Dartblog

Matt Drudge refers this morning to Jim Pinkerton’s Newsday column which alleges that Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong is a racist film. These three articles argue similarly. At Slate, the “implicit racism of King Kong” is discussed and in the Washington Post it is described as “a parable of exploitation, cultural self-importance, the arrogance of the West.”

That charge was bandied about after the first film was released in 1933. The claim now, near as I can tell (and, this being utter silliness, I’m not exactly close-reading these critiques) is that director Peter Jackson, working in our enlightened age, ought to have known better. Why weren’t the chracters—ape included, of course—in his film all of a bland orange skin tone with moderate temperaments and non-descript languages and uncertain sexuality? Moreover, why didn’t he use computers to ensure that all of the characters look the same, to avoid any possible charges of discrimination? Because, as we all know, when a director makes an actor do something in a film, and that something is a bad thing, that director almost certainly believes that all people who look like that actor are, in actuality, bad people.

There are two named culprits. Some people seem to think that the depiction of “the natives” is racist, because said natives, their world lightyears behind ours, shout and use pointy sticks when visitors arrive. The problem is that these characters are black. I suppose Peter Jackson was stuck in a hole, because rather than Peter Jackson’s Neutral Monkey Film, he wanted to make King Kong, which is a 1932 story written by Delos Lovelace, Edgar Wallace, and Merian Cooper. It calls for a savage tribe of pointy stick-brandishing natives.

Critics don’t seem to mind that Jackson’s depiction of savage tribespeople is an outright pan of tribal life. (And who needs more to be defended than tribespeople who, without electricity, won’t even be able to see this xenophobic assault on their culture and worldview?) Critics are worried about the fact that the natives have dark skin. I wonder, though, how believable the film would have been had Jackson opted for a diverse tribe of savages. African-Savages, Anglo-Savages, Asian-Savages, and Latino-Savages all wielding their pointy sticks together in unity. Frankly, I don’t think that would play very well. Mostly because, from what little I’ve read, the whole idea of “remote tribe” has a lot to do with the members being of one small geographic region and common descent.

Now, let me talk about polar bears. I’ve seen these creatures on National Geographic specials innumerable. They are apex predators: cruel, mean, scary things. They eat adorable seals. They get into massive pawfights, which sound cute but are actually terrifyingly bloody and dangerous. I also seem to recall that the fathers are wont to consume their just-born children, so the mother must protect the young. Cruel. But the thing about polar bears is that they are all white. In a movie about a grotesquely large polar bear terrorizing Manhattan, the bear will most likely have a white coat.

So when creative people endeavor to create movie magic out of the original King Kong story, it stands to reason that Kong remains a giant black gorilla who climbs up the Empire State Building and grabs a girl. He is unquestionably savage and terrible at the beginning. What giant wild gorilla isn’t? And he’s black. What pithecanthropus monster isn’t? When your source material is as strict as all that, there isn’t much room for ape diversity. I’m not sure the second charge—that Kong himself is a bigoted commentary on black people or some reference to slavery—as levied against Peter Jackson is fair either.

I suppose my problem with all this is that the articles about Kong all seem to carry the subtone of: Look how hateful we still are; how little we’ve learned since 1933. And even if a writer is unwilling, yet, to call Peter Jackson a racist for his film, the original version is unfailingly called racist for both of the above reasons. The writers are now forgetting—or erasing—that it was a virtual masterpiece of cinema in its time and remains a milestone today. They are simply unwilling to consider any work, whether contemporary or historic, within the context created by the artist.

It is why the Merchant of Venice isn’t performed as often as it ought to. It is why Looney Toons must be prefaced.

I had a music professor last year who all but banned the phrase “on the way to” in his class. That made me smile. You can always hear people talk about how Beethoven was on the way to Mahler, but what they are really doing is setting in rhetorical shadow their inability to deal properly with either Ludwig or Gustav in their own right. I had an English professor this year who early on said that there are three progressive levels of interpreting Shakespeare: childlike enjoyment for the face-value entertainment, haughty undergradute illation, and finally pure enjoyment for both the face-value and the enwombed entertainment.

Today’s critics are stuck on level two. With movies like Kong, instead of judging the storytelling, they can only extrapolate subtle connotational messages on contemporary society from between the hairs of a huge computer-generated gorilla. That’s not only overthinking it: it’s a slap to Delos Lovelace, Edgar Wallace, Merian Cooper, and the various directors who have undertaken to make their story into an entertaining film. As Stanley Crouch writes in today’s Daily News, let the cliché die.