King Kong: Original Myths and Digital Imagery
Almost from the moment of its invention, the “realism” of photography was violated by its most talented practitioners. Gustav Le Grey created spectacular seascapes by combining the top half of one photograph (the sky) with the bottom half of another (the sea). Since the two exposures were joined at the horizon, the viewer may not realize that she is viewing a composite image. Photographers such as Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Gustav Rejlander used multiple negatives to create compositions which mimicked the conventions of Victorian painting. For his historical-moralistic panorama The Two Ways of Life (1875) Rejlander used 32 wet collodion negatives—an impressive, laborious feat that anticipates the methods of digital image-making by more than a century.
As with photography, the manipulation and fabrication of the cinematic image to create a more compelling illusion of reality—or pure fantasy--began early. In 1895 W.K.L Dickson, who developed the kinteograph with Thomas Edison, used double exposures (running a piece of film through the camera twice while altering the composition of each pass) to make himself appear headless, two-headed, and make his bodyless head appear to rest on a plate.
Georges Melies placed actors before painted backdrops in A Trip to the Moon (1902). Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) used a matte effect to add a moving background to the static set of a boxcar’s interior. King Kong (1933) used stop-motion animation to make miniature apes and dinosaurs move, and—much like Le Grey—combined different shots (tiny humans in the foreground, Kong in the background)—to make the miniature ape appear to tower menacingly over real humans. In Citizen Kane director Orson Welles and cinematographer Greg Toland used double exposures (the lens focused on a different plane of action during each pass), wipes, and other techniques to create shots which for decades viewers have taken to be single-take, deep focus shots, just as Le Grey’s seascapes can still fool us.
Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong updates this tradition of image manipulation with the use of CGI (computer-generated imagery). Now, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is photographed against a green screen instead of a rear projection screen. King Kong is digitally animated pixels instead of a hand-animated metal armature covered in fur. The compositing of separate image elements is now accomplished on a computer rather than within the camera or with an optical printer. Whereas earlier films started as raw film stock in a camera, became workprint in a moviola, and finished as a release print in a projector, in Kong all audio and video elements are loaded into digital editing programs and the final digital version of the film is transferred to film for theater projection.
At the level of form and content, however, not much has changed since 1933. The 2005 King Kong strives to provide the same elements as the original film: wonder, suspense, horror, romance, spectacle, tragedy. It strives no less to attract a ticket-buying audience and realize a profit for the producers. Although the technology has changed, the elements of so-called Classical Hollywood Cinema (the star system, continuity editing, psychological realism, narrative closure) have not.
Indeed, the typical product of Millennial Hollywood, of which Jackson’s King Kong is an example, is an old-fashioned film tricked out with the newest sound and picture technology. Films such as Jurassic Park (1993), Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997), Godzilla (1998), Gladiator (2000), Pearl Harbor (2001), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), Troy (2004), Van Helsing (2004) and War of the Worlds (2005) are digital remakes of older films and/or revivals of classic genres. They are technologically innovative but stylistically and thematically conservative and traditional. But beyond this generic familiarity, is something essential about the moving image lost when digital media supplements or replaces film?
Today many film scholars and critics are complaining that cinema is drifting too far from its photographic roots—from it’s cinematic roots as well. Some critics fear that fin-de-siecle cinema would a fin du cinema. A 2001 collection of essays was entitled The End of Cinema as We Know It.
Although discussing a very different group of films, in 1983 Baudrillard described the type of cinema critics are complaining about today:
“A whole generation of films is appearing which will be to those we have known what the android is to man: marvelous, flawless artifacts, dazzling simulacra which lack only an imaginary and that particular hallucination which makes cinema what it is.”
One critic offered King Kong as part of this “end of cinema” thesis. In a mixed review of the film, Scott Foundas complained that, “…there were too many moments during King Kong when I felt I was witnessing the end of cinema, the final obfuscation between movies made by men and those made by machines.”
