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Saturday, December 17, 2005

RE: Wiping Away a Few Tears…

Posted by on December 17 at 21:52 PM

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.


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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

I think that if you actually see the movie, Charles (for whom my admiration and fondness are vast), you may find it possible to read Jackson's remake as a response to the clear racial subtext of the original (actually, it's barely even subtext; it's practically text). He foregrounds Kong's non-innocence and presents the collision/alienation of cultures/species as a grand scale tragedy. I think the new King Kong is ultimately about evolution.

The proper veil through which to view Jackson's film isn't the primitive racial consciousness of 1930s Hollywood (or its attendant Barthesian analysis), but the eye-scales of contemporary religious discourse. There's more at work in this movie than a black-white dialectic (though that's there, too, along with island savages right out of old Hollywood--if not, indeed, Maori New Zealand). It's about race, yes, but in the sense of the non-speciated human race and its seemingly genetic tendency to destroy.

Talk about your intelligent design.

And P.S. Birth of a Nation is about the KKK, which is a bit less complex as subjects go.

I will be in Portland this afternoon. I will watch King Kong in that city with your recommended veil.

Yeah Sean, get real! God, you're such a racist!

ugh.

Charles - are you drunk-blogging again?

i was in portland. it started to snow. i decided to walk around the city. i did not watch king kong. i will see it some other time.

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