JAMESSNEAD

Spectatorship and capture in

King Kong: the guilty look*

Although films are not necessarily myths, as is sometimes asserted, certain

films have managed to remain repeatedly compelling and thus to assume a
permanent, quasi-mythic status in a society's consdousness. The tireless
popularity of such films might be related to Claude Levi-Strauss's notion of
myths as narratives that endure because they give vent to an unspoken
component, a repressed content. Their latent plot would resolve contra
dictions in the public sphere, conflicts that cannot be resolved in any other
way than through their transfom‫ו‬ation into a fictitious narrative.1 Basing
his insights on Marcuse's notion of 'surplus repression', film critic Robin
Wood has argued that contemporary society, repressing desires that would
otherwise threaten its stability, vents these desires through the figure of
the monster. The Hollywood monster film allows, among other things, a
safe outlet for such desires in a surrogate form, and a vicarious experience
pleasurable and horrific-of the chaos that such a release would bring
about in reality. More specifically, Wood states that society represses: (1) 'sexual
energy itself '; (2) 'bisexuality' (which he defines as the arbitrary ‫ת‬ature of
social norm.s surrounding masculinity and feminity); and (3) 'female
sexuality/creativity'. A too strictly practised internal repression may end in
extemal oppression - a generalised hostility directed against a societa1
'other', especia11y the 'other' as women or non-Westem peoples.2 Especially
in a movie such as King Kong (1933), which stretches all boundaries-tem
poral, spatial, and natural-we must specify in Wood's paradigm areas of
racial fear and taboo that certain American myths, both in literature and in
film, attempt to ma‫ת‬age and transform. Surplus repression is primarily
sexual, to be sure, but we must remember that the oppression it spawns is
largely political. lndeed, it has been variously argued that some whites
oppress blacks on the outside in order to repress elements of 'blackness'
inside.3 1n film portrayals of blacks, the political is never far from the
sexual, for it is both as a political and as a sexual threat that the black skin
appears on screen. And there are very few instances in the history of
Hollywood cinema in which the colour black has been writ so large and
intruded 80 powerfully into the social plane of white norma1ity. Blackness
in motion is typically sensed as a threat on screen, and 80 black movement
in film is usually restricted to highly bracketed and contai‫ת‬able activmes,
 54 C‫ז‬itia‫נ‬l Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1

such as sports or entertainment. King Kong is an exception to this rule: the

attempt to contain King Kong fails, and he makes off with not just any
woman, but with a white woman. King Kong, then, is a noteworthy, though
perhaps surprising, instance of 'the coded black' - in this case, the carrier
of blackness is not a human being but an ape, but we shall see that
the difference can easily be bridged.
In their analysis of 'John Ford's Young M‫ז‬. Lincoln', the editors of Cahiers
Du Cinema say that films often contain 'constituent lacks' or 'structu‫ז‬ing ab
sences . . . the unsaid included in the said and necessary to its
constitution'.
These absences 'have some connection with the sexual other scene, and that
"other scene" which is politics'.4 Our reading of King Kong wi1l attempt to
supply some of these constitutive omissions. Through a reading of the sub
plots in King Kong, we can see that the film's political aspects are hidden by
the emotive nature of the sexual plot's covert build-up and ambiguous
release. King Kong is able to cloak and leave unresolved a potentially
explosive allegory of racial and sexual exploitation by manipulating the
codes whereby films typically portray romantic conflict and resolution.
Unravelling the relationship between the sexual and political plots in the
film means tracing the surface plot, the political sub-plot, and tracing the
transformations of audience perspective implied by each. Few products of
the American cinema have made such a rapid and indelible impression as
King Kong. From its first release in 1933, the film was immensely popular,
and it helped RI<O at least temporarily survive bankruptcy. In King Kong's
wake, the director/producer team of Emest B. Schoedsack and Merian C.
Cooper made two sequels, Son of Kong (1933) and MightyJoe Young (1949),
and others have followed these. Kong, the centre of attention, has joined
that group of cultural reference-points and large-scale metaphors that
includes Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Santa Claus, and Sherlock Holmes -
neither kin nor foreign, neither completely real nor completely fictitious.
One can buy postcards of Kong scaling the Empire State Building (recently,
an inflated facsimile of Kong was temporarily hung there), or buy bumper
stickers stating that 'King Kong died for your sins'.
Kong has become a classic in large part because of his very 'humanness'.
As we shall see, the ape's 'humanness' engages, but also conceals, the
underlying political point the film illustrates. Early on in the production,
there was some debate over just how human Kong should appear. The
chief technician and animator, Willis O'Brien, wanted a sympathetic,
anthropomorphic Kong, and won out over Cooper's more 'monstrous'
conception. In the end, O'Brien's artistic virtuosity helped 'humanise'
Kong, giving an eighteen-inch clay model familiar and often endearing
gestures and expressions. The humanness of King Kong, the key to King
 Spectatorship and capture in King Kong: the guilty look 55

Kong's success, also tips us off to the various ways in which the film
appeals to its spectators.