Wheeler Winston Dixon complains that the synthetic images of blockbusters like Titanic (1997) and The Matrix (1999) prove that the Lumieres’ tradition of realism has lost out to Melies’ tradition of spectacle”
“Mundanely perfect, these computer-engineered images conjure up the mechanical perfection of Maxfield Parrish illustrations, while simultaneously banishing the real to a phantom zone of nonexistence. And yet, as one eye-popping scene of spectacle and destruction after another fills the screen…audiences are bored, unsatisfied…The veracity of the moving image has been hopelessly compromised; the demarcation line between the real and the engineered (both aurally and visually) has been obliterated. All is construction and fabulation. All is predetermined; nothing natural remains.”
The success of the digital image—or any other new media--can attributed to the process Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “remediation”: the adoption of the conventions of an old medium by a new one. Robinson and Rejlander “remediated” the older conventions of painting in the new art of photography. Today, CGI hides its artificiality by adopting the familiar and acceptable pictorial conventions of the photograph:
“To achieve photorealism, the synthetic digital image adopts the criteria of the photograph. It offers a single station point, a monocular point of view, and a photographic sense of appropriate composition…The photograph erases the human subject through the mechanics and chemistry of lens, shutter, and film. Digital graphics erases the subject algorithmically through the mathematics of perspective and shading embodied in a program.”
Remediation resembles Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” Likewise, the “content” of CGI is, in part, film.
John David Ebert, however, complains that CGI remediation of painting is not thorough enough. According to him, the problem with current CGI is that it ignores older pictorial conventions such as sfumato; the use of haze to indicate distance:
“With CGI-painted images…as they stand now, there is no such distinction between foreground and background, for the two are in exactly the same focus and show no differences of color perspective. The shots, consequently, look nowhere near as realistic as they are touted to be, but instead have caused film to look more and more like video games.”
For Ebert, digital films are unintentionally remediating the wrong media: video games instead of painting. He suggests that, “ visual technonerds should be required to take courses in art history.”
Digital technology can also effect the overall balance of elements of a film. Robert Kolker observes that the computer, because it more readily enables the creation of imaginary worlds, is
“…allowing filmmakers a wider scope of expression or, on the negative side, an opportunity to allow all creativity to flow to the design, while narrative and editing remain as banal as usual.”
Jackson’s King Kong realizes both the negative and positive opportunities of digital filmmaking. Jackson and his team can create a vaster and more fantastic Skull Island, and a more fluid and expressive Kong than the 1933 or 1976 versions of the film. But the film’s characterizations are familiar and the dialogue scenes are constructed out of conventional medium and close shots.
King Kong is technologically more complex but aesthetically simpler than Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994). The complex shifts in time and point of view, the stark contrast of youthful innocence and homicidal impulse, the troubling identification with murderers, and the charged, expressionistic performances of that film have no equivalent in King Kong—except perhaps the performance of Kong (created by actor Andy Sirkis). To a large extent Jackson has indeed allowed creativity to flow to the digital design of the film and has allowed narrative and editing to become banal.
Consequently, a digital ape is more expressive than any of the flesh-and-blood humans. Kong’s digital fur is more believable than Watt’s blonde wig. During the final battle atop the Empire State Building one can easily be distracted by the amazing digital recreation of 1933 Manhattan, your eye drifting from the foreground action (whose outcome you know) to the background.
Baudrillard was as critical of the content of movies as the form:
“Cinema plagiarizes and copies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes silent films more perfectly than the originals, etc…”
Baudrillard could be describing King Kong. But he gives filmmakers too little credit. Like many contemporary films, Kong is aware of its history. In the postmodern fashion it is nostalgic and self-conscious at the same time. Just as George Lucas packed Star Wars (1977) with allusions to the classic films that have influenced him, Jackson doesn’t allow us to forget the original King Kong. Jackson’s film begins with Art Deco titles which resemble the titles of a 1930s RKO film (just as Star Wars begins with a text crawl which recalls the serials of the 1930s). The original Kong’s score is performed in the musical spectacle that accompanies Kong’s theatrical appearance.
The story and imagery of Jackson’s King Kong retroactivates cinema’s original myth that the cinematographer-explorer-scientist will bring images of raw nature to civilized society. In 1895 W.K.L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson (who worked for Thomas Edison) wrote one of the earliest histories of cinema and enthusiastically described the micro-cinematic observation of tiny insects, “Monsters close upon each other in a blind and indiscriminate attack, limbs are dismembered, gory globules are tapped, whole battalions disappear from view.” This sounds like the scenes of creature combat in King Kong and an earlier digital effects film, Starship Troopers (1998).
