| I’m
not into the Quasimodo tradition in movies (the mancentric
fantasy of the hot babe able to see the beauty and depth in
the butt-ugly schlub[1]),
and I’m not into old Hollywood. So when Peter Jackson
announced he was following Lord of the Rings with
a remake of King Kong it evoked less than a weak
fart of anticipation. But then I saw the previews, which marketed
it as Titanic vs. Jurassic Park, as if Jackson
were attempting to once and for all trump his directorial
predecessors (James Cameron and Stephen Spielberg) by laying
all his cock and balls on the table. But then I saw the movie,
and realized Jackson was dodging any boring patriarchal cinedick-measuring contest in favor of a more nuanced confrontation with himself and Hollywood and all theaters of spectacle,
diagnosing how things get fucked up between directors and
their audiences and offering a tender parable of the romantic
tension between ape and blonde as a cinematic cure that cynical
misreaders like David Denby (The New Yorker) often
dismiss as a spoonful of sugar.
People
assume Jackson’s proxy in this movie is either the maniacal
Hollywood director played by Jack Black or Kong himself or
both. I’m assuming people assume this because Jackson
is fat and so are Kong and Black. Except Jackson underwent
a bodily transformation during the filming of this movie,
losing something like 70 pounds, as if, like another Jackson’s
famous attempt to model himself after a leading lady,[2]
what P.J. really wants to do is be Naomi Watts. This is an
extratextual parallel to the subtext of the movie (which the
movie itself alludes to with Adrien Brody’s heartfelt
declaration that his love is both obvious and “in the
subtext”), in which Watts, an actress playing an actress,
acts as a director playing to her audience, performing feats
of vaudevillian dexterity for the temperamental childlike
destructive force shrouded in darkness, that is, both King
Kong and us. Initially Kong is delighted, but when Watts tells
him that’s enough, he rages in unsatisfaction, tearing
up the jungle like an audience howling and throwing popcorn
at the screen after being totally pissed off by M. Night Shyamalan’s
The Village.[3]
Watts, as director, tries pandering again after Kong saves
her life from Stephen Spielberg (T. Rexes on lease from Jurassic
Park), literally bending over backwards as she juggles
several CG rocks. But Kong, as audience, having already proved
his love and trust for Watts/director by engaging in the fully
immersive interactivity of beating the shit out of some dinosaurs,
reacts to her juggling with a giant yawn — he is no
longer satisfied, even momentarily, by passively viewing what
passes for cheap thrills. What he wants after his hard day
of videogaming is to share a tender moment with Watts, in
the same way a techno-savvy audience wants something ‘real’
from its director. And so Watts/Jackson stops juggling in
quiet shame and tucks herself into Kong’s/the audience’s
hand, lovers at last, looking out onto the digital sunset
together in a moment of pure, symbiotic bliss.
Sometime
before that the movie makes what appears to be a poops literary
reference with its inclusion of Conrad’s criticism of/ode
to colonialism, Heart of Darkness, on one of the
character’s reading list, as if inadvertently equating
that book’s racism with its own in an attempt at coattail
profundity. But then said character says to the lone black
protagonist “It isn’t just an adventure, is it,”
which could be construed as some trite comment pilfered from
my junior high book report if the term ‘adventure’
weren’t implicitly split apart when crossed with the
name of the boat sailing toward Skull Island: ‘Venture’.
So that the character, and Jackson, is really saying “This
isn’t just some ad venture.” If King Kong
could be likened to Heart of Darkness, it’s
not in its exploitation of ooga booga natives for dramatic
effect (which exploitation Kong, unlike Conrad, later
savages), but in its thematic trajectory: the fate of Peter
Jackson’s sanity as it sails into the dark soul of Hollywood.
Hollywood is personified here in Jack Black, who’s toned
down his signature spaz into something muted, campy, and perfect:[4]
to Black/Hollywood, nothing is real, not even death: everything
exists to be filmed, not lived: and, most damning of all,
rather than court his audience (as Watts does Kong), he traps
it, lulling it to sleep by smashing a bottle of chloroform
on its face. This is commerce masquerading as art to the extreme,
and Jackson takes his criticism into the post-millennial era
by having Black then put the captured Kong on Broadway, in
chains, as part of a cheesy musical reenactment of what transpired
earlier in the movie. This set-up blew my mind on at least
four levels: 1) a movie within a play within a movie that
undercuts all three 2) the ooga boogas do the exact same Cats-like
song-and-dance they do in the 1933 original in an absurd send-up
of the original’s racism that complicates the remake’s
appropriated racism;[5]
3) the mockery of the theater audience hungry for spectacle
implicitly mocks the theater audience watching Kong
as spectacle only; 4) the confrontation between ideal audience
(Kong) and spectacle audience (theatergoers) is an apt illustration
of the post-millennial condition, with the audience marveling
at itself in chains, devisceralized on stage. Both audiences,
the watched and the watching, are paralyzed. It’s like
staring at a car crash but the car crash is yourself. And
totally absent from this debacle is Watts (and by extension
Jackson), who’s left Broadway for a life of anonymity
and let some other blonde/director go through the motions
of being chained up, facing one audience with her back to
the other, pretending to be terrified and helpless for the
amusement of a theater full of people gawking at her ass.