Plot summary
The plot of King Kong is, as its makers continually stressed in interviews,
absurd, very much like that of any typical adventure yarn. If we compare it
with the plot of Melville's Moby Dick, for instance, we find both similarities and
differences: a somewhat obsessive leader and his crew journey into
unknown seas without their ful1 knowledge of his intentions. The group
encounters a terrifying, murderous creature of fantastic dimensions. Yet
here Carl Denham returns to New York with King Kong and even lives to
make an oration over his corpse, while neither Ahab nor his men (except
for lshmael) return from the encounter with the whale. Another variation
is the presence of Ann Darrow (her name almost certainly alludes to
Oarence Darrow, defence lawyer in the 192 5 Scopes 'monkey' trial),
usually referred to simply as 'the girl' - in most cases, such seafaring
adventure tales are womanless. These two peculiarities - the importation
of the monster into civilised society, and the addition of a woman to the
adventure model - are quite pertinent. The film has four main divisions:
(1) New York and the discovery of the girl; (2) the voyage; (3) encounter
with natives and Kong in the primeval jungle; (4) New York and the death
of Kong.
The first shots of the film place us in New York harbour, seen from
Hoboken, and the various docks, ships, and cargoes suggest 'trade',
'commerce', and 'transportation'. As in Moby Dick, we hear about the
expedition's leader before we see him. Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is
a theatrical producer, ruthless in his pursuit of 'pictures', even under the
most dangerous circumstances. He has chartered a ship and its hold,
curiously, is ful1 of explosives and gas bombs. Denham wants to get under
way, but he has not found what he needs most for his film: 'The public,
bless 'em, must have a pretty face to look at . . . ' The aggressive Denham
searches Depression breadlines for the right woman. In the Bowery he sees
Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) reaching for an apple from a fruitstand. The
proprietor berates her, but Denham 'rescues' her by paying for the fruit.
The girl is well-bred, and has some acting experience, so Denham promises
her 'the thrill of a lifetime' if she will come with him, and assures her that
he has no improper interest in her. Haltingly, she agrees to sail with
his crew.
The second part takes place as the ship (called the Venture) is underway.
 56 Critical Q,uirterly, vol. 33, no. 1

Ann seems to be enjoying the trip more than the first mate, Jack Driscoll
(Bruce Cabot), who is openly hostile to women. ln their first encounter, he
slaps her accidentally. He apologises to her, but insists that she does not
belong ‫ חס‬such a dangerous mission: 'Women just can't help being a
bother.' As time goes by, however, their relationship warms. Meanwhile,
Denham. has told Driscoll and Captain Englehorn (Frank Reicher) about an
island west of Sumatra, in uncharted waters, where he has heard there is a
huge wall, 'built so long ago the people who live there now have slipped
back, forgotten the higher dvilization that built it'. The wall is there to keep
something out, 'something neither beast nor man ... monstrous, all
powerful, still living, still holding that island in a grip of deadly fear . . .
1 tel1 you there's something ‫ חס‬that island that no white man has ever seen
... if it's there, you bet 1'11 photograph it.' He gives Ann Darrow a screen
test on the ship deck, coaching her to react in fear to an invisible assailant.
In part three, the ship reaches what they now call 'Skull Island'.
Through the dense fog, the crew hears the sound of drums. At daybreak,
a party lands ‫ חס‬the island, and sees the wall: '. . . it might almost be
Egyptian . . . Who do you suppose could have built it?' Denham. exclaims:
'What a chance! What a picture!' Soon, they see a group of blacks dandng
in a rite that seems to centre ‫ חס‬a young girl with garlands around her
neck. Denham. shouts out: 'Holy mackrel! What a show!' Ann shouts,
'1 want to see,' and pushes forward from the protective men around her.
Denham. says, 'lf I could only get a picture of that before they see us . . .'
Soon the Chief (Noble Johnson) stops the dandng. The witchdoctor (Steve
Oemento) has complained that the Americans' presence has spoiled the
ceremony. The Captain, who by chance knows their dialect, tries to placate
the Chief, who is now demanding Ann as the sacrifidal object, to be
exchanged for six black women. To this offer, Denham. says, 'Yeah,
blondes are pretty scarce around here,' and signals a slow retreat to the
boats.
Ann and Jack declare their love for each other that night: 1'm scared for
you' - Jack says - '1sort of guess l'm scared of you, too.' Reluctantly, they
kiss. Soon afterwards, two blacks abduct Ann from the ship. Jack, dis
covering her absence, organises a rescue party armed with guns. Mean
while, the blacks have substituted Ann for the girl in the rite. Now decked
with garlands, Ann has been strapped to a high altar beyond the wall and
abandoned there. Watching from the wall's ram.parts and gates, the Chief
hits a giant gong, invoking Kong, who approaches the stone columns to
which Ann has been tied. She screams, in earnest now, as Kong takes her
into the primeval jungle.
The rescue party forces its way past the gates into a realm of prehistoric
 Spectatorship and capture in King I<ong: the guilty look 57