Baudrillard goes further and argues that movies tendency towards self-consciousness, nostalgia, and retro-styling is another instance of a postmodern loss of reality:
“Simultaneous with this attempt at absolute coincidence with the real, cinema also approaches coincidence with itself... Cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object just as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a referential in perdition.” (italics in original).
Today, cinema does seem fascinated with its own processes. Formal self-consciousness (what Bolter and Grusin call “hypermediacy”) has become a standard element of illusionistic Hollywood films. Blow Out (1981), Broadcast News (1987), Ed Wood (1994), Quiz Show (1994), Topsy-Turvy (1999), The Majestic (2001), The Aviator (2004), Ray (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Being Julia (2004), Capote (2005) and Walk the Line (2005) include behind-the-scenes stories of movie, television, literary, theatrical, and musical productions.
There is even a subgenre of “lost object” films about the creation of spectacle using quaintly archaic technologies. In Chaplin (1992) silent movies are edited by hand measurement of film. Boogie Nights (1997) laments the transition of the adult film industry from film production to videotape production. In Almost Famous (2000) a magazine editor marvels at a primitive fax machine which is laughably slow by contemporary standards. In Good Night and Good Luck (2005) producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) cues broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) not via earpiece—headsets were too bulky for on-camera talent to wear—but by tapping him on the leg with a pen.
Self-reflexivity has always been an element of King Kong. The plot of Kong Kong is set in motion by the desire to make a movie. Kong is the spectacle that draws customers to a New York theater and ourselves to our local theater. Jackson’s King Kong is the most media-centric of the three versions. Much more time is devoted to the travails of producers, writers, and performers. The opening montage suggests the importance of entertainment to Depression-era New York City. The police shut down street crime and shut down bankrupt theaters. Denham’s (Jack Black) exertions as a scheming producer are almost as shocking as Kong’s rampages. Denham has a loyal, risk-taking cameraman in this version. Ann “tames” Kong with the same performing skills she used to beguile vaudeville audiences. We see Denham’s dream of a cinematic coup dissolve when a roll of film depicting the dinosaur stampede is accidentally ruined. The film also dwells on the strategic dishonesty of the film business when Denham’s lead actor (initially) proves to be a coward and is later publicly, falsely credited for rescuing Ann.
For Carina Chocano King Kong is “A movie about the movies, and specifically an exploitation picture about exploitation pictures…a bazillion-dollar spectacle that reserves the right to question the morality of spectacles…Kong is the last gasp of the great, natural world, reduced to consumerist spectacle.”
Read differently, King Kong is about how a recording of reality may be better than reality itself. When Denham’s footage is ruined, capturing Kong alive and bringing him before paying customers is the only way Denham can make money. Instead of images of Kong, he presents an audience with the real Kong. Images can be controlled. Animals cannot. Hence the death and destruction that follows. Rather than a “last gasp of the great, natural world, reduced to consumerist spectacle,” Kong proves that the natural world is reluctant to be reduced to spectacle. Kong would rather die than submit to such exploitation. Filmmakers may be better off with an imitation.
There is one “lost object” King Kong speaks to with unintentional irony. Carl Denham’s film expedition is a very ambitious location production. The entire crew travels to the other side of the world. The logistical challenge compounds the usual challenges of making a movie. There is an historical basis for this style of production, which began with the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and reached its zenith in the fiction films of 1960-1980.
In films such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Deliverance (1972), Sorcerer (1977) The Deer Hunter (1978), Days of Heaven (1978) Apocalypse Now (1979), Heaven’s Gate (1980) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) filmmakers took location production to an extreme—taking casts and crews to distant, inhospitable climates, removing themselves as far as possible from centers of film production. Filmmaking became a heroic adventure in itself, with the filmmakers battling storms, floods, illness, and political instability. Immersion in distant locales would provide for images that would immerse audiences in the texture and atmosphere of specific places, not studio backlots.
