King Kong Theory

King Kong Girl

105 KING KONG GIRL peter jackson’s 2005 version of KING KONG opens at the beginning of the twentieth century. As modern, industrial America is built, people start giving up the old social rituals, such as burlesque theatre and touring companies ,andwelcomingthenewformsofentertainmentand control that are cinema, and porn. King Kong tells the story of a lying, megalomaniac film director, a cinema man who loads a blonde woman onto a boat. She is the only woman on board. The place they are headed for is called Skull Island. It doesn’t feature on the map because no one has ever come back from there alive. Primitive population, fetal creatures, little girls with tangled black hair, terrifying, toothless old women, all screaming in the torrential rain. The population kidnaps the blonde woman, as a sacrifice to King Kong. They tie her up and an old woman 106 KING KONG ThEORY puts a necklace round her neck before handing her over to the enormous gorilla. The previous humans bedecked with this necklace have all been munched like appetizers . King Kong has neither cock, nor balls, nor boobs. The viewer is never able to ascribe a gender to it. It is neither male nor female. It is merely hairy and black. This thoughtful, herbivorous creature has a sense of humor and a taste for displaying strength. There is no erotic seduction scene between Kong and the blonde. Beauty and the beast tame and protect each other, and are sensual and loving with each other. But in an asexual manner. The island is crawling with creatures that are neither male nor female: monstrous caterpillars with slimy, penetrating tentacles, but moist and pink, like cunts, grubs that look like cocks that then open and become toothed vaginas to behead the crew. Others come closer to the iconography of gender, but within the domain of polymorphous sexuality: hairy spiders, and masses of identical grey brontosauruses, resembling a horde of clumsy spermatozoids. In this film, King Kong becomes a metaphor for sexuality before the separation of the genders politically imposed at the end of the nineteenth century. King Kong is beyond male and beyond female. It is hooked on the link between man and beast, adult and child, good and bad, primitive and civilized, black and white. It is hybrid, beforetheimpositionofthebinary.Theislandinthefilm KING KONG GIRl 107 becomes the potential for ultra-powerful, polymorphous sexuality. Just what cinema wishes to capture, display, distort, and in the end destroy. When the man comes to rescue her, the woman is reluctant to go. he wants to save her, to take her back to the city and to normalized heterosexuality. Beauty knows that she is safe with King Kong. But she also knows that she will have to leave its big, reassuring palm, go and live in the land of men and manage there alone. She decides to go with the man who has come to find her—rescue her from this safety—in order to return her to the city where she will once again be under constant threat. Slow motion close-up on the eyes of the blonde, as she realizes that she has been used. She was only bait to capture the animal. The animality. her choice of heterosexuality, and life in the city, is the decision to betray her ally, her protector. With whom she shared a number of things. To sacrifice all that is wild and powerful within herself, the part of her that laughs and bangs its chest. That which reigns on the island. Something had to be offered as sacrifice . King Kong is put in chains and displayed in New York. It must terrify the crowds while remaining securely tethered, so that the masses can in turn be subdued, just as by pornography. We want to touch the bestial, to get up close and tremble, but we don’t want any collateral damage . There will inevitably be damage, because the beast willescapefromhishandler,asintheshow.Thesedaysit 108 KING KONG ThEORY is not so much the utilization of sex and violence to other ends that presents a problem, but rather the fact that the ideas shown in the film cannot be recuperated: violence and sex cannot be tamed through representation. In the city, King Kong crushes everything in its path. The civilization being built at the beginning of the film is destroyed in no time at all. The force that was not tamed, respected, or left...