Thoughts on King Kong

Rebecca says that King Kong is the worst movie of the year. Worse than Stealth? But seriously, I think that she makes some good points, despite my praise of the film's special effects.

I agree with Rebecca, for example, that Jackson's King Kong is, at a fundamental level, racist. The better half has suggested that Jackson's New Zealand background makes him less sensitive to the issue of race than an American director would be. I don't know enough about New Zealand (and the Maoris) to say. My point on this would be that, if you think about it, the King Kong story is fundamentally a racist one. King Kong is a giant, black gorilla who lives on a tropical island, where savages worship him and practice some form of human sacrifice to him. The savages, dark-skinned, seize a blond white woman and offer her up to the ape; the ape falls for the white woman, and that's, in the end, his downfall. In the process, the black ape is captured and, er, enslaved. But his brute, physical strength makes it impossible to keep him in chains. In the end, he must be destroyed.

One need not be Black Panther Eldrige Cleaver in Soul on Ice to find this narrative problematic.

If you want to tell the story, it seems to me that you can't avoid that racist baggage. I can't imagine what form the story would take to avoid the black-white issues (where the ape represents a racist image of the black man) and the modern-primitive/savage issues. Ann Darrow as a black woman? The ape is white? The Skull Islanders are Vikings?

So, one wouldn't really need to see King Kong to criticize the film as racist. At least, that's my view.

The film is also too long, and it is rather self-indulgent. But, as I hope to make clear in a future post, we live in The Age of Self-Indulgence. So the film is a product of it's time . . . .

Btw, I liked Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Link.