But King Kong is made in a style that renders the possibility of its own story less likely. Jackson, Lucas, Spielberg, Robert Rodriguez and other filmmakers are creating a green-screen aesthetic that negates the need for location shooting. This constitutes a return to the studio style in which actors never sacrificed the comforts of home and performed their roles on a soundstage against background footage of foreign locales shot by second unit crews. The final look of a film is, again, not dependent on uncontrollable locations but on the capabilities of filmmaker-controlled special effects.
King Kong’s digital Skull Island has a storybook grandeur but none of the dampness, dirt, and darkness of the jungle locations of, say, Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Sorcerer, or Apocalypse Now. Real jungle color and textures have been, in Dixon’s phrase, banished to “a phantom zone of nonexistence”.
In this context the use of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to add thematic weight to King Kong backfires. Writers such as Twain, Melville, and Conrad wrote adventure stories based on their own real-life travels and adventures. Filmmakers like Peter Jackson make adventure films based on their experience of other films.
For Hollywood, though, the ontology of the film image—the status of the profilmic event—is less important than the economy of entertainment. Audiences enter a theater with a predisposition to believe. The digital image will seem “real” as long as the movie around it is believable to an audience. And if audiences believe what they see, enjoy it, and keep paying to see it, filmmakers will give them more of the same. Despite what Dixon asserts, audiences are neither bored nor dissatisfied with digital imagery. If they were, films like King Kong would flop.
When audiences start laughing at digital “synthespians,” get bored with remakes, become dissatisfied with digital backgrounds, tire of the fantasy-action-adventure genres (all elements of Kong), or otherwise demand that movies “get real,” the photographic image may make a comeback. “Shot on film” might someday become the badge of honor and marketing ploy “A Cast of Thousands” or “In Technicolor and Cinemascope” were in an earlier era.
Sources
Gordon Baldwin, Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms (1991)
Jean Baudrillard The Evil Demon of Images (1983)
Jay David Bolter and David Grusin Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)
Carina Chocano “Tall, dark…” Los Angeles Times December 12, 2005
W.K.L Dickson and Antonia Dickson History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph (1895)
Wheeler Winston Dixon “Twenty-five Reasons Why It’s All Over” (2001)
John David Ebert Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (2005)
Scott Foundas, “The Return of the Kong” LA Weekly December 12, 2005
Robert Kolker A Cinema of Loneliness Third Edition (2000)
Robert Kolker Film, Form & Culture Third Edition (2002)
n.a. The Photography Book (1997)
As with photography, the manipulation and fabrication of the cinematic image to create a more compelling illusion of reality—or pure fantasy--began early. In 1895 W.K.L Dickson, who developed the kinteograph with Thomas Edison, used double exposures (running a piece of film through the camera twice while altering the composition of each pass) to make himself appear headless, two-headed, and make his bodyless head appear to rest on a plate.
Georges Melies placed actors before painted backdrops in A Trip to the Moon (1902). Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903) used a matte effect to add a moving background to the static set of a boxcar’s interior. King Kong (1933) used stop-motion animation to make miniature apes and dinosaurs move, and—much like Le Grey—combined different shots (tiny humans in the foreground, Kong in the background)—to make the miniature ape appear to tower menacingly over real humans. In Citizen Kane director Orson Welles and cinematographer Greg Toland used double exposures (the lens focused on a different plane of action during each pass), wipes, and other techniques to create shots which for decades viewers have taken to be single-take, deep focus shots, just as Le Grey’s seascapes can still fool us.
Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong updates this tradition of image manipulation with the use of CGI (computer-generated imagery). Now, Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is photographed against a green screen instead of a rear projection screen. King Kong is digitally animated pixels instead of a hand-animated metal armature covered in fur. The compositing of separate image elements is now accomplished on a computer rather than within the camera or with an optical printer. Whereas earlier films started as raw film stock in a camera, became workprint in a moviola, and finished as a release print in a projector, in Kong all audio and video elements are loaded into digital editing programs and the final digital version of the film is transferred to film for theater projection.
At the level of form and content, however, not much has changed since 1933. The 2005 King Kong strives to provide the same elements as the original film: wonder, suspense, horror, romance, spectacle, tragedy. It strives no less to attract a ticket-buying audience and realize a profit for the producers. Although the technology has changed, the elements of so-called Classical Hollywood Cinema (the star system, continuity editing, psychological realism, narrative closure) have not.
