Old Monsters, New Faces, Same Problem: King Kongs 1933 and 2005

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The most interesting choice Peter Jackson and his King Kong crew made when updating the 1933 classic is also their most obvious choice, one that colors every aspect of the film: setting their movie in 1933. Think about it: almost all movie remakes contemporize their stories, setting them in their own time and translating all the details accordingly. But while the new Kong updates the story’s sights and sounds, using twenty-first century CGI to improve on the ginormous ape's movements as he rampages across first Skull and then Manhattan Island, it does not update the story’s cultural moment to the twenty-first century itself. While this decision allows the filmmakers to cram their movie with all kinds of depression-era period detail and Hollywood in-jokes appropriate to the movie-within-a-movie framework they inherited from the original, it yields some unfortunate results as well. Jackson’s Kong impressively expands and modernizes the special effects of the old, providing Kong with a trio of T-Rexes to battle instead of just the one of the 1933 version. The new movie also corrects the scientific errors of the old, incorporating our greater understanding of the prehistoric food chain; the brontosauruses here are herbivores, dangerous to humans only because of their wild stampeding as they flee from a pack of velociraptors. The problem, the unnerving, maddening problem, is that the new movie fails to modernize the sensibilities of the old, retaining much of the baldly racist-primitivist implications of the original.

The new Kong, in fact, in its compulsion to outdo every aspect of the original, makes greater use of the fact that the story starts in a depression-era New York City. The movie’s opening moments announce loud and clear that Jackson’s people researched the original Kong’s setting pretty thoroughly; the scenes of poverty-stricken New York, replete with a shantytown in Central Park, soup kitchens and labor demonstrations, not only reveal an American underside that 1930s Hollywood rarely acknowledged, but also pay homage to the few films, like Hallelujah I’m a Bum, Modern Times and Sullivan’s Travels, what did--however tamely. Of course, to generate the obligatory irony, the soundtrack for these shots is Al Jolson’s “I’m Sittin’ on Top of the World” (also a joke about the movie’s finale, natch.) In both of these versions, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray once, Naomi Watts now) is compelled to join Carl Denham’s film/crew sea expedition mostly through hunger and a desire to avoid entering the less reputable professions available to young women of 1933. The new one gives her a whole vaudeville background backstory, including an anachronistic reference to the Federal Theater. (It started in 1935).

Most emphatically, the period detail in Jackson’s film emphasizes and enlarges upon the racist discourse the original was both enlisting and perpetuating. Stop and think for a minute about the 1933 version, directed by Merrion C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. A group of white filmmakers travels to an island somewhere in the tropics that is populated by prehistoric fauna and a primitive, dark-skinned community of people who sacrifice blonde-haired white women to the giant ape who terrorizes over the whole place. The film crew scraps the movie idea and decides they can do one better by abducting the ape and putting him on a stage on the Great White Way. The body of the other, on display, for the tonily-dressed white audience. The racial undertones of all of this are obvious enough, and even vaguely acknowledged in the 1933 movie: when the film crew first meets the natives and begins backing away nervously, one of the men whistles the tune of "St. Louis Blues," the W.C. Handy standard (frequently recorded and heard in the 1920s and 30s) in which an African American woman laments losing her lover, perhaps to a white woman--as if the blues will placate the savages’ anger. While the people inhabiting the island are not directly equated with Kong, they share the main attribute of being somewhat human, but less so than the whites. Having a white woman captured by a dark male, of course, would set off plenty of anti-miscegenation alarms in a film released less than 20 years after Birth of a Nation was a hit. Cooper was aware enough of this blatant racism that for his next film, an adaptation of Rider Haggard’s She, he took a novel set among savage peoples in Africa and transplanted the events to . . . Siberia.

Cut to 2006. Jackson’s Kong replaces "St. Louis Blues" with "Bye Bye Blackbird," one of the most vexed songs of American popular culture, at least from the standpoint of racial history. This is the song that, during the New Orleans flood of 1927, a steamboat orchestra was playing as it pulled away from the docks, carrying white passengers to safety and leaving African Americans stranded in the flooding city. It’s also a song whose most famous version including lyrics was recorded by Josephine Baker, herself an icon of the primitivist obsession gripping western culture throughout the 1920s. The song arises on the soundtrack of the new Kong immediately after the scene when the ape has been unveiled to the Broadway audience, surrounded by dancing "savages" – African American dancers clad in outfits not unlike those that Baker herself was wearing in 1933. The film cuts from this scene to that of a vaudeville stage where a troupe of white-clad white women, including Darrow, dance to "Blackbird." The intense color contrast seems to be exposing the problematic racial structures of the story.

