Beauty Is the Beast: Sex-Crazed Colonialism and Monstrous Movie-Making Unchained

This is a big one. "King Kong" is one of the greatest films ever made by almost any meaningful measure: a then-state-of-the-art visual effects extravaganza, an iconic score during an era when prolonged non-diegetic music was rarer, the biggest box-office blockbuster of its day with niche genre appeal to children and of fantasy, horror and kaiju, even camp, coincident with more supposedly high-brow interests of real-world consequence and a reflexively complicated narrative structure, much imitated and one of the most iconic figures and endings in the history of cinema. If anything, it ranks too low in some critics lists--likely because of its age, blockbuster status and childhood and genre appeal. Art without being artsy about it. Regardless, it was ranked 43rd and 41st in the American Film Institute's rankings of U.S. cinema. Attempts to at least appear more scientific or objective have involved combing IMDb references to measure cinematic influence. A 2018 one by Italian researchers ranked "Kong" as the fourth most influential film from a Western perspective--after only "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), "Star Wars" (1977) and "Psycho" (1960). A 2016 study ranked it lower at 13th. Notably, too, it's an older film than those ranked above it, with "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" (both 1931) being lower, and its impact is especially evident in some of the other most beloved pictures, from "Creature from the Black Lagoon," "Godzilla" (both 1954), "Jaws" (1975), "Alien" (1979), "Jurassic Park" (1993), to today's "Godzilla vs. Kong" (2021).

This was a Hollywood studio achievement bringing together three main groups of talent and as all housed under the studio whose very name associated it most with the then-still rather new era of talkies, RKO (the R standing for radio) and distributed under the moniker "Radio Pictures," and as executive produced by David O. Selznick, who'd go on to only inflate his reputation more with his more-involved engineering of "Gone with the Wind" (1939). First, there's the directing-producing team of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, who were already veterans of the expedition-film genre of creating docudramas or fictionalized semi-documentaries out of voyages to exotic places, customs and animals--"Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life" (1925), "Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness" (1927) and "The Four Feathers" (1929). They were also concurrently playing off this reputation of theirs with "The Most Dangerous Game" (1932), involving the same cast, crew and Carroll Clark's protean jungle set as "Kong." The brilliance of the latter is that Cooper and Schoedsack, or a parody of them, are inserted into the drama with the filmmaker character of Carl Denham. This is the catalyst of the picture's reflexive construction, as well as its complication of colonialist racial and sexual dynamics in the related expedition-film and jungle-film genres.

Reportedly, it was studio screenwriter James Creelman, working with Cooper, who introduced the autobiographical touch of making the film's expedition a filmmaking one, but it was Ruth Rose, having traveled and worked on Cooper and Schoedsack's films, who made it more reflective of the filmmakers and their experiences, with Denham doubling Cooper, Jack Driscoll that of Schoedsack and Anna Darrow as Rose herself--adding some romance to satisfy the critics within and without of Denham/Cooper's prior oeuvre. It's not the sanctioned coupling of actress Darrow and misogynist Driscoll that's of interest here, though, which only serves to contrast with the main taboo one of Darrow and Kong. As Rhona J. Berenstein says in the essay, "White heroines and hearts of darkness: Race, gender and disguise in 1930s jungle films," Fay Wray's Darrow represents both white womanhood--blonde wig included--and is a partner to and double of the black representation of the jungle. Playing on the colonialist racial schema of its day, Kong is associated with the island's black natives, which coupled with Darrow replacing a black woman to be sacrificed as Kong's wife, raises the spectre of miscegenation--and quite suggestively realized what with Kong attentively responding to Wray's continuous screaming and especially the scene of sniffing his fingers after undressing her with them.

There's considerable ambiguity here between the male gaze of the colonialist expedition and that of Kong and the island's natives, as well as, perhaps most dominant of all, the complicit to-be-looked-at-ness of Darrow. She may be no victim at all in this racial crossing, and, indeed, she's exactly acting out in her scenes with Kong the instructions given to her on the ship in Denham's camera test, including the screaming that's open to interpretation. Moreover, before Kong snatched her from bondage on the platform, it was the natives who did likewise from the ship and, before that, what Denham did in picking her off the Depression-era New York streets for the role in his movie. If Darrow, then, is the actress played by an actress (Wray), Kong is the monster-as-movie. The imagined presence in camera tests on the ship, the wall-framed god on the island, captured for and released from the theatrical venue by "attacking" cameras onto gazing spectators, eating them and framed through apartment windows, and finally climbing the biggest stage and phallic skyscraper in the city, to be finally captured in the metaphor of film-as-death: a series of still images from motion--ironically, rather the reverse of the stop-motion animation process. Technically, Kong is not only metaphorically a movie, but also sometimes literally a film-within-a-film, via the visual effects of mattes and rear projection to combine stop-motion animation with the live-action stagings.

