King Kong

King Kong
A Review by John David Ebert

No sooner was the Empire State Building completed in 1931 than the logic of myth demanded that it be assaulted by a giant monster. At the time, it was New York’s tallest skyscraper (at 1,250 feet); indeed, the structure was so high that its designers had originally constructed its mooring mast for the purpose of docking zeppelins, but this science fictional premise—perhaps inspired by Lang’s Metropolis—had to be given up once it was tried out, for it was too difficult and extremely dangerous. In mythology, however, the erection of any towering structure acts as a lightning rod for monsters or angry deities. In Beowulf, for instance, Grendel shows up only after the palace of Heorot has been completed. In Hittite myth, likewise, a giant monster known as Ullikummi is grown into a huge stone column by the warrior Kumarbi, and the tower keeps growing toward the heavens until it is noticed by the sun god, who then informs the other gods that it must be stopped, whereupon Ea attacks it by cutting its feet out from under it with a copper sickle that was originally used at the dawn of creation to sever the sky god from the earth goddess. In Greek mythology, likewise, Zeus cannot rule safely from his palace atop Mount Olympus until he has dealt with the threat represented by the Titans and giants sent up by Gaia to overthrow him from below.

The erection of skyscrapers, furthermore, is itself the performance of a myth, that namely of the old Gnostic, Neoplatonic ascent of the soul through the planetary spheres to return to its origins in the Empyrean. For in Gnosticism—as well as in Plato—the earthly realm is fallen and the body is the tomb of the soul; thus, its physical birth through the female is the primary means whereby it becomes entrapped in matter. The soul’s rebirth takes place through the mind of the father, however, whereby it leaves the cavern behind and grows wings on its ascent toward the sun, escaping into a world of pure Forms governed by mathematically intelligible rational laws, the very same laws which the demiurge used as blueprints to forge his imperfect cosmos.

King Kong, too, like Plato’s narrative, moves from the cavern to a solar apotheosis in the heavens, only the viewpoint is from that of an ape rather than a rationally enlightened human being. But the hidden mythological structures of Merian Cooper’s narrative also involve an evolutionary ascent, in this case, by way of a recapitulation of the history of the human brain, for the narrative travels gradually backwards in time to the realm of tribal man and beyond, to an age of dinosaurs in which mammals did not yet exist. Skull Island, with its gigantic wall separating the realm of Leviathan from the world of tribal man—in a reiteration of the great wall built by the Dutch to keep out the ‘savages’ on what later became Wall Street in New York—is itself a perfect metaphor of the human brain encased in its cranial exoskeleton, in which the reptilian brain stem inherited from the dinosaurs is kept separate from the higher and more evolved brains by the limbic ring. Kong’s dragon-slaying victories over the dinosaurs, moreover, recapture the victory of the tiny mammals over the reptiles in the great mass extinction episode of 65 million years ago; then, with the image of Kong in his bone-cluttered cave, we find ourselves inside the limbic ring with its mammalian instincts, poised at the earliest beginnings of the process of hominization. When the giant ape is captured and borne back to Megalopolis, we enter the urban labyrinth of the brain’s neocortex transformed into a vision of concrete and steel. But here the ape-man, with all his pleasure principle urges is not welcome, for the biplanes which shoot him down from the tower are a mechanical reiteration of the bat-like flying creatures which attacked him in his eyrie on Skull Island. The contrast is deliberate, for in that environment, Kong was King; in the asphalt jungle, he is merely the sacrificed animal, the blood offered to the gods in order to make the towers grow.

This was the mythological skeleton underpinning Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 film, and it is important because absolutely every element of it is non-negotiable for an understanding of the myth. Peter Jackson seems to have realized this, for his new version of King Kong is exquisitely faithful to the structure of Cooper’s film. The 1976 version in which Jessica Lange played the role once occupied by Fay Wray, in contrast, failed because its filmmakers did not understand the mythic elements of the narrative, and as a result, their decision to leave out the dinosaurs—in favor of verisimilitude–ruined the story’s evolutionary architecture.
Jackson also avoids the mistakes made by Spielberg in Jurassic Park, for his characters are carefully drawn, and their problems and personality clashes fascinating to watch. He takes the necessary time to develop the emotional geography of his characters so that when the monsters start eating them, the viewer actually finds himself keeping careful track of who is left alive after each debacle. This is the film that Jurassic Park should have been, for it is filled with lots of dinosaurs instead of just two or three, and involves them in long, complicated sequences of astonishing inventiveness. The stampede of brontosauruses fleeing from a velociraptor attack will make clear what I mean, as will also Kong’s fight with not one, but three T. Rex’s.