creatures. Denham says, 'If I could only bring back one of these alive.'
Some of his men are eaten by a plesiosaurus, others fall into a deep ravine
as Kong shakes them off a tree trunk they have been using as a bridge.
Soon Kong is taking Ann to his cliffside lair. Jack follows mm there,
arranging that Denham should return to the ship for help.
Jack, by lucky timing, rescues Ann from Kong's dwelling. They swim
back to the beach, pursued by Kong, who devastates the village in his
wake. Denham shouts, 'We came here to get a moving picture, and we've
found something worth more than all the movies in the world . . . If we
can capture mm alive.' Finally, Denham is able to immobilise the ape with
gas bombs. He stands over the fallen ape's hulk and says, 'Why the whole
world will pay to see this ... We'll give mm more than chains. He's
always been king of his world, but we'll teach mm fear ... We're million
aires, boys.'
In the fourth part, Denham is seen backstage at a Broadway theatre with
Ann and Jack, telling reporters about the 'eighth wonder.of the world' he
is about to unveil. He tells the first-night audience: 'l'mgoing to show you
the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was king and a god in
the world he knew. But now he comes to civilization, merely a captive, a
show, to gratify your curiosity ... ' The curtain rises, and the terrified
crowd sees Kong standing on a huge platform, restrained by a halter
around his neck and chained to steel crossbars by the wrists.
Denham tells the photographers to take the first pictures of Kong in
captivity, but as the flashbulbs go off, Kong s‫ס‬rs, thinking they are
harming Ann. He breaks free and searches New York for Ann, causing
death and havoc. He finds her in an upper-storey hotel room and takes her
from Jack while he is still unconscious. Perhaps mistaking it for a tree, he
climbs the Empire State Building with Ann in his hand. Jack suggests that
the police try to shoot mm down. Kong, now at the top of the building,
puts Ann on a ledge and fights off the planes, but in vain. Six fighters
attack mm repeatedly with machine guns, he falls off the building and
dies. Jack climbs to embrace Ann while Denham stands over the fallen
ape's corpse delivering the final lines: 'It wasn't the airplanes. It was
beauty killed the beast.'

Supplyi‫ת‬g the omitted plots

One of the more interesting aspects of this synopsis is that it betrays
immediately the contradictions and instabilities of the presumably 'happy'
ending. Whose story is it? Certainly for Ann Darrow the narrative ends
happily: she has gone from a solitary Bowery existence to her lover's arms
58 C‫ז‬itiail Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1

atop the Empire State Building, and has achieved no small degree of fame
in the process. Simllarly, the lure of beauty has taken Jack from the sea and
promised him a blissful domesticity. But in the end, the relationship be
tween Ann and Jack survives only at the cost of an execution. The narrative
pleasure of seeing the (white) male-female bond re-established at the end
tends to screen out the full meaning of the final shot: the accidental (black)
intruder lies bloody and dead ‫ חס‬the ground, his epitaph given ghbly by
the very person who has trapped him. Kong's plot has the least happy
ending of all. As can be seen in Birth of a Nation, a desired political end
(the erasure of the black/savage from white/civilised society) has been rep
resented in a plot that gives it a justification that seems necessary for
narrative reasons (the reconciliation of the white marriage unit). For whose
sins, then, did King Kong die?
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'. It is no accident that Denham is the keenest
proponent of the 'love angle' on the events he has brought about. From
the beginning, he has explained Ann's presence by the need for there to
be a 'beauty' if there is to be a 'beast', and at every juncture until Kong's
death, he under lines the 'beauty and the beast' notion. His interpretation
is supported by the opening titles, with their relation of 'an Arab
proverb' which claims that once the beast disarms himself in the face of
beauty, he is as good as dead. The opening moments of the film, then,
predispose the spectator to accept Denham's platitudinous reading of the
film. But, as we learn during the film, Denham is anything but a reliable
and disinterested commentator. An altemative reading would suggest that
the film is not about Jack and Ann, or about Kong's actions, but really
more about the motives and effects of Carl Denham's deeds - all the
more so, since he is the only character who remains unchanged from the
beginning to the end, and is throughout the tale the driving force behind
the plot's events. What, then, is the deeper nature of his 'venture'?
0n a purely film historical level, we could call King Kong an autobio
graphical, self-referential film, and not be too far from the mark. Cooper
and Schoedsack met under trying circumstances in a foreign country, and
seemed bent on repeating that initial experience on film. Their early film
careers took them on dangerous expeditions to bring back, not animal
skins or precious artefacts, but pidures of exotic subjects. Their joint
ventures Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), filmed respectively in Iran and
Thailand, still count as milestones in the ethnographic film tradition. While
Grass, almost in spite of its makers' efforts, ended up as a more or less
straight ethnographical document, in Chllng, Cooper and Schoedsack
 Spectatorship and capture in King Kong: the guilty look 59

manage to integrate a preconceived plot with location shooting (to the

detriment of the film's enthnographic value).5 While on another expedition
in Africa, they came up with the idea of a film involving many of the
elements of King K‫ס‬ng, although their first idea was - incredibly - to make
the film in Africa without the use of any special photography. Many
incidents in the film, including the 'discovery' of Ann Darrow in the
Bowery, were based on actual events. According to one source, Cooper
told the scriptwriter, Ruth Schoedsack (his collaborator's wife): 'Put us in it
... Give it the spirit of a real Cooper-Schoedsack expedition. '6 Moreover,
Cooper and Schoedsack used the same secrecy and tantalising advertising
about King K‫ס‬ng the film that the fictional Denham uses to promote King
Kong, 'the eighth wonder of the world', and the creature also makes a
rather striking debut on the stage of a large Broadway theatre. In fact, one
of Cooper's publicity gambits involved placing large cannons at the
entrances to the theatres where King K‫ס‬ng was showing, with placards
reading 'this theater is armed to defy King Kong'. Possibly, then, Denham's
coup fulfils the imaginary desire of the Cooper-Schoedsack type of
moviemaker, and also the imaginary fear of the horror-movie audience:
instead of bringing back pictures, Denham brings back the real thing.

