Ape and Essence: Peter Jackson’s King Kong

1. AN EXEMPLARY ‘NEW HOLLYWOOD’ PRODUCTION

As an exemplary ‘New Hollywood’ production, albeit out of Wellington, King Kong (2005) is, to invoke a clutch of familiar terms, a ‘high concept’, CGI effects, ‘front-loaded’, ‘event film’, embodying the contemporary blockbuster’s typical ‘synergies’ in its multi-media profit outlets (here primarily the film-derived electronic videogame). In a narrative designed to showcase the most advanced special effects technologies, its visual and sonic excess exhibits ‘a double inscription of audiences, simultaneously addressing the viewer as a naïve and ironic spectator’. (1) Through this last, and its extraordinary virtual 1930s Manhattan, it exemplifies postmodern popular texts’ simultaneous cultivation of ‘nostalgia’ and ‘irony’ (2), sharing the ‘allusionism’(3) of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (with the Jurassic Park series competitively reminisced in the Lost World sequences), but predominantly through sustained reference to a single source film, making it a prime instance of contemporary Hollywood’s attraction to remakes, sequels and prequels. Though King Kong is illuminated by various of Fredric Jameson’s well known arguments about post-modernist art (4), this discussion resists seeing it purely symptomatically, however much aspects of it may invite that. Setting Kong apart from other comparable films are, though, first, its New Zealand production, emphasising the possibilities of computerised meta-location in a work that, unlike The Lord of the Rings, hardly uses New Zealand landscapes, and, second, its conflation of impersonal institutional motivations with the most personal – the ‘legend’ of the director as child’s encounter with the original, now reworked in obsessional love and emulation. For Hollywood directors historically the personal has conflicted with commodity economics, but with later Jackson, to a degree only equalled today by his part-mentor Spielberg, personal and impersonal fuse, except that his early films’ New Zealand content now seems impossible except as displaced into LOTR landscapes and The Frighteners’ and King Kong’s fragmentary local allusions. Third, its reworking of Ann Darrow’s interspecies encounter inflects the original’s rich history of interpretation, pastiche, and parody in terms of sexuality, surrealism, black rebellion and post-colonial critique (5) in newer directions of equal interest. Kong’s stylistic excess is intimately inscribed in the ‘double register’ of two brief early paradigm moments, well before Skull Island’s major action sequences – Ann’s (Naomi Watts) hesitant boarding of the ‘Venture’ , and, later, one of the crew eyeing from his bed the mysterious hysteria-provoking map seemingly with a life of its own on a bedside table – both intensifying minor local suspense mechanisms to near parody, with constantly moving, emphasising camera, fragmenting closeups, minatory white flashes in the second instance, and emphatically eerie soundtrack, all very different from the original’s terse beginnings. Such effects offer three overlapping modes of reading-(i) naïve reaction to the overtly controlling rhetoric; (ii) sophisticated ironic reaction to the parodic superflux, (iii) with the ideal post-modern audience holding both together – equally true of the kinetic hyper-dynamism of the spectacular action sequences.

2. A REMAKE

As a remake Jackson’s King Kong belongs to a category for which theorisations now abound (6), complicating baseline economic explanations with the compulsion to retell significant fictions to later audiences. Here the extreme is Van Sant’s Psycho (1998) its near shot-by-shot mimesis of the original – though with flagrantly different actors, colour,etc, requiring a connoiseurship that enables intertextual comparisons otherwise invisible. Van Sant’s film typifies the remake in foregrounding intertextual comparison, but atypically excludes from its very academicised project less specialised audiences hoping for new narrative thrills. Though much less exclusive in its demands as a mass audience text necessarily easily legible to audiences aware of the prototype (as who is not?) but unfamiliar with its shot by shot details, Jackson’s Kong’s relation to Cooper and Schoedsack’s original is declared, and underlined by reviewers’- and implicitly their readers’ – widespread ability to compare it, at least very broadly, with the original, and even occasionally with the 1976 version.

