Hitler's Favorite Movie
On the way down to Central America, American Airlines treated Kate and I to an extended layover in Dallas-Ft. Worth, the Days Inn, and the local mall. I wanted to see the new remake of King Kong, but the film was three hours long, and we would miss the shuttle back to the hotel. So we ate burritos while the mall's Christmas psychological operations hammered the gospel of Capital into our skulls. Kong stayed with us the entire trip, though: in the jungles, in the cities. In some places, maybe Tikal (see previous entry), I half expected to see Kong. The archetypal terror and awe that I experienced as a boy watching the 1976 version was with me there as the jungle reverberated off the steep Mayan pyramidal inclines, stone angles that I somehow associate with the slope and prominence of the gorilla's forehead.
Kong was also with us in the space between the EuroWorld and the TwoThirdsWorld, a regard on display in the more touristed areas like Belize's Caye Caulker, which, besides being a launch pad for exploring the spectacular barrier reef, was a protected pomo mish mash market for selling the kind of generic primitivism that seems to show up at all of the hot so-called "ecotourism" sites in the world. This primitive aesthetic mostly comes in the form of carved representations of "savages" that appear to all come from the same factory no matter where you are in the world. One six foot carved ebony statue kept reappearing in Belize like a cigar-shop Indian. The statue was skinny, black, tall, dreadlocked, adorned with dried grass and husks, and in its hand was a long spear. The statue's face was twisted into an open-mouthed frown that showed off a set of sparse pointed teeth. The grotesquery was further intensified by the confounding of gender signs. Alongside the statue's apparent mascuilinity was a pair of breasts painfully bound with fibrous ropes. At the Belize airport gift shop, the statue was dressed in a t-shirt and boxer shorts (which read "Unbelizeable!"). As Kate and I waited for our plane home, we had the opportunity to witness a cross section of Belizean ecotourists - each uniformed with safari khakis and/or desert island white linens and the obligatory box of duty-free rum, each "tanned, rested, and ready" for work again. As the only English-speaking country south of the Rio Grande, certain parts of Belize are fast becoming Cancun II. This spectacle of tanned whites was emceed by the carved savage, who held a sign that transformed the entire little airport scene into a tidy metaphor for the whole post-colonial economy. The sign read in pidgin English: "I im di native god uv stress. You tek mi pitcha; I tek you stress." And this is exactly what happened.
One would think this symbolic economy would abate - that the Victorian-era rhetoric of savagery would be smoothed by a multicultural globalization. Instead, the opposite appears to be the case. The smoothing effects of global capital have produced a desire for the savage as a commodity whose "authenticity" must be increasingly intensified. Thus we end up with a vision of the hypersavage that never existed even in our wildest Victorian sexual panics. But this savage is not to be feared as such, but rather pursued and captured on film to demonstrate the authenticity of one's own spiritual quest. The savage becomes Lacan's small a object, the sublime mother object of reconciliation, the divine androgyne, the ultimate palliative for the dissociative life in Capital's Cubicles. You tek mi pitcha; I tek you stress.
On our first night back home, Kate and I paid our fifteen bucks to see King Kong in all its racist (and I mean Birth-of-a-Nation racist) glory - from the soot-black island natives and their gorrilla king to the blue sparkle in Naomi Watts' Aryan eye. (The 1933 version was reportedly Adolf Hitler's favorite film. Goebbles' was Snow White.) Unavoidably, Kong is a story of miscengenation panic. The surprising part was that the new film conspicuously de-eroticized the 1976 version. The director, Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame), came up with some clever ways around the patent racism of the storyline, too. The hypersavagery of the natives was so overboard, for a certain audience it must have read like a spoof. Moreover, the film utilizes a flicker effect that gives it a technicolored aesthetic, which contributes to its forgivability. That is, the film simulates an archaeological artifact that serves the same purpose as, say, '50s iconography on a pack of cigarrettes.
King Kong 2005 is a dizzying technological feat. In real dollars, it is the fifth most expensive film in history. There were at least 15 people, according to the credits, that were responsible for dressing the gorilla model's fur for two years. The film is an unrelenting thrill ride, and I will say I came away with my mind at least partially "blown." This is a film whose visceral aspect should position it very well for the global market. The epic power of the film comes precisely from the technological drama. The film itself, in many ways, is about filmic technology. The expeditionary team that hunts Kong down happens to be a film crew (unlike the film's predecessors). The action is mediated through a film producer's hand crank camera, whose aesthetic is reproduced for us on the big screen. Kong exists in technological layers - a movie-watcher's movie. Better yet, it is a movie producer's movie, seen through the filmmaker-character's eyes, perfectly adapted to the new culture of technological authorship - of individual tourist authors and video travelogues. This is a film for the Range Rover 80mm digital cam sharpshooter who occupies the most privileged position in the global economy: the god's eye that proves its omnipotence in the spectacle of its irresistable panopticism.
What is most striking and beautiful about the film is its symmetry. While it is both about race, gender, and technology, its umbrella theme is global interpenetration and its attendant disasters. On the one hand we have the island, a Hobbsian nightmare of nature at her most opportunistic. At its acutest, the chaos expresses itself in the destruction of the filmmaker's camera after a mighty fall into a ravine. More catastrophic than death, the loss of the captured images represents the ultimate tourist catastrophe (no pictures, honey!). Here at the nadir of the technological narrative, the camera itself is sacrificed in a mucoid crevice where the crew is swarmed with prehistoric insects. The symmetry is balanced later, of course, by Kong's fall from the Empire State Building after the technological apotheosis of Kong's swatting the airplanes. Of course, "It wasn't the airplanes; it was beauty what killed the beast" goes the line. The undeniable power and brilliance of the film is the unspoken mediation of the entire story through the eyes of the filmmaker, the girl, Kong, and the rest. It is entirely a story of the eye, of the eye's seduction and destruction. The camera is seduced and destroyed by the spectacle of the beast; the beast is seduced and destroyed by the spectacle of the girl/skyscraper.
In the 1976 version, the crew was an oil expedition, and Kong climbed the World Trade Center, a project finished in 1973 during the oil crisis. Oil and the towers have had obvious symbolic ties through 9/11. In Nietzschean terms, the dionysian-apollonian symmetry of the 1976 film is expressed in oil and architecture. On the dionysian end, the film portrays oil that literally springs forth from the heart of savagery, bubbling up through the ground during the natives' sacrificial orgy, even becoming part of the ritual itself. On the apollonian end, we are met by the Twin Towers, a technical triumph launched by this same black crude - towers that were the ultimate and perhaps final expression of Le Corbusier's architectural modernism. In contrast, the 2005 Kong plays out a symbolic economy for the postmodern, post 9/11 world where the towers have dissolved into columns of light and video image. That is, the new economy works not with the materiality of oil and steel, but rather with the immateriality of meaning. This is exemplified by the new resource of value - exoticism itself - which enters the logics of the apollonian apparatus, the corporate mediascape. The commodity system has turned inward to the harvesting of meaning (in other words, the organization of cybernetic capital). So to answer the question "Where was King Kong when we need him?": he's gone Hollywood.
posted by thebaffler at 8:52 AM
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