Plot one: Blackness captured

0n a more deeply historical level, we discem the first stage of what I
called earlier 'the political plot'. Let us rewrite the plot in the form of a
question: what happens when an entrepreneur engages on a 'venture' to
capture certain views of what he calls a 'lower' civilisation? Denham's
adventure resembles any one of a number of forays by Europeans to non-
European nations in search of animals, minerals, artefacts, photographs -
and even human beings. The moral of the tale might concern what happens
when 'savages' are brought back into 'civilisation' for profit. Recall that
although at the beginning of the film, Denham's explicit purpose is only to
take pictures, it is not long until he begins to think of taking things, and
soon after, he gets what he wants, as a merely natural continuation of visual
forms of capture. A sort of optu:al colonisation precedes and prepares for an
actual one. King Kong deverly distorts the metaphorical connection
between Denham's joumey and the European-American trade in African
slaves by setting the story in the Pacific, 'west of Sumatra', and yet
portraying the islanders not as Malays, but as 'Oceanic Negroids'. 7 As an
allegory of the slave trade, then, and of various other forms of exploitation
and despoil ment, Denham's journey might be expected to resemble what
we already
(‫)(כ‬ C‫ז‬itiail Q,‫ש‬rterly, vol. 33, no. 1

know about Eu.rope's encounters with traditional (and in this case,

African) peoples.
The ambitions of the Venture's crew and leader evoke ideals at the heart
of the West's economic success and psychological self-esteem. The ship, as
we leam in the first few minutes, is leaving with dangerous 'cargo'
(dynamite, guns, and bombs), and will likely return with tamed 'cargo' (in
the event, black cargo). This transaction is the very definition of 'trade', and
no less of the slave trade. Hence, Denham's expedition, eccentric on the
surface, is intimately linked (as in the establishing shots of New York har
bour) with the centres of world trade, and the very authority of American
commerce and enterprise. He has an inherent right to go to other cu.ltures
and interfere in their affairs, as long as his plans work out. He is just trying
to make an honest return on his backers' venture capital.
The assumption about the white male's 'other' - other races, women - is
that they will remain passive means to Denham's ends. The venturers
make a clear separation between 'lower cultures' and 'higher cultures',
and jump to the racist conclusion that the island's great wall could not
possibly have been built by 'the [black] people who live there'. Despite
their sense of separateness from the 'native' population, the Ventu‫ז‬e crew
enlists its aid when it is expedient (when, for example, Kong storms the
walls looking for Ann): 'Good work!', Captain Englehom shouts at the
blacks. Yet the arrogance of the crew towards these 'ethnics', then, is more
than just a reprehensible attitude. Historically (in slavery and colonialism)
as in this film, such attitudes culminate in the often successful attempt to
humble, humiliate, or even annihilate the victim. Recall Denham's words
just after Kong has succumbed to the gas grenades: 'He's always been the
king of his world, but we'll teach him fear.' Reading Kong as a captive,
Denham's pleasure in showing Kong off on a stage platform (in every
sense, an 'auction block') takes on a certain historical pungency.
Women, similarly to blacks, appear not as people or potential
partners, but as objects of others' stares, a sort of visual capital.
Remember that, despite Ann's early fears, Carl Denham's interest in her
is not even re motely sexual. In fact, his contempt for women in the film is
only matched by Jack Driscoll's. The non-sexual, homocentric impulses
of the leading men, left unchecked, will eventually destroy the fabric of
society as cer tainly as King Kong would destroy its exterior. Carl is
obsessed with money, is orally aggressive and visually avaricious (greedy
for things to see and photograph); Jack mistrusts women and desires
solitude or at best all-male companionship. Carl's interest in Ann is
purely economic, not personal - her blond hair, blue eyes, and fair skin
qualify her for his preconceived 'beauty and the beast' scenario. Soon,
one sees that the
 Spectatorship and capture in K‫ז‬ng Kong: the guilty look 61