The critic Harvey Greenberg has generalised from Spielberg’s Always (1989), a ‘hidden’ reworking of A Guy Named Joe (Victor Fleming, 1943), four psychoanalytically derived, but more widely usable positions which the remaker may adapt towards the original.(7) Thus the remake may (i) ‘exist under the sign of an unwavering idealisation’ in fidelity to the original; or may (ii) in a movement ‘analogous to the creative resolution of…oedipal conflict’ take the original ‘as a point of…relatively unconflicted departure’; or the original may (iii) ‘incite the [re] maker’s unalloyed negativity’ resulting in its ‘disfigurement’ and ‘parody’; lastly, (iv) ‘similarly worshipful and envious of the maker’, the remake may enter ‘into an ambiguous, anxiety-ridden struggle with the film [the director] both wishes to honour and eclipse’… his ‘contested homage dwindling to a hopelessly compromised raider of the lost text’ (8). If these categorisations are broadly viable, Jackson’s film would seem to fall dominantly under (ii) ‘relatively unconflicted departure’ both honouring the parent text and asserting its own difference, if not independence, but through a process in which both (i) and (iii) figure, though parody’s friendlier manifestations resist “disfigurement”, and (iv) is a not wholly avertable spectral presence in a film ambivalently enacting secondariness alongside superiority. Some famous remakes have all but completely occluded their filmic predecessors, but the original King Kong resists marginalisation, ensuring any remake’s umbilical status, whatever its technological advances. Jackson’s remake’s subterranean acknowledgement of this may be found in Kong’s capture and theatrical display (significantly dependent on the breaking of Denham’s Bell and Howell camera which leads to the abandoning of his film), a micro-allegory, readable in the context of 2005 (though not of 1933 or 1976) of traditional on-location film making’s displacement by a new meta-locational “cinema of attractions” (9), in its self-relexiveness as much enacting Driscoll’s reference to “Carl’s infallible ability to destroy the things he loves” as proving a paean to the new sensation cinema’s powers to, at least in some directions, outdo the old, but only in some.

In summarising Jackson’s Kong’s more obvious relations to the original, a distinction should be made between remakes proper (characterised by the retention of core narrative elements), and films invoking the original only allusively (e.g.Morgan Delft’s nostalgia for gorillas and romantic Marxism in Morgan A Suitable Case for Treatment, Karel Reisz, 1966, and Marco Ferreri’s Adios Al Macho, aka Bye Bye Monkey, 1977), the latter’s painful meditations on contemporary sex and gender changes presided over by a giant fallen statue of the dead Kong. The often despised Di Laurentis/ Guillermin remake of 1976 contemporises the narrative, making Kong’s discovery contingent on a multinational’s search for oil, jettisoning the quest’s film making rationale and consequently Denham as director. Jackson contrastingly focuses both on the obsessive film maker and on recreating, via countless cinematic and photographic mediations, a 1933 Manhattan, a more static, stylised object for CG’s hyper-realistic visualisation than the present actual. He also reworks the original’s Lost World dinosaurs, whereas the 1976 remake, caught in special effects limbo, with stop motion outmoded and CG motion capture unknown, wholly deleted them, and rendered Kong himself, in ways widely felt, ‘man in a monkey suit’ unsatisfactory. Despite their differences, both, however, retain basic plot functions and Kong’s tragic trajectory, which must, unless the ‘myth’ is to unravel, end in his death. (Even the electronic game allows only highest scoring adepts to unlock an escape from New York option). Generally Jackson’s Kong is distinguished not by obvious revisionist shifts, but by less obvious amplifications of the spare original. These involve (i) the invention of new characters; (ii) the invention or redisposition of character traits- e.g. Driscoll changing from woman-wary stranger to socially conscious playwright, the bluff Engelhorn metamorphosing into a sinister mitteleuropean rare animal trader; and, most strikingly, too great a change to be classified with these others, the relationship between Ann and Kong, (iii) the invention or amplification/reworking of incidents – e.g. where instead of Denham screentesting Ann screaming, he films her with (the newly invented) Bruce Baxter, using the dialogue of Driscoll’s original naïve courting of Ann, a scene expanded by Denham’s annoyance at Driscoll watching, and conflict over Baxter’s improvisations. Pervasive minor expansions of that kind, and the much extended spectacular scenes, double the narrative’s length.

