Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture

By Cynthia Erb

Studies the cultural impact and audience reception of King Kong from the 1933 release of the original film until today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Apr 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9780814337424

Cynthia Erb

Cynthia Erb is associate professor of film and English at Wayne State University.

Book preview

TRACKING KING KONG

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND TELEVISION SERIES

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

GENERAL EDITOR

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

ADVISORY EDITORS

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Robert J. Burgoyne

Wayne State University

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Anna McCarthy

New York University

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lisa Parks

University of California–Santa Barbara

Jeffrey Sconce

Northwestern University

TRACKING KING KONG

A HOLLYWOOD ICON IN WORLD CULTURE

SECOND EDITION

CYNTHIA ERB

© 2009 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America.

13 12 11 10 09     5 4 3 2 1

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Erb, Cynthia Marie.

Tracking King Kong : a Hollywood icon in world culture / Cynthia Erb. — 2nd ed.

p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and television series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3430-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. King Kong (Motion picture : 1933) 2. King Kong films—History and criticism. 3. King Kong (Fictitious character) I. Title.

PN1997.K437E72 2009

791.43′72—dc22

2008037698

Designed and typeset by Sharp Des!gns, Inc., Lansing, Michigan

Composed in ITC Charter

To my parents,

Margaret and Richard Erb

CONTENTS

Preface to the Second Edition

Introduction

1 A Showman’s Dream: The Production and Release of King Kong

2 Camera Adventure, Dangerous Contact: Documentaries and Genre Traditions behind King Kong

3 Monstrous Returns in the Postwar Context: Mighty Joe Young and Godzilla

4 Gorilla Queen and Other Tales: Male Spectatorship and the King Kong Parodies

5 King Kong’s Melancholy: A Reading of Peter Jackson’s King Kong

Conclusion

Notes

Filmography

Selected Bibliography

Index

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

In the decade since this book first appeared, King Kong’s visibility in both academic and popular culture has increased considerably. New readings of the original King Kong (Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, 1933), such as those by Susan Buck-Morss and Merrill Schleier, reflect the growing interest in modernism that has characterized film and media studies, as well as other sectors of the humanities, in recent years.¹ Scholarship on King Kong has also benefited from a greater emphasis on revisionist approaches to 1930s film history, as practiced by such historians as Donald Crafton, Robert Spadoni, and Martin Rubin.²

Outside of academe, Peter Jackson has obviously played a pivotal role in reviving interest in both the original King Kong and its popular protagonist. When Jackson’s remake of King Kong was released in late 2005, initial critical and fan responses were mixed, and did not seem to offer the makings of an illuminating reception study. This is why I opted for a close textual analysis of the remake for this revised edition (see chapter 5) rather than an audience-oriented study. Now, three years later, I have some regrets about this decision, because provocative fan responses to both Jackson’s remake and the original Kong have since emerged at various websites. In this preface, I sketch out some of the current discourses that define the King Kong fandom, emphasizing Jackson’s efforts to address fans during the remake’s promotional campaign, as well as fan discussions of King Kong on the Internet. When I wrote this book in the mid-1990s, I was somewhat skeptical about the value of fan studies for an examination of the King Kong phenomenon. I now believe that fan discussions reveal virtually as much as academic analyses about the stakes of reading and interpreting King Kong today.

When the first remake of King Kong (John Guillermin) was released in 1976, the producers distanced themselves from the achievements of Merian Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and Willis O’Brien. Jackson took a different tack: he used interviews and public appearances to define himself as a serious King Kong fan whose remake would constitute an homage to the original film. Over and over again, Jackson related the story of how, as a nine-year-old boy in Pukerua Bay, New Zealand, he had first fallen in love with Kong after seeing the original film on television. Four years later, he tried to make his own version of King Kong, using a Super-8 camera.³

To some extent, Jackson’s identification of himself as a Kong fan was probably strategic: he apparently wished to recruit the gigantic Lord of the Rings fandom for King Kong, while putting a personal imprint on his remake’s promotional campaign that would work against the perceptions of extreme commercialism that had dogged Guillermin’s remake. But it is noteworthy that Jackson spent a great deal of time trying to educate spectators about the original King Kong, both because of his passion for the film and to establish a relationship between it and his own remake. This educational campaign, which emphasized fan responses, was most apparent in the flurry of Kong-related DVDs released in late 2005, just prior to the remake’s dual world premieres in Wellington, New Zealand (Jackson’s home), and New York City.