Indeed, the typical product of Millennial Hollywood, of which Jackson’s King Kong is an example, is an old-fashioned film tricked out with the newest sound and picture technology. Films such as Jurassic Park (1993), Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997), Godzilla (1998), Gladiator (2000), Pearl Harbor (2001), Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), Troy (2004), Van Helsing (2004) and War of the Worlds (2005) are digital remakes of older films and/or revivals of classic genres. They are technologically innovative but stylistically and thematically conservative and traditional. But beyond this generic familiarity, is something essential about the moving image lost when digital media supplements or replaces film?
Today many film scholars and critics are complaining that cinema is drifting too far from its photographic roots—from it’s cinematic roots as well. Some critics fear that fin-de-siecle cinema would a fin du cinema. A 2001 collection of essays was entitled The End of Cinema as We Know It.
Although discussing a very different group of films, in 1983 Baudrillard described the type of cinema critics are complaining about today:
“A whole generation of films is appearing which will be to those we have known what the android is to man: marvelous, flawless artifacts, dazzling simulacra which lack only an imaginary and that particular hallucination which makes cinema what it is.”
One critic offered King Kong as part of this “end of cinema” thesis. In a mixed review of the film, Scott Foundas complained that, “…there were too many moments during King Kong when I felt I was witnessing the end of cinema, the final obfuscation between movies made by men and those made by machines.”
Wheeler Winston Dixon complains that the synthetic images of blockbusters like Titanic (1997) and The Matrix (1999) prove that the Lumieres’ tradition of realism has lost out to Melies’ tradition of spectacle”
“Mundanely perfect, these computer-engineered images conjure up the mechanical perfection of Maxfield Parrish illustrations, while simultaneously banishing the real to a phantom zone of nonexistence. And yet, as one eye-popping scene of spectacle and destruction after another fills the screen…audiences are bored, unsatisfied…The veracity of the moving image has been hopelessly compromised; the demarcation line between the real and the engineered (both aurally and visually) has been obliterated. All is construction and fabulation. All is predetermined; nothing natural remains.”
The success of the digital image—or any other new media--can attributed to the process Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “remediation”: the adoption of the conventions of an old medium by a new one. Robinson and Rejlander “remediated” the older conventions of painting in the new art of photography. Today, CGI hides its artificiality by adopting the familiar and acceptable pictorial conventions of the photograph:
“To achieve photorealism, the synthetic digital image adopts the criteria of the photograph. It offers a single station point, a monocular point of view, and a photographic sense of appropriate composition…The photograph erases the human subject through the mechanics and chemistry of lens, shutter, and film. Digital graphics erases the subject algorithmically through the mathematics of perspective and shading embodied in a program.”
Remediation resembles Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” Likewise, the “content” of CGI is, in part, film.
John David Ebert, however, complains that CGI remediation of painting is not thorough enough. According to him, the problem with current CGI is that it ignores older pictorial conventions such as sfumato; the use of haze to indicate distance:
“With CGI-painted images…as they stand now, there is no such distinction between foreground and background, for the two are in exactly the same focus and show no differences of color perspective. The shots, consequently, look nowhere near as realistic as they are touted to be, but instead have caused film to look more and more like video games.”
For Ebert, digital films are unintentionally remediating the wrong media: video games instead of painting. He suggests that, “ visual technonerds should be required to take courses in art history.”
Digital technology can also effect the overall balance of elements of a film. Robert Kolker observes that the computer, because it more readily enables the creation of imaginary worlds, is
“…allowing filmmakers a wider scope of expression or, on the negative side, an opportunity to allow all creativity to flow to the design, while narrative and editing remain as banal as usual.”
Jackson’s King Kong realizes both the negative and positive opportunities of digital filmmaking. Jackson and his team can create a vaster and more fantastic Skull Island, and a more fluid and expressive Kong than the 1933 or 1976 versions of the film. But the film’s characterizations are familiar and the dialogue scenes are constructed out of conventional medium and close shots.
King Kong is technologically more complex but aesthetically simpler than Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994). The complex shifts in time and point of view, the stark contrast of youthful innocence and homicidal impulse, the troubling identification with murderers, and the charged, expressionistic performances of that film have no equivalent in King Kong—except perhaps the performance of Kong (created by actor Andy Sirkis). To a large extent Jackson has indeed allowed creativity to flow to the digital design of the film and has allowed narrative and editing to become banal.