Jackson’s opening, after the overtly retro echoing of his source’s deco titles (stasis replacing motion as if to unconsciously signal, or betray, that the remake’s CG amplifications might, despite their brilliance, lack the original’s naïve energy), immediately foregrounds rewriting. Montaged monkeys, apes, and other zoo animals expand on the original’s shipboard monkey, latent evolutionary connotations and the jungle connections of the film’s twin islands, Manhattan and Skull, while the shots of the Hoovervilles accompanied by Al Jolson’s ‘I’m sittin’ on Top of the World’ and vaudeville acts intercut with evictions, colourfully heighten the original’s Depression setting. A little later, Deham’s trying to think of actresses to replace his missing star (Myrna Loy, Mae West, Jean Harlow, “ Fay who is already working for Cooper”, in film historical in-jokes) verbally underlines the film’s identification of history with the cinema. One may doubt that the elements of critique in the opening’s virtuosic cutting between Hoovervile and vaudeville possess much force of socio-political meaning, either for the viewer or for Jackson whose interest in the choreographed evictions seems overwhelmingly performative (Hooverville as vaudeville), with the primary history being addressed through a digitalised 1930s Manhattan, cinematic, and of the 1990s and early 2000s.

3. A DIGITAL EXTRAVAGANZA

Though this account centres on narrative rewritings, reflecting interest in Jackson’s relation to classical cinema and continuities between his early and later films, his King Kong can hardly be considered apart from its reworkings of perhaps the most famous special effects in Hollywood history. It celebrates action-fantasy cinema’s seventy year movement towards photorealistic simulation: painted mattes replaced by CGI; stop motion by caught actor’s (Andy Serkis) motion inscribed on a computerised Kong, with key comparisons located in Kong himself, down to the programmed details of his fur, solving problems prominent in the prototype (10); the dinosaurs, with Jackson’s reptilian stampede replaying a sequence from King Kong’s part prototype The Lost World (1925) and prefiguring Jurassic Park (1993); Ann’s bridal sacrifice; Kong’s capture, escape and death on top of the Empire State Building; the extraordinary, seemingly miles long forward rushing travelling shots from the ship to the island’s wall, produced across a miniature, but intensely hyper-credible set. All these may partially eclipse the original, but only partially, and in limited directions, as suggested long before CGI technology, when Claude Ollier stressed ‘the remarkable power of its [the original’s] dreamlike configurations’, arguing that the very imperfections in the special effects enabled surreal atmospheres more perfect technology would have dispelled, claiming of the battle between Kong and the Tyrannosaurus Rex watched by Ann ‘how even the minor flaws in the continuity of perspective or movement, far from detroying or enfeebling the credulity of the spectacle, are in accord with the presentation of a totally dreamlike state, a dream created by means of spatial illusion, optical displacements, and disruptions between individual shots and the overall continuity’.(11) Jean Boullet, similarly seeing the original film as ‘an animated dream’, emphasised the influence of Dore’s engravings on the depiction of Skull Island, effects only made possible by the film’s grainy monochrome photography, like Skull Island’s echoing the melancholy symbolism of Boeklin’s painting ‘The Isle of the Dead’, both anterior subversions of the dream of perfect simulation by the force of the symbolic and/or surreal irrespective of relative technological crudity. (12) (Note that hyper-realism, with its own ‘dreamlike’ figurations, rather than perfect realism, is the product of the technologically superior special CG effects of Jackson’s Kong, as seen in the painterly frames from the Manhattan sequences below).