Some of these DVDs, such as the 1976 remake of King Kong and the director’s cut of Jackson’s The Frighteners (1996), were obliquely related to the remake, yet apparently designed to play into its build-up campaign. More important was the DVD release of King Kong: Peter Jackson’s Production Diaries, a collection of video-blog entries from the set of the remake that received a great deal of its own press coverage.⁴ Jackson had commissioned Michael Pellerin to produce these video blogs, which had first been shown on www.kongisking.net, the independent fan website approved by Jackson. Fans were thus treated as the first and primary audience for the Production Diaries, which were later released on DVD to the general public. In addition, the content of many of the blogs was aimed at fans: in one entry, Jackson urged fans to send in their questions about filmmaking (by posting them to the kongisking web site); in another, he brought out items from his own personal King Kong collection, such as a brontosaurus armature used in the original film (reinforcing his own status as a Kong fan).

During the promotional campaign for his remake of King Kong (2005), Peter Jackson characterized himself as a major Kong fan. Here he poses with the sole surviving armature of King Kong used in the original 1933 production. (Courtesy of Photofest, Inc.)

Also important to the remake’s build-up campaign was the release of the original King Kong on DVD. A number of DVD editions of the film became available, and several of these included a documentary produced by Jackson and Pellerin titled RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World (2005). This seven-part making of documentary featured Jackson, Ray Harryhausen, and other celebrity fans sharing their knowledge about King Kong. A noteworthy portion of Production 601 that also attracted press attention was Jackson’s reconstruction of the lost spider pit scene. Cooper had reportedly shot this scene, but cut it prior to release. Footage for the scene has never been found, and the question of whether or not Cooper actually produced it has been a source of debate in fan circles.⁵ Jackson instructed his crew at Weta Workshop (the special-effects company he founded) first to re-create the visual and animation effects used in the 1933 Kong, and then to put these to work in production of a new black-and-white re-creation of the spider pit scene—a scene designed in every way to mimic and match the style of the original King Kong. Jackson could be accused of a bit of egotism in creating a version of the lost scene, as if to finish the original King Kong. And yet this part of Production 601 is effective on several levels: (1) it furnishes a lucid tutorial on contemporary and historical visual effects; (2) the re-created spider pit scene adds to the list of Jackson’s well-known and admired efforts to mimic period film styles (see his Forgotten Silver [1995]); and (3) by re-creating the spider pit scene, Jackson establishes a bridge between that moment in the original Kong and the insect pit scene in his own remake—the latter a thematically pivotal scene for that film.

In sum, a significant portion of the huge promotional campaign for the new King Kong consisted of inventive efforts by Jackson to address the fandom. The remake’s first release met with mixed reviews, however, and at first it seemed Jackson’s efforts to connect with the fans had not been altogether successful. With the passage of time, however, it seems that Jackson’s version of King Kong has been drawn into the fandom, with interesting results. In the case of Guillermin’s 1976 remake, fans tend simply to dismiss the film, refusing to engage seriously with it. Whether fans like Jackson’s film or not, its substantial project seems to compel them to think comparatively, and the results often illuminate fan readings of both the original and the 2005 versions of King Kong. I want to turn to some of these comparisons, which reveal aspects of fan approaches to narrative and romantic elements of King Kong. Then I consider a fan discussion of racial stereotyping in the original King Kong. The latter proved to be especially revealing about the frameworks that guide fan readings.

Although fan responses to Kong appear at various Internet sites, I focus on the message board for the original King Kong at IMDb.com. The message board for Jackson’s remake does not feature many substantial responses; it seems that those who consider themselves to be serious Kong fans use the board for the 1933 film to discuss King Kong and related films. One of the more substantial threads developed around a debate about the respective merits of Cooper’s and Jackson’s films. Although this debate sometimes overlapped with mainstream press reviews, the fan responses exhibit markers of reading codes and reference points that are specific to the fandom. The expertise supporting fan reading practices is impressive: fans can cite textual details not only of King Kong, but of a wide range of related texts; they can support their readings with a range of off-the-beaten-path documents, such as interviews, biographies, and scripts; and in some cases, they can draw upon rare information, such as personal conversations with celebrity Kong fans like Ray Harryhausen or Bob Burns (owner of the sole surviving King Kong armature). When a fan posts, s/he thus displays expertise by creating a written response that is itself an act of participation in the fandom. (Put differently, fan responses do not simply state or explain; they compete, as fans issue statements designed both to link themselves to other fans in the community and to stake their position by foregrounding their own expertise about King Kong.)

