Peter Jackson's King Kong will cause your average academic to explode in hyperventalitory fits about evils like crass capitalism, American imperialism and racialized sexualities. These predictable complaints predate the viewing of the film because they are staples of American academic culture. No left-thinking scholar would dare utter a word in favor of Jackson's film for fear of being shot down by his or her peers as supporting capitalism, imperialism, racism and heteronormative gender roles . . . across species. But can you imagine a more boring reaction to a work which somehow manages to offend so many sensitivities? To assume that it can be no more than the sum of its ideological failings entails another assumption: that Peter Jackson is unaware of the historical context not only of his film but the original.
One more thing: to focus on what the film captures about its historical moment and 1) not acknowledge that there is a significant difference between a work produced in a given historical moment and one which reproduces that moment 70 years later and 2) plain lazy thinking. I'll deal with the latter first:
LOOK AT EVERYTHING JACKSON CRITIQUES! LOOK HOW DAMNING HIS CONDEMNATION OF COLONIAL EXPLOITATION, CAPITALIST HUBRIS, STEREOTYPICAL MASCULINITY AND HOLLYWOOD VALUES IS! LOOK AT VALORIZATION OF THE CLIFFORD ODETS-LIKE DRAMATIST, THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CREW CHIEF AND THE INDEPENDENT WOMAN IS! LOOK! SEE?
The knee-jerk academic criticism of the film would miss the subtle way in which Jackson's film fights the stereotypes of the people populating it. He and his co-writers scripted narrative that invalidates the stereotypes to which an academic who hasn't seen the film but "knows" what it's about would object. No one who left that movie would think the spirit of American ingenuity—valorized in Act One but vilified in Act Three—such a wonderful thing. Unless academics are so hardened that they don't empathize with Kong, there is simply no way that they leave the film thinking anything other than:
- Racism is bad.
- Sexism is bad.
- Capitalism is bad.
- Hollywood is bad.
- Platonic love is super.
- Animal rights are awesome.
The means by which those thoughts are achieved are suspect . . . as they should be, given that Jackson remained faithful to the film he had adapted. The only way this strawman would be satisfied would be for Jackson's film to resemble the original in name alone. But isn't what he's done more subversive? Isn't sneaking sound left-thinking morality into an otherwise morally reprehensible film a good thing? Isn't that the sort of counter-propaganda the academic left should support? I think it is . . .
. . . but I should add that I have no proof anyone, academic or otherwise, actually thinks these things about the film. I thought them as I watched it because I couldn't deny that some of the representations—esp. of the "race" of "natives" who "worshipped" Kong and looked suspiciously like the Uruk-hai from The Lord of the Rings— had me squirming. Then I asked myself the difficult questions those who will condemn the film outright will never ask:
What else could he have done? Created an ostensibly uninhabited island actually peopled by a race of "white" "natives"? How would they have gotten there? Proto-European imperialism anyone? If you don't count the Vikings, the European peoples were land-locked for far longer than any other ethnic group. The Polynesians populated thousands of tiny islands from New Zealand to that rock out there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean which no one even knew was there before the advent of satellite technology.
If you follow Jackson's racial logic, what you have is a highly-specialized society which has 1) impressively come to inhabit this island from whereabouts unknown, 2) built tremendous walls to protect the rest of the world from the island's occupants and 3) descended into a state of mere substinence because their duty as stewards has prevented their culture from evolving. Maybe I'm not the one to comment on the representation of an evolutionary arms race, since I'm inclined to strip it of its cultural implications and say "that's what happens in an evolutionary arms race," but the fact that I'm already churning this information through such lofty cognitive devices indicates that the film does what any respectable film should:
It presents you with grist your mill can't easily refine.
UPDATE: I have created another comment thread since this one seems to be intimidating people.
Well that preference, as a sort of practical strategy maybe, makes perfect sense to me, Scott, but I was actually saying something else, something descriptive rather than prescriptive - after all, as I believe you yourself maintain, isn't this the realm in which films may more accurately be said to belong?
Posted by: Matt | Tuesday, 03 January 2006 at 08:02 PM
...and then there is of course what Zizek says about the liberal's unacknowledged complicity in the fantasies of the Good 'Ol Racist...but that is yet another matter.
Posted by: Matt | Tuesday, 03 January 2006 at 08:04 PM
Sorry to clutter up the comments, but there is another interesting take here (via here), if anyone is keen.
Posted by: Matt | Tuesday, 03 January 2006 at 08:17 PM
...somewhat less favorable here.
Posted by: Matt | Wednesday, 04 January 2006 at 07:24 PM
Bad form commenting to primarily to myself on a dead thread, I know, but something upstream Scott said struck me in the head the second time coming down:
and the more I think about the problem the more I think that phantasm that is "race" should play second-fiddle to the reality that is class. In part because race is a social fiction, i.e. doesn't really exist, whereas class isn't and does ...
