Current Forum: Session 9: Horror and Race	Read 8 times 	
Date: 19-Mar-2001 19:08:54	
Author: SIMMONS, DAVID C. <dcs7316@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Coded Spectacle in King Kong (1933) 	
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       Snead makes an important comment in his discussion of Cooper’s 1933 film, King Kong. He says, “The story of King Kong becomes comprehensible only if we replace what has been left unsaid, and refuse to be diverted by the familiar mechanics of the ‘love plot’” (Snead 184). In this email I want to examine how certain structures of race, class, gender, and sexuality are coded within both content and form of this famous horror film. I will attempt to do this with the rhetorical device of asking questions and then providing possible answers. 
       Question: In what way is blackness conflated with monstrousness in King Kong?
Possible Answers: 
•        Kong is the embodiment of blackness (Snead 182).
•        In the film’s beginning, Cooper particularly added the opening: “Old Arabian Proverb” about “the beast looked upon the face of beauty” right after the opening credits.
•        At the film’s ending, Denham remarks: “It wasn’t the airplanes, it was beauty killed the beast.”
       Question: In what ways is blackness conflated with primitive savagery in King Kong?
Possible Answers:
•        Denham: “Wall . . . built so long ago that the people who lived there have slipped back . . . forgotten the higher civilization that built it.” The Islanders are coded as being unable to build such an efficient wall.
•        Jack Driscoll, speaking of the Islanders: “They’re up to some of their heathen tricks”
•        The actors portraying the Islanders have their bodies painted (made to look even blacker, “marked” as Snead explains), spears, etc. to look as “primitive” as possible. They are constructed as savages who offer up women to Kong.
•        Denham: “Have you had any luck with the natives? Gunpowder’s something new in their lives.”
       Question: In what ways is whiteness coded as being superior or ideal?
Possible Answers:
•        Denham about the natives: “Funny they haven’t spotted us . . . I’d have thought the whole population would’ve been out on the beach.”
•        The native virgin being sacrificed has white flowers in her hair. The natives are willing to pay 6 of “their” women for Ann.
•        Skipper (translating for native leader): “He says, ‘Look at the golden woman.’” Denham: “Yeah . . . blondes are pretty scarce around here.” 
•        Denham: “There’s something on this island [King Kong] no white man has ever seen”
•        Ann is dressed in white with high-key lighting when she is placed between the pillars as a sacrifice for Kong. She is coded with this super-whiteness.
       Question: In what ways is femininity conflated with spectacle?
Possible Answers:
•        Carl Denham: “The public, God-bless-em, must have a pretty face to look at”
•        Ann gets into trouble, it seems, after she sees the ceremony of the natives and says, “I want to see.” Hollywood film, as Mulvey has reminded us, places the female in a position of “to-be-looked-at-ness.” For the female to desire to be the see-er and not the seen is going to be a problem in such a system. 
       Question: In what ways is the “otherness” of Kong like the “otherness” of Ann. How is this eroticized?
Possible Answers:
•        Kong takes off Ann’s clothes, smells her garment, tickles her, then smells his hand. The music is sensual. 
•        Spectators can disavow the pleasure of thinking of themselves as the virile black man going after the white woman (Snead 188).
       Question: In what ways is masculinity conflated with an active ability to save?
Possible Answers:
•        Denham rescues lower-class Ann Darrow by paying for the fruit she’s stolen.
•        On the island, the active men from the ship have to rescue the passive, screaming Ann from the clutches of King Kong. 
•        The press in NYC to Ann: “Mr. Driscoll saved you from that ape, huh?”
       Question: How is Colonialism made to look “normal” and “natural”? 
Possible Answers:
•        “A sort of optical colonialization preceeds and prepares for an actual one” (Snead 185). 
•        Denham, when he sees the natives’ ceremony: “Holy mackerel! What a show!”
•        “What if it doesn’t like getting its picture taken?” Denham: “That’s why I brought along those cases of gas bombs”
•        Denham shoots a dinosaur that is lying down, almost dead. “Look at the size of that brute . . . if I could only bring back one of these alive.”
•        The sailors have “colonized” the natives at the gates. The natives have “naturally” let them take control.
•        Snead: “The assumption about the white male’s ‘other’—other races, women, is that they will remain passive means to Denham’s ends” (185).
•        Denham: “He’s always been king of his world. Now we’ll teach him fear. We’ll be millionaires, boys!”
•        Auction block scene. Denham: “I’m going to show you the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was a king and a god in the world he knew. But now he comes to civilization, merely a captive, a show, to gratify your pride.” 
       Question: How is heterosexuality reaffirmed in this film?
Possible Answers:
•        The film moves us from the homosocial world of Denham and Jack to the heterosexual couple of Ann and Jack.
•        “Jack mistrusts women and desires solitude or at best all-male companionship” (Snead 186). 
•        At their first meeting, Jack not only slaps Ann accidentally, he says, “Women can’t help being a bother.”
•        After the helicopters shoot Kong dead, Jack goes to roof and takes Ann in his arms. The white couple is brought together (will be married tomorrow) so that the nation will be made right again.
       Question: How does form position the spectator in a white, male, middle-class, heterosexual position?
Possible Answers:
•        When Denham first meets Ann on the streets, he looks at her face, and so does the spectator, in CU, with soft focus. As Mulvey says, the spectator is positioned with a male gaze. The female connotes “to-be-looked-at-ness.”
•        As the Islanders in the canoe steal Ann, the spectator looks down on them from a high-angle shot as if we are on the ship. We never see visual material from the Islanders’ POV. The camera places the spectator in the white position, similar to the situation we observed in Battle of Elderbush Gulch. 
•        When the spectator observes the dancing Islanders with the torches, it is through an extreme long shot. The spectator is far removed from their position.
       As we have observed, King Kong has taught us, through codes of both form and content, a way to conceive of ourselves and the world around us, according to a very specific system of race, class, gender, and sexuality.