For example, many fan responses to Jackson’s remake of Kong took up the issue of the film’s excess—its length and its ways of fleshing out and elaborating upon the original King Kong, a film that was a model of the textual economy that defined classical cinema in the 1930s. Although the issue of excess had also defined mainstream reviews of the remake, fan analyses framed matters of textual excess differently from press reviews. Consider, for example, this fan’s critique of the remake’s excesses: PJ made a worthy remake, but because he loved KK so much, he didn’t know where to stop with his version. Some prefer battling 3 T-Rex’s, that is fine. … I felt these scenes slowed down the pace of the narrative for the sake of showcasing special FX.⁶ Perhaps the fan is responding to Jackson’s identification of himself as a King Kong fan. At any rate, this critique manages to be something of a compliment, as the fan takes note of Jackson’s cinephilia and his devotion to Kong. In a sense, then, even when a fan seems to make the same point as a press review, s/he is likely to organize the response in a fashion that refers back to the fandom—here, the idea of the director himself as a fan.

Many fans used the comparison thread (i.e., answering the question of which film was better) to express a strong preference for the original King Kong, while simultaneously arguing that Jackson’s remake should be regarded as a valuable work in its own right. Consider the way this fan prioritizes the original King Kong:

KK ’33 is IMHO [in my humble opinion] the superior film, I can watch it ANYTIME. KK ’05 is quite good, lots of action, great special effects, good cast. It is long—but still watchable. My biggest complaint was all those uninteresting unimportant characters being foisted on me. … I didn’t feel they were integral to the plot. … That said, it was one of the best remakes I’ve seen, coming up close 2nd with John Carpenter’s The Thing.⁷

Despite criticism, by ranking the most recent version of Kong as a remake second only to Carpenter’s 1982 cult film, this fan is also very complimentary to Jackson.

In addition to comparing the overall value of these two versions of King Kong, fans dedicated quite a bit of space to the issue of the romance between Kong and Ann. Jackson’s strong revision of the romance compelled the fans to reflect on what had attracted them to this aspect of the original film. Many fans objected to Jackson’s decision to depict Ann as affectionate and emotionally responsive to Kong. For many, the original film’s power had depended on Ann’s refusal of King Kong’s love. As one fan put it, "I found the original Kong’s ending to be much sadder than Jackson’s ending, because in the original film Kong’s love for Anne [sic] Darrow is unrequited. He dies misunderstood and unloved, with no one to cry for him."⁸ Another fan expressed a similar perspective:

I hated how the Kong in ’05 made it seem like Ann was in love with him … she wasn’t—she was terrified. She didn’t go ice-skating with him in Central Park or anything of the sort … she was absolutely frightened of him. When I watch the 1933 version, I don’t feel bad until the very end, and then I only feel some sympathy. The 2005 remake got this whole feel of the movie completely wrong.⁹

This fan’s closing critique offers a useful reference to atmosphere or mood—an area of filmmaking in which Jackson tends to experiment. Barry Keith Grant has pointed out, for example, that the box office failure of The Frighteners may have stemmed from viewer confusion about the relationship between genre and mood in that film.¹⁰ Responses to Jackson’s revision of the romance tend to form a sub-category of the larger question of excess: on the whole, fans prefer the sketched-in, enigmatic quality of Ann’s responses to Kong in the original film, as opposed to the remake’s insistent focus on Ann’s overt displays of affection for him. Still, some viewers commented positively on Jackson’s revision of the romance. One viewer sent this posting to the New York Times website the day the remake opened in New York: "Jackson pays homage to the original [King Kong] by using many now familiar lines, but his greatest tribute is the deep development of the emotional bond between Kong and Ann, something lacking in the original."¹¹

One of the lengthiest threads on the IMDb.com message board for the original King Kong began when a fan invited others to comment on the original’s depiction of Charlie, a Chinese cook who is a member of the Venture crew: Is it me or is that one of the most clichéd portrayals I have ever seen? ‘Me don’t like’ [a reference to the style of Charlie’s speech]. Other than that the film is great.¹²