Another failing of the 1976 version of King Kong was its attempt to modernize the narrative, an error sidestepped by Jackson, who understands that the film was essentially a response—albeit unconsciously on Cooper’s part—to the construction of the Empire State Building, which came as the climactic development of an architectural trend toward gigantism that had begun during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. The whole development had been set in motion by John and Washington Roebling in the 1860s with their construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the two huge stone towers of which were the first structures in New York to dwarf the city’s cathedrals. The army of skyscrapers which followed, each taller than the last, was the manifestation of an almost religious urge to break free from the earth and attain escape velocity into a gravityless orbit about the planet, a desire not fully attained until the NASA flights of the 1960s. This urge was rooted in a deep unconscious yearning of Western humanity to swallow the planet alive, to place it, for the first time, inside an artificial environment, just as the creation of Central Park was an attempt to digest Nature by miniaturizing it.

But Gaia would not tolerate such hubris, and just as she brought forth the great serpent-man beast Typhon to assault Zeus in revenge for his defeat of the Titans, so in 1933 she unleashed King Kong from her depths with a mission: to capture a maiden and take her to the top of the skyscraper which, in its ascent, had thought to be rid of Her forever. That was Kong’s real mission and once he had completed his task, he could be dispensed with, offered as a sacrifice to the machine.

The Megalopolis by this point had become self-aware, and so it responded to this first great threat to its existence with the creation of the comicbook superhero, many of whose first adventures in the late 1930’s involved defending Gotham from attack by giant monsters. These first superheroes seemed innocuous enough, for they were made only out of newsprint, after all, and yet they were essentially immune cells who were featured right from the start defending the Empire State Building against a number of attacks: Marvel’s first great superhero, the Human Torch, for instance, fought the Sub-Mariner after he had ripped out the mooring post of New York’s tallest skyscraper, and Batman, in an early adventure, was featured machine-gunning a giant human from his batplane, for the giant had climbed to the top of a fictional structure that suspiciously resembled the Empire State Building.

But Jackson understands that the final climactic battle of King Kong should not take place at the top of the World Trade Center, as it does in the 1976 version, for these buildings were so big that Kong is all but swallowed up by their immensity and therefore poses no essential threat to them or to the city that he is supposed to be attacking. Jackson also realizes that this final battle between mythic monster and machines must not take place at nighttime, but at the break of day, for in the dragon-slayer myth of the solar hero, the rising sun heralds not only the decline of the nocturnal zodiac of constellations with all its fabulous beasts, but also the end of the dreams and fantasies of the night. The rise of technopolis, likewise, brought with it an end to myths and monsters as it sterilized the earth of their presence through the conquistador explorations of the scientists and caballeros who chased all the beasts from their places demarcating terra incognita on the old mappae mundi.
Merian Cooper directed his King Kong virtually simultaneously with an adaptation of A Most Dangerous Game, even using many of the same actors and sets to visualize this modern fable of the ancient hunt. Hence, his creation of King Kong as the ultimate prey with civilization itself in the role of the stalker is an updating of an archaic ritual that is as old as civilization itself, for on works of art from ancient Mesopotamia we find the king depicted in the so-called ‘Royal Hunt,’ hurling spears and arrows at lions. The symbolism of the Royal Hunt continued on into the time of the Assyrians, who depicted their kings slaying lions from chariots, and the fact that such kingly monster slayers as Gilgamesh and Herakles kill lions and wear their pelts indicates that the symbolism of the hunt was fundamentally bound up with the idea of kingship. For the king was the incarnation of the city itself, and while the lion may have been the king of beasts, the king of the city was the highest human representative of the divine rule of the gods on earth, and his victory over the lion was an assertion of the essential rightness of the Chain of Being, in which the human world ranked below that of the gods, but was higher than that of the animals.
Cooper and his co-creator Ernest Schoedsack placed themselves as actors inside two of the biplanes which shoot down Kong, thus implying continuity with the tradition of the Royal Hunt, only in the modern megalopolis, the king, instead of shooting arrows from his chariot, fires bullets at King Kong from a biplane. Thus, in the war between civilization and nature, the polis wins, and the planet itself comes one step closer to being engulfed by the Mega-polis which is nowadays almost coterminous with the surface of the earth.
Peter Jackson’s King Kong has come at a time when the city itself is under siege from alien powers, both real and fictional, natural and man-made, and so it seems appropriate to retrieve the earliest work of celluloid art to feature the polis under attack by a giant monster. King Kong was the first of the monster flicks that would later come pouring like a cataract out of 1950s B-movie Hollywood, beginning with Ray Harryhausen’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms in 1953, which then became the inspiration for the Japanese film Godzilla in 1955. That film showed the Japanese psyche at work processing through the picture language of myth its post-traumatic nightmare of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later on the invention of the Japanese superhero of the anime cartoons would come as the city’s immune response to dealing with threats of such magnitude.
With our modern world cities under attack from terrorists, hurricanes and tsunamis—forces often pictured in narrative form as monsters and demons—it is no wonder that the superhero film is so popular today. Thus, it seems doubly appropriate to bring back the giant ape who was the superhero’s sole raison d’etre to begin with.
Peter Jackson is a visionary with a love of film fantasy shared by King Kong’s original creators, and his updating is a sweeping testament to the power of modern cinema to create its own myths.