In the original 1933 Merian C. Cooper film, King Kong was a portentous symbol. He represented whites' fear of and obsession with miscegenation. Kong was a giant Negro intent on abducting and violating our white women. Fortunately for us, I suppose, Kong is blinded by his lust. It becomes his Achilles' heel: the one thing that he is powerless over, and this is accordingly exploited by the dominant white civilization to ensure his subjugation. This latter point doesn't seem to be as heavily argued as the former, but it's undeniably omnipresent. Two of the film's most famous lines are: "Some big hard-boiled egg gets a look at a pretty face and bang - he cracks up and goes sappy," and of course "Oh no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.” Indeed, beauty is instrumental to the beast's downfall. Kong would never have been captured if he didn't follow the blonde Ann Darrow back to his village where her people were waiting to drug him and take him back to New York. He certainly wouldn't have broken free of his chains, climbed up the Empire State Building, and gotten shot down if he weren't obsessed with possessing and protecting her. This crazy ape would still have been king of the jungle if he just didn't fall so hard for this white bitch. Because the whites have her and he doesn't, they have the upper hand. In the battle for dominance, Kong's enormous size and brawn becomes irrelevant when the other side can control his object of desire.

King Kong is a product of a deeply racist culture--the Great Depression saw a surge in lynchings, as whites were desperate to retain their self-respect and dignity and announcing yourself better than a nigger seems to be the natural way to do so. But it's not quite a racist movie, or at least the passage of time has kept it from being a racist movie. The film is saying to black audiences that the downfall of the black people is contingent on their desire to assimilate into the dominant white culture. In order to wiggle out from under their oppressor's thumb, they must reject white civilization and develop their own. If they continue to try and assimilate, they will continue to be controlled. This militant attitude is hardly the final (or even a particularly plausible) solution to stopping racism and oppression, but it seems like a solid start in that it demands the formation of a distinct but valuable black identity.

We may also want to reflect that only under the guise of a giant ape could a powerful, strong, threatening black character be depicted in a big-budget Hollywood picture circa 1933. The norm was song-and-dance men and comedians--easy to marginalize, easy to ignore. In a way, King Kong is sort of progressive in shoving racial conflict in our face and demanding we take a whiff. And of course, we sympathize with Kong over the human (read: white) characters. Kong loves Ann, but she prefers her own kind even though they seem to take her for granted. This hardly seems just, and accordingly you don't come out of the film feeling good about the status quo.

In his tome Cult Movies I, Danny Peary relates the “Kong as humbled black man” and “white fear of miscegenation” readings of King Kong, along with a more benign apolitical one. He sees Kong as being a manifestation of the id, of the buried sexual drive, specifically that of the film director Carl Denham. This reading seems to work as well as any other and helps to save the film from the forces of political correctness while ensuring its status as a legitimate work of pop art. If I don’t exactly subscribe all the way to it, it may be because I believe that the audience must feel either relatively neutral to the “monster of the id” or take vicarious pleasure from his crimes (like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees). But the audience of King Kong feels genuine pity for him, and this can only really be felt if Kong is somehow the victim of gross social injustice.

Still, Peary provides solid support for his thesis, starting with the assertion that King Kong was filmed with a dream logic. He says that our first view of Skull Island (Skull Island, dude, see that?) is an exact reproduction of Arnold Bocklin's "distinctly dream-like" painting Isle of the Dead and that Kong changes size according to scale multiple times throughout the film (as needed for the scene). To this we could add that Cooper actually got the idea for the film after having a dream of a giant ape attacking New York. We should also acknowledge the stop-motion special effects, which are hardly realistic but not exactly cheesy either. It‘s more that they are simply abstract, divorced from reality in a way that isn‘t ironic as much as legitimately dreamlike.

Particularly significant I think, you see something akin to naivety or confusion in all the characters. Kong doesn’t understand why the photographers are taking pictures of Ann and grows enraged and protective. Ann doesn't really understand what Kong wants with her and she becomes frightened. The rest of the humans don’t know what he wants with her and so they act in self-defense. The Skull Island natives slip easily into a racist mold of cultural naivety. They had never seen a blonde woman before, and they interpret this novelty as meaning that she will make a particularly good sacrifice for their God. This naivety and confusion keeps the film from really having any villains. Because they don’t know what they are doing they haven’t any moral accountability. A lack of moral accountability suggests a lack of free agency, and vice versa. Since they don‘t understand why they are doing what they are doing or the greater ramifications of the action, it doesn‘t represent an actual moral decision. This lack of free agency is distinctly dreamlike. In some ways, dream narratives may represent an ideal for film narrative in that they demand complete emotional involvement from the dreamer, but the dreamer hasn’t any control over their own actions.