The thread that developed from this initial inquiry ran for the better part of a year and took several turns. First, fans supported the initial critical posting about Charlie and extended the discussion to stereotypical approaches to Asian and Asian American characters in such films as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Blake Edwards, 1961). Fans also criticized the stereotypical depictions of natives in the original Kong and many related films, such as Trader Horn (W. S. Van Dyke, 1931), Tarzan the Ape Man (W. S. Van Dyke, 1932), and Mighty Joe Young (Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1949). Although the question of King Kong as a racial figure did not immediately emerge, when it did, the tenor of the discussion changed: in place of a discussion involving many fans, a debate dominated by two fans emerged, each sending numerous detailed postings that reflected a great deal of expertise about the King Kong tradition. This debate was cordial for a time, but became increasingly heated and eventually broke off—evidently due to the anger of both fans. Both appeared to espouse what might be termed liberal, antiracist positions; their difference hinged on the question of reading. One fan espoused what I would call an allegorical approach to interpreting King Kong. The other championed an approach his/her opponent referred to as literalist. Because this label carries negative connotations, I would tend to characterize it according to the explicit information it recognizes—characters, setting, plot elements, and so forth. What began as a fairly reasonable discussion of racial meanings in King Kong became a heated debate over what can and cannot be done when interpreting the film. The overall debate is difficult to capture here: certain statements from each of the two sides can appear blunt and forceful, and yet both fans displayed signs of a thoughtful struggle with the questions at hand. What follows are brief excerpts from messages sent in February 2007 (note that additional entries appeared between those provided below).

EXPLICIT APPROACH

I guess I really can’t deny [the presence of stereotypical characters] in Mighty Joe Young. The natives being mystified by a jack-in-the-box and the African gunmen [fleeing from] Joe while the white men stand their ground. … It does seem rather odd that Merian Cooper would be party to such a thing. … Was that really who he was or was he just playing by Hollywood’s rules?¹³

ALLEGORICAL APPROACH

[King Kong is] far less overtly racist than Tarzan or Trader Horn mainly because Kong … is a distinctly non-Western and … non-white figure whose powerful-if-ill-fated struggle against a cruel and imperialistic world inspires an empathy for his plight.¹⁴

EXPLICIT APPROACH

Kong was an animal, not a representative for the black man. As for the peeling off of Ann’s dress, it’s been stated numerous times that they wanted Kong to inspect Ann like a toy.¹⁵

ALLEGORICAL APPROACH

That’s exactly what I mean by a rigid, literalist approach. It focuses solely on the filmmakers and the film proper, not on audience reception and the intricate responses the film inspires down the line.¹⁶

EXPLICIT APPROACH

Merian Cooper said that Kong was an ape and not some racial, sexual, or political symbol. … There is no other way around it.¹⁷

To some extent, this exchange reinforced a sentiment I had when writing this book in the 1990s: as important as fan responses are to reception studies, certain frameworks that prevail in fan circles can prevent the scholar from making claims about the text s/he may feel are necessary.¹⁸ In this case, refusing allegory makes it virtually impossible to relate the figure of King Kong to discourses of race. It is not surprising that my book falls squarely within the allegorical camp; indeed, this book was cited by the fan representing the allegorical approach. Although academics generally favor allegory and metaphor in interpretation, it should be pointed out that the explicit approach can support complex, nuanced readings and responses. Indeed, the fan who embraced the explicit approach was the first to respond to the initial posting about Charlie, expressing a critical view of this Asian (or Asian American) character, and then proceeding later to critique the depiction of the black natives in Mighty Joe Young (see the note above). This fan also mentions discussing the question of race and King Kong with an author well known in fan circles, suggesting that s/he has given the issue quite a bit of thought. Still, Merian Cooper’s authority over all Kong-related matters strongly guides this fan’s response: the fan frequently refers to Cooper’s statements about Kong in his/her postings, and, in keeping with the explicit approach, the fan is unwilling to contradict Cooper’s statements about the meanings of his film. Cooper and Schoedsack frequently ridiculed allegorical readings of Kong in interviews; according to the filmmakers, the meanings of King Kong emanate from the story itself, nothing more.

But let us return to the original posting on Charlie. The fan who initiated this debate criticizes the character as clichéd and objects to his childish, broken use of the English language. S/he concludes, Other than that the film is great. To draw upon the work of Stuart Hall, this response might be called negotiated: the fan admires the film as a whole, but reserves the right to criticize parts of it.¹⁹ On the whole, this mixed or negotiated approach seemed the most common in fan responses to the question of race and King Kong; moreover, although many fans tilt in the direction of the explicit approach to reading Kong, most appear willing to disagree with the filmmakers’ stated intentions about the films.