The degree to which contemporary spectacular cinema has abandoned coherent narrative for roller coaster (or white water rafting) rides in a reinvented ‘cinema of attractions’ has been much debated (13). Jackson’s King Kong provides ambivalent evidence, being attached to narrative and character cohesion especially in its large scale expansion of the narrative’s beginnings, yet at the same time undermining them where character consistency is flagrantly suspended for momentary effects – as when Bruce Baxter, everywhere else identified with narcissism and cowardice, suddenly emerges inexplicably as heroic rescuer, or where the bundle of loose, conflicting attributes constituting such characters as Engelhorn and Jimmy threaten to fly apart. Whether such contradictions should be seen as generic to special effects CGI cinema and a growing characteristic of Jackson’s output from Lord of the Rings on is a question too large to be pursued here. Undoubtedly, though – separating Jackson’s King Kong (and Lord of the Rings) from many special effects films – their CGI workings are not at all monolithically action-oriented, but the less monotonous ground of quieter meditative effects – especially the scenes on Kong’s eyrie and at dawn on the Empire State Building between Ann and Kong, which touching moments lead into consideration of the film’s central relationship.

4. WITH UNEXPECTED THEMATIC INTERESTS

Why is Ann so Sad? – The Year of the Female Primatologist – Cross-Species Variations on an Old New Zealand Theme.

“Gorillas are big. They’re big but they’re good” – Morgan (David Warner) in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment.

Ann-Naomi’s sadness – so different from Ann-Fays’s spunky optimism – is a narrative given. Both heroines are metaphorical, if not literal, orphans, but only Ann-Naomi’s intimate past is referenced, in Manny’s silverback-fatherly “Ever since you been small people been letting you down”, a melancholy biography further suggested when, as Denham describes her role in his film, she adds “She’s not even sure she believes in love…. If she loves someone, it’s doomed”. This prompts his postmodernist anachronistic echoing of Gable’s line to Monroe in The Misfits, with its animal capture parallels to King Kong, “You’re the saddest girl I ever met”, and her self-identification with the sad clown – “I make people laugh that’s what I do”. What motivates this sadness? Her personal past? The Depresssion? Female marginality? Society’s atomism (she admires the socially concious writer Driscoll whose play called ‘Isolation’ she wants a part in). Her melancholy may be overdetermined by all these, but it will be argued below that there is at least another clue to her condition.

Naomi Watts’ sweetly candid, wide-eyed Ann is highly feminine, but in no way overtly sexual (whereas Jessica Lange’s Dwan writhed comically-orgasmically in Kong’s grasp). Unwilling to enter the burlesque house where a job exists, she is compared with the crudely sexual women displayed in photos then arriving. When first seen she is performing in drag, chaplinesquely moustached. Prefiguring her masculine adventurer role, this also suggests diminished sexual, though not female, presence. The closest she is to any male, Driscoll apart, is to the elderly father figure “Manny”. Despite her beauty, the men around her lack sexual interest in her (the equally narcissistic Denham and Baxter), or are innocent devotees (the man-boy Jimmy and the Chinese cook), while her relationship to Driscoll is primarily defined by admiration of his socially committed writing. Ann’s paradoxical mixture of hyper-femininity and asexuality parallels that of Kong who, though hyper-masculine, is notably without the original’s much commented on sexuality (14). The original Kong had peeled away panels of Ann-Fay’s dress, fascinated by their delicate texture and her scent on his fingers. This famously censored violation (only restored much later) which Guillermin makes less resonantly explicit as a cheekily priapic Kong exposes Dwan’s breasts, is omitted by Jackson, whose interspecies relationship is thus enacted between representatives of a highly gendered but de-eroticised masculinity and femininity, more like father and daughter than lovers. Also Jackson’s refraining from restaging Kong’s original appearances at the windows of bedrooms, moments celebrated for their surreally sexualised nightmare properties (15) can best be explained by the desire to de-eroticise his ape.

