with your host, Dmetri Kakmi

King Kong

USA, 1933

Produced and directed: Merian C Cooper, Ernest B Schoedsack

Cast: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot

King Kong is modern myth. The story of a colossal primate that wreaks havoc on civilisation touched generations and is as alive today as it was when it was released almost one hundred years ago. Sequels, remakes and multiverse spin-offs followed, but none come close to the otherworldly magic, poetic majesty and carnal suggestiveness of the original.

Alarmed by the sex and violence in this pre-code Hollywood blockbuster, the Hays Code censors (1934-1967) removed many offending scenes. All except one was found and put back when the film was restored in subsequent decades. Footage that was not found — giant insects and reptiles devouring crew members when Kong shakes them off a log into a chasm — was recreated with gory relish by Peter Jackson for his version of the film in 2005.

According to god’s gazette, Wikipedia, King Kong ranks as one of the great horror movies and fifty-sixth greatest movie of all time. Rare for a horror film, it is deemed historically and aesthetically significant. Today it is remembered for groundbreaking special effects, such as stop motion animation, rear projection, miniatures and matte painting.

And the leading lady’s ceaseless screams.

Canadian born Fay Wray (1907-2004) was already a leading lady when she appeared in the film that immortalised her name. (She appeared in Mystery of the Wax Museum in the same year.) All I can say is she must have been hoarse by the end of filming King Kong. If she let off one more of those ear-piercing shrieks I would have tossed her in his mouth myself. Surely even she realised after a point that the poor lunk was not going to eat her—at least not in the way she imagines. 

All Kong wanted was some nooky. Why else does he wrestle a symbolic snake shortly after bringing Ann Darrow to the love shack? (He toys with dead serpent’s limp form in a highly suggestive coitus interruptus sequence.) And surely he has only one thing in mind when he peels off Ann’s garments, like a delectable banana, as she swoons in the palm of his hand. He even sniffs his fingers after touching her lily-white skin.

So what is King Kong about?

The creative team behind this masterpiece touched on an archetype. Like all potent allegories, the things Kong represents transcend time and place, and they carry different meaning for different people. Cooper and Schoedsack sold the film as a retelling of Beauty and the Beast (‘It was beauty killed the beast,’ Carl Denham sententiously announces). Recent feminist readings argue King Kong is a date rape story. Another theory opines that the giant ape is an emblem of white anxiety about black sexuality. The 1976 and 2005 versions point to environmental callousness. Pitching Kong against that other formidable post-war Japanese symbol, Godzilla, the multi-verse films focus on humanity’s innate destructiveness and ongoing battle against nature.

An undercurrent in the horror genre is rampant male lust and the way socialised man is perceived (and possibly sees himself) when in the grips—like a frenzied animal that will do anything to find relief. This notion is expounded in wide-eyed delights such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and the following year’s wonderfully named I Married a Monster from Outer Space. (Though I must say if I married a monster that looks like Tom Tryon, I’d let him try on anything he wants. Baba-boom!)

With this in mind, I assert that Kong is a treatise on male virility and man’s pitiable apprehension before woman’s sexual allure — not so much beauty killed the beast, as beauty neuters beast and makes him feel inadequate in the process. 

Kong may rise to the peak of ecstasy atop the metaphoric erection, the Empire State Building, but he is destined to lose his potency. His clumsy attempts at seduction fall short in civilised society, where a woman expects to be wooed not dragged off to a cave and taken by force. This is why a beast like Kong reigns supreme in the jungle and is supplemented in the city by a sap, like the ship’s first mate, Jack Driscoll. As Kong breathes his last, Ann Darrow has already moved on to her next conquest. 

Man’s wilting humiliation is woman’s triumph. The battle between man and woman is sempiternal. That is why the dominant images in the story are circular and set up a chain of visual echoes and correspondences. The New York train, for instance, is the serpent Kong wrestles in the cave, the Empire State Building is the mountaintop lair, the airplane that guns down Kong is the pterodactyl. Only in the latter part of the story civilisation trumps the primitive.

One of the more striking elements of King Kong is the way it looks. It is atmospheric, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. The old studio masters knew how to light a film. The contrasting, shadow-filled black-and-white cinematography creates a sense of dread and expectation, and it perfectly supplements the lyric matte paintings and studio sets to create a fantasy of a lost world. The background projection is often framed by a circular canopy of trees and undergrowth so that it looks as if the viewer is peeking through a window into another time. 

Wreathed in mist and covered in steamy jungle, Kong’s Island is an enclosed bower for the eruption of primal passions. The reigning king may be brought low in the climax, but his enduring popularity proves that you cannot keep a good man down. He will rise again.

Dmetri Kakmi is the author of The Dictionary of a Gadfly (as The Sozzled Scribbler), The Door and Other Uncanny Tales, Mother Land, and When We Were Young (as editor). His gothic novel The Woman in the Well will be published in 2025. He is currently working on a psychological crime novel called The Perfect Room.