In this book, I too espouse something like a negotiated approach to King Kong. Like many academics, I believe the film grew out of modernist documentary and fiction film traditions that in some sense reflected forms of oppression and the colonial gaze that prevailed in the United States and much of the Western world in the 1930s. And yet, if I were writing this book now, I would put even more emphasis on a known textual influence on Kong—James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). As authored by Mary Shelley and Whale, Frankenstein is a fundamentally anti-patriarchal narrative. It seems that Frankenstein influenced Cooper and screenwriter Ruth Rose to create a beast exploited by an explorer to the point that it sets out to destroy everything the explorer stands for. I would not call King Kong a subversive film, but I suspect that its mixed structure more often than not generates negotiated responses. I used to worry that acknowledging this mixed quality of King Kong amounted to an apology for the film, a denial of its racism, but I now believe the film’s mixed quality actually makes it one of the best films for addressing racial meanings in 1930s cinema.²⁰

A summary of chapters 1–4 can be found in the introduction that follows. New to this second edition is chapter 5, which is dedicated to a textual analysis of Jackson’s remake. Drawing primarily on Walter Benjamin’s early work The Origin of German Tragic Drama, I have tried to show how Benjamin’s concepts of the baroque and melancholy illuminate the remake. Melancholy is a tone that defines much of Jackson’s work. Perhaps the most striking revision in his version of Kong is the transformation of the ape protagonist from a violent creature exhibiting Freudian drives into a more romantic, moody hero, prone to contemplative moments of melancholy. In response to a recent revival around melancholy as a critical concept, I have tried to use Benjamin’s work and Jackson’s film to explore connections between melancholy and extremely violent spectacle—a linkage common in the early twentieth century, but not as common today.

I received a great deal of generous support while working on both editions of this book. Colleagues offering various forms of support over the years include Robert Burgoyne, Corey Creekmur, Harry Geduld, Claudia Gorbman, James Naremore, Kirsten Thompson, and Barrett Watten. Barbara Klinger’s ongoing work on Hollywood, new media, and reception studies has played a pivotal role in my thinking about King Kong’s reception through the years. Barry Grant’s thoughts about Peter Jackson’s work greatly influenced the new portions of this edition.

In addition to this collegial support, I received a good deal of financial support over the years: a doctoral research fellowship (Indiana University); a faculty research award (Wayne State University); a Humanities Center faculty fellowship (Wayne State University); and a Josephine Nevins Keal faculty fellowship (Wayne State University).

Many archivists and archives offered support crucial to the writing of this book: Ron Haver (deceased; Los Angeles County Museum of Art); Diana R. Brown (Turner Entertainment Company); Ned Comstock (Archives of Performing Arts, University of Southern California); Brigitte J. Kueppers (Theater Arts Library, University of California, Los Angeles); Richard C. Lynch (Performing Arts Research Center, New York Public Library); Ron Magliozzi (Film Study Center, Museum of Modern Art); William Barry (Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress); and Brenda McCallum (Popular Culture Library, Bowling Green State University). Staff members at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles were also helpful during several of my research trips.

I am greatly indebted to Colonel Richard Cooper, who granted permission to access files from the Merian C. Cooper Collection at the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. James V. D’Arc, curator of the Cooper Collection, and the staff of Special Collections and Manuscripts, Harold B. Lee Library, provided invaluable assistance during two research trips.

One of my favorite research moments during the writing of this book occurred when Forrest J. Ackerman invited me to view his King Kong collection of memorabilia, as well as tour the famous Ackermansion. When I used to read Famous Monsters of Filmland as a child, I had little sense of where this pastime might eventually lead. Both my father, now deceased, and my mother supported me through the long struggle to complete the first edition of this book. My brothers, Doug and Dave Erb, continue to contribute to what I know about films and fan culture.

INTRODUCTION

This book offers an extended analysis of King Kong, one of the best-known characters ever produced by the Hollywood cinema, and a figure repeatedly activated in art and mass culture, both in the United States and abroad. As I write this introduction, interest in the 1933 film King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, has resurged in the academy, with a flurry of new textual analyses appearing in highly visible books and academic journals. King Kong continues to make regular appearances in commercial culture—notably in recent advertisements for Coke and Energizer batteries. A remake of Mighty Joe Young (1949), Cooper and Schoedsack’s postwar spin-off of King Kong, was released in 1998. And Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3), completed a remake of King Kong for Universal that was released in 2005, and which is discussed in more detail in chapter 5.