However we ultimately interpret King Kong, its dreamlike elements signify that, at the very least, this giant ape is not just a giant ape. King Kong works on a simple narrative level, but it’s difficult to just leave it at that; the picture is too off-beat to reward a literal reading. This is precisely why Peter Jackson’s recent remake is such a strange bird. Jackson’s Kong really is nothing more but a giant ape. There’s no subtext and no hidden agenda: Kong represents nothing more or less but himself. A giant ape movie that is actually about a giant ape? Now that’s insane.

Jackson’s literal treatment of the Kong story isn’t a “dumbing down” of the original; in a way, the literal treatment has actually made Jackson‘s Kong considerably more audacious and provocative. Walking out the film, I saw one of the ushers asking a furry comic book geek how it was. He looked down and shyly offered, “It was really sad.” Sad it is. The audience doesn’t cheer at the end of the film, they shuffle out all depressed. But the good kind of depressed. You’re a little too embarrassed to bring out the Kleenex and bawl at the end of it, but you come pretty damn close. King Kong is a terrific tear-jerker and a terrific love story, but need I remind you it’s the death of a fucking computer-generated giant monkey that we’re getting choked up over, and that his widow is a blonde human that fits in the palm of his hand? The audience isn’t getting worked up just over the left-behind human, mind you, as is the case in the well-accepted weepers Old Yeller and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial. They’re getting all choked up over the giant ape, who genuinely loved the girl and really got the short end of the stick in the whole deal.

I think that it’s probably an oversimplification on my part to say that the emotional and intellectual domains of the film experience are diametrically opposed, but they certainly appeal to different aspects of the film experience. A film can be brilliant without being particularly emotionally affective, just as a film can be emotionally affective without being particularly brilliant. Of course, I don’t have a great deal of use for a cinema made up exclusively of blinking colored lights, but I’m also just anti-intellectual enough to distrust a cinema composed exclusively of Latin appealing only to those who have learned how to read Latin.

I have to admit that it gives me a bit of a thrill to acknowledge that Jackson has achieved with King Kong what Todd Haynes (who earned a bachelor’s degree in Art and Semiotics (the study of signs and how meaning is made and understood) from Brown) failed to with Far From Heaven. Haynes’ Far From Heaven was a pleasantly bizarre misfire, but a misfire it was. In terms of accomplishing what it set out to do, it was a total failure. He’s trying to make us sympathize with Barbie dolls, but it doesn’t work. At the end of the day, we still regard them as Barbie dolls. Haynes ends the film with the words “The End” which was met with a small round of chuckles at the screening I was at. Anti-intellectual or not, I have enough elitism in my blood to praise mass audiences (even art house mass audiences) in the same terms that St. Thomas Aquinas praised animals. They serve God better than man because they live their natures purely, without guilt. Jackson’s trick seems to be that he doesn’t obsess over the idea of attaching meaning to a neutral object. Doing so is to adopt a distance from the material that will produce the same effect as one of campy condescension.

Indeed, campy condescension was the general tone of the Kong script Jackson wrote shortly after The Frighteners. After finishing Lord of the Rings, Jackson took a look at his script and loathed it, describing it as “flip” and “smart-arsed.” The script no longer represented where he was artistically post-Lord of the Rings. His decision to revise seems to have been a wise one. Because Jackson seems to be genuinely in awe of Kong and genuinely respects both the character and his story, the film produces a powerfully potent emotional response from the audience.

Still, I have the same modest complaint about King Kong that I have about Jackson‘s Lord of the Rings. A movie that has something for everybody doesn’t really have anything just for me. Pretty much everybody likes Lord of the Rings; it’s effortlessly perfect in a way that demands little in the way of forgiveness or ideological defense. Aesthetically and politically, it’s decidedly uncontroversial. (One is tempted to say the same about Casablanca and Star Wars, but indeed the animalistic mass audience can dismiss the former for being talky and dismiss the latter for being hokey, afflictions that are conspicuously absent in the Lord of the Rings films.) There is certainly something to be said about the cinema as communal experience, but that form of movie love strikes me as shallow compared to that borne from forming your own distinctive associative groups. True movie love tends to strike us the hardest in adolescence and in adolescence there is a natural desire to form your own identity that is hardly facilitated through assimilative experiences like Lord of the Rings. By removing the subtext and approaching the material head-on, Jackson has turned the patently absurd King Kong story into a similarly universal experience; no small feat I must admit. (Conventional wisdom would dictate that three-hour fantasy epics would grab a larger audience than three-hour bestiality weepers.) King Kong is anything but soulless or cold, but I think that it might be fair to call it impersonal. Jackson is a great filmmaker from a marketing standpoint, as he’s created a product that everybody wants, but he seems to have lost the divisiveness that marks a real film artist.

