JAMES SNEAD

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 consciousness. 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 transformation into a fictitious narrative.’ 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 nature of
social norms surrounding masculinity and feminity); and (3) ’female
sexualitylcreativity’. A too strictly practised internal repression may end in
external oppression - a generalised hostility directed against a societal
‘other’, especially the ’other’ as women or non-Western peoples.2 Especially
-
in a movie such as King Kong (1933), which stretches all boundaries tern-
poral, spatial, and natural - we must spec+ in Wood‘s paradigm areas of
racial fear and taboo that certain American myths, both in literature and in
film, attempt to manage and transform. Surplus repression is primarily
sexual, to be sure, but we must remember that the oppression it spawns is
largely political. Indeed, it has been variously argued that some whites
oppress blacks on the outside in order to repress elements of ‘blackness’
inside.3 In 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 so powerfully into the social plane of white normality. Blackness
in motion is typically sensed as a threat on screen, and so black movement
in film is usually restricted to highly bracketed and containable activities,
54 Critical 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 Mr. Lincoln’, the editors of Cuhiers
Du Cinema say that films often contain ‘constituent lacks’ or ’structuring 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 will 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 RKO at least temporarily survive bankruptcy. In King Kong’s
wake, the directorlproducer team of Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C.
Cooper made two sequels, Son of Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe 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 full 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 Ishmael) return from the encounter with the whale. Another variation
is the presence of Ann Darrow (her name almost certainly alludes to
Clarence Darrow, defence lawyer in the 1925 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 full 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 Quarterly, 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. In their first encounter, he
slaps her accidentally. He apologises to her, but insists that she does not
belong on such 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 civilization 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 . . .
I tell you there’s something on that island that no white man has ever seen
. . . if it’s there, you bet I’ll 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 on the island, and sees the wall: . . it might almost be
I.

Egyptian . . . Who do you suppose could have built it?‘ Denham exclaims:
‘What a chance! What a picture!’ Soon, they see a group of blacks dancing
in a rite that seems to centre on a young girl with garlands around her
neck. Denham shouts out: ‘Holy mackrel! What a show!’ Ann shouts,
‘I want to see,’ and pushes forward from the protective men around her.
Denham says, ‘If I could only get a picture of that before they see us . . .‘
Soon the Chief (Noble Johnson) stops the dancing. The witchdoctor (Steve
Clemento) 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 sacrificial 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: ’I’m scared for
you’ - Jack says - ’I sort of guess I‘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 ramparts 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 Kong: 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 him 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 him 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 him more than chains. He’s
always been king of his world, but we’ll teach him 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: ’I’m going 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 g r a t e 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 stirs, 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 him 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 him 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.’

Supplying 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 Critical Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1

atop the Empire State Building, and has achieved no small degree of fame
in the process. Similarly, 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 on the ground, his epitaph given glibly by
the very person who has trapped him. Kong’s plot has the least happy
ending of all. As can be seen in Birth ofa Nation, a desired political end (the
erasure of the blacklsavage from whitelcivilised 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 alternative 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’?
On 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 pictures 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 Chang, 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 Kong, although their first idea was - incredibly - to make
the film in Africa without the use of any special photography. Many
incidents in the film, inchding 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 Kong 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 Kong 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

On a more deeply historical level, we discern 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 optical colonisation precedes and prepares for an
actual one. King Kong cleverly distorts the metaphorical connection between
Denham’s journey 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 N e g r ~ i d s ’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
60 Critical Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 1

know about Europe’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 learn 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 cultures
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 Venture crew
enlists its aid when it is expedient (when, for example, Kong storms the
walls looking for Ann): ’Good work!’, Captain Englehorn 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 quallfy her for his
preconceived ’beauty and the beast’ scenario. Soon, one sees that the
 Spectatorship and capture in King Kong: the guilty look 61

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

potential white marital bond more surely than King 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 marking of ’jungle blacks’ that we are familiar with, and which
films like King Kong and T a m n 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’ (derived 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’ - no less 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 in trying to convey in sound the
extreme transgressions of normality on the screen. Steiner’s coding of
blackness by ‘the drum’ founds (in the relatively youthful art of synchron-
ized movie sound) a longstanding cinematic device - though it 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 narrative 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 semiotic 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 narrative 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 Western
62 Critical Quarterly, 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.’*
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 H o l l y w ~ o d . ’ ~
Indeed, 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’.’O 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-
Western world.

