification with Ann Darrow, she has enjoyed the intense sado-masochistic passion of being loved by a supremely powerful and unbridled hairy ape as well as the more sublimated pleasure of a more conventional marriage to the smaller, but still brave Jack Driscoll.
Rubinstein, Mark (1977) King Kong: A myth for moderns. American Imago pp. 1-11.
Published originally in the PANY Bulletin Spring, 2006