The racist overtones of the original King Kong give it a nasty confrontational kick that’s missing in Jackson’s version. The original Kong is divisive; you’re owning up to something when you adopt it into your collection. Divorced from sociological concerns and taken on the level of pure movie however, Jackson’s Kong is much nastier and delivers much more of a punch than the Cooper original. The film’s centerpiece is a battle between Kong and a pride of Tyrannosauruses. His preferred method of execution is prying their jaws open, but at least one gets his head smashed in and Kong rips another’s tongue out of its mouth with his teeth like Billy Hayes in Midnight Express. Sweeeeet mother of God! That is some brutal shit. (For the sake of brevity, I won’t even get into the man-eating slimy worms.)

According to Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” review of the original, the jaw-prying was always there. It’s been way too long since I’ve seen the 1933 version (it was reshown today on Turner Classic Movies and I forgot about it!), but for the record, while I recall Kong fighting the dinosaurs I overlooked or somehow forgot that particular detail. I doubt though that the dinosaur fights in the original ever approached the visceral brutality of Jackson’s remake.

King Kong may very well be the most violent PG-13 movie I’ve ever seen. If these things were happening to human beings the picture would likely score an easy NC-17. (Even Sin City‘s Yellow Bastard had his coconut cracked open off-screen with only Frank Miller’s hard-boiled dialogue providing the details.) But since it’s a giant ape tearing apart dinosaurs, the violence is seen as less immoral--or less imitable, whatever it is that the MPAA is rating for. PETA recently issued a statement praising Peter Jackson for not using real gorillas in the film, as if using real gorillas was ever really an option. Obviously, PETA is trying to piggyback on the glut of press from the film. While there is, of course, an unmistakable anti-captivity message to the film, I wonder why PETA is slow to acknowledge that the dinosaur fight is a virtual, big-budget Hollywood version of bear-baiting and cockfighting that’s implicitly endorsed by the MPAA. Anyway, I mean all that more as observation than criticism. This dinosaur fight, man, it’s a brilliant piece of sinny. Peter Jackson has more than cemented his reputation as one of the great action directors; he fills the scene up to the gills with action but the action is all actual movement. American blockbusters are infamous for their fractured split-second cuts, but Jackson never over-edits; he gives a shit about craftsmanship.

And the violence itself, well it’s exhilarating, and it’s the right choice for the character. Ripping out dinosaur tongues--that reinforces for us that we‘re dealing with an animal here. I wonder sometimes about the people on the MPAA’s rating boards. I mean, they must know that this sequence is a masterpiece of filmmaking and that to touch a frame of it would be an act of sacrilege. But they also must know that if they were to give the film an R because of this, the sequence would in fact be defaced to get the more marketable PG-13 rating and King Kong would be a lesser film because of it. The perils of American capitalism and Puritanism, aye? I’m a big admirer of Jackson’s Dead Alive and one of the things that I admire about it is that it’s really kind of perfect for eight-year-old boys. In terms of sheer gallons of the stuff, it might be the most bloody film ever made, but it’s all gross-out humor and as such it’s kind of innocent. And yet, quite a few critics argue that it’s “not for kids.” Why? Because the content doesn’t fit into the parameters they’ve set in their minds for morally acceptable violence. It’s really rather laughably rigid thinking. The violence against dinosaurs in King Kong, it gets you questioning again about how we instinctively associate a moral dimension to on-screen violence even when it doesn’t make any rational sense. I mean, it’s emotionally affective to see Kong killing dinosaurs, but as dinosaurs are extinct doesn’t that mean that these images are not morally corruptible?

Jackson admirer Jerimiah Kipp writes, in a rare pan of the film, that “the politically-correct will be gnawing off their arms about (Jackson’s) treatment of the native islanders.” I beg to differ; as far as I can tell the Skull Islanders don’t resemble any known ethnic group. Jackson is exploiting “dark-skinned native” imagery, but is careful not to make any reference toward any specific race or ethnic group, suggesting that political correctness has already metastasized into his bones. Kipp does score a salient point though in noting that, in order to further neutralize charges of racism, Jackson casts Jamaican actor Evan Parke as one of the first mates to discover the island. However, any possible good will built by this decision is destroyed when Parke becomes one of the first to die, thus conforming to modern action movie scripts. I disagree though with his assertion that Parke’s death “feels like we're stuck back in the casual prejudice of 1933, only now it's stuck in the double standard of trying to apologize for itself while simultaneously following the genre rules.” I believe that blacks deserve to have stories in which they are three-dimensional, are the heroes, and don’t die first; but I also believe that there are degrees of racist exclusionism and I don’t believe that the 2005 version’s treatment of blacks is morally equivalent to that of the 1933 version.