Still, when I tell friends and colleagues that I have spent years working on a book about King Kong, I am often greeted by looks of surprise and puzzlement. For this reason, in addition to the usual explication of methods, I wish to devote some space to answering the question, Why analyze King Kong at all? For it seems to me that the constant repetition of this figure in American culture, even as the figure is generally consigned to the realm of the trivial, is not accidental. Academics, of course, are invariably pressed to legitimate our objects of analysis. And yet the trivialization of King Kong has become a kind of censorship that prevents us from looking at the figure’s cultural stakes, which, as I show in this book, are quite high.

When I began working on King Kong in the late 1980s, I was chiefly influenced by theories of reception and mass culture that were then prominent in film studies. The most central of these was set forth in Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott’s book Bond and Beyond, which demonstrates that fictional characters can be treated as popular heroes—complex texts in their own right that can be tracked through cultural circuits extending beyond the texts that originally gave birth to these characters.¹ Like James Bond, Scarlett O’Hara, Batman, and the Star Trek characters, King Kong has become a cultural phenomenon repeatedly featured in advertisements, political cartoons, musicals, operas, novels, comic books, film sequels, music videos, and other cultural works.² King Kong thus meets Bennett and Woollacott’s definition of the popular hero, in the sense that the character has ultimately transcended the bounds of the 1933 film that produced him, becoming recognizable and meaningful, even to people who have never seen the original film.

Although inspired by the work of Bennett and Woollacott, I was increasingly struck by King Kong’s difference—the features that set him apart from characters like Bond and Batman. King Kong is not a white male hero, as so many popular heroes are, and furthermore, Kong’s tragic story develops from his definition as cultural outsider. King Kong represents a cross-penetration of American notions of exoticism and monstrosity, and on this basis many scholars view the original film as a conservative and indeed racist text. Although it is not my intention to slight this line of criticism, which I show to be valid in many ways, my research nevertheless indicates that the film’s narrativization of exotic monstrosity has fostered a reception history that is in some respects less predictable and more compelling than one finds in tracking the reception histories of white male fictional heroes. Among classical Hollywood films, King Kong remains fairly distinct as an adventure film whose protagonist is a tormented exotic. The film encourages identification with King Kong as a rather mysterious animal figure, whose domain is violated by an arrogant white male exploration filmmaker. Repeatedly attacked and provoked by this filmmaker, the giant ape eventually turns on him and exacts revenge. My contention is that King Kong’s call to identify with the position of tormented outsider has historically been answered by spectators outside the mainstream, including international, gay, black, and feminist artists and audiences. My work thus differs from the bulk of academic research on King Kong, which locates the text’s significance at the moment of production and initial release in the early 1930s. Although I am interested in the terms of the film’s production and original release (a topic covered in chapters 1 and 2), I am also concerned with tracking this popular figure’s historical function as a fertile site for artists and audiences invested in working through issues of race, gender, sexuality, class, and national fantasy, from the 1930s to the present.

Some of the best recent work on King Kong has been produced amidst the recent boom in historical and cultural research on documentary cinema.³ Although King Kong has long been known as a work of classic horror, recent scholarly work has turned up perhaps the essence of its cultural use value: King Kong stands as one of the most familiar popular dramatizations of the ethnographic encounter in American visual culture. Although reductive and kitschy, the King Kong story nevertheless stands as an important popularized account of transcultural contact—of a transaction accomplished between an arrogant white explorer and an exoticized other. It is well known that King Kong was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, two men who made their reputations in 1920s ethnographic cinema. Yet until recently scholars were likely to argue that King Kong’s status as myth had something to do with its supposedly timeless cultural value. I would counter that King Kong’s function as mass myth has derived from its status as an exploration narrative taken up with negotiations between a Western character and an exotic. The contours of King Kong’s original story are thus potentially global and multicultural, and the film’s use value issues from its dramatization of contact between representatives of First and Third Worlds.