misogyny of the males (Jack and Carl) threatens the continuance of a

potential white marital bond more surely than Kmg Kong's infatuation
with Ann.
The visual design of the film itself encourages a strict separation and
hierarchy of blacks and whites: the black 'natives' receive the kind of
cinematic m‫ו‬l‫ז‬king of 'jungle blacks' that we are familiar with, and which
films like King Kong and Tarzan the Ape Man (made the year before, in 1932)
helped to canonise. We already know what can be expected from the Skull
Islanders, as they are coded in advance for their later demise. Blacks'
function here is literally that of 'props' (denved from 'stage properties'):
figuratively owned by the whites' appropriating 'look'; soon to be literally
owned through various modes of exploitation. They are well 'directed' in
the film, and provide the 'jungle film' - ‫ סת‬less than the grass huts or the
wall or the palm trees - with its indISpensable and unchanging back
ground. The first marking is an auditory one: drums. Since the Venture's
crew arrives with the island in fog, they actually hear the island and its
blacks before they see it. King Kong's score (composed by Max Steiner) is a
virtual handbook for aural coding, managing to convey in Wagnerian-style
leitmotifs the semantics of particular scenes. Cooper was not exaggerating
when he claimed that as much as a quarter of the film's overall effective
ness came from Steiner's music. The creatures' horrific growlings and the
orchestral climaxes vie with each other i‫ ח‬trying to convey in sound the
extreme transgressions of normality on the screen. Stemer's coding of
blackness by 'the drum' founds (in the relatively youthful art of synchron
ized movie sound) a longstanding cinematic device - though 1t was seldom
used as subtly as it is here.
Later, we see the blacks in their ritual dance. For a 1933 screen audience,
black skin was a code for limited narrabve range. Blackness in such a
context could not but mean 'the primitive', 'the elemental', as well as 'the
marginal', the 'unproductive'. So the blackness of the South Pacific
islanders serves a senuotic function, introducing us, as it were, to the most
primitive human beings before we later encounter the most primitive flora
and fauna (foremost of these fauna, Kong himself!). The islanders'
facial paint, shields, spears, headdresses, and lack of clothing are physical
mark ings that restrict their potential for narrabve action: we suspect
that, like Kong, they are futureless: they will either disappear and perish
or be forced to serve or entertain those who have 'rescued' them.
The filmic marking of the islanders as small-scale surrogates for Kong -
whose mass seems to have absorbed the conglomerate blackness of his
worshippers - becomes even clearer when one notes that some of the
blacks in the ritual have made themselves up in Kong-like skins. In
Westem
 62 C‫ז‬itiall Qwz‫ז‬terly, vol. 33, no. 1

culture, the literary and historical tendency to identify blacks with ape--like
creatures is quite clear and has been well-documented. A willed misreading
of Linnaean classification and Darwinian evolution helped buttress an
older European conception (tracing from as early as the sixteenth century)
that blacks and apes, kindred denizens of the 'jungle', are phylogenetically
closer and sexually more compatible than blacks and whites: 'the Negro
ape connection served as sufficiently indirect means by which the white
man could express his dim awareness of the sexual animal within himself.'8
Merian Cooper's actual words to Fay Wray take on a new meaning against
this background. She asked him for some information about who her lead
ing man in his new project (Cooper was being, much like Carl Denham,
quite secretive) would be. Cooper could only promise her that she would
be playing opposite 'the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. '9
lndeed, in the film, Carl Denham's description of Kong as 'neither beast
nor man' might serve as a racist's description of the black person.
In light of the issues discussed above, one might read King Kong as a way
of dealing with the question: what is the worst that can happen now that
the monster-savage has come into civilisation? America, in the midst of the
Great Depression in the early thirties, was already undergoing profound
traumas, and several have suggested that King Kong's rampage through
the streets of Manhattan 'served to release the pent-up anger and frus
tration and fear of the millions who had been pitched headlong into the
Great Depression ... a rampaging gorilla ... scales [the] bastion of
capitalism, the Empire State Building' .10 There were racial, as well as
economic tensions in the North, however. Black migration from the South
to the North doubled between 1920 and 1930 as compared to the previous
decade. The race riots of the early twenties (many of them in the North)
still hovered in the collective memory, their recurrence an ever-present
possibility. In divergent but equally insistent ways, the Harlem renaissance
and the first Scottsboro trial (1931) kept the unsolved question of race at the
forefront of white attention, even as whites often attempted to ignore the
presence of the black. So for audiences in 1933, and presumably ever since,
the image of an amorous black ape running amock in New York City with
a white woman he has abducted must indeed have addressed on some
profound level the question of how to deal with the 'cargo' that the twin
imperatives of trade and greed have caused to be imported from the non
Westem world.

Plot two: Endangered women

A second and related political plot involves the use of the figure of the
 Spectatorship and capture i‫ ת‬King Kong: the guilty look 63