But the 2005 Kong does nothing to address the backwards and sinister associations of non-whiteness with sub-humanism. The new Skull Island denizens are both more violent and more creepily unearthly than their 1933 equivalents. When they attack the film crew they are filmed in close-ups, in low-angle shots, turning them into flailing, moving parts of black bodies, effectively dehumanizing them. In fact, with their hoarsely whispered, guttural speech, their dreadlocks and primitive clothes, they superficially but unmistakably recall the orcs of Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. In other words, they carry the earmarks of Jackson’s most evil, inhuman, near-human race from his recent epic. Furthermore, another text casts a strange racializing shadow over the film. Adding a note not found in the original movie, Jackson takes on references to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as ballast. This is a book whose dark-skinned natives never seem to be whole human beings. Conrad depicts his Africans as being "a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling." The new Kong actually quotes the text immediately before and after that description while omitting these phrases—and does so right before the islanders attack. The filmmakers are admitting a debt to Heart of Darkness, but unthinkingly aping the way it dehumanizes non-European bodies by turning them into a dizzying mass of black body parts.

This gets more complicated. In the movie, Heart of Darkness is being read, implausibly enough, by a half-literate character, Jimmy, the film’s coming-of-age cabin boy (who has his own mysterious savage past). Jimmy likes to ask reading-group style questions about the book to the ship’s mate, a gruff African American named Hayes. These two are engaged in a mentor/mentee relationship that is hard not read some homoerotic hints into. (After all these are sailors.) Furthermore, and obviously enough, both the May-September and the white-black aspects of this pairing point toward that erotic relationship at the heart of the movie plot.

Ah, that romance. From the white folks’ arrival on Skull Island, Darrow and Kong are locked in some sort of symbio-erotic dance. Her primal scream when she is seized by the natives is answered by the monster’s distant roar. This is jungle fever. Of course, as everyone who has ever read a word about either the original or this Kong knows, the ape is meant to be, and indeed emerges as, a human, all-too-human, sympathetic character. Again, Jackson’s version outdoes 1933 in this regard, providing the ape with interiority in his scenes with Darrow: the ape laughs at her stunts and howls angrily at her rejections. Indeed, when Kong momentarily escapes to Central Park with Darrow (not in the 1933 script) the scene is endearing enough to put all those mawkish Ephron, etc. movies to shame (not that they needed any help). But humanizing the ape is a problematic thing in light of the movie’s treatment of racial others; it is as if the Big Lug has received the human characteristics that have been denied the Skull Island natives.

The Darrow/Kong romance is complicated, of course, by the difference in species and, furthermore, by the love triangle, in which Adrien Brody plays the third leg/wheel/man, Jack Driscoll. Driscoll's participation is fraught with the erotics of race. Hollywood movies have a history, of course, of coupling two appropriate white protagonists at the end of films, regardless of whom the characters might have been attracted to along the way to the conclusion. (In some ways, this is Hollywood’s history, the dominant feature of the aesthetic.) The 2005 Kong injects Driscoll into its ending in a way the 1933 Kong does not, emphasizing how the narrative has successfully returned the white woman to her proper partner. It is a telling moment, at the movie’s very climax, visually as well as thematically. Probably Kong’s most famous physical feature is his flattened boxer’s nose. Meanwhile, probably Brody’s most famous physical feature is his elongated hawk's beak of a nose, certainly popularly thought of as an ethnic signifier. Jackson likes cutting from one to the other. He does this at the movie's finale, on the top of the Empire State building: flat nose, Darrow, big nose, all on top of pointy spire. I’m not going to get all Freudian here, but you sure can.

In a way it’s fascinating to see how painstakingly Jackson’s team has renovated the stylistic aspects of a classic film, updating its scenes of prehistoric adventure for the post-Jurassic Park, CGI generation, while utterly failing to address its racist undertones, except to make them overt tones. In another way, it’s disturbing. One of Jackson's goals was clearly to use technology to make his Kong more realistic-looking and realistic-sounding than the original. Reducing the goofy camp factor of the movie serves to turn the story's racist sentiments into a matter of film style, as if to deny their actual import in a world in which racism persists and, for example, African-Americans still get left out in the cold, in a pinch. The new Kong’s aesthetic upgrade makes the film’s sinister qualities all the more dangerous and difficult to swallow than those of the original.

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