Originally published on The Solute
Content note: This article contains references to sexual assault and to racist exploitation and imagery
Alright, that should about cover everything wrong with Kong. So what did it do right to become so unforgettable? The answer has to start with O’Brien. Cooper and Shoedshack wanted to film live gorillas fighting live Komodo dragons until they saw the rushes from O’Brien’s never-finished Creation and realized he could bring their ideas to life far more cheaply and effectively.
And is it ever effective. One thing the many remakes and reboots forget is Kong isn’t a literal gorilla. He’s an immortal, mythical being, who’s been tormenting Skull Island for lifetimes, without father or mother, despite what the 2017 Skull Island would tell you, simply existing, neither man nor beast nor god.
Kong’s an even bigger shit than Denham, and not just because he’s twenty feet tall. Besides all the Ann assault, he lashes out violently at everyone and everything, indulging in outright sadism as he grinds two of the Islanders underfoot. And yet, O’Brien gives him a soul. Like Disney, he understood that an animator’s most important job is to develop character. Even the Tyrannosaurus develops a personality in its one scene, his crouching, craven movements giving him a sense of reptilian cunning.
O’Brien claims he got the idea to go into animation from his boxing days, when he and a coworker goofed around with some statues between bouts. And it’s true you can see his firsthand experience in the boxing-like choreography of the fight scenes, contrasting Kong’s higher, strategic intelligence against the lizard-brained dinosaurs, reinforcing his status between beast and man. He can be charmingly childlike as he plays with the dead monster’s broken jaw, then frighteningly cold-blooded as he scowls and beats his chest in triumph. But then, when he sees his own blood, probably for the first time after all his years fighting prehistoric beasts, it’s heartbreaking. Besides, who hasn’t wanted to lash out violently at everyone and everything at least once?
For all King Kong’s unexamined imperial assumptions, there’s a rich vein of critique too. Kong’s tragedy is the tragedy of the colonized. Cooper claims to have been inspired by a pair of Komodo dragons that died in captivity. In The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, Fatimah Tobing Rony compares Kong instead to Ota Benga, a Zairean man who was kept in the monkey house of the Bronx Zoo, forced to live in a cage, and who eventually killed himself. “He once was a king. Now he comes before you in chains,” Denham says, sounding an awful lot like a slave auctioneer.
Whatever his origins, Kong stands in for an older, more violent form of masculinity that’s existed in many cultures. “Toxic” is probably the word for it. But it’s also tragic. It’s hard not to admire him in his brutal ownage of his prehistoric neighbors or to suffer with him as he finds the modern world has weapons he can’t fight. It’s certainly no coincidence that Travis Bickle, the movies’ greatest representation of tragically thwarted machismo, wears an army jacket with a patch identifying him as a member of King Kong Company.
O’Brien wasn’t as confident in his creation, and panicked when he saw the impressions his team left in Kong’s fur (taken from a rabbit, of all things) jump from frame to frame. He was sure the project would be over as soon as the producers saw it, but he knew his neck was saved when one of them said, “Look how mad he is! He’s bristling!”
Even if most viewers today won’t leap to the producer’s conclusion, the fingerprints O’Brien and crew left on Kong and his opponents are essential to the movie’s magic. Now that effects are done partly with and partly by computers so that they seem untouched by human hands, Kong looks better than ever. Instead of making their contributions invisible, the movie invites us to watch the animators like necromancers at work, giving life to dead matter. In some scenes, you can see the dinosaurs whip their clay tails around with boneless grace. In others, like the battles with the stegosaurus and tyrannosaurus, these tiny figures seem to move with thousands of pounds of weight.
Even the goofs, like Kong’s hair, only make the trick seem more magical, like the thrill of the uncanny when Kong picks up Ann and she turns into a doll, or when he shakes the sailors off the log and the ragdoll-like models are just barely believable enough to create horrific images of bones painfully bending in directions they should never bend. I’ll admit, though, that second one’s pretty heavily dependent on the actors, who, depending on the quality of their screams, can make the scene look like either pure terror or some kid throwing dolls around.
And speaking of the soundtrack, there’s also the vividly uncanny, unearthly sensation of hearing obviously electronic sounds coming out of the tyrannosaurus’s mouth, a trick Ishiro Honda would repeat for his monster’s metallic howl in the original Godzilla. And more than any foley man, the filmmakers owe their success to Max Steiner and his ominous, operatic score, playing the audience’s pulse as easily as his orchestra play their instruments. This is the rare movie to use overcranking for drama instead of Benny Hill-style comedy, and the rarer one where it actually works.
The surrealists loved Kong, and no wonder. O’Brien took inspiration from the great engraver Gustave Doré and the proto-Surrealist Symbolist Arnold Bokclin to create shadowy, misty, impossibly teeming jungles and swamps straight out of a dream.
And when Kong runs wild in New York, it has the same effect as Surrealist painters like René Magritte (or Bocklin, while we’re at it) who disorientingly dropped fantastical images into everyday surroundings. There’s literally hundreds of movies about monsters rampaging through the big city. But, maybe because their effects were too seamless, none of them made it look this vividly like something that should not be and definitely should not be here has invaded our reality. And even though it’s obviously using cheesy old rear projection techniques, the scene of Kong dangling some poor woman hundreds of feet above the crowd below is still dizzyingly horrifying.
Maybe the Surrealists were right. Kong has endured so long in the collective consciousness because it digs so deep into the collective unconscious of dreams and myths, exploiting the colonial anxieties of its time and reaching beyond them to a realm of nightmare and endlessly plastic symbolism that will never grow old.