Undoubtedly Jackson’s Kong, via Serkis’ digitally transformed performance, is far more authentically gorilla like than the original stop motion model and 1976’s gorilla suited actor. Both the 1933 and 1976 Kongs, via their limitations, bipedally invoked the black underclass, the 1933 version weaving throwing hooks like a black heavyweight, an achronological Joe Frasier to a contemporary eye, connotations expelled from a Kong frequently on all fours, front limbs knuckling the ground, his body, expressions and some of his vocal characteristics indubitably primatelike, mediated through thirty years of location filming of wild gorillas. Of course this authentic detail is contradictorily attached to a fantastic creature enacting myths of murderousness completely dispelled by observation of gorilla social life. To have the one without the other is impossible without disempowering the myth, but even in the ur-version hints of gentlenesses exist, suggesting the later film’s, as when Kong carries Ann-Fay like an infant and places her delicately on his cave’s rock shelf, even though she registers only horror, and their interaction is foreclosed by the narrative’s Beauty and the Beast mantra. Alongside the later film’s action sequences there is an expansion of such paradoxically peaceful connotations, as where a vegetarian Kong peacefully chews shoots despite Ann, sprawled in the foreground, trying surreptitiously to escape; or where she sits in Kong’s hand or sleeps in the crook of his arm, suggesting edenic interactions, “affection without ambivalence, the simplicity of life free from the conflicts of civilisation that are so hard to endure, the beauty of an existence complete in itself”- Freud on his beloved chows (16). In one extraordinary moment there is a tableau – abruptly broken when the sleeping Kong awakes – as Driscoll and Ann touch hands across the length of the widescreen in front of Kong’s huge sleeping head, alluding to Michelangelo’s ‘Creation of Adam’ on the Sistine Chapel ceiling; with here surrogates for Adam and Eve touching and God displaced onto Kong, the primate evolutionary source of the human.

Though a vaudevillian rather than a zoologist, Ann-Naomi evokes what Donna Haraway in Primate Visions calls the ‘primal stories’ acted out by the great female primatologists Dian Fossey, Jane Goodall and Birute Galdikas (with gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans respectively), ‘dramas of touch’ in which ‘nature approaches man through the white woman’ (17). The subjects of famous National Geographic films, and in Fossey’s case, Gorillas in the Mist (Michael Apted, 1988), their fame was in part created cinematically. Ann and Kong in the moments just noted and the Central Park skating idyll, hyperbolically restage in fantastic contexts widely publicised moments and images of rapport between Fossey, Goodall, Galdikas and their apes, with Ann’s desperate attempts to save Kong at the end reminiscing Fossey’s much publicised grief at the killing of ‘Digit’.

Equally, Ann instructing Kong about the ‘beautiful’ recalls human-primate sign experiments with the chimpanzees Washoe and Nim Chimpski, though here taking the short cut of vocalisation, when Kong articulates, despite apes’ physical incapacity for vocally articulated language, a barely audible, but unmistakeable “yes”. Books by Haraway, Carol Jahme, and Sy Montgomery are fascinated by the question why women are so dominant in primatology field work? (Could this also be said of the two female screenwriters, with Jackson, of his later films, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens?) Though even Montgomery finds Fossey’s later trajectory questionable, and Haraway foregrounds the debatable aspects from feminist and postcolonial perspectives of these beautiful white surrogate mothers, the positive aspects conveyed are powerful, centring round surrogate motherhood, shamanistic oneness with the animal world as emphasised by Montgomery (19), ecology, the pursuit of unconditional love, and female empathy, all of which, gathered in the heroine, inflect the central relationship in Jackson’s King Kong. Here, Ann-Naomi’s suggestions of broken family life suggestively interact with Goodall’s and Fossey’s comparable backgrounds, and the suggestions made by Montgomery of the female primatologists’s trajectory as a searching for unconditional love (20), as I read it, for a primordial maleness, for the father, sensitised but uncompromised in strength, the contemporary heterosexual feminist’s reverie. In Jackson’s King Kong such thematics are inflected by another motif, much rehearsed in New Zealand cinema and culture, the inflection by the feminine of the pioneer society’s foundational masculinism, so that alongside its ecological and interspecies thematics, Ann-Naomi’s and Kong’s encounter might be difficult for those immersed in New Zealand film not to read in such terms. When she dances and juggles for him these moments recall in reverse incidents in both those iconic founding films of the early contemporary New Zealand industry Goodbye Pork Pie and Smash Palace (21), his rough ‘crew culture’ humour in repeatedly knocking her over results in her admonitory “No, I said No”, and his consequent tantrum is ended by the comic punishment of a rock he has dislodged in his anger hitting him on the head. The motif is grotesquely echoed in Driscoll’s comedy Cry Havoc, written for Ann, as Driscoll’s interior overvoice, as he watches, declaring his regret at never articulating his love, reminds us. But such pathos conflicts with the stage events where the hero is ludicrously in drag as he insists on his love, with, moments later, a less attractive surrogate for Ann articulating a parodic version of Ann’s regret at Driscoll’s reticence to a rather masculinised older woman who expresses her impatience with such male foolishness. This short stage sequence is full of further destabilisations, e.g. the hero’s offsider remarking of his friend’s cross dressing “look at yourself, look what you’ve become” and reverse-quoting Joe to Sugar in Some Like It Hot, “no woman is worth this”; the hero in drag then reminiscing Cagney with “Shut up and hand me the grapefruit”, and asserting, with obvious reference to his female disguise, “I don’t care what it takes, I gotta win her back”.

