Magnificent Animal

Adrian Martin

1. Cf. Meaghan Morris, ‘Great Moments in Social Climbing: King Kong and the Human Fly’, in Too Soon, Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

King Kong: the sovereign individual, on top of the free world. But his sense of himself and his power is based on a delusion: at any second, those planes are going to bring him down. The story of Kong is, through and through, a disquieting tale of confusion, contradiction, non-reconciliation: when the self-made movie-man proclaims at the end that "‘Twas beauty killed the beast", he forgets that, in the fairy tale, the loving woman saves the man by doing away with the beast that he previously was. Kong, on the other hand, is only dead, which is a scarcely reassuring end to any fairy tale. Peter Jackson’s current, disappointing version of the Kong story recycles, thoughtlessly, this final-line cop-out.

Popular culture since 1933 – the year of the original Cooper/Schoedsack King Kong – has been obsessed with images of this mighty ape, in two starkly different forms: Kong on high, and Kong flat out on the ground. Marco Ferreri began Bye Bye Monkey with the corpse of Kong, still decaying on a New York street in 1978; and Yann Lardeau from Cahiers du cinéma was saddened by the publicity campaign that accompanied the Paris premiere of the 1976 remake: an animatronic Kong, laid out horizontally and twitching, while the punters filed along a platform above him and gawked down. (1)

Emmanuel Frémiet Gorilla Carrying off a Woman 1887 Bronze

2. Ted Gott & Kathryn Weir, Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong (Queensland Art Gallery Publishing, 2005).

3. Giorgio Agamben (trans. K. Attell), The Open: Man and Animal (California: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 16.

There is a before and after to the Kong icon. In Kiss of the Beast, an exhibition held at Queensland Art Gallery from November 2005-Janury 2006, curators Ted Gott and Kathryn Weir presented their research into the links between the original King Kong and a range of preceding artists and image practices, pre-eminently the work of sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet (1824-1910). His Gorilla carrying off a woman (1887) is the template for Kong clutching a white woman while asserting his sovereignty. (2)

King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

The many subsequent parodic takes on the image and story of Kong speak volumes about our inability to take this material seriously – and about our unease concerning where to place and contain this creature who is neither human nor animal. Peter Jackson makes him as human and sentimental as possible – once he has his stomping-around urges under control – but there are other ways of exploring what Giorgio Agamben has called the ‘incongruity of these two elements’, the human and the animal within Man, and the ‘ceaseless divisions and caesurae’ between them. (3)

On the Town (Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1949)

When Ann Miller screams at the beastly advances of sailor Jules Munshin in the Donen-Kelly On the Town (1949), she is declaring her kinship with Fay Wray (and her prodigious lung power) in King Kong. After all, she has already determined that Munshin is clearly an evolutionary throwback to the barbaric creature who stands as a statue in the Natural History Museum. But once the comedy and the song – the great ‘Prehistoric Man’ – get rolling, all these old-fashioned values are immediately reversed. In the post-war climate that On the Town channels, it is the Woman (the professional woman, at that) who is the Beast, and Man who is the Prey. What did they call Ann Miller in her heyday? The magnificent animal.