I'm not at all sure about this. I think one could actually make a good argument that "class" is equally a social, or rather "Marxist" fiction (if by Marxism one means a certain rigid formalism, perhaps). There are indeed several traditions of Russian philosophical thought (though not only Russian, of course!) that seek to address this question. To quote from an article soon to be published by the philosophy journal, Naked Punch (written by Mikhail Epstein):
"Another source of the term "conceptualism," less evident but perhaps more decisive for the fate of this movement in Russia, is the medieval philosophical school of the same name. Among the European scholastics of the 13th and 14th centuries, conceptualism functioned as a moderate version of nominalism, which asserted that all universals have their being not in reality itself but in the sphere of purely mental concepts. As such, this school was opposed to realism, which posited one continuum of physical and conceptual reality, insisting on the ontological being of such universals as love, soul, beauty, goodness and other general concepts. Strange as it may seem, an analogous confrontation of two intellectual trends occurred in the late Soviet period, with Marxism insisting on the historical reality of such general ideas as "class," "the people," "collectivism," "equality," "history," and "progress," while conceptualism argued for the purely nominative and mental basis of these ideological constructions. Like its medieval counterpart, conceptualism attempts to expose the realist fallacy that attributes objective existence to general or abstract ideas. Whereas the Soviet system gave the status of historical reality to its own ideological pronouncements, conceptualism attempted to expose the contingent nature of these concepts by unmasking them as constructions proceeding from the human mind or generated by linguistic practices...
The origins of Russian conceptualist discourse can be traced to the works of the philosopher, writer, and literary critic Andrei Siniavsky, particularly to his treatise "On Socialist Realism" (1959)."
(end quote)
Of course Heidegger has some things to say about resisting ontology as well, but that's probably another kettle of squid.
(Oh, and in answer to Alpha Male's query, I have been lucky enough to live in several third world countries so far--though never longer than a year each...)
Posted by: Matt | Thursday, 05 January 2006 at 07:09 PM
Isn't it pretty obvious that specific classes, as in the "working class" or the "middle-class" are nominal constructs, whereas class itself, in the sense of patterns of differential inequality, is not?
Posted by: Stephen | Thursday, 05 January 2006 at 09:09 PM
Of course, I only saw Jackson's 05 Kong once; and once
might not be enough.
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Friday, 06 January 2006 at 01:13 PM
Well, I've come to this rather late, but I must comment on Ancrene Wiseass's statement that the Skull Island natives were "by far, the darkest-skinned people in the movie". When watching the film, I got the impression that they weren't supposed to be dark-skinned, but covered in mud or else paint or something like that. Certainly in reality, the actress who played the feral child is a Maori, and so is very much lighter-skinned than Hayes, the first mate. No, it doesn't really help with the race stuff.
Posted by: Brett | Friday, 06 January 2006 at 02:06 PM
Well I think Adam's link trumps mine.
As in: Why must we insist on so dignifying the hopelessly banal, with blogs for example? This film is entirely banal; if there is anything critical about it, it is the way it throws its banality in our face (making the hubristic Avant Garde mistake of pretending this mere excess is something revolutionary in itself). It's aesthetic, meanwhile, is one of saturation and contempt (for the viewer).
The immediate answer - because the banal is the very stuff of blog - does not really satisfy me. Perhaps we are more like the Russians once were, with their poshlost' for example, than we would generally care to admit. The potential complicity of a certain postmodernism with neocon ideology, or Empire, or even 'the worst' having long since been understood by many a genuine postmodern theorist, these films are merely revelling in the diagnosis before the genuine leap. In other words, they make the common mistake of reading too literally, and so wallow in prescription before description (granted, some bad postmodern theorists do this as well, to more or less useful degrees; it is hard NOT to, these days).
But maybe the correct language in which to describe this wallowing is indeed that of therapy, or, if you prefer, psychoanalysis. Maybe it has become SO obvious at this point that one needn't even be a practicing psychanalyst to say so (cf. Adam's wonderful link).
Posted by: Matt | Sunday, 08 January 2006 at 10:50 AM
Why must we insist on so dignifying the hopelessly banal, with blogs for example?
When I was an undergraduate, Pat McGee (who's written a couple books on Joyce, one each on Lacan and Derrida, and has a forthcoming one on film theory) told me that the reason he decided to write an article for PMC on Titanic wasn't because it was good, but because it was important. It captured something about the cultural moment in which we currently live, something more interesting that writing about say French New Wave. Sure, FNW is more interesting intellectually, but it's also less relevent culturally. So there's that.
Plus I went and saw it, had some thoughts of middling intellectual substance, and did as I always do when I do: I blogged.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Sunday, 08 January 2006 at 12:50 PM
Aha, the normative is revealed as such at last! It wasn't meant as a personal criticism at all, Scott; on the contrary (hell, I'm as reluctant a fan of Zizek as the next). Thank you for the response. I'll check out the article. And link to you.
Posted by: Matt | Sunday, 08 January 2006 at 02:37 PM