Current Forum: Session 9: Horror and Race	Read 5 times 	
Date: 19-Mar-2001 21:59:12	
Author: DRAKE-BOYT, ELIZABETH D. <edd1290@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: The Beast Within 	
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       I find myself intrigued with Kyle's question about what really happens when a movie throws different groups (i. e. women, blacks, American Indians, Latinos, etc.) of "otherness" into one outcast category. Are there any distinctions between these groups and their coded stereotypes as outcasts? When the movie is, like King Kong (Cooper: 1933), a horror genre, in which the representation of the "other" being offered for view is a monster, the device of "othering" becomes extreme. Snead ("Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong: the Guilty Look") takes the position that the giant ape is, more or less, a symbol of the giant cultural anxiety we have of black sexual power. He goes through his argument matching the othering of blacks with the othering of Kong's character, and I must admit, it is pretty convincing. 
       But even Snead does not say this is the only way to look at the movie's coding. ". . .much of what I say," he writes, "here might apply to other non-white groups that film makers have depicted in their stories. . ." (Snead: 188). He goes on to list other marginal groups. But suppose for a moment that we don't want to deconstruct the coding in King Kong along racial connotations and stereotypes. Perhaps, for a change of pace, we could use Snead's methodology to relate the character of Kong to another group of people far more hidden and obscure to the filmic diegesis than the exotic blacks who kept Kong contained on their island--the "real outsider", or "other" known as the movie audience itself. 
       To begin, I would like to follow up on the suggestion Nick  and Jason gave in their powerpoint presentation of having students write the story of the movie from Kong's point of view. This activity, besides being both fun and informative for students as an in-class exercise, has started me on the idea that maybe the character of Kong could be examined as standing 
for the movie viewer: the heterosexual white middle class male. Snead (in paraphrasing Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni) states that studies on black images in film neglect to 
“. . .investigate the filmic text or its implied audience," and that the cinema is an ". . .ideology presenting itself to itself, talking to itself, learning about itself" (187). If that is so, then we don't have to look very far to find the source of monstrosity in film--it is resident in the one who looks, or the viewer. 
       Indeed, with the story of King Kong, we are presented with a film maker, Denham, on the Hollywood quest to capitalize on the love of the look, or specifically, the vicarious stimulation of desire in the paying public that is the cinema stock in trade: "He [Denham] is just trying to make an honest return on his backer's venture capital" (193). What better way is there to do that than to show the viewer the monstrosity of his own self as embodied in a giant gorilla? Or, in other words, Cooper could have deliberately used the image of Kong as the collective Id of the viewer, holding up to the movie-goer a kind of giant mirror of his own unrecognized inner desires and monstrosity. 
       This presents an interesting twist on the Bordwell and Thompson definition of the kind of monster in horror film that is ". . .an ordinary human who is transformed" (185). Thought of in this way, Denham's words on Kong, "He's always been the king of his world, but we'll teach him fear" (194) have a different spin. After all, isn't stimulating fear in the viewer what a horror movie tries to do? And in a sense the viewer is the king of his world, having the choice of many kinds of cinema entertainment, and sending the Hollywood movie industry into endless attempts to capture his attention and $7.50. 
       Denham's adventure, then, isn't off into some exotic tropical island, but into the "heart of darkness" resident in "normal" human beings. We first discover Kong on an island with a main geographic feature shaped like a human skull. This makes me think Cooper might wish to suggest that we are being taken into the jungles of the human mind. It doesn't make sense to compare Kong with the black islanders, because they are so different. Kong is big and strong and powerful. The islanders are small and weak by comparison. Snead recognizes that the black islanders are just so much backdrop, or are really being used as props (194). As wild and savage as they may seem, they're nothing compared to the monster that waits hidden from 
conscious view. 
       In fact, all the other characters are small and weak compared to Kong. This feature, if Kong represents the movie viewer, works a kind of weird reversal of conditions in the movie theatre, in which the people watching are small compared to the giant images projected onto the screen. And yet the viewer has the power to make or break a movie. Kong remains hidden until summoned to accept the sacrifice of a female. And not just any female, Snead is careful to remind us, but a white female, Anne. Kong reaches out and simply grabs her, owning her in the same way the male movie audience member "grabs and owns" the female star of a movie by 
being able to look at her carefully-prepared image. Anne has been prepared for her role in advance by Denham. He first lures her into the adventure, then coaches her in her acting while 
still on board the ship. And like any good movie maker, Denham also captures the spectator Kong (whose eyes grow larger with interest when he sees her, just as an audience member might lean forward to get a better look at the female star image on the movie screen) through Kong's weakness for Anne's beauty. 
       So then it is off to New York, where Kong wrecks havoc. Snead, in quoting other sources, supplies us with an interesting suggestion with regard to this part of the movie, by saying 
that, ". . .King Kong's rampage through the streets of Manhattan 'served to release the pent up anger and frustration and fear of the millions who had been pitched head-long into the Great Depression'. . ." (195). 
       There are constant reminders of the "beauty and the beast" idea in the film, as several comments have pointed out. I am struck in this context by a quote in Euripides' tragedy, "Hippolytus" (428 BC)in which is a statement of virulent misogyny on the part of the male figure 
Hippolytus. "We should not suffer servants to approach them [clever women], but give them as companions to voiceless beasts, dumb. . .but with teeth, that they might not converse, and hear 
another voice in answer . . . Curses on you! I'll hate you women, hate and hate and hate you, and never have enough of hating . . . Some say that I talk of this eternally, yes, but eternal too, is woman's wickedness. Either let someone teach them to be chaste, or suffer me to trample on them forever." (Scene III, lines 645-669) Well, and so we do give women to that part of ourselves, the beast within, for it is to serve our own lust that she has been made; or so goes the implication. "Kong has become a classic in large part because of his very 'humanness" Snead writes. "The humanness of King Kong, the key to King Kong's success, also tips us off to the various ways in which the film appeals to its spectators" (191). There is the coded link 
between the viewer of the movie and the character of Kong. 

Works Cited
        1"Hippolytus", from Greek Tragedies, Vol. 1, Second Ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, Eds. University of Chicago Press, Chicago: 1942.