Plot two: Endangered women

A second and related political plot involves the use of the figure of the
 Spectatorship and capture in King 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 in common with King Kong than it seems at
first. If Kong is objectified blackness (’beastliness’ in the 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 peculiar 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 Frau,
‘King Kong and the White Woman’, conveys what is at stake with greater
explicitness 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 to-be-looked-at-
ness’.ll For Denham, the value of the beast and the girl lies only in their
juxtaposition, a combination based upon pre-existing sexual and visual
conventions in Western 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 in Denham’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. In Birth ofa
Nation and in countless 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
illicit titillation, the overt result, as here, is to elicit the attention - and
usually, the violent retribution - of the white male. It 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 concern 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 later,
64 Critical 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 return. 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-
looking 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 ignores 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 diegesis. One simply refuses to notice these concerns, swept along
by the techniques of smooth closure and suture at which film practice had,
by 1933, become very adept.I2

Plot transformations: Spreading the guilt

I 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 blacklwhite, femalelmale, savagelcivilised, beastlhuman.
This temporary suspension of racial and sexual fixity only makes them
seem even more necessary once the viewer returns 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 fantasies, and to project
the viewer’s sense of guilt onto the otherness 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 suggesting 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’.13It 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-
fication. 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 identlfy in an alienated way with
Denham’s authority, experiencing their identification with his authority
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 fantasies: the hidden desire
of seeing 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 initial response to otherness is either to ignore it, to deny it, or to
assimilate its privileges and trappings, albeit at a safe distance.l4 But that
assimilation of otherness, 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 punishment
(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 otherness: not only the black male,
66 Critical Quarterly, 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. Identify-
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 social roles and limits: monsterlhuman; womanlmale; savagelcivilised;
blacklwhite. 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 to see 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 Kong: the guilty look 67

of his powerful voyeurism, or the way in which his obsessive need to look
at spectacles - to see things 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 framing otherness. The political ideology of
the film soon becomes inextricable from the pleasure we take in the very
act of seeing. The power of staging a ‘show‘ (watching a ‘girl’ scream or
‘natives’ dancing) 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 something singing, dancing, or otherwise ’to be looked at’.
We never question Denham’s right to ‘pick up’ the girl, or to interrupt and
photograph the island rite, or to abduct Kong, because it is precisely the act
of photographing 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 line between
importing a ’show’ and importing a ’captive’ has blurred. Recall that he
introduces 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 again: ’Holy mackrel, what
a show!’ Black captivity is not far away.
Denham not only transforms the political plot into a plot of seeing, but
he also continually changes his own definition of what seeing entails. At
the beginning, 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) into 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 thing
(Ann) herself without even leaving 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 supporting the connection between ’female weakness’
and ’male strength’. So Denham needs a photograph of the girl being
threatened by King 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,
seeming to undermine the quest for the perfect film, but in fact hastening
its production. For Kong’s actual abduction of the girl incites the male
response better than a mere picture could. It also brings the threat itself
into Denham‘s physical possession: now he has not only got his pictures,
68 Critical Quarterly, 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 harmless 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 vicious 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 s p e ~ t a t o r s h i p . ~ ~
King Kang 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 his obsession
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.

* 0 George Snead

Notes
See Claude Levi-Strauss, ’The Structural Study of Myth‘, in Structural
Anthropology (New York: Anchor, 1967), pp. 202-28.
See Robin Wood, ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film’, from The
American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film (Toronto: Festival of Festivals,
1979).
See, for instance, the argument of Calvin C. Hernton’s Sex and Racism in
America (New York: Grove Press, 1966) or Joel Kovel’s White Racism: A Psycho-
history (New York: Random House, 1971), or the chapter entitled ’First
Impressions: Initial English Confrontation with Africans’, in Winthrop D.
Jordan‘s White over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1812
(New York: Norton, 1968).
Editors of Cahiers Du Cinema, ‘John Ford‘s Young MY. Lincoln‘, in Movies and
Methods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 19761,
p. 496.
 Spectatorship a n d capture in King Kong: the guilty look 69

5 See David MacDougall’s article, ‘Beyond Observational Cinema’, in Principles

of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings (The Hague: Mouton, 1975).
6 Orville Goldner and George E. Turner, The Making of King Kong: The Story
Behind a Film Classic (New York: A. S. Barnes, 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)’, Cinema Texas: Program Notes, vol. 7, no. 7
(12 September 1974), p. 2.
11 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16, no. 3
(Autumn 1975).
12 Daniel Dayan, ’The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema’, in Nichols, Movies and
Methods, pp. 449-51.
13 Nick Browne, ’The Spectator-in-the-Text: The Rhetoric of Stagecoach ‘, Film
Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Winter 1975-6).
14 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1972), pp. 151-2.
15 David MacDougall, ’Prospects of the Ethnographic Film’, Film Quarterly,
vol. 23, no. 2 (Winter 1969-70).