fear of a big, black dick, or the liberal leni riefenstahl

king kong (universal, 2005) isn’t peter jackson’s only neo-colonialist action fantasy subsisting on disavowed homosexual desire, but it is his worst. without the narrative drive of tolkien, he gives us nothing to think about for 187 minutes except the film’s fear of darkest africa and the realization that the ape is after all sensitive and perhaps ought not to have been imported to the city and turned into a form of spectacular capital.

riefenstahl used bombastic film form to serve the nazi dream and jackson bombastic film form to serve the liberal dream. riefenstahl posits unquestioning obedience to centralized authority descended from the clouds as the highest social value, jackson posits feeling good for feeling bad as the highest social value.



[rrr thanks our friend, professor clover of uc davis, for developing the concept "feeling good for feeling bad" in terms of liberal ideology.]

at first the film works to make us afraid of whatever the fictional film’s cast and crew might find on mysterious skull island, hidden in the fog — an island which turns out to be populated by dark-skinned cannibalistic “natives(1)”. these “natives” know that the 25 foot black gorilla they worship has a pronounced taste for white meat, so they offer him naomi watts. after the ape uses her like a rag doll for a while, she dances for him; after he rescues her from some intelligently designed dinosaurs that time forgot, she teaches him to touch his heart as a sign for “beautiful” while watching the sun rise(2). the gorilla turns out to be human after all!

once the animal/human philosopheme has been deconstructed, the evil, greedy and arrogant director (jack black) and live animal capturing ship captain (thomas kretchmann) can use chemical weapons to bring kong back to new york city. there, of course, he wreaks havoc on everything until he finds watts' character while adrien brody’s jack driscoll emotes.

all of the original’s race politics have been scrupulously preserved by jackson, even if he has cast the jamaican born black actor evan parke as a heroic, conrad interpreting, member of the ship’s crew and turned the character of film director carl denham (jack black) into cardboard auto-critique(3). the first exemplifies jackson’s career move from tolkienism to tokenism and the second needs to be understood as an attempt to fool us into understanding the film as a critique of that which it actually functions as. (see cloverist analysis above)

all of which ignores how witlessly slow the film is, how bad the “comedic” references to the 1933 version are (cooper/schoedsack, rko,) how imbecilic the cgi depression era nyc looks, especially exposed by contemporary camera movements, how tiresome the pasty color of the opening (expressing the poverty of the times) and the saturated color of the of the island (expressing the fecundity of the “primitive”) are etc. etc.

notes:
1) the “beautiful” sign sets up hollywood’s favorite bathesian trick of narrative economy and we spend the rest of the film waiting for kong to make it again atop the empire state so that we can at last go home.

2) interestingly, rrr was unable to find an image of these natives on the web, despite the fact that they are neither a big surprise nor a super secret special effect, suggesting that the producers fear word of mouth reaction to their racism.

3) the film attempts to use mise-en-abyme to establish an alibi of critical distance from its own ideology. another example would be the appearance of dancing natives from the 1933 kong in the “obviously” exploitative and ill fated broadway premier.