In 1933, when the first King Kong was released, several minutes had to be cut because they were deemed way too scary. A scene featuring a pit of horrid insects so alarmed the audience at a test screening that it was removed.
Peter Jackson, in his new version of the movie, has restored the scene — and with relish. His insects and spiders are so unutterably icky that you could hear gasps all round the audience at the premiere screening at Montecasino. One is reminded that before he hit the blockbuster bigtime with his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson was responsible for Bad Taste, a splatterfest about flesh-eating aliens.
At the Montecasino function, film promoter Barry Ronge gave a speech setting out the background to the making of the new King Kong (a companion piece to his publicity material for the film in movie distributors Nu Metro’s publication The Holiday Times). He told us how Jackson, at age nine or so, had been so entranced by seeing the 1933 King Kong that he went home and starting making replica models and sets. So, said Ronge, you could say that Jackson had been working on King Kong since the age of nine.
Perhaps that’s why the movie seems most appropriate for audiences of about nine. Well, let’s say nine up to about 14, and they should be reasonably tough — the action is ferocious and there are many hideous creepy-crawlies, as mentioned above. It is a grand spectacle, especially in the two hours or so leading up to the great battle between Kong and the dinosaurs (yes, there are dinosaurs too — eat your heart out, Jurassic Park). And that great battle is a truly stunning visual feat of computer-generated animation. The last hour, though, is rather dull by comparison. You just have to wait patiently for Kong to start trashing New York.
The illusion of deeper and more meaningful themes that Jackson managed to preserve in The Lord of the Rings is entirely absent from King Kong. Okay, they were never there. Unless you do a psycho-analytic reading (which has been done) and you start to wonder what kind of monster from the id would be represented by a huge gorilla from an ancient realm untouched by evolution or the modern world; a huge black gorilla, moreover, with a passion for a svelte blonde woman. In 1933, it has been noted, the half-suppressed hysteria about savage and extremely well-endowed black men getting their hands on the fragile flower of American woman-hood was still crackling in the air.
Jackson seems vaguely aware of such an undercurrent, allowing himself a pretentious little gesture towards significance when he shows a sailor on the ship heading for Kong’s island reading Heart of Darkness, which gives rise to a portentous peroration from another (black) crew-man. Joseph Conrad’s novel is, famously, about a trip up the Congo river at the darkest times of Belgian colonialism, to find a man who has “gone native” and become a tribal despot. Heart of Darkness was criticised by Chinua Achebe, among others, for using Africans to represent the savage shadow of white civilisation; others have found in it a sense of the evils of colonialism and the darkness at the heart of humanity (and/or civilisation) itself.
But King Kong is not built to carry much significance. It is B-movie trash elevated to grandiose heights, the creature feature to end all creature features. It never engrosses like The Lord of the Rings; you’re always aware of a shrewd and highly skilled filmmaker pulling out all the stops. Jackson ignores the 1970s and 1980s takes on King Kong and restores the figure of the film director who, in his megalomania, captures Kong and brings him to the United States. A combination of Cecil B de Mille, Werner Herzog and PT Barnum, this director, Carl Denham (played here by Jack Black), is chasing the ultimate movie when he stumbles across Kong and finds that he fits the bill perfectly. It’s as though the movie is self-consciously signalling its own construction as a film product — and one born from the mind of an overly ambitious filmmaker.
I think we are meant to feel ambivalent about Denham, the director/showman. He is hateful in many ways, but also, perhaps, to be admired for his sheer single-mindedness. He wants to make a great picture, dammit! At any rate, he gets to deliver the last, nonsensical line of the movie — it wasn’t the fighter planes that killed Kong, he muses; it was beauty that killed the beast. Whereas, in fact, it was Denham himself who killed Kong.
Here is another odd echo of the 1933 version. Its directors, Ernest Schoedsack and Merian Cooper (a fighter pilot during World War I), cast themselves as the fighter pilots who eventually shoot Kong down as he clings to the Empire State Building. (In 1976, it was the World Trade Center but, obviously, that’s not an option now.) It’s as though Cooper and Schoedsack were gleefully acknowledging the fact that they created the monster for the joy of destroying him, but of course only after he had given us entertainment pleasure by destroying lots of other things.
There is always some destruction involved in creation, as Harold Bloom notes in The Anxiety of Influence. The artist is not simply a reverential disciple in relation to his or her artistic forebears. Ronge, in his speech, intimated that Jackson’s King Kong was an extraordinary update of an extraordinary movie; a tribute from a master to a masterpiece. But, just as computer-generated animation (Jackson’s métier) has now all but replaced the stop-motion animation that made the 1933 King Kong possible, it’s as though Jackson’s movie does not so much pay tribute to the original as attempt to replace it. He destroys it by absorbing it, overwriting it, and then inflates his own movie to truly Kong-like proportions. With lots of hot air.