Consequently, a digital ape is more expressive than any of the flesh-and-blood humans. Kong’s digital fur is more believable than Watt’s blonde wig. During the final battle atop the Empire State Building one can easily be distracted by the amazing digital recreation of 1933 Manhattan, your eye drifting from the foreground action (whose outcome you know) to the background.
Baudrillard was as critical of the content of movies as the form:
“Cinema plagiarizes and copies itself, remakes its classics, retroactivates its original myths, remakes silent films more perfectly than the originals, etc…”
Baudrillard could be describing King Kong. But he gives filmmakers too little credit. Like many contemporary films, Kong is aware of its history. In the postmodern fashion it is nostalgic and self-conscious at the same time. Just as George Lucas packed Star Wars (1977) with allusions to the classic films that have influenced him, Jackson doesn’t allow us to forget the original King Kong. Jackson’s film begins with Art Deco titles which resemble the titles of a 1930s RKO film (just as Star Wars begins with a text crawl which recalls the serials of the 1930s). The original Kong’s score is performed in the musical spectacle that accompanies Kong’s theatrical appearance.
The story and imagery of Jackson’s King Kong retroactivates cinema’s original myth that the cinematographer-explorer-scientist will bring images of raw nature to civilized society. In 1895 W.K.L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson (who worked for Thomas Edison) wrote one of the earliest histories of cinema and enthusiastically described the micro-cinematic observation of tiny insects, “Monsters close upon each other in a blind and indiscriminate attack, limbs are dismembered, gory globules are tapped, whole battalions disappear from view.” This sounds like the scenes of creature combat in King Kong and an earlier digital effects film, Starship Troopers (1998).
Baudrillard goes further and argues that movies tendency towards self-consciousness, nostalgia, and retro-styling is another instance of a postmodern loss of reality:
“Simultaneous with this attempt at absolute coincidence with the real, cinema also approaches coincidence with itself... Cinema is fascinated by itself as a lost object just as it (and we) are fascinated by the real as a referential in perdition.” (italics in original).
Today, cinema does seem fascinated with its own processes. Formal self-consciousness (what Bolter and Grusin call “hypermediacy”) has become a standard element of illusionistic Hollywood films. Blow Out (1981), Broadcast News (1987), Ed Wood (1994), Quiz Show (1994), Topsy-Turvy (1999), The Majestic (2001), The Aviator (2004), Ray (2004), Finding Neverland (2004), Being Julia (2004), Capote (2005) and Walk the Line (2005) include behind-the-scenes stories of movie, television, literary, theatrical, and musical productions.
There is even a subgenre of “lost object” films about the creation of spectacle using quaintly archaic technologies. In Chaplin (1992) silent movies are edited by hand measurement of film. Boogie Nights (1997) laments the transition of the adult film industry from film production to videotape production. In Almost Famous (2000) a magazine editor marvels at a primitive fax machine which is laughably slow by contemporary standards. In Good Night and Good Luck (2005) producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) cues broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) not via earpiece—headsets were too bulky for on-camera talent to wear—but by tapping him on the leg with a pen.
Self-reflexivity has always been an element of King Kong. The plot of Kong Kong is set in motion by the desire to make a movie. Kong is the spectacle that draws customers to a New York theater and ourselves to our local theater. Jackson’s King Kong is the most media-centric of the three versions. Much more time is devoted to the travails of producers, writers, and performers. The opening montage suggests the importance of entertainment to Depression-era New York City. The police shut down street crime and shut down bankrupt theaters. Denham’s (Jack Black) exertions as a scheming producer are almost as shocking as Kong’s rampages. Denham has a loyal, risk-taking cameraman in this version. Ann “tames” Kong with the same performing skills she used to beguile vaudeville audiences. We see Denham’s dream of a cinematic coup dissolve when a roll of film depicting the dinosaur stampede is accidentally ruined. The film also dwells on the strategic dishonesty of the film business when Denham’s lead actor (initially) proves to be a coward and is later publicly, falsely credited for rescuing Ann.
