King Kong: It was Vaudeville Killed the Beast

Last night, my wife and I saw Peter Jackson's King Kong movie, and I was rather impressed. I do think that they went a little overboard in the Jurassic Park look-alike contest, but I suppose they had to say, "Look what I can do!" to validate the re-make. It is somewhat disturbing that Jackson, former director of Lord of the Rings, has made his African natives look like orcs. Nevertheless, if you neglect the potentially offensive bits, it's good stuff.

One of the best improvements over the original is that the female lead, Ann Darrow, has some depth. In the original, all she seemed to do was scream. Admittedly, Jackson's Ann screams a lot too, but it's more understandable, since she has three T-rexes trying to eat her at the time. In the re-make, it feels like Ann has a much more complex background--the movie starts with a great parallel montage between scenes of her in a vaudeville act singing about how great life is and scenes of the Great Depression with people rooting through the garbage for something to eat. After she loses her job, the casting director sees Ann in a reflection and wants to hire her because she was the "saddest thing he'd ever seen." She answers that he's wrong about her, because she wants to make people laugh. In the movie, she ends up doing both.

Now, in the original, I didn't quite buy that King Kong, receiver of beautiful female sacrifices up the wazoo, can't find any of them remotely beautiful except the one white girl he gets. It would have had some plausibility if the girl were a redhead, like my wife, but a blond? I think not. As noted above, all the girl in the original can do is scream. Now, I have a cat that meows a lot, and let me tell you, if you have a noisy creature around, you become more inclined to eat its flesh, not less. If I were Kong, I would have eaten the girl, and ended up better off, I might add.

In the remake, Kong's herbivorous impulse seems more reasonable. At the opportune moment for King Kong to eat Ann, she does a vaudeville pratfall and plays dead, surprising Kong. She then realizes she can make it into a bit of a game, and does various acrobatics to amuse him. King Kong starts laughing, and even plinks her a couple of times. After repeatedly plinking her, she yells at him to stop--"No means no"--and he throws a little fit that involves hitting mountains and getting rocks to fall on his head, but he never harms her.

It reminds me of the joke about the cannibal who refused to eat a clown, because he tasted funny. If someone makes us laugh, we're more inclined not to eat him or her. It makes me wonder if, when my cats are running around the house, making weird noises, and seeming insane, perhaps they are not insane at all; perhaps I have done something to make them suspect I'm thinking about eating them, so they are doing a kitty vaudeville act in the hopes it will satiate my bloodlust.

In addition to Ann's pratfalls, there's a great scene in New York when King Kong takes her to the iced-over lake, repeatedly falls, and both of them are laughing. In fact, many of the most "human" moments between the two of them involve laughter of some sort. Well, okay, those are the only two I can think of, but they were pivotal. Aristotle remarks, "Of all living creatures, only man is endowed with laughter." Kong's ability to laugh humanizes him and is what enables their relationship to grow.

At the end of the movie, the director who hired Ann surveys Kong's dead body and concludes, "It was beauty killed the beast"--that is, Kong loved Ann so much that he kept hanging out on the empire states building getting his butt kicked by helicopters until he was killed. But since the movie clearly presents the director as a scumbag, I think we need to question his assessment. Kong was not slain by "beauty"--he's probably eaten quite a few beautiful African maidens in his day. No, he was slain by vaudeville and the transformative power of comedy. He has traded in his bananas for the banana peel.

There are many ways in which Kong can also be seen as a tragic hero with a tragic flaw, since it is his affection for Ann that proves his undoing. While we might be tempted to privilege this tragic aspect over the comedy, the reason that Kong holds such tragic power is because he was first drawn to Ann's comedy. In the remake, tragedy and comedy are deeply intertwined--while Ann's pratfalls comically mimic death (as when she "plays dead" and then jumps back up), they foreshadow Kong's own tragic fall to his death from the empire state's building. The Kong who humorously fell on the ice is the Kong who, fifteen minutes later, will fall and never get up. The blog entry that was intended to be funny borders on the serious. One of the characters remarks while reading Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, "This isn't just an adventure story, is it?" King Kong itself becomes more than just an adventure story by intermingling the comic with the tragic, while Kong himself becomes both funny and sad, the tragic hero slain by a killing joke.