TWAS BOOTY THAT KILLED THE BEAST
Lately I have been thinking about King Kong.
Specifically, his love interest with Fay Wray.
In Peter Jackson's remake, the relationship is much clearer, much more pg-13. Kong likes Naomi Watts because she shows a lot of spunk, won't take his shit, and falls down with a remarkable grace lost in physical comedy since the decline of the vaudeville theater.
Exacerbated due to the lonliness of being the last of giant, prehistoric apes, which several large skeletons shows that there was a point taken on the director to show.
The original was a beast of another color.
There seemed to be something far more sinister in his movement and actions. The 30's Kong played out more out of whitey's mixture of fear with a twisted voyeuristic taboo at the notion of Faye Wray's flower of wasp womanhood violated by some swarthy jungle monkey heck bent on miscenegation. Our introduction shot of him is of a large, menacing head, eyes bugging out, mouth agape in the sinister smile of a trenchcoat exhibitionist or chronic masturbator. What Kong expected to do with this woman was rather intriguing, given the tried and true failures built in to grossly incompatable anatomical pairings between rail thin Hollywood starlets and thirty foot tall stop motion monkeys.
In the remake Kong's attachment seems much more of an emotional one. Maybe CGI is inherently more Alan Alda than the rough and tumble, earthiness of clay and primitive puppetry. It would take brighter minds than I to get to the heart of that eternal question.
This time around it is Naomi Watts, who if anything, tries to seduce the big ape with song and dance, when all Kong wants to do is snuggle and watch the sunset. Kong as couch potato, Kong as albundy forever denying the pitiful advances of his sexuall frustrated wife. Hey, the poor guy just wrestled about eight Tyrannasauruseses, some while suspended in vines off the side of a cliff. Sometimes after a hard day at the plant you want to kick back, chew some bamboo and just vegetate.
This may be simply the once meatnormous Peter Jackson filling in the blanks, projecting his once sweaty bulk onto that of Kong, radically redefining the truest forms ephemeral aspects of romantic love as sloth and gluttony vs the virility and passion of love making and other typical storytelling staples.
The knight in hairy armor may slay the dragons for m'lady, but he shore as shit is gonna watch him some tee-vee when he is done. Forget the flashlights, ladies, save the batteries for your electric pleasure wands and “back massagers”.
When the newly wussified modern Kong escapes his chains and runs amok, he believes he sees his love interest around every corner, but disappointedly tosses each dame of a simmilar physical characteristic aside when he finds out that it is a case of mistaken identity.
The original Kong was much more Ike Turner, wanting to roughly possess the beauty, for reasons unknown.
Maybe the large apes perished when their sexual desires waned from other large hairy brutes to hairless females one twentieth to scale. Outside of using the tribal females as suppositories or inserting them roughly into their oversized urethra holes, I cant see what the danged dirty ape planned to do with these minature females. Or maybe its the cruelest irony of all. In this age of viagra and boner pills galore, this Kong can't get it up.
Maybe there is a deeper psychological message here, of how nature ensures balance by driving the natural reproductive instinct to more environmentally sound forms by driving the urges of more space consuming beasts on a sliding scale. Or maybe its a parable of the futility of basing one's lust solely on physicality? Or how the rampaging, infantile, impotent sexual urge is a plodding, ineffectual brute in the face of a civilized society. Notice how Kong, innefectual in his attempts to roughly couple with his lady love, still doesnt get the message, and instead of retreating from his unrealistic desires, attempts to take them a step further by climbing to the top of the most loomingly phallic symbol around, the Empire State building.
Maybe it is strictly a Freudian exploration of sexual development, and the inability for the infantile urges to weather the storm of maturity?
The kindler, gentler, dr. phil/oprah era's beast's ascent to the top of the tower is not to the skull cracking release of orgasm, but a fast forward to the post snog cuddle.
The old Kong is a dark, unhealthy id trapped and bound by the confines of polite society, who cannot fully be tamed, and is murdered for his transgressions, all the while aiming for immediate physical gratification. The new Kong dies off due to his dogged attempts to fight instead of fuck. Or maybe its because Kong's bashfulness in not using the greatest weapon known to ape: the monkey biscuit. Let's face it, that other Kong would still be up there since the 30's if he started chucking his doo doo bidniss at the crop dusters swooping at him. Even the most daring aces of the First World War would balk at the prospect of flying into THAT anti aircraft artillery. Falling to your fate covered in flaming ape shit is NOT the stuff that legends are made.
Most cynically, maybe its a grand fable denouncing the pursuit of perfect beauty, or how the animal within is crushed by the machine of modern society.
You aim for intangible, incompatable beauty, you take the big fall.
Don't go chasing waterfalls, Kong.
Stick to the rivers and the streams that you are used to.
Either way, the end moral is simple.