For Carina Chocano King Kong is “A movie about the movies, and specifically an exploitation picture about exploitation pictures…a bazillion-dollar spectacle that reserves the right to question the morality of spectacles…Kong is the last gasp of the great, natural world, reduced to consumerist spectacle.”
Read differently, King Kong is about how a recording of reality may be better than reality itself. When Denham’s footage is ruined, capturing Kong alive and bringing him before paying customers is the only way Denham can make money. Instead of images of Kong, he presents an audience with the real Kong. Images can be controlled. Animals cannot. Hence the death and destruction that follows. Rather than a “last gasp of the great, natural world, reduced to consumerist spectacle,” Kong proves that the natural world is reluctant to be reduced to spectacle. Kong would rather die than submit to such exploitation. Filmmakers may be better off with an imitation.
There is one “lost object” King Kong speaks to with unintentional irony. Carl Denham’s film expedition is a very ambitious location production. The entire crew travels to the other side of the world. The logistical challenge compounds the usual challenges of making a movie. There is an historical basis for this style of production, which began with the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and reached its zenith in the fiction films of 1960-1980.
In films such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Deliverance (1972), Sorcerer (1977) The Deer Hunter (1978), Days of Heaven (1978) Apocalypse Now (1979), Heaven’s Gate (1980) and Fitzcarraldo (1982) filmmakers took location production to an extreme—taking casts and crews to distant, inhospitable climates, removing themselves as far as possible from centers of film production. Filmmaking became a heroic adventure in itself, with the filmmakers battling storms, floods, illness, and political instability. Immersion in distant locales would provide for images that would immerse audiences in the texture and atmosphere of specific places, not studio backlots.
But King Kong is made in a style that renders the possibility of its own story less likely. Jackson, Lucas, Spielberg, Robert Rodriguez and other filmmakers are creating a green-screen aesthetic that negates the need for location shooting. This constitutes a return to the studio style in which actors never sacrificed the comforts of home and performed their roles on a soundstage against background footage of foreign locales shot by second unit crews. The final look of a film is, again, not dependent on uncontrollable locations but on the capabilities of filmmaker-controlled special effects.
King Kong’s digital Skull Island has a storybook grandeur but none of the dampness, dirt, and darkness of the jungle locations of, say, Aguirre, The Wrath of God, Sorcerer, or Apocalypse Now. Real jungle color and textures have been, in Dixon’s phrase, banished to “a phantom zone of nonexistence”.
In this context the use of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to add thematic weight to King Kong backfires. Writers such as Twain, Melville, and Conrad wrote adventure stories based on their own real-life travels and adventures. Filmmakers like Peter Jackson make adventure films based on their experience of other films.
For Hollywood, though, the ontology of the film image—the status of the profilmic event—is less important than the economy of entertainment. Audiences enter a theater with a predisposition to believe. The digital image will seem “real” as long as the movie around it is believable to an audience. And if audiences believe what they see, enjoy it, and keep paying to see it, filmmakers will give them more of the same. Despite what Dixon asserts, audiences are neither bored nor dissatisfied with digital imagery. If they were, films like King Kong would flop.
When audiences start laughing at digital “synthespians,” get bored with remakes, become dissatisfied with digital backgrounds, tire of the fantasy-action-adventure genres (all elements of Kong), or otherwise demand that movies “get real,” the photographic image may make a comeback. “Shot on film” might someday become the badge of honor and marketing ploy “A Cast of Thousands” or “In Technicolor and Cinemascope” were in an earlier era.
Sources
Gordon Baldwin, Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms (1991)
Jean Baudrillard The Evil Demon of Images (1983)
Jay David Bolter and David Grusin Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)
Carina Chocano “Tall, dark…” Los Angeles Times December 12, 2005
W.K.L Dickson and Antonia Dickson History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kinetophonograph (1895)
Wheeler Winston Dixon “Twenty-five Reasons Why It’s All Over” (2001)
John David Ebert Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society (2005)
Scott Foundas, “The Return of the Kong” LA Weekly December 12, 2005
Robert Kolker A Cinema of Loneliness Third Edition (2000)
Robert Kolker Film, Form & Culture Third Edition (2002)
n.a. The Photography Book (1997)
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