The Wily Filipino

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

Peter Jackson's King Kong is grand entertainment in the swashbuckling Saturday matinee B-movie style (not that I saw any of those growing up). It's also a film that perhaps more explicitly foregrounds the colonial, with knowing nods to Conrad and the historical cinematic / anthropological apparatus. (A poster for Cooper and Schoedsack's 1927 film Chang appears prominently in the background in an early scene.)

The premise is familiar to everyone: Jack Black plays Werner Herzog, who orders people around to lug his equipment deeper into the jungle -- oh wait. Jackson skillfully grounds the film during the Great Depression, with quickly sketched, if sanitized, scenes of hunger and unemployment. It's a nice contrast to the well-heeled denizens of New York who get swatted around in Times Square near the end of the film. Black and his crew (including the gorgeous Naomi Watts, wonderfully effective in an early scene where she channels her wide-eyed Mulholland Drive performance, plus Adrien Brody as a shanghaied Clifford Odets) head off somewhere in the direction of Indonesia, and end up in a jungly Mordor instead.

It's not a perfect movie, certainly. It's too long, for starters, and whatever emotional depth fostered while the cast is still on the ship (showing how everyone falls in love with Watts, basically) is squandered by the long illogical screaming rollercoaster ride in the center. (Illogical because hardly anyone gets injured after being flung, bitten, strangled, swallowed, crushed, machinegunned, dropped, slid, stampeded -- you name it. Once you're wounded, you're pretty much dead.) At least Jackson is clearly enjoying himself, as in the scenes where Gollum's head is swallowed by a giant pink leech (J-Lu had her hands over her eyes for that one), or when Kong plays with a Tyrannosaurus Rex's broken jaw. (Now that I think about it: it's actually a glimmer of the old Peter Jackson, of Bad Taste and Dead Alive, that we see here.)

In any case the film is a smart illustration, already surely argued elsewhere, of how King Kong was American national psychosexual anxiety writ large, the embodiment of the brute native inhabiting the wild, uncolonized interior. (In fact, we get two gleefully egregious depictions of ooga-booga natives: the first, kissing cousins of the Urok-hai; the second, a hilarious mishmash of just about every Savage in the popular repertoire.) In Jackson's film the narrative thrust (pardon the pun) is in two parallel directions: the cinematic capture of the unexplored frontier, and the fear -- or more precisely, the thrill -- of miscegenation.

Of course we know what happens: ape meets girl, girl meets ape, they fall in love, and things end badly. After an unexpectedly touching scene in Central Park (if you're not rooting for the couple at this point, there's something wrong with you), Kong and Watts end up climbing the Empire State Building. (It's significant that Jackson uses a smaller scale in the film; here, Kong is still dwarfed by the New York skyline.) Perilously perched on the phallus of Western capitalism, Kong suffers the consequence of his hubris and impossible love; he must be brought down, aided, in this case, by American military might. For a few tantalizing seconds, we see the devastated blonde hesitate at the precipice -- but is rescued by her "real" love. Order has returned.

Posted by the wily filipino at January 18, 2006 01:25 AM