Having made these preliminary remarks about the possibilities inherent in a reception analysis of the King Kong figure, I should add that one of the early difficulties encountered in working on this project lay in the fact that on the whole, current theories of reception and mass culture often seem less than ideally equipped to handle the factor of racial difference or, more specifically, the question of historical African American responses to classical Hollywood films. Jacqueline Bobo’s important ethnographic study of black female spectatorship makes case studies of recent films The Color Purple (Steven Spielberg, 1985) and Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991).⁴ And yet there is still relatively little work on black reception of pre-1960 Hollywood films. King Kong was produced in a period historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham dubs the nadir of U.S. race relations, as race riots, lynchings, and state-sanctioned deprivation of black civil rights prevailed.⁵ In African American writing, King Kong is one of several racial personae, such as Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima, and Stepin Fetchit, who serve as shorthand expressions for various forms of racist practice. An example occurs in Chester Himes’s protest novel If He Hollers Let Him Go, when protagonist Bob Jones, upon encountering Madge, a blonde female coworker at the shipyard where Jones is employed, notes that she backed away from me as if she was scared stiff, as if she was a naked virgin and I was King Kong.⁶ One might argue that in this passage some type of black male identification with King Kong takes place, but as a colleague pointed out to me, this is a kind of agony of identification—stemming from a cultural assignment that produces anger and panic in the black male character.⁷ (Indeed, Jones’s subsequent encounters with Madge culminate in a wrongful accusation of sexual assault that eventually causes his downfall.) Himes’s critical use of King Kong as shorthand expression draws upon a whole Western history of depicting black male sexuality as bestial for its excessive and predatory nature, especially in relation to white women. In addition, King Kong’s status as an ape activates longstanding Western assumptions about the process of evolution. In the myth of King Kong, the ape sees the white woman, and in reaching for her reaches for the possibility of evolving or becoming human. Historically, Western models of evolution have operated to the detriment of all persons of color but to black people most of all, in the sense that evolutionary discourses maintain an ostensibly scientific but actually mythical association between blackness and the state of being savage or primitive.

To my knowledge, existing theories of reception and mass culture fail to address the kind of agonized identification depicted in If He Hollers Let Him Go. For a time, the difficulty of adapting reception theories to the case of King Kong seemed to pose a methodological impasse, and I wondered whether the project ought to be abandoned. After all, devoting a book to King Kong inevitably stands as an attempt to validate the figure as an object of intellectual scrutiny, and many people find King Kong a profoundly objectionable film. Although some readers may object to parts of this book, I have come to believe that King Kong can prove a highly instructive case for theorists of reception and mass culture, provided that multicultural and global concerns are given a central role in shaping the study. Indeed, one of the reasons minority audiences (especially historical audiences) have not received sufficient attention in reception studies is that relatively little historical documentation exists for tracking their responses. There are admittedly a number of recent reception projects focusing on aspects of the historical African American reception of American cinema, such as black stars, black movie houses, and race films, but there is still relatively little research on African American responses to Hollywood films made during the classical period.⁸ King Kong, a Hollywood film that foregrounds matters of racial difference—albeit often in disabling ways—has historically attracted quite a bit of black commentary. Moreover, the critique of King Kong offered in If He Hollers Let Him Go is suggestive of the extent to which historical black responses to the figure, though virtually always critical, have nevertheless often been productive rather than simply dismissive. It has often been less a question of simply censoring or suppressing Kong than of appropriating the figure to produce cultural commentary or even new art works. In a sense, then, portions of this book are designed to track those moments of productive critique and invention.

Although Donna Haraway mentions King Kong only briefly in her influential book Primate Visions, a study of the primate figure in science and popular culture, her depiction of the primate-monster as a hybridic figure of both terror and possibility is extremely well suited to the case of King Kong.⁹ As I have been suggesting, much of King Kong’s cultural use value issues from its status as popular dramatization of the ethnographic encounter, or of contact between First and Third Worlds. Within this narrative scheme, the character King Kong stands as a mediating figure caught between worlds. King Kong’s monstrous hybridity manages to absorb most of the binary structures characteristic of Western thought—East/West, black/white, female/male, primitive/modern. Although many critics find the linkage between Kong’s blackness and his animal monstrosity simply disabling, my own attitude toward King Kong might be characterized as a stance of intellectual ambivalence: my argument depends on an assumption that, although King Kong incorporates many of the racist discourses and images that were ubiquitous in the 1920s and 1930s, the film is nevertheless significant for its invitation to identify with the suffering black exotic. Indeed, I find it difficult to think of any other Hollywood film from the classical period that operates in quite this way. I