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Is King Kong a Racist Parable?
There’s a storm brewing around everybody’s favorite giant ape. That storm insists that this big black ape is more than he seems. King Kong, some people allege, is a symbol (and not a particularly friendly one) of black males in American society.
The storms seems to have broke thanks to an offhand remark made by David Edelstein in an MSN Slate column, reviewing Peter Jackson’s new movie:
Jackson doesn’t deal with the implicit racism of King Kong—the implication that Kong stands for the black man brought in chains from a dark island (full of murderous primitive pagans) and with a penchant for skinny white blondes. But the director has supplied a fatherly black man (Evan Parke) on the crew to look after a teenage misfit (Jamie Bell): See, blacks aren’t all out of place in civilization! Some even take care of whites!
The spark was fanned into a flame by the Drudge Report picking up the story, and even forced a response from Edelstein. Edelstein retorts:
Sorry to disappoint you, folks, but this didn’t originate with me. Yes, King Kong is a piece of entertainment, a fantasy, a movie (as some readers feel compelled to remind me), but it has often been viewed as an imperialist American parable: the arrival at an island of black “savages” who seize the white blonde; the capture of the gorilla who is brought in chains to America … Reviewing the remake in 1976 in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael acknowledged the racism charge while taking a somewhat anti-liberal contrarian line: “Whites have sometimes spoken of King Kong as a racial slur, but the black men that I’ve known have always loved it. It was their own special urban gorilla-guerrilla fantasy: to be a king in your own country, to be brought here in chains, to be so strong that you could roar your defiance at the top of the big city and go down in a burst of glory.”
Similar sentiments were picked up in other places like a Newsday column, and the UK’s Times Online. Writing for the Times, Kwame McKenzie offers the most scathing view of the movie as a parable of the dangers of black male “hypersexuality”:
The story feeds into all the colonial hysteria about black hyper-sexuality. This imagery has a long history and is difficult to shift. […]
The story also touches the raw nerve of the Darwin-based association between black men and apes. Though the monkey noises and the discussion about whether Africans are the missing link between apes and humans may be out of the classroom, it still has to be endured by black footballers when they travel to away games.
The whole issue is I think a very interesting one, as it opens up people’s eyes to the possibility that media artifacts which we typically see as “just entertainment” have multiple levels of meaning, and can be read very differently depending on who the audience is. In an article for the Detroit Free Press on the “psychobabblers” stirred up by this movie, Jeff Gammage offers what I think is a very important point:
“King Kong is who you need him to be,” says Wesleyan University film expert Jeanine Basinger, author of nine books on movies. “I constantly tell my students, ‘You are what you see.’ You want to tell me he’s the sexual libido of an adolescent? Now I know who are you, thank you very much.”
We could go on and on about whether King Kong is or isn’t a racist allegory, or look for any number of subtexts or hidden meanings within any media artifact or pop culture symbol set. And I think doing so can be a very productive exercise. What’s needed, I think though, is that we focus on the questions, rather than endlessly battle about who is right. It’s a matter of us exploring and developing a media literacy which is highly lacking in our culture. An easy place to start for people new to the topic might be the Center for Media Literacy. The CML has boiled down a nice set of 5 simple axioms to guide people in their quest to become literate in how the media operates.
- All media messages are ‘constructed.’
- Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules.
- Different people experience the same media message differently.
- Media have embedded values and points of view.
- Most media messages are constructed to gain profit and/or power.
Each of these principles has a corresponding simple question the budding media theorist can and should ask:
- Who created this message?
- What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
- How might different people understand this message differently from me?
- What lifestyles, values and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
- Why is this message being sent?
I know a lot of people really chafe at the notion of analyzing movies and media messages, like it’s somehow going to strip the enjoyment out of it. Or “Sometimes an ape is just an ape,” as they say. If that’s your bag, then I’m not really sure what to say to you. Good luck navigating the mediascape as we move into the future, I guess. You think media and marketing are crazy now? Come back and talk to me ten years in the future and let’s see where we’re at. Taking small steps towards media literacy now and training yourself to ask questions and engage others in meaningful conversations is only going to pay enormous dividends in the future. Taking an active interest in these types of dicussions allows you to have a formative influence on what happens, rather than just being swept along for the ride. At least that’s my own perspective on it - one out of many possible and useful interpretations. What’s yours?
- Fisher King
- Whore of Reason
- The Futility of Interpreting Parables
- Jason Dove and the Kings of Kong
- I will utter dark sayings of old
- Prev: Designing Your Own God
- Next: Paganism & Otherkin-ism
December 17th, 2005 at 7:29 pm
yep, my analysis get some people`s backs up too. certainly , the things we observe in an image or movie says a lot about who we are as much as what the media it`s self is. personally, i believe that if we don`t watch media critically, then we become prey to it and respond unconsciously to it`s content in the future. to me it`s never an accident that a coke bottle is in the fridge in a movie or a specific new car is driven by the hero or that a specific point of view is taken by a character. everything is a message.
December 17th, 2005 at 7:51 pm
Well, that’s not just you. There are agencies whose sole business is to read through movie and tv scripts and find opportunities for product placement.
December 17th, 2005 at 9:11 pm
i very rarely watch t.v and when i do i am amazed at the compression of actual viewable content. it is becoming squeezed between more and more ads, informative breaks, news updates and other euphemisms fro commercials. add to that the internal pressure from product placement within the actual content of the program and what you have is one contunual infomercial.
what they should do is make the infomercials actually entertaining and serialise them so that people will return for the next episode. there are enough sheep out there to pull it off and more of them have hi def and surround sound and whatever enhancements for it to be a real mind fuck. the piece-de-resistance would be to have the “stars” of these commercials appearing at the local wal-mart to sign your personal box of whatever product they`re selling.
i`m either a genius or i`m badly in need of some sleep.