5. THE 8 1/2TH WONDER OF THE WORLD

Jackson’s Kong’s ‘personal’ meaning for Jackson – no less so for following his other special effects idol Ray Harryhausen’s statement that Willis O’Brien’s work in King Kong inspired his film career – might legitimate a speculative reading of The 8th Wonder of the World (the film’s subtitle) as an occluded 8 ½, an oblique artistic autobiography, more ½ no doubt than 8, with the hugely commodified ‘event film’ making such expression (whether conscious or unconscious) more fitful than in Forgotten Silver with its fictional pioneer New Zealand film maker and temporally displaced Jackson surrogate, Colin McKenzie. That film presented an antic version of Jackson’s future trajectory, in which the fictional pioneer’s masterpiece was the De Mille-like Salome, with Jackson’s New Zealand ‘epic’ progenitor Rudall Hayward acknowledged only in the pastiche of his small scale ‘community comedies’. Colin McKenzie’s identification with Hollywood film making from his New Zealand base is an almost uncanny preview of Jackson’s The Frighteners, The Lord of the Rings and King Kong. The Frighteners, that inflated exemplar of “left hand drive” cinema (23), translated Wellington and Lyttelton into small town USA, in a way hardly interpretable beyond Hollywood colonialism, despite the text’s few half-buried markers of New Zealandness (replicated in King Kong more broadly in the moko’d Maori among The Venture’s crew, and in the less immediately legible presence of local actors, e.g. Michael Lawrence, Geraldine Brophy, Jacinta Waiwai, Ray Woolf, Vicky Haughton, etc). Kong, however, metamorphoses Wellington into 1930s Manhattan, a trope of a more extreme order, suggesting that if Jackson’s trajectory ends in voluntary subjection to Hollywood, at least this happens on the largest scale, far beyond the local settings translated into anonymous US small towns or suburbs in minor home productions aimed at second tier American markets, even enacting, by virtually shifting Manhattan to Wellington, a hyperbole of the momentary reverse take over by one of its smallest satellites of American entertainment’s financial centre.

Like Forgotten Silver, King Kong has a film maker at its centre, with Jackson transforming Robert Armstrong’s original hardboiled obsessive into Jack Black’s chubby Orson Welles lookalike, a shifty paradigm of genius, overreacher, showman and confidence trickster. Not unexpectedly – although Armstrong’s Denham echoed Schoedsack and Cooper’s self-images of men of action shooting in exotic regions films such as Grass (1925) and Chang (1927) – Jackson’s Denham-Welles is a more complicated case, with many more details defining him as a film maker, e.g. the introductory shots framing him symbiotically with the projector and its beam, his disputes with the studio executives (only alluded to in the original’s dialogue) and his fleeing them to preserve his project, all readable in terms of Jackson’s relationship with Hollywood and diversion of film making to his Wellington base. However, the choice of Welles as surrogate might be revealing of how Jackson would like still (post Harry Lime’s Heavenly Creatures appearances) to perceive himself, as the outsider and aesthetic rebel of his beginnings, although the later blockbusters are attuned to mass demand in a profoundly unWellesian way.

