Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture

Conclusion

conclusion A lthough the thrust of this book has been to chart out the reception history of King Kong, a motivating force guiding the project has been my own personal fascination with the unpredictable ways cinematic phenomena leave the space of the film and exhibition industries, to be taken up in surprising sectors of culture and everyday life. At the beginning, I was most inspired by critical work done on fan audiences, and an early version of this project heavily emphasized the King Kong fandom, which has historically been immense. Ironically, the violence inherent in attempting to adapt scholarship on fans to the case of King Kong led me to rethink the project. On the whole, fans of King Kong, as fans are prone to do, tend to go to great lengths to preserve and maintain the integrity of the text. Indeed, what is intended as fan homage often becomes an attempt to protect the text from critique, and this attempt at protection has meant that historically, fans have generally not been interested in exploring the social and racial dimensions of King Kong. In other words, the theories of reception and mass culture that were prominent when I began did not seem workable, or at least sufficient, for the case of King Kong. Inanefforttodevelopanalternateapproach,Isetaboutamassingmaterial on the King Kong phenomenon, which, as this book should indicate, comprises a large quantity of texts, amounting to an astonishing range of permutations in the legend. In taking this route, I have made some conceptual choices that may be vulnerable to critique within the very terms of reception analysis I claim to embrace. First, much of this book consists of a text-based approach, in the sense that a great deal of textual analysis of films and other artworks has been incorporated into the project, so that I may have risked suggesting that| 251 252 | Conclusion my own patterns of interpretation can be equated with the reading activities practiced by historical film audiences. And second, rather than favoring the bulk of textual phenomena on King Kong, which might have granted the study a certain quantitative validity, I have often ignored commercial phenomena in favor of a small number of texts “from the margins,” promoting these latter to a place of centrality. Indeed, I think one possible critique of my analysis of gay and black responses to King Kong might be that the number of texts scrutinized is too small and too fragmentary to permit a generalization about how these minority groups have approached the film. It has not been my intent to be casual or flippant about reception methods. On the contrary, the decision to embrace textual analysis and favor texts produced “from the margins” has been motivated by a desire to reconstruct some sense of the historical minority audiences of King Kong, as well as the terms of the film’s international impact. Although it is demonstrable that this filmhashadsignificantimpactonsuchaudiences,whetherpositiveornegative, available reception methods tend not to favor this type of research. On the whole, I wanted not just to apply reception methods to King Kong, buttoconfronttheartobjectwiththemethodandviceversa.Clearly,arigorous receptionstudyofKingKongimmediatelychallengesanymainstreamportraitof the film audience constructed by the film industry, for ample evidence suggests that historically viewers have loved King Kong or loathed it, have consumed the film happily or criticized it, but often by appropriating portions of it for new artworks. I have also found, however, that as a large textual tradition, the King Kong phenomenon seems to force a critique of certain tendencies in reception studies. For example, the subcultures approach has often been prone to reduce minority spectatorship to small, homogeneous communities displayingpredictableresponsepatterns.Ihavethereforesoughttodemonstrate that if one wishes to speak of a “black” response to King Kong, this is only the beginning of a vastly complex endeavor in which a wide range of demographic, social, and historical factors must be taken into account. Reception inquiry nevertheless remains one of the most effective ways to demonstrate not just the popularity of films, but the creative forms of critique generated by spectators. If one considers an important element of the King Kong story—namely, the moment of outbreak, as the beast runs wild and storms against culture—one can then examine how an artist like Ronald Tavel adapts this to the needs of gay utopian fantasy, or how a black artist like blaxploitation director William Crain (responsible for Dr. Black and Mr. White Conclusion | 253 and other horror films) uses...