woman as a justification for various kinds of subterfuge and violence. As

we have seen, King Kong diverges from typical adventure plots both by
including a woman on the voyage and by bringing the monster back. Both
variations allow related ideological propositions to be advanced. Ann
Darrow ('the girl') has more i‫ ת‬common with King Kong than it seems at
first. If Kong is objectified blackness ('beastliness' i‫ ת‬the white aesthetic),
then the girl is objectified beauty- both are 'freed' from a lowly state, but
must then 'serve' Denham's design. They only exist to satisfy the male
viewer's active and erotic look. Denham's wish to see what 'no white man
has ever seen' testifies to a pecuiiar sort of cross-racial voyeurism, osten
sibly shared by the spectator he serves, particularly given the way in which
he plans to excite the black ape by teasing his appetites with the 'bait' of
the girl (the film's German title of the film, King Kong und die Weisse F‫ז‬au,
'King Kong and the White Woman', conveys what is at stake with greater
explidtness than the English). Just as Kong and the natives are coded for
their blackness ('primitiveness', 'earthiness'), the woman is 'coded for
strong visual impact so that [she] can be said to connote t be-looked-Qt
ness' .11 For Denham, the value of the beast and the girl lies only i‫ ת‬their
juxtaposition, a combination based upon pre-existing sexual and visual
conventions in Westem iconography - a positioning that for most of the
film. threatens to destroy the girl, and that does (as the opening titles
already reveal) finally annihilate Kong.
But the coding of Ann's body goes even further. She is not just 'beauty',
but also 'endangered beauty'. Freud might locate a certain sado
masochistic nucleus i‫ ת‬Denham's desire to see the 'girl' molested or at least
scared out of her wits by a black ape representing remorseless phallic
potency. But these drives are not confined to Denham's case: instances of
the endangered woman pervade the history of Hollywood film.. ln Birth of a
Nation and i‫ ת‬countless other films, the agents threatening the woman are
often, if not always black, then coded as representatives of darkness. If the
covert result of endangered beauty is to furnish the spectator with a certain
illidt titillation, the overt result, as here, is to elidt the attention - and
usually, the violent retribution - of the white male. lt is only a violent
abduction of the girl by two blacks (small-scale surrogates for Kong, who
abducts her himself later) can shock Jack out of his male-centred fancies
and into an active concem for the heterosexual bond.
The girl has several other functions on this particular voyage. As we
have seen, the film uses her as the centre of erotic energy, thereby
diverting both visual and intellectual attention from the purposes of
Denham's trip. For the audience at least, she offers a secondary
rationalisation for Denham's theft of Kong. The reasoning would be: the
blacks (and Iater,
64 C‫ח‬tiClll Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1

Kong) have stolen the girl, and therefore Denham is justified in stealing
Kong (and anything else he wants to take) in retum. True to form, Denham
does not even use this Justification, because he sees the removal of Kong
not as theft, but as a good business proposition. In any case, the
viewer's attention focuses on the danger that the girl seems to be in,
while over lookmg the actual dangers to which Kong (blacks) are being
exposed. As opposed to the graphic display of the blacks' acts of theft,
the film's discourse completely 1gnores the 'removal' of Kong to New
York. The film leaves out, as it were, the entire slave trade, the voyage,
and the 200 years of slavery in the New World. It goes straight from the
African 'discovery' to the American 'insurrection'.
The silencing of the plots sketched out above takes place on the level of
filmic dieges1s. One simply refuses to notice these concems, swept along
by the techniques of smooth closure and suture at wh1ch film practice had,
by 1933, become very adept.12

Plot transformations: Spreading the guilt

1 would like to outline three ways in which the political plots are trans
formed, and suggest why these transformations are so effective. The first
transformation, as we have seen, subsumes all sense of political reality
beneath the 'love plot'. The second engages the spectator in a series of
fantasised visual exchanges which loosen the initially heavily coded
oppositions of black/white, female/male, savage/civilised, beast/human.
This temporary suspension of racial and sexual fixity only makes them
seem even more necessary once the viewer retums to more ordinary reality.
The third transformation makes the narrative of Denham's conquests into
a story about seeing, and thereby draws us into a necessary complicity with
its imperatives.
The rhetorical problem of the monster-film is to elicit the spectator's guilty
participation in a number of normally repressed fantas‫ז‬es, and to project
the viewer's sense of guilt onto the othemess that the monster represents.
The manipulation of the spectator occurs through the usage of the coding
measures outlined above, but at key moments, film also manipulates point
of view as a way of suggestmg identifications that will have an ideological
effect later. Part of the pleasure of the cinema, after all, is the sense it gives
us of spatial ubiquity and authority (a sense that Lacan, at least, would
term 'imaginary'). At times, as in a novel, the spectator is placed in the film
by an omniscient point of view, at times by a character, at times by both,
and at times steps completely out of the filmic point of view (the spectator
 Spectatorship and capture in King Kong: the guilty look 65

then realises he or she is in a theatre, watching a film. The spectator's place

'is a construction of the text which is ultimately the product of the
narrator's disposition towards the tale'. 13 It is not true that we identify only
with those in a film whose race or sex we share. Rather, the filmic space is
subversive in allowing an almost polymorphically perverse oscillation
between possible roles, creating a radically broadened freedom of identi f
‫ג‬.cation. But this freedom only increases the guilt that comes from looking
at that which should remain hidden.
For the white male viewer, the forceful and successful Carl Denham and
perhaps even the 'love interest' Jack Driscoll are obvious locations of
identification. Black male viewers might identify in an al1enated way with
Denham's authority, experiencing the1‫ ז‬identif‫ג‬.cation with his authonty
almost as a compensation for their submission in real life to similar auth
orities. Women viewers might not find Ann as 'ideal' a 'model' as Denham
does. Her sniffling timidity and incessant screaming grate on one's sensi
bilities, yet they are only extreme versions of behavioural codes that here
and elsewhere connote female weakness. The weakness of the female, as
we have seen, provides the chance for males to test and confirm the range
of their strength
Ann's terror, if not her reactions to her terror, is believable enough.
Through her, white male and female viewers experience fear and passivity
vicariously, although for a black spectator, her position - being terrorised
by blackness - could only be shared with the greatest psychic conflict.
If Robin Wood's paradigm is correct, then King Kong would allow the
white male to vent a variety of repressed sexual fantas1es: the hidden
desire of seemg himself as an omnipotent, phallic black male; the desire to
abduct the white woman; or the combined fantasy: to abduct a white
woman in the disguise of a phallic black male. Barthes suggests that
bourgeois society's in1tial response to othemess is either to ignore it, to
deny it, or to assimilate its privileges and trappings, albeit at a safe
distance.14 But that assimilation of othemess, particularly if it releases
repressed desires, is brief, and comes at the cost of increased guilt, a guilt
that is often dis charged in the oppression of the other. Kong's ultimate
pumshment (public execution by firing squad) seems an expression of this
dynamic. The ending, then, would have different effects on different
viewers. A white male viewer might sense in Kong's death a cleansing of
his previous identification with the beast. A black viewer might not only
reject the price Kong pays for his own 'guilt', but also would wonder why
there is no price to be paid by Kong's exploiters.
As we have seen, there is a tenderness about the ape, which would
imply that it has absorbed all aspects of othemess: not only the black male,
66 Critiau Q‫ז‬,‫ש‬terly, vol. 33, no. 1