Whereas the original Denham’s project retained oddball documentary elements, with Ann-Fay engaged solely to provide a female focus for terrifying discoveries rather than screen romance, Jackson’s Denham clearly plans to fit any discoveries into a more conventional cinematic adventure-romance (in line with early 2000s spectaculars), with Ann-Naomi and Bruce Baxter co-starring. Denham’s addiction to secrecy, more extreme in the later version, might bring to mind the secrecy surrounding the shooting of Jackson’s later films and the controlled release of information about them as protection for their ultimate commodity value, a tendency carried further in attempts to control criticism at home by actions recorded by Jackson’s biographer.(24) Jackson’s Denham, though, is no simple self-projection; many of his traits fitting generalized fictive portraits of the overreaching artist. Arguably, though, his darker aspects, e.g. continuing filming while people are dying, his willingness to risk Ann and Denham’s lives to capture Kong, obliquely reflect the guilt attached to Jackson’s masterpiece, Heavenly Creatures, which the makers must have known would have ethical consequences, shattering the post-release anonymity surrounding Parker and Hume’s later lives.

Whereas Robert Armstrong’s original Denham explains why he operates the camera himself rather than employing a cameraman (one had in the past fled a charging lion), Jackson’s Denham takes Herb the cameraman along with him. If details attached to the director are granted potential significance, those here provoke interpretation. Even before Herb’s death, Denham does the shooting himself, with the cameraman only advising on lenses and carrying the tripod. Thus, initially, Jackson cancels the original Denham’s pioneering individualism by adding a cameraman/director of photography (think of the role of Bollinger, Blick and Lesnie in the later films) and a scriptwriter (Walsh, Boyens,Stephen Sinclair), Driscoll, now a New York playwright, with scenes showing Denham’s dependence on him, insertions that underline the cooperative genesis of any film, most of all CGI productions with their multiple separate task units. However, this is contradicted by Jackson’s Denham assuming Herb’s role, and by Herb’s demise and Driscoll’s absence from the new theatrical 8th Wonder of the World show, thus asserting the director’s primacy, in a wavering manifestation that not only matches Jackson’s acknowledgements of the films’ multiple authorship but also the contradictory forcefulness with which he enacts the role of auteur.

The question why Jackson refrains from reworking certain of the original’s memorable sequences is complicated. Answers are suggested above as regards both Kong’s removal of panels from Ann Fay’s dress and the sexualised threat of the ‘surrealist nightmare’ window framings, but why the attack on the elevated railway should be transferred to a tram (even though Kong does swing along the underneath of the el) is difficult to speculate, unless one sees the switch as reworking more grandly the 1950s trams that are so notable a part of the historical Wellington and Christchurch re-creations in Braindead and Heavenly Creatures, modest in comparison, but the beginning of many later developments. Writing on The Frighteners, Rebecca Robinson argued the creation of a vestigial palimpsestic text, subdominantly consisting of New Zealand references, most of them invisible even to local viewers, within the dominant Hollywood text, references too hidden to be read as a statement of resistance, but nevertheless a kind of ambivalent marking of origins.(25) In Kong such traces (already noted in the minor actors) may also be found, a detail like the Nestle’’s chocolate Denham offers the native girl, fitting not only the American context but the local one, with Nestle’’s (pronounced without the acute accent) a very New Zealand institution in times past, while the seashore vista from Kong’s eyrie surely resembles a New Zealand foreshore view more than an Indonesian island. Most overt, for New Zealand viewers, is the use of Auckland’s great art deco picture palace, the Civic Theatre, as the site of Denham’s exhibiting of Kong.

