Don Quikong

In 1933, my mother went to see a matinee showing of "King Kong" at the movie house in her tiny Massachusetts town and was unable to walk home. The possibility that a rogue gorilla was waiting somewhere on the route to her house was too much for her.  She was 12 and pretty and perpetually alienated. She was just the kind of slip of a girl that a menacing ape might snatch up in his paw, and when you start thinking about it that way, you realize the original Kong was almost certainly a stand-in for untrammeled male sexuality and probably even a subconscious reaction against the Twenties, the Jazz Age, the sense that male black sexuality -- from Africa, dig? -- was creeping into the white style aesthetic (and had to be shot down). Or maybe, sometimes, a gorilla is just a gorilla. You decide.  Anyway, her father had to come get her and walk her home. He was, by all accounts, not the type to see the humor in that situation.

The new King Kong takes for granted that nobody in this day and age is going to be scared of a giant gorilla, so director Peter Jackson has loaded in all kinds of other scary stuff, including freaky dark-skinned people with Orphan Annie eyes and bad teeth (kind of tropical Orcs, who had that horrible Sauron Net dental plan), dinosaurs from the Jurassic Park taxi squad and bugs that suck your brains out and huge bats and ...Well, you can't blame Jackson for tricking up an island like this where everything is poisonous or weird or horrible. He's been stuck in New Zealand for all those years filming Tolkien.  (That may explain why the dinosaurs seem so ... quotidian. It's kind of depressing to find out that T. Rex doesn't bite very hard, apparently. Kong is repeatedly noshed and acts like he's been nipped by a Boston terrier.)

As a result, the person sitting next to me, who plays a lot of video games, held the movie in high esteem.  New Kong, after a lengthy exposition, settles into the "first one thing, then another" jacked-up surrealism that the gamers call home.

I was alternatingly exhilarated and bored out of my mind. I kind of wish I had been wearing some of the neuro-sensor EEG equipment that market researchers are beginning to use, something that could monitor my brainwaves to determine when I was miserable and when I was enthralled. I'd be interested to know, now, which emotional state had more running time.

The best thing about the New Kong is Kong himself, and the nicest thing you can say about Jackson is that he insists upon the monster's having more inner life than the humans. The gorilla part of the movie is a rather exquisite meditation on loneliness. In 1933, Kong was an id movie. The 2005 version is all about ego. There are heart-breaking scenes of Kong staring off at Maxfield Parrish sunsets, with nobody to share them with except Naomi Watts, who would be more appropriate, for him, as floss. Kong is the movie's great idealist, the guy who really buys the whole "anything for love" concept. Yes, I know Adrian Brody's character appears to be on a parallel track, but what jungle was that guy the king of, when the movie started? He's a lonely playwright with a big nose who's trading up to be with Noami Watts.  (An aside. I'm really not into the girl-on-girl thing at all, but I find myself wondering if Watts will ever, ever, ever have a screen kiss with a man that doesn't pale, in sultriness, to, well, you know where I'm going.) And for Watts's ingenue, Kong is really just another version of Hawkeye in "Last of the Mohicans"   -- the only guy on Match.com who really honors his commitments. Kong is more than that. He's Quixote with a banana problem, ready to die for his ideals.

If you stripped this movie down a little, it would be (a) of watchable length and (b) possibly capable of exploring the dark, terrifying, psychological questions it kind of halfway poses (the beast in us; the human in beasts, etc. , etc.).  There have been some interesting stabs at this kind of thing,  when "art" directors tackle big-budget action movies. Most recently there was "Batman Begins," which opened with a lengthy Asian exploration of the quest for self and the understanding of dharma (and then devolved into nitro-fueled mush).  But the movie that "King Kong" more closely resembles is the 2003 "Incredible Hulk"  which began as an emotionally frozen narrative on estrangement -- sort of a radioactive Bergman movie -- before turning into a noir -- well, vert, actually -- comic book.  Kong is inferior to Hulk because Jackson is too much of a ringmaster to explore anything with the kind of focus mustered by Ang Lee, who has moved on to directing gay cowboys.

I'm working on a movie called "Brokeback Jungle."  It's two giant male apes, and notwithstanding the recent research indicating that boy monkeys like boy toys, they're both mad about Easy Bake Ovens, turning out one banana tea cake after another. They spend one weekend together in Manhattan, and by the end of it, they're beating out Sondheim's "Being Alive" on their chests and refusing to go back to the rain forest. Hotel Chelsea tops Hotel Rwanda every time for these guys.

Comments

[David]

By the way: best blog post title ever...
-David

[The Wreck]

Isn't that true of most Hollywood movies nowadays? There's always some sort of spiritual theme that gets hamered down by bright lights and big computer effects. Part of the reason that we are becoming bored with movies like King Kong is that the effects no longer give us that wow feeling. Hopefully Hollywood will figure out that we want more Walk the Lines and less computer graphics.

[squirrel]

I wonder if the current batch of young ladies will be as frightened by Peter Jackson's giant animated monkey. I'm sure they will be impressed, at least.

Eh, everyone has there own thing. Personally, I'll miss the she-elves and their perfectly groomed eyebrows.