In the immortal words of Jack Kerouac, pretty girls indeed make graves.
Specifically, his love interest with Fay Wray.
In Peter Jackson's remake, the relationship is much clearer, much more pg-13. Kong likes Naomi Watts because she shows a lot of spunk, won't take his shit, and falls down with a remarkable grace lost in physical comedy since the decline of the vaudeville theater.
Exacerbated due to the lonliness of being the last of giant, prehistoric apes, which several large skeletons shows that there was a point taken on the director to show.
The original was a beast of another color.
There seemed to be something far more sinister in his movement and actions. The 30's Kong played out more out of whitey's mixture of fear with a twisted voyeuristic taboo at the notion of Faye Wray's flower of wasp womanhood violated by some swarthy jungle monkey heck bent on miscenegation. Our introduction shot of him is of a large, menacing head, eyes bugging out, mouth agape in the sinister smile of a trenchcoat exhibitionist or chronic masturbator. What Kong expected to do with this woman was rather intriguing, given the tried and true failures built in to grossly incompatable anatomical pairings between rail thin Hollywood starlets and thirty foot tall stop motion monkeys.
In the remake Kong's attachment seems much more of an emotional one. Maybe CGI is inherently more Alan Alda than the rough and tumble, earthiness of clay and primitive puppetry. It would take brighter minds than I to get to the heart of that eternal question.
This time around it is Naomi Watts, who if anything, tries to seduce the big ape with song and dance, when all Kong wants to do is snuggle and watch the sunset. Kong as couch potato, Kong as albundy forever denying the pitiful advances of his sexuall frustrated wife. Hey, the poor guy just wrestled about eight Tyrannasauruseses, some while suspended in vines off the side of a cliff. Sometimes after a hard day at the plant you want to kick back, chew some bamboo and just vegetate.
This may be simply the once meatnormous Peter Jackson filling in the blanks, projecting his once sweaty bulk onto that of Kong, radically redefining the truest forms ephemeral aspects of romantic love as sloth and gluttony vs the virility and passion of love making and other typical storytelling staples.
The knight in hairy armor may slay the dragons for m'lady, but he shore as shit is gonna watch him some tee-vee when he is done. Forget the flashlights, ladies, save the batteries for your electric pleasure wands and “back massagers”.
When the newly wussified modern Kong escapes his chains and runs amok, he believes he sees his love interest around every corner, but disappointedly tosses each dame of a simmilar physical characteristic aside when he finds out that it is a case of mistaken identity.
The original Kong was much more Ike Turner, wanting to roughly possess the beauty, for reasons unknown.
Maybe the large apes perished when their sexual desires waned from other large hairy brutes to hairless females one twentieth to scale. Outside of using the tribal females as suppositories or inserting them roughly into their oversized urethra holes, I cant see what the danged dirty ape planned to do with these minature females. Or maybe its the cruelest irony of all. In this age of viagra and boner pills galore, this Kong can't get it up.
Maybe there is a deeper psychological message here, of how nature ensures balance by driving the natural reproductive instinct to more environmentally sound forms by driving the urges of more space consuming beasts on a sliding scale. Or maybe its a parable of the futility of basing one's lust solely on physicality? Or how the rampaging, infantile, impotent sexual urge is a plodding, ineffectual brute in the face of a civilized society. Notice how Kong, innefectual in his attempts to roughly couple with his lady love, still doesnt get the message, and instead of retreating from his unrealistic desires, attempts to take them a step further by climbing to the top of the most loomingly phallic symbol around, the Empire State building.
Maybe it is strictly a Freudian exploration of sexual development, and the inability for the infantile urges to weather the storm of maturity?
The kindler, gentler, dr. phil/oprah era's beast's ascent to the top of the tower is not to the skull cracking release of orgasm, but a fast forward to the post snog cuddle.
The old Kong is a dark, unhealthy id trapped and bound by the confines of polite society, who cannot fully be tamed, and is murdered for his transgressions, all the while aiming for immediate physical gratification. The new Kong dies off due to his dogged attempts to fight instead of fuck. Or maybe its because Kong's bashfulness in not using the greatest weapon known to ape: the monkey biscuit. Let's face it, that other Kong would still be up there since the 30's if he started chucking his doo doo bidniss at the crop dusters swooping at him. Even the most daring aces of the First World War would balk at the prospect of flying into THAT anti aircraft artillery. Falling to your fate covered in flaming ape shit is NOT the stuff that legends are made.
Most cynically, maybe its a grand fable denouncing the pursuit of perfect beauty, or how the animal within is crushed by the machine of modern society.
You aim for intangible, incompatable beauty, you take the big fall.
Don't go chasing waterfalls, Kong.
Stick to the rivers and the streams that you are used to.
Either way, the end moral is simple.
In the immortal words of Jack Kerouac, pretty girls indeed make graves.