As stated above, Kong exhibits at various thematic levels a ‘feminisation’ which is arguably historically New Zealand film’s – as I noted of 1970s film making in A History of the New Zealand Fiction Feature Film (pp. 113-14, passim) and more widely New Zealand’s, in line with dominant socio-cultural accounts. This can also be seen as Jackson’s, the individual film maker’s trajectory, repeating that ascribed to cinema and nation, beginning with the completely femaleless Bad Taste, continued in the hyperbolically masculinised crew (and crude) culture comedy of Braindead and Meet The Feebles, the former with its hyper-grotesque treatment of the mother – before arriving surprisingly at the female-centred world of Heavenly Creatures, written in collaboration with Fran Walsh, with King Kong having a second female writer, Philippa Boyens, as well, a trajectory continued, though in my view, abysmally, in The Lovely Bones, which challenges The Frighteners as Jackson’s worst film, despite its apparent feminist credentials. However one interprets these influences, the parodic play within King Kong, Cry Havoc, suggests an unruly response to this feminisation, even an expression of residual resentment at the repression of favourite atavistic subject matter in the move from niche horror comedy to mass (including family) audience films.

Linked to this, as a kind of archaeology or retrospection of the early films played out in the later one, or simply as the irruption of Jackson’s past, is the presence of aspects notably expelled from The Lord of the Rings and from King Kong’s central relationship. Think, for instance, of the gross inter-species intercourse between Blitch the walrus and the tiny catlike creature in Meet The Feebles as an anterior parody of the Kong/Ann-Naomi relationship. Hence the traces of the early films’ more outlandish trademarks in Kong’s moments of indulgence of the comic-nauseous and scatalogical – as in the camel shit on the floor of Driscoll’s sleeping quarters, the lambs’ brains and walnuts shipboard meal reminiscing the communal vomit libation in Bad Taste and the ear eaten with custard in Braindead. Also Denham’s insistent lavatorial references (self mocking comparisons of himself to a cockroach in a toilet bowl, reminiscing Meet the Feebles coprophagous fly’s feeding habits), as well as the comically flagrant refusal of post-colonial ‘political correctness’ with the natives of Skull Island, as grotesque as those in Braindead or the burlesque Vietnamese in Meet The Feebles), their provocative abjectness even exaggerated if we know that, beneath the impenetrable makeup, some are played by Maori (one by Vicky Haughton, the good Nana of Whale Rider no less). Indeed Braindead is disclosed retrospectively as the later film’s disreputable sibling, pre rather than post parody of Kong, centred as it is around the monstrous effects wrought by the rabid simian brought to Wellington, as aficionados are reminded by the empty crate labelled “Sumatran Rat Monkey” in Driscoll’s unsavoury berth.

One of the last moments reworked is Schoedsack and Cooper’s playing the parts of aviators in the Empire State assault – “we should kill the sonofabitch ourselves” (26), mirrored by Jackson’s presence as ‘gunner’ in one of the aircraft attacking Kong. The original trope is intriguing enough ‒ the directors asserting their powers of life and death over the narration, and their Hemingwayesque virility over Kong – but Jackson’s repetition of their act (though done all but invisibly with the director near unrecognisable beneath flying gear), suggests meanings impossible earlier, bringing into play Driscoll’s remark about Denham killing the thing he loves. Kong, echt gorilla, but also shifting signifier, father, romantic lover, redeemed male, innocent primitive world, etc. etc., at key moments might here embody as he did in the scene of his theatrical exhibition, the traditional cinema assaulted, destroyed, overcome, but perhaps also undefeated and alive within the more creative products of the spectacular digital cinema. Even for this viewer, a long way from wholly in love with the contemporary blockbuster and Jackson’s post Heavenly Creatures films, there is within King Kong enough commitment to the complexities of the historical cinema and of the overreacher artist, as distinct from the first person shooter aficionado, alongside the multi-media entrepreneur, to make King Kong significant viewing.

—

First published in Illusions, no.41, July 2009, pp.8-13, reprinted here with illustrations and a few revisions.