December 17th, 2005 at 10:42 pm
Seems like deliberately pushing fuel into a smoldering fire to me. Kong ends up as a sypathetic character. He starts as a monster but then becomes a victim. People suffer because he was kidnapped and brought to America, so isn’t it just as valid to say “OH NO! It’s about America kidnapping foreign nationals and holding them prisoner without charge!” It’s not a bloody black thing.
December 18th, 2005 at 12:42 am
The point is, if you were black and an American, you might think otherwise. Whether or not any of our viewpoints are 100% right or exclusive to the truth, I think its important to recognize that other people view the same piece very differently and with good reason. And part of the power than any truly relevant story has culturally is that its able to fill the fantasies and fears of any number of groups at once.
December 18th, 2005 at 12:57 am
My take from the start was, “Dude, Peter, you’re not supposed to point out that orcs are a racist symbol.”
December 18th, 2005 at 1:16 am
Speaking of orcs, I thought Ran had a cool take on that a really long time ago:
http://ranprieur.com/essays/JRRT.html
December 18th, 2005 at 6:27 am
If you want to read Kong as some kind of metaphor for black people, he could also be read as a symbol of black empowerment (albeit one ultimately brought down by The Man), beating the crap out of dinosaurs, tearing up New York, swatting biplanes out of the sky… this isn’t Stepin Fetchit we’re dealing with here, this is more like Sweet Sweetback (or should that be Sweet Silverback in this case?).
December 18th, 2005 at 12:19 pm
heh. i thought i was the smart person out there to “get” this film =)
December 18th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
Tim, thanks for linking to Ran’s interesting piece, which I have not before encountered.
It fits in with my view that, in a certain sense, time is cyclical and the Atlantis myths are a remembrance of a common past and future (and now present, i.e. an immense global technological empire that consumes itself).
December 18th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
Oh, thanks for reminding me of that Atlantis theme. I’ve been meaning to write about that. Now is as good a time as any!
December 18th, 2005 at 4:59 pm
James Russell:
I think that’s essentially the point of that reading of the story. Namely, that the power of the black male, no matter how great, is ultimately “contained” in the end.
December 19th, 2005 at 12:00 am
But see, here’s the deal. If you end a story so that the protagonist or the forces of good or whoever we identify with end up dying unjustly, you create a cognitive dissonance which might impel action on the audience. Now, that’s not the be-all and end-all, many other considerations exist, but I think in isolation, if you “read” the film in a contrarian way and cheer for the guy who gets killed, you’ll leave a little disturbed–which is good. Walk out of a theatre upset, and suddenly, the once-familar light of the starbucks sign looks like the sign of opression.
E.g., FX (a Fox channel!) had a made-for-TV movie where some Muslim terrorists hijack a nuclear plant. The SWAT team rushes in, all but one gets killed, he plays First-Person-Shooter/Sneaker drama for a while, then gets pinned down by a terrorist who goes turncoat and helps him defuse the bombs, get out safely, etc. By the end, you’re cheering for the Lone Cop and his “Not Gonna Decimate Anything Today” Humanitarian Muslim buddy… but then the backup shows up. Our Lone Cop then takes the turncoat “hostage” in order to protect him and avoid “hero” status–then a police sniper kills the turncoat while he’s being led at gunpoint. It’s very jarring, to say the least, and it was very clear that the director intended that effect and operated from that theory.
Oh, and I hate film theory. I can only watch B-movies & horror movies anymore, really, just because they’re easier to see through. Less engrossing & less psychically taxing.
December 19th, 2005 at 12:10 am
Yeah I agree. There’s a part of me that really thinks its important for people to sit up and really look at what they’re being immersed in culturally. But there’s another part of me that is really starting to not give a shit anymore myself. Analyzed/interpreted meaning for me is becoming kind of a mindfuck thats too easy to get lost in - another trap for your mind possibly as dangerous as whatever they originally intended it to mean, maybe even moreso. I don’t know.
December 19th, 2005 at 8:00 am
Those 5 questions and 5 concepts the Center for Media Literacy put out are excellent. Thanks for drawing that to our attention.
If any of you want to explore them deeper, don’t get put off by the 404 they have on the links to the questions and concepts. If you click on the “download” link you’ll get an 87 page pdf that fleshes out the idea. It’s intended for k-12 teachers, so it’s got some pretty awful pedagogue-speak, but if you can get past it there are a lot of useful ways of raising these questions.
December 19th, 2005 at 7:09 pm
“King Kong” IS a racial allegory. And “E.T.” was a religious allegory.
However, thankfully kids don’t give a fuck about those things. When I was small, “King Kong” was cool because he could beat up dinosaurs, climb the tallest building in the world, AND be nice to a beautiful girl. All the race/class stuff filled my head later on, and I’m aware of the existence of such beliefs.
My niece was only 3 when we were flipping channels and settled on the original b/w version of “Kong” on cable. She was glued to that TV like we were watching Spongebob or something like that. I doubt she saw the allegorical messages– she was hypnotized by Ray Harryhausen’s special effects.
And, if she grows up and tells me one day that “King Kong” is racist, well… I’ll be just as impressed as that day whe I saw her surrender to the magic of classic cinema.
btw: I love Peter Jackson’s remake. I saw it over the weekend. I highly recommend it.
March 29th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
[…] Race, Oh My (Joe’s Dartblog, 12/15) A beastly cliché dies (NY Daily News, 12/15) Is King Kong a Racist Parable? (Pop Occulture, 12/17) […]