Pensees: King Kong

King Kong

Scattered and hasty thoughts about the movie. I thought I’d throw them up here in their crude unedited form for any who might be interested.

On my flight to Phoenix last Friday I decided to watch the featured movie which would last the duration of the flight and probably help me forget the fact that I was crammed between two over-sized Americans in seat E. The bizarre combination of having spent over an hour at the gate entranced by the glories of Jonathan Edwards’ Religious Affections while I waited to board and the carnal agitation of having to sit in seat E once I boarded probably did not leave me in the best frame of mind to watch King Kong. Then again, I wonder if there is any frame of mind suitable for the rape of intellectual dignity that the movie proved to be. I chose to lay aside Edwards’ Religious Affections and taste the culture. I could barely endure the entire length of the movie. I literally forced myself to keep watching, writing down comments in my journal while doing my best to muffle my groans, snorts, and sniggers.

I am not a movie critic. I’m just a critic. The plot is simple: man and ape have same passion for white, female blondes. (I shall here deliberately avoid all the possible symbolisms that have been speculated in the media except to say that I couldn’t help but thinking that the culture does seem to have reduced love to the ape-like.) In the struggle for the blonde, the white man wins by default because ape dies of broken heart, apparently only coming to grips with the awful fact of incompatibility as WWI aircraft try to gun him down from the top of the Empire State Building. Poor beast. It was obvious the blonde had fallen for him too.

I am no expert on cinema, but I couldn’t help but be irritated by the inconsistency of proportions throughout the entire movie. I could never really quite figure out how big King Kong really was. He was so huge that mountainsides and buildings collapsed under him, but, as massive as he was, he didn’t break the ice on the pond when he and the lovely Miss Darrow had the romantic skate after they were reunited in NYC.

Now, I realize that it was fantasy. And fantasy, as a genre, is good. But even fantasy has to maintain internal consistency. Think Chronicles of Narnia or Lord of the Rings. By “internal consistency,” I mean that the “reality” of the fantasy must stay consistently realistic. In Kong, all the human beings were real human beings. Or, were they? The lovely Miss Darrow somehow could run heart-pounding minute after minute up and down steep, tropical terrain and still maintain her hair. Not to mention the super-athletic quality of running full sprint with a few spectacular falls to boot for what seemed to be an interminably long period of screams and growls.

Even in fantasy, there has to be a sense of internal realism. The perfect timing of every life-saving occurrence (i.e. the bats that arrived just in time to distract the ape as the man and woman made their escape) became nauseously predictable. Boring. There was no internal sense of realism. Miss Darrow would just escape the jaws of a carnivorous monster, collapse to catch her breath, when another uglier, badder monster would rear it’s bloodthirsty head.

As Rebecca Hagelin of homeinvasion.org warns in the latest edition of Imprimis, the vast majority of the media is “sexual, violent, and often plain stupid.” This movie ranked with the stupid. I suppose that the burlesque dancer (for that is what Miss Darrow was going to do before she was “rescued” by the scheming film-maker) turned into fleeing leggy eye candy might have some kind of titillating effect on brainless male worldlings of Jr. High ilk, but even male worldlings (at least those with brains) who have no compunction about ogling would have been turned off by her stupidity. I wonder if the typecasting trials included a performance of the open-mouth duh look. It certainly was a major part of the script for the blonde. For a major section of the picture (of which she was the main actor), her lines must not have been too difficult to learn:

“No.”
“Wait.”
“Beautiful.”
“Jack, run.”
“Please, somebody help us. They’re gone.”
“Stop. Let me go.”

I vaguely remember media speculation about who this particular film insults. Does it insult the black male or the white male? I recall some sympathy with the concerns, but now that I’ve seen it I think all of humanity is insulted including females. It seems to portray that men and apes are equally limited in their expectations for a woman: as long as she is sexy we can tolerate the “duh look” on her face. And women should be equally insulted since clearly in the world of men and apes the only women worth looking at twice are leggy, brainless blondes. And, to add insult to injury, women are so mindless that any ape who shows sensitivity is sure to win their hearts. I’m sure all the ape-like idiotic males that watched that movie were thoroughly indoctrinated in the power of the puppy-dog look. If the behemoth Kong could give the weepy, puppy-dog, tender eyes to the knock-out and thereby win her undying affection, then surely the beer-gut white guy who has a vocabulary slightly more extensive than Kong’s grunts stands a chance with dazzling women.

That Miss Darrow is dumb is not even in question. When she is reunited with Kong in the city, the emotion portrayed in her eyes and in the eyes of the ape was enough to make anyone seating in seat E scorn out loud, “This is so stupid.” (Much to the vexation of his over-sized row partners.)

Finally, the scene of the drugged up King Kong in the auditorium, chained for the spectators to gawk at and his arousal back to his old strong self by the sight of a blonde brought to my mind the biblical event of Samson before the cheering Philistines. As in King Kong, their object of entertainment turned deadly.

The word “Philistines” has become a by-word for the culturally-depleted, the boorish, the barbarian, and soon-to-be-ruined. The Philistines who were so boorish to enjoy looking at a shriveled man chained to pillars (what kind of entertainment is that?) were shocked when their entertainment became the instrument of God’s judgment.

We often talk about the onslaught of sex from the movie industry, but the onslaught of stupidity is just as great and almost as deadly. Like the spectators in Kong and the mockers of Samson we don’t even realize that we are about to be terrorized by our own entertainment.

On my return flight, the featured movie was “The Road to Glory.” I opted to read nearly one hundred pages of Religious Affections this time.