but also the female. The black spectator, while free to assume any position
in the film, would need to contain temporarily a wrenching ambivalence
about its white-centred discourse - one that connects exclusionary or
debasing signifieds to the black's chief signifier of skin colour - since it is
from this discourse that the narrative pleasures of the film derive. ldentify
ing with Kong would bring similar pleasures to black audiences as to white
viewers, but it would be less easy for a black viewer, in most cases, to
shrug off Kong's demise and death and to replace it with the image of the
happily unified white couple.
The camera's visual rhetoric facilitates an almost promiscuous violation
of socia1 roles and limits: monster/human; woman/male; savage/civilised;
black/white. By various exchanges of glances, looks, and camera angles, a
space of mixed identity soon arises, exchanging and connecting our (here,
the camera's) 'look' with the viewpoints of normally discrete subjects. For
example, the film tends to pose threats to the girl from the left-hand side of
the frame, with the girl on the right. And the film's (as well as the publicity
posters') basic black-white confrontations involve blackness threatening
whites from the left: the first landing; Ann's kidnapping from the boat;
King Kong's first approach to her on the sacrificial altar. Yet during the
screen test on the boat, whites threaten Ann in the same way: Denham, on
the left, photographs Ann, on the right. The series of shots that follows
(close-up of Denham; Ann sends a mock scream in the direction of
Denham's camera, and us) exactly anticipates the sequence that occurs
when Kong later approaches her (close-up of Kong; Ann sends a real
scream in Kong's direction). Rather than providing us in both cases with a
distanced spectatorial set-up, the camera shuttles us between subjective
points of view, even those of the monster: Denham's, and Kong's. The
ubiquitous camera has no scruples, it seems, about class, race, or even
species: the need t‫ ס‬see is more important, as the film progresses, than the
need to separate or the need to repress.
There is one telling exception to this rule: the camera never assumes the
subjective point of view of the blacks on the island (although a 'third
person' view reports certain events that the white crew cannot have wit
nessed). Given their absurd behaviour and witless manner, identification
with them would require an emotional generosity that most white spec
tators simply could not muster (perhaps a few black spectators would be
able to separate the actual black actors from the degraded roles they
assume).
Perhaps the most difficult transformation to resist is our gradual
impli cation in Denham's optical colonialism. Even a viewer repulsed
by Denham's many negative qualities would have difficulty escaping the
pull
 Spectatorship and capture in King I<ong: the guilty look 67

of his powerful voyeurism, or the way i‫ ת‬which his obsessive need to look
at spectacles - to see thi‫ת‬gs immobilised on stage or on screen - imposes
upon its objects not a neutral mechanical process, but a deleterious form of
framing. The 'capture', applicable to photography as well as the hunt, well
expresses the dual aspect of frami‫ת‬g othemess. The political ideology
of the film soon becomes i‫ת‬extricable from the pleasure we take i‫ ת‬the
very act of seei‫ת‬g. The power of stagi‫ת‬g a 'show' (watchi‫ת‬g a 'girl'
scream or 'natives' danci‫ת‬g) is no longer Denham's alone. King Kong,
by a rather devious movement, makes us cheer him on. Indeed,
Denham frequently justifies his most ruthless wants by calling them
ours: 'the public, bless 'em, must have a pretty face to look at . . .'
The ideology that the public represents would only be able to use blacks
and women as somethi‫ת‬g si‫ת‬gi‫ת‬g, danci‫ת‬g, or otherwise 'to be looked at'.
We never question Denham's right to 'pick up' the girl, or to i‫ת‬terrupt and
photograph the island rite, or to abduct Kong, because it is precisely the act
of photographi‫ת‬g that defines his (and our) feeling of mastery over what
we see. And only through photography have we been able to satisfy our
own 'need-to-see'. Yet it becomes clear that for Denham, the li‫ת‬e between
importi‫ת‬g a 'show' and importi‫ת‬g a 'captive' has blurred. Recall that he i
‫ת‬troduces Kong to the New York audience as 'merely a captive, a show,
to gratify your curiosity'. His usage of the same word, 'show', for his first
sight of the blacks' ritual recalls the slavery plot agai‫ת‬: 'Holy mackrel, what
a show!' Black captivity is not far away.
Denham not only transform.s the political plot i‫ת‬to a plot of seeing, but
he also continually changes his own definition of what seei‫ת‬g entails.
At the beginni‫ת‬g, he claims that he only needs a picture of 'beauty', but in
fact he does not photograph Ann but takes her (as he later takes Kong) i‫ת‬to
his physical possession. In a sense he has already reached his stated goal at
the start of the plot: he can have both the picture of 'beauty' and the real thi
‫ת‬g (Ann) herself without even leavi‫ת‬g New York. But what he really
wants (although he does not say this) is the girl's meaning as an
ideological code. His picture must show her in danger, thus eliciting a
display of 'manly' protectiveness and supporti‫ת‬g the connection between
'female weakness' and 'male strength'. So Denham needs a photograph of
the girl bei‫ת‬g threatened by Ki‫ת‬g Kong. In this sense, Kong is both a part
of his goal and a potential pitfall for his design.
In the event, Kong not only threatens Ann, but abducts her as well,
seemi‫ת‬g to undermine the quest for the perfect film, but i‫ ת‬fact hasteni‫ת‬g
its production. For Kong's actual abduction of the girl i‫ת‬cites the male
response better than a mere picture could. lt also brings the threat itself
i‫ת‬to Denham's physical possession: now he has not only got his pictures,
68 C‫ז‬itical QUllrte‫ז‬ly, vol. 33, no. 1

