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Introduction T his book offers an extended analysis of King Kong, one of the bestknown 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| 1 2 | Introduction 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 StarTrekcharacters, 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 Americannotionsofexoticismandmonstrosity,andonthisbasismanyscholars 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 tormentedexotic.ThefilmencouragesidentificationwithKingKongasarather 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...

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