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Dec. 29th, 2005 02:39 amSo last week I went to see the new King Kong with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theatrgirl, more out of professional masochism than anything else, really. I was not aware of the one selling point that might have gotten me to the movies otherwise (Adrian Brody) and Charlize Theron really bothers me (and until yesterday I was convinced that it was she, and not Naomi Watts, who played Ann Darrow, and really, the two of them measure at the identical mediocre-okay level of acting talent, like a 6.1 or something like that, and are functionally interchangeable from everything I have ever seen).
But yeah, um, the movie.
The thing about King Kong is, it is a deeply racist story. And while the colonial narrative aspect of it can be meta-ed into self-referentiality by the dimestore Jimmy Olsen's reading of "Heart of Darkness," remake or not, social commentary or not, I sort of don't see how you could ever tell that story in a way that didn't serve up to the public the inherent racism of the basic plot. I mean, you could do it as some kind of postmodern from-King-Kong's POV existential sort of thing, but then it wouldn't be an adventure story. Because really, it is a colonial narrative of white "adventureres" coming to an island filled with very "other" savages, where the blondest, whitest woman gets kidnapped, straight out of all the Native captivity legends, and "sacrificed" to the Giant Ape that is metonymically linked to the natives portrayed as subhuman/inhuman. Then, naturally, she falls in love with him/his virility, because he is so BIG (if you know what I mean) and, to put it crudely, the subtext of that film is, "once you go black, you can't go back." Think about it: the original was made in the 1930s, back when those "evolutionary" ascent-of-man diagrams of ape ---> non-white-slouching-man---->white totally erectus man were Science, rather than evidence of the complicity of science in the discourse of racism.
King Kong is that dialectical convergence--"the savage other" as the object of both fear and desire, which are alternately articulated and sublimated, depending on which one happens to be more lucrative at any given point. As Michael Taussig wrote about "otherness in the primeval jungle" in :” Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: “it must not be overlooked that the colonially constructed image of the wild Indian was a powerfully ambiguous image, a seesawing, bifocalized and hazy composite of the animal and the human...In their human or humanlike form, the wild Indians could all the better reflect back to the colonists vast and baroque projections of human wildness.” Yes, indeed. Human Wildness? (eventually desublimated even in the fey cowardly silver screen star) Check. (NB: also mapping as "wild and baroque" are the elaborate CGI creatures that really can only be described in one way--VAGINA DENTATA--that the men battle in between their altercations with the dinosaurs and the spiders).
But back to What It All Is Actually About. Here's the thing: the racism of the original movie could exist in its historical context as an uninterrogated adventure trope. Clearly, that is impossible in 2005, and there are weak, diluted attempts to "comment" on the way the White Adventurers engage with the Savages (Jack Black keeps trying to force a chocolate on a native child in a manner that is as patronizing as it is obnoxious, and even his companions are appalled), but the end result? The child BITES Jack Black. (Which is really viscerally satisfying on some level, since the plot point that challenged my suspensions of disbelief the most was the fact that everyone kept rescuing Jack Black time and again, despite the fact that he was clearly instigating every misfortune that befell the crew members and in general was so sociopathic that he made John Malkovich in "Shadow of the Vampire" seem like a Kohlberg Stage 6 sort of chap) but you know, the child is SAVAGE. With SHARP TEETH. Whatever "critique" the filmmakers tried to pack into the third-act Broadway dramatization of the first act, when the island encounter, the captivity and the rescue, are replayed, complete with on-purpose caricaturesque natives and the visual referents to the World Fairs of Yore? All that exists in total disconnect from how these Natives are portrayed during the original encounter on the island: perpetually in trance, foaming at the mouth, displaying only whites of their eyes, because their irises are rolled back in their heads. They seem unwashed, gratuitously decorated with pieces of bones, piercings, tattoos and necklaces made of sculls. They are filmed with a jerky MTV-on-meth camera. Can it be read as "commentary"? Well, I guess explicitly racist visual semiotics ARE commentary in and of themselves, but commentary doth not a critique make. Whatever vague references the film engages in, simply by the virtue of being produced not in an ahistorical vacuum but in a postcolonial milieu, the natives are served up to the audience in a completely straight fashion. We, the viewers, are POV-ing/identifying with the white progagonists, and we are supposed to be repulsed by and frightened of the violent natives, and we are, thanks to the cinematography and the soundtrack. The film positions us as consumers of our own fear of the Native Savage and rapidly reproduces the process of the socialization into the colonial mindset in the darkness of the movie theater.
The entire coda of the movie can, of course, be read as the tragedy of importing the "satellite subject" into the metropole--a story you can read in Voltaire's "The Ingenu" or watch in Bontoc Eulogy. But any implications of the consequences of transforming a colonial subject into an object-for-display are fed right back into the same old discourse of undifferentiated Savage Brutality (the see-saw of fear and desire, again), and in this case, channeled into the weird semiotics of Violence + Tall Building in New York = Intervention by Very Patriotic Heroic American Planes, a.k.a. a revisioninst 9/11 wish fulfillment fantasy. And how is this framed? What is the text? Why, "it was beauty that killed the beast," this stamping the entire enterprise with a soothing genre prescription: you have just watched a fairy tale. And as we all know, fairy tales happen in a chronotope that is both long ago and far away... try to not project your wild and baroque postcolonial critiques onto it...it's just a fairy tale...a very, very racist fairy tale...
theatrgirl, more out of professional masochism than anything else, really. I was not aware of the one selling point that might have gotten me to the movies otherwise (Adrian Brody) and Charlize Theron really bothers me (and until yesterday I was convinced that it was she, and not Naomi Watts, who played Ann Darrow, and really, the two of them measure at the identical mediocre-okay level of acting talent, like a 6.1 or something like that, and are functionally interchangeable from everything I have ever seen).But yeah, um, the movie.