Yet the absence of the true director so enrages the ideal
audience that it breaks its chains, smashing up the theater
and dozens of post-modern theatergoers as it grabs blonde
after blonde, tossing each derivative aside in its desperate
search for the real thing.
It’s
here, in the destruction that follows, that King Kong
critiques the collateral violence of action adventure movies
(including itself) by throwing Adrien Brody into an ironic
act of heroism: Brody goads Kong out of Times Square in what
appears to be an attempt to focus Kong’s wrath on him
and away from others, but what follows is an extended sequence
of destruction as Kong tears up the city in his pursuit of
Brody, who kills even more people by running them over in
his pointlessly fleeing vehicle. This is action hero not as
defender of the people but as defender of violence, as if
all heroes are defined by their trail of destruction. Of course
Kong is having it both ways here, but it wouldn’t
be honest, or interesting, if it wasn’t, and it wouldn’t
be speaking a language its audience could understand in order
to communicate what it wants to say: “Beauty killed
the beast,” Black says after the death of Kong, who,
having fallen from the Empire State Building (the name itself
an explicit reference to Hollywood’s employer, American
imperialism), lies face-up on the ground, like an audience
willfully slain by a director committed to beauty over commerce,
within commerce (I mean the whole thing, pre-marketing, cost
over $200 million).
But
Kong isn’t just about the complicated romance
between director and audience: it also chronicles the relationship
between an artist (the playwright/screenwriter played by Adrien
Brody) and his art. As Black says to Brody early in the movie,
after Brody stays on the already departing boat instead of
leaping into the water and swimming back to shore, “If
you really loved the theater, you would’ve jumped.”
Brody spends pretty much the entire boat ride typing away
behind bars: for an artist in Hollywood, all the living quarters
are full: you eat, sleep, and work in a cage. Once they hit
the island Brody tries to shake off Hollywood’s indictment
of him as the effete artist afraid to engage with reality:
he leaps and jumps all over the jungle, getting not just his
hands but his whole bodily being dirty — but it isn’t
until late in the movie, back in the city, in a theater watching
his own play, that he has his epiphanal moment of self-overhearing:
he’s moved to tears by what he’s saying through
the actors on stage, suddenly aware of his love for art above
all else (an art personified by a director/Watts in love with
an ideal audience/Kong); and his reaction is to walk out of
his own play in a Wittgensteinian moment of discarding the
ladder that led him to this height of awareness (a ladder
he built). What he wants is not art contained by life, but
a fusion of life and art, or in cinematic terms: romantic
love. The scene acts as an ironic parallel to the scene in
which Kong (the ideal audience) destroys the theater (the
spectacle audience) on his way out of the post-millennial
endgame: both Kong and Brody are outraged by the confinements
of life within spectacle, and both, overpowered by the emotion
generated by the tension within this containment, invert the
relationship by choosing the life outside the spectacle. The
irony is in where they run: both to love: Kong to death, Brody
to a happy ending.
with
contributions from movie companion Harris Klahr
_________________________
[1]
What’s problematic is that this affirmation of depth
over superficiality actually reaffirms superficiality in that
the butt-ugly schlub is mistaking surface beauty for nuanced
depth. That the hot babe’s supposedly inherent depth
is never questioned in this tradition makes this a shallow,
sexist construct — and the gender roles are never reversed:
even in movies in which the butt-ugly girl chases the total
stud the butt-ugly girl isn’t ugly at all, as epitomized
in The Truth about Cats & Dogs (Janeane Garofalo)
and She’s All That (Rachel Leigh Cook) and
lampooned in Not Another Teen Movie with the “pretty
ugly girl” (Chyler Leigh).
[2]
Cf. how Michael Jackson became Diana Ross for a brief
second before completing his transformation into a total fucking
freak of nature.
[3]
All po-mo trickery aside, I liked the atmosphere, the
music, the tender hand-holding moments between Joaquin Phoenix
and Ron Howard’s daughter, Phoenix and Howard themselves,
and the trees.
[4]
Black looks like a bloated DiCaprio, and his ham-fisted
man-of-ambition acting here is a variation on DiCaprio’s
work in The Aviator.
[5]
This solution to the problem of transferred racism
via nostalgic appropriation is lightyears beyond the cognitive
scope of George Lucas with his minstrel Jar Jar in blackface
(see The Phantom Menace). |