Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture

2. Camera Adventure, Dangerous Contact: Documentaries and Genre Traditions behind King Kong

2 | Camera Adventure, Dangerous Contact Documentaries and Genre Traditions behind King Kong S ome of the more interesting recent work on film genres departs from a traditional notion of genre as a stable classification system divorced from contingency and historical change. Armed with new historical and cultural studies methods, scholars have increasingly approached genres as complex discursive systems comprising not only the films themselves, but also extra-filmic phenomena, including other artworks, mass media materials, and various cultural phenomena and artifacts.1 Approaching genres this way offers certain advantages: for example, the concept of generic evolution, long treated as a natural and inevitable transformation of genres from classic to baroqueforms,canbeseenasanoutcomeofhistoricalorsociologicalshiftsand developments. In addition, it becomes clear that the way in which audiences comprehend a film’s codes and conventions is not a stable process, but one that may vary considerably from one historical setting to another. In contrast to the last chapter, which analyzed King Kong’s historical meanings by referring to promotional discourses surrounding the film’s release, this chapter works toward a close reading of the film itself. Reception critics often avoid close textual analysis, and yet I attempt to provide a reading more carefully grounded in the discourses and images that circulated in the 1930s than critics of the film have often done in the past. As discussed in the previous chapter, King Kong is best grasped through codes characteristic of the travel documentary and jungle-adventure traditions—two generic fields in which Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack staked their professional| 59 60 | c h a p t e r 2 reputations in the 1920s and early 1930s.2 Two of the most salient recurring tropes from these genre traditions—the camera/gun trope and the drama of the touch—are especially prominent in King Kong. In claiming that conventions from the travelogue and jungle traditions essentiallydovetailinKingKong,IamindebtedtoDanaBenelli,whoseresearch on the documentary impulse in 1930s Hollywood films suggests that King Kong is a hybrid text composed of techniques drawn from the two traditions.3 Benelli’s research is compelling for its refusal to respect traditional boundaries separating documentaries from features, or nonfictional from fictional forms. Central to both the travel and jungle film traditions are representations of ethnographic contact with the exotic “other.” Often hailed as a sort of “mass myth,” King Kong’s cultural importance has depended greatly on its status as one of the best-known mass cultural representations of ethnographic encounter. Although many popular and academic readings of King Kong focus on its romance, and thus concentrate primarily on King Kong’s relationship with Fay Wray, it seems to me that if one assumes that ethnographic encounter lies at the heart of the film, and thus governs its depiction of the meeting between cultural and natural “worlds,” then crucial to the film’s dynamic is the masculine exchange between nature filmmaker Carl Denham and the exotic King Kong—two figures mythically and respectively embodied through tropes of camera adventure and the drama of the touch. Thewidespreadpopularityoftravelandjungleadventurefilmsinthe1920s and 1930s was a facet of the larger cultural phenomenon known as modernist primitivism—the fascination with non-Western cultures and artifacts that became a defining impulse of European and Euro-American art and thought during the modernist period. Primitivist impulses can be discerned in many classic Hollywood films and film sequences, such as the “Hot Voodoo” number in Blonde Venus (Josef von Sternberg, 1932), the Everglades picnic sequence in Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), or the whole of I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), but primitivist tropes are most crucial to the two genretraditionsunderconsiderationhere.Formanyculturalcritics,primitivism is at best a deeply problematic affair—an uninformed decontextualization and mixing of African, Arabic, Oceanic, and other cultural traditions. Primitivism can thus appear almost inevitably narcissistic, a discursive project saying little about the actual lives and experiences of aboriginal people, instead revealing more about the views of the Western artist or ethnographer, the one doing the “primitivizing.”4 In the specific case of popular film, the last two decades Documentaries and Genre Traditions behind King Kong | 61 have witnessed a significant resurgence of the jungle film genre, exemplified in such critical and box office successes as Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1980), The Gods Must Be Crazy! (Jamie Uys, 1981), Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (Hugh Hudson, 1984), “Crocodile” Dundee (Peter Faiman, 1986...