The thing about King Kong is, it is a deeply racist story. And while the colonial narrative aspect of it can be meta-ed into self-referentiality by the dimestore Jimmy Olsen's reading of "Heart of Darkness," remake or not, social commentary or not, I sort of don't see how you could ever tell that story in a way that didn't serve up to the public the inherent racism of the basic plot. I mean, you could do it as some kind of postmodern from-King-Kong's POV existential sort of thing, but then it wouldn't be an adventure story. Because really, it is a colonial narrative of white "adventureres" coming to an island filled with very "other" savages, where the blondest, whitest woman gets kidnapped, straight out of all the Native captivity legends, and "sacrificed" to the Giant Ape that is metonymically linked to the natives portrayed as subhuman/inhuman. Then, naturally, she falls in love with him/his virility, because he is so BIG (if you know what I mean) and, to put it crudely, the subtext of that film is, "once you go black, you can't go back." Think about it: the original was made in the 1930s, back when those "evolutionary" ascent-of-man diagrams of ape ---> non-white-slouching-man---->white totally erectus man were Science, rather than evidence of the complicity of science in the discourse of racism.
King Kong is that dialectical convergence--"the savage other" as the object of both fear and desire, which are alternately articulated and sublimated, depending on which one happens to be more lucrative at any given point. As Michael Taussig wrote about "otherness in the primeval jungle" in :” Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: “it must not be overlooked that the colonially constructed image of the wild Indian was a powerfully ambiguous image, a seesawing, bifocalized and hazy composite of the animal and the human...In their human or humanlike form, the wild Indians could all the better reflect back to the colonists vast and baroque projections of human wildness.” Yes, indeed. Human Wildness? (eventually desublimated even in the fey cowardly silver screen star) Check. (NB: also mapping as "wild and baroque" are the elaborate CGI creatures that really can only be described in one way--VAGINA DENTATA--that the men battle in between their altercations with the dinosaurs and the spiders).
But back to What It All Is Actually About. Here's the thing: the racism of the original movie could exist in its historical context as an uninterrogated adventure trope. Clearly, that is impossible in 2005, and there are weak, diluted attempts to "comment" on the way the White Adventurers engage with the Savages (Jack Black keeps trying to force a chocolate on a native child in a manner that is as patronizing as it is obnoxious, and even his companions are appalled), but the end result? The child BITES Jack Black. (Which is really viscerally satisfying on some level, since the plot point that challenged my suspensions of disbelief the most was the fact that everyone kept rescuing Jack Black time and again, despite the fact that he was clearly instigating every misfortune that befell the crew members and in general was so sociopathic that he made John Malkovich in "Shadow of the Vampire" seem like a Kohlberg Stage 6 sort of chap) but you know, the child is SAVAGE. With SHARP TEETH. Whatever "critique" the filmmakers tried to pack into the third-act Broadway dramatization of the first act, when the island encounter, the captivity and the rescue, are replayed, complete with on-purpose caricaturesque natives and the visual referents to the World Fairs of Yore? All that exists in total disconnect from how these Natives are portrayed during the original encounter on the island: perpetually in trance, foaming at the mouth, displaying only whites of their eyes, because their irises are rolled back in their heads. They seem unwashed, gratuitously decorated with pieces of bones, piercings, tattoos and necklaces made of sculls. They are filmed with a jerky MTV-on-meth camera. Can it be read as "commentary"? Well, I guess explicitly racist visual semiotics ARE commentary in and of themselves, but commentary doth not a critique make. Whatever vague references the film engages in, simply by the virtue of being produced not in an ahistorical vacuum but in a postcolonial milieu, the natives are served up to the audience in a completely straight fashion. We, the viewers, are POV-ing/identifying with the white progagonists, and we are supposed to be repulsed by and frightened of the violent natives, and we are, thanks to the cinematography and the soundtrack. The film positions us as consumers of our own fear of the Native Savage and rapidly reproduces the process of the socialization into the colonial mindset in the darkness of the movie theater.
The entire coda of the movie can, of course, be read as the tragedy of importing the "satellite subject" into the metropole--a story you can read in Voltaire's "The Ingenu" or watch in Bontoc Eulogy. But any implications of the consequences of transforming a colonial subject into an object-for-display are fed right back into the same old discourse of undifferentiated Savage Brutality (the see-saw of fear and desire, again), and in this case, channeled into the weird semiotics of Violence + Tall Building in New York = Intervention by Very Patriotic Heroic American Planes, a.k.a. a revisioninst 9/11 wish fulfillment fantasy. And how is this framed? What is the text? Why, "it was beauty that killed the beast," this stamping the entire enterprise with a soothing genre prescription: you have just watched a fairy tale. And as we all know, fairy tales happen in a chronotope that is both long ago and far away... try to not project your wild and baroque postcolonial critiques onto it...it's just a fairy tale...a very, very racist fairy tale...