but he has at least two subjects - the girl and Kong - that others will pay to
see and photograph, especially as a pair. Denham's obsession with seeing
licenses unlimited ventures, but it can never be satiated, particularly in its
specific form as the wish to see (and later possess) what 'no white man has
ever seen'.
The momentum of the plot transforms the viewer's question 'what will
Carl Denham's venture exploit or destroy next?' into the question 'what
will I see next?', a question that seems more hannless than the first one
until one considers the close linkage between seeing, capturing, and killing
that Denham's actions and the film establish. The photographers that
Denham invites to Kong's 'showing' threaten to restart the 'seeing
capturing' cycle, and so it is no accident that at this point Kong intervenes
to stop the vic1ous visual cycles.
'An ethnographic film may be regarded as any film which seeks to reveal
one society to another,' but King Kong, however unflatteringly, is an ethno
graphic film that reveals one society to itself, or perhaps more exactly,
reveals to its spectators the diversity and ambivalence of spectatorship. 15
King Kong teaches us that the viewer's need for spectacle and vicarious
enjoyment may issue from deeper needs that many people are willing to
pay, steal, and even kill in order to satisfy. Denham, although hisobsession
is particular, would stage public fantasies about generally repressed sexual,
political, and historical violations. Hence, King Kong dies for everyone's
sins, not JUst for Denham's. The general guilt inheres in the general gaze.

* @ George Snead

Notes
1 See Claude Levi-Strauss, 'The Structural Study of Myth', in Structural
Anthropology (New York: Anchor, 1967), pp. 202-28.
2 See Robin Wood, 'An lntroduction to the Amencan Horror Film', from The
Amencan Nightmare. Essays on the Horro‫ ז‬F1lm (Toronto: Festival of Festivals,
1979).
3 See, for instance, the argument of Calvin C Hemton's Sex and Raasm ‫ו‬n
Amenai (New York: Grove Press, 1966) or Joel Kovel's White Raasm: A Psycho
h‫ו‬sto‫ז‬y (New York: Random House, 1971), or the chapter enbtled 'First
Impressions: Initial English Confrontation with Africans', in Wmthrop D.
Jordan's White over Blllck: Ame‫ח‬ain Attrtudes TOWtl‫ז‬ds the Negro, 1550-1812
(New York: Norton, 1968).
4 Editors of Olhie‫ז‬s Du C1nema, 'John Ford's Young M‫ז‬. Lincoln', in Movres and
Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: Umversity of California Press, 1976),
p. 496.
 Spectatorship and capture in K1ng Kong: the guilty look 69

5 See David MacDougall's art‫ג‬cle, 'Beyond Observabonal Cmema', m Pnnc‫ז‬pks

of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hock1ngs (The Hague· Mouton, 1975)
6 Orville Goldner and George E Turner, The Mak‫ו‬ng of K‫ו‬ng Kong The Story
Beh‫ו‬nd a F‫ו‬lm Class‫ו‬c (New York· A. S Bames, 1975), p 78.
7 Goldner and Turner, p. 38
8 Jordan, p. 491.
9 Goldner and Turner, p. 68.
10 Robert Walker, 'King Kong (1933)', C1nema Te‫גע‬s: Program Notes, vol. 7, no. 7
(12 September 1974), p. 2.
11 Laura Mulvey, 'VISual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema', Screen 16, no. 3
(Autum1975 ‫)ת‬.
12 Daniel Dayan, 'The Tutor-Code of Class1cal Cinema', in Nichols, Mov‫ו‬es and
Methods, pp. 449-51.
13 N‫ג‬ck Browne, 'The Spectator-m-the-Text: The Rhetonc of Stagecoach', F‫ו‬lm
Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Winter 1975-6).
14 Roland Barthes, Mytholog‫ו‬es, trans. Annette Lavers (New York Hill and
Wang, 1972), pp. 151-2.
15 David MacDougall, 'Prospects of the Ethnograpluc Film', Film Qu‫וו‬rterly,
vol. 23, no. 2 (Wmter 1969-70).
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