Second, then, are the effects departments responsible for merging Depression-era New Yorkers with a fantastic, otherly world--most notably, the stop-motion animation as created by Willis O'Brien, who with his additional contributions to design and narrative was arguably, besides Cooper, the main creative force behind the film. One only need examine O'Brien's prior oeuvre to get a sense of how significant even his unseen or uncredited contributions were here, especially the abandoned RKO production of "Creation" that was merged into "Kong," and the dinosaur-themed expedition-film turned monster-on-the-loose picture "The Lost World" (1925), which RKO purchased to avoid plagiarism claims. In addition to O'Brien and the models, including the creation of Kong, by Marcel Delgado, there's the matte painting by the likes of Mario Larrinaga and Byron Crabbe, to compliment the partial full-scale and miniature settings. The sound effects by Murray Spivack also work remarkably well in combination with the effects and overall sound design. Two new methods of visual effects work were also invented in time to make the fantastic combination of the stop-motion animation and live action in "Kong" more effective: an improved rear-projection system developed by Sidney Saunders and Linwood Dunn's optical printer. Consequently, rear projection would increasingly become a staple of classic cinema, while Dunn's work on "Kong" may be his most extensively remarkable next to that on "Citizen Kane" (1941).

And, third, Max Steiner's score. Michael Slowik's book, as developed from a thesis, "After the Silents: Hollywood Film Music in the Early Sound Era, 1926-1934," is most instructive in this area. He criticizes a narrative that posits "Kong" bursting onto the scene with a score by Steiner "that single-handedly revolutionized film music practices and paved the way for the Golden Age." Conversely, although there are precedents, such as Steiner's own score for "The Most Dangerous Game," his one for "Kong" may be more remarkable for how different it is from musical accompaniment during the era: modern, mostly non-diegetic and prolonged (occupying three-fourths of the runtime according to Slowik), orchestral and of a high volume with heavy brass passages and dissonant chords that emphasizes and helps create Kong and the fantasy's scale, and blurring themes and extensive mickey mousing to go along with a score that is saliently in tune with the images. In the American Film Institute's list of 25 Hollywood scores, Steiner's "Kong" is the oldest recording ranked. The Academy didn't even award music until the following season.

A comparison to the lack of music in prior monster movies such as "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" further illustrates the significance of Steiner's score, as well as subsequent prolonged ones in shockers such as "Bride of Frankenstein" (1935). While likely seen as a fantasy adventure in a self-parody vein of the type of expedition films Cooper and Schoedsack had already made, or the similar jungle films such as "The King of the Kongo" (1929) serial, the Tarzan franchise, or even an exploitation flick that Berenstein also mentions in her article, "Ingagi" (1930), along with the added fairy-tale, beauty-and-beast romance to satisfy those pesky critics, and as combined with O'Brien's stop-motion animated fantasies, "Kong" may also be framed within two then-emerging genres: horror and kaiju. Horror was a somewhat new genre at the time that was just coming into its own at neighboring Universal with the success of Gothic horror adaptations turned cinematic shockers in "Dracula" and quickly followed by "Frankenstein." "Kong" loosely follows the same complex discovery plot, as identified by Noël Carroll, of these fellow monster movies: of onset, discovery, confirmation and confrontation. The first phase works especially well here. Steiner's score begins as we enter the fog and view Skull Mountain after all the build-up and mystery of what Denham and company might find on the uncharted island and what the natives' ceremony exactly entails, as the diegetic drum beating seemingly competes with the otherly-world themes of Steiner's non-diegetic music.

Kaiju, a Japanese term, wasn't even a thing at all in Hollywood then, although one may see in O'Brien's prior films or its beginnings in Winsor McCay's cartoons ("Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914), "The Pet" (1921)) that giant dinosaurs and even prehistoric ape-like creatures were imagined as interacting with people. Kaiju proper, however, is often considered to have begun with "Godzilla," but retroactively, especially with the international appeal of enormous creatures destroying cities seen in the Jurassic Park, Pacific Rim, Cloverfield, superhero and MonsterVerse franchises that timeline is frequently pushed back to at least cite the original "Kong."

Since this beginning, kaiju and horror-monster movies have elicited and allegorized wider themes--colonialism, race, sex and cinema here; venereal disease and xenophobia in "Dracula;" more othering and monstrous movie metaphors in "Frankenstein;" more duplicitous and repressed sex nightmares in "Jekyll and Hyde" (already filmed in 1920 and 1931, among others); to nuclear weapons and Cold War geopolitics in "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953), "Them!" (1954) and "Godzilla"--in addition to being audial-visual technical marvels or effects spectacle. The most beastly and beautiful films are the ones where the monstrosities have meaning--inwardly within movies themselves and outwardly with the spectator and their larger world.