Kipp doesn’t say anything about the film’s Chinese character Choy, but Choy seems to closely reflect the script for Asians as being sexually ineffectual and “wimpy.” Choy isn’t on-screen long enough for the caricature to make us genuinely uncomfortable, but still I detected a bit of a twist on Jackson’s part. Choy is so wimpy that we begin to read him as more gay than Chinese. Our scripts for gays and Asians begin to overlap and this idea of racial caricature becomes overwrought, self-conscious, kind of funny, and then finally neutralized. The flamingly gay Asian archetype calls attention to our prejudices against both groups and then satirizes them.

But I’m getting a little off-track. One of the things that interested me about Jackson’s Skull Island natives is that they weren’t dumb and ignorant like the ones in the original Kong; they were genuinely nasty. They reminded me of the rednecks in Marcus Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, frankly; there was this righteous rage toward these intruders that seemed to enable their latent sadistic streak. When they capture Ann and offer her to Kong it doesn’t seem to be because they are in awe of her whiteness, but because they wish to denigrate it. I mean, they kind of cheer when Kong whisks her away. This encapsulates the miscegenation myth every bit as much as the original Kong but it does so in a way that affords the natives considerably more dignity. Before, they raped white women because they desperately wanted to have sex with white women and there was no other way for them to do so. Here they rape white women to affirm their racial superiority. I have a term for this. I call it “deification through demonization.” As villains, the Skull Islanders are allowed the moral capacity for evil and are placed on a level of cognitive development comparable to our own. You could call these guys “ignoble” savages; by refusing to grant them the protection of naivety and by making them evil, we never really see them through paternalistic terms. This model also indirectly gives their civilization a sense of legitimacy. Believing that they are racially superior indicates that they like their racial identity.

Vilifying the Skull Islanders helps to counterbalance a later scene where Denham displays Kong for the pleasure of Depression-era society ladies. Kong is visibly beaten and depressed, a fact that Denham exploits in his opening monologue and reinforces by surrounding the ape with dancers in blackface. By giving the islanders a sense of superiority of their own, we realize that the balance of power can easily be tipped either way. Whites are not intrinsically superior to the non-whites or vice versa; rather it all depends on whose rock we’re standing on. You see, if we were to allow that only the whites could be racist that would rob the non-whites of something fundamental to their humanity. (There is no way that the whites could NOT be racist in this material, as the entire premise seems to necessitate a sort of callous disregard for the Skull Islanders. Since they aren’t an officially discovered country, it never occurs to Denham that he should court their favor or gain their permission. Living in a non-country, they are a non-people.)

The vilification also helps to flesh out Kong. Early on, Kong does very little to rise above his animal roots. He’s boorish and lacks even the most fundamental shreds of empathy. Ann does some tricks for him, he’s impressed and he begins to push her down with his index finger. He thinks that this is hilarious, but Jackson lets Ann let out some grunts of pain. Kong keeps doing this before Ann demands him to stop. Kong throws a fit, but she doesn’t show any fear toward him. Shortly after they watch a sunset together and she conveys the concept of “beauty” to him. A bond grows between them, and Kong learns to love and, in a way, respect Ann. He doesn’t cross her boundaries again. It’s necessary that we dislike Kong at first so that his relationship with Ann gains some kind of significance. Ann has made him a better person, the gap between the two cultures has been bridged, and yet by the end of the film he’ll be dead. The ending is devastating not simply because we empathize with both characters, but because it shows us that people can grow and love can make a difference but that none of this really amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world. We know that Kong is going to die because we are familiar with the original film and there is never a sense that the ending is fashionably nihilistic or a cheat. And yet, we aren’t given any hints earlier in the film that this a doomed romance. Believe it or not, what Ann and Kong have is the real deal.

I feel that King Kong is an extremely effective weeper, but too much of this is reliant simply on Jackson’s direction and his actors’ performance. I’m glad that his post-LOTR rewrite eliminated the snark of the original script, but I think that he should have run it through the word processor one more time and cut out some of the fat. Specifically in the film’s first hour, little of which contains any special effects, action, or anything fleshing out the relationship between Ann and Kong. A subplot involving Denham escaping his film’s financers never really pays off, and when Jackson uses it to squeeze some suspense out of Denham’s ship taking off we get to feeling jerked around. Speaking of jerking us around, Jackson seems to believe that giving the monster’s lunch some sort of background and third-dimension will increase our involvement in their deaths. This is sort of naïve. When a film consists of nothing but Marion Cranes that die off within the first hour, we quickly realize that the director has been playing us for chumps and our emotional investment and interest in these people was all for nothing.

It seems that Jackson didn’t know what movie he wanted to make until he was far past the 100-page mark. The result is a film that might have been perfect at two and a half hours but at three feels too short. I wanted more psychic energy to be invested in the Skull Islanders and with Ann and less with characters that Jackson later disregards as unimportant. Jackson promises an extended edition of the film on DVD and maybe then I’ll be seeing the same masterpiece that everybody else has. Until then, I’m a little sad to say that King Kong is a near-miss for canonization.