RE: Wiping Away a Few Tears…
Sean, you have disappointed me. As the great black American Barthian critic James Snead (who died at the age of 35 in 1989 but left us with the invaluable book Black screens/White images) King Kong is not an innocent monster, at least when it comes to race. I’m actually dumb-shocked that no one has seen the resurrection of this film as tantamount to the resurrection of Birth of a Nation, but it seems that white critics have, over the years, conspired to give Peter Jackson (a New Zealander) the freedom to perpetuate the worst white myths. Anyway, I expected more from you, a man I admire.
I have to agree with this. A dismissal of racial readings of LOTR (some claim it's a Nordic supremacy fable, with dark orcs as Africans) is understandable. But you don't have to be an oversensitive film-grad semiotician to see the racial subtexts in King Kong--they're about as subtle as porno dialogue. And, in fact, Gail Dines analyzed the original version from that angle extremely well a few years ago:
http://hustlingtheleft.com/CRAPP_E_LIB/dines.html