I went to see Jackson’s KING KONG the other day. I was pleased with the film’s spectacle, but disappointed to the point of disgust by the theme and tone of the film’s last scene. Why did they change the ending?
Instead of having Ann Darrow captured by the giant ape in New York, while her fiancé and the brave airmen go to rescue her and shoot the monster, she is uninterested in human love; she goes to the beast willingly, her eyes melting with love for the man-killer, and the soldiers shoot at her, while she stands in front of the ape trying to wave the planes away.
It is the single most stupid and disgusting moment I have ever seen in a film. Not only was my suspension of disbelief broken, my sympathy for the character was not merely lost, it was reversed. I was hoping the heroine would die.
This was eerie, almost horrific experience it was for me. You see, A little while ago, I wrote an essay for a Book called KING KONG IS BACK (Daivd Brin was the editor) http://www.sff.net/people/john-c-wright/King_Kong_is_Back.htm
In that essay, I made the point that King Kong was a memorable movie because it was about grim necessity. I said there was be something irretrievably lost in the national character of the American public if they misunderstood either of the two elements which were in conflict in the King Kong film. It is a monster movie, but one where we feel some pity for the monster when he falls. To save the girl, he has to die, but it is sad that he has to die.
My first point was this: if we were to feel no pity for the beast, killed by beauty, we should be too callous to be Americans any longer. But my second point was this: if we were no longer able to understand why the beast has to die, if we were to feel no loyalty to the human race, we should be too weak and muddle-headed to be Americans any longer.
If we are rooting for the monster that preys on human beings, we might not even deserve membership in the human race any longer.
It was that muddle-headedness I saw celebrated in the climax of the Jackson film. He actually expected his audience to cheer for a girl trying to save a monster who has killed scores of men, and killed and eaten scores of women.
The monster was now the hero. The airmen are now the villains.
I notice that the only scene missing from the remake is when Kong rampages among the native villagers. I wonder if this was done for artistic reasons or for Political Correctness. Maybe if Kong had killed and eaten a bunch of black aborigines, Jackson would not have been able to show him as the sympathetic hero of the movie.
The Carl Denham character was also altered from being a tension of two opposites themes to a one-dimensional comic figure. In the original, he is an adventurer with a camera. Here, he is a phony no-talent, whose essential phoniness is played for laughs while his men die all around him. In the original, when Kong is defeated, and Carl Denham shouts, “We’ll make a million dollars, boys, and I’ll share it with all of you!” That is actually meant to be a triumphant moment. Getting a million dollars in 1933 was not thought of as a bad thing. In the remake, the line sounds like a fraud. Likewise for his famous last line about beauty killing the beast. The Carl Denham in his film is a character invented by people too weak and muddle-headed to be Americans any longer.
This is why the film shocked me. When I wrote that essay, I was half-kidding. I did not take seriously the possibility that one side or the other of the American character would simply vanish. Then I saw the thing I parodied in my essay portrayed with all seriousness on the big screen.
I could not shake the eerie feeling that I had written the death sentence of this great Republic with my own hands.
If this movie succeeds, then we’re not Americans any more, not really. We might as well pack up the whole nation and ship it back to Europe.
