King Kong

When the fantasy/adventure movie King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, was released in 1933, the film immediately became more than just a big movie hit for the studio RKO. The movie, and its archetypal image of the giant prehistoric gorilla King Kong rampaging through New York City and carrying off the screaming blonde heroine to the top of the Empire State Building, has had a profound hold on the US cultural imagination, and its legacy continues to the present day. With a screenplay co-written by James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose (who was married to Schoedsack), from an idea conceived by Cooper and Edgar Wallace, King Kong used new technology such as stop-motion animation, traveling mattes, and back projection, as well as dramatic music, and startling and strange sound effects, to elevate a story about travel and adventure to the level of spectacle and horror. The screams of the Manhattanites on Broadway running away from Kong were meant to reflect our own horror and fascination with the great savage beast. Starring Robert Armstrong as the jungle filmmaker Carl Denham, Bruce Cabot as first mate Jack Driscoll, and Fay Wray as would-be starlet Ann Darrow, King Kong tells the tale of how these three sail toward Indonesia to make a jungle picture, and end up finding Kong “way west of Sumatra.” Ultimately the biggest star of the film was Kong, who endures as a cult cultural icon, inspiring other Kong films, such as the sequel Son of Kong, and the Toho Studios 1962 film King Kong vs. Godzilla, and two major remakes, one in 1976 produced by Dino De Laurentiis, and one in 2005 by Peter Jackson. Yet culturally, King Kong is more than just an amusement park ride or a national monster fetish. There is something about the film and its story that entices viewers and interpreters to read it in diverse and sometimes perverse ways: as Surrealist dream, capitalist fairy tale, campy horror genre movie, imperialist metaphor, allegory for the unconscious, history of ethnographic spectacle, and repressed spectacle for racial and sexual taboos. As Cynthia Marie Erb writes (Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture, 2009), the monster figure evokes an ambivalent response: Kong is interpreted as both a catalyst for anarchy, and a container for conservative values about the racialized Other.