Cirque du So'Gay

But it had the best title I ever came up with, besides "The Kinetics of the Helix-Coil Transition in Polyglutamic Acid." I blame this paper on the coincidence of my taking American Narrative Cinema and Shamanism (which turned out to be a critique of ethnography... not a course on how to become a shaman, and also turned out to be the best class I took at Swarthmore barring Inorganic Chemistry). Despite not having a clear sense of semiotics, formal analysis or post-structuralism, I got an A. Thanks Patty! Of course, I didn't fall asleep during our screening of Birth of a Nation, and every time Godfather was mentioned I didn't scream "Fucking Great Movie" and do a kegstand in the back of the screening room. So I present to you a timely analysis of the original King Kong. And fuck you, Adrian Brody.

(Ma)King Kong: Ethnographic Spectacle
A well-dressed, middle-class, white audience sits in the New Roxy Theater, New York City, in 1933. They await the premiere of King Kong, “The Eighth Wonder of the World.” One particular matron might even request that she not be placed so near to the screen, as it “hurts her eyes.” The crowd is filled to capacity, the result of a marketing blitz which included a half-hour original radioplay, and the serial publication of the story of “King Kong” in Mystery Magazine (AFI, 2003:2). A willing yet captive audience ready for the pure pleasure and horror of the spectacle, New York, and the rest of the world took in King Kong readily, praising it up and down, and believing it (2003:2). A fifty-foot ape? Perhaps not, but the narrative structure of the film, combined with the filmography of the directors Merion C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, induced an authority of representation, which I would like to closely examine here. Cooper and Schoedsack’s King Kong is a compelling intersection and demonstration of the interplay of ethnography, (mis)representation and horror, presented as a “fantastic” feature film (Hall, 1933). Kong is pop culture entertainment, but it is also ethnography, and a reading of this dual nature can help to illuminate problems inherent to ethnographic ideology and the production of representations and knowledge of the Other through the medium of film.
In analyzing the ethnographic aspects of Kong, I am largely relying upon Fatimah Tobing Rony’s piercing study of cinematic racial ethnographic spectacle The Third Eye, particularly her chapter “Teratology,” which involves a close reading of King Kong as ethnographic spectacle par excellance. Having read portions of Rony’s work after constructing my own analytic framework for reading Kong, I realized that several of my points correspond closely to her own, predated and presaged by them. While I rely on her groundwork, I will try here to avoid her “close reading” of Kong, instead positing our mutual theses from my point of view and drawing mainly on the film as text. In my examination of the nature of ethnography, I am employing terminology and concepts culled from two works of ethnography and anthropological theory, namely Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other, Michael Taussig’s Mimesis and Alterity. I have been equipped by these magnificent studies to approach ethnography and colonialism, the relationship of the West with the Other.
The recognition of King Kong (and other films, of course) as producing ethnographic knowledge is of great importance, as it keys the viewer into more clearly viewing their role in the maintenance of the dialectic (image?) of the west and the rest. The image, and particularly the moving image, are powerful modes of representation, and understanding that the cinematic real (reel?) is really made up (to borrow Taussig’s phrase) helps to evidence the act of the production of ethnography. Finally, I wish to express the enormity of this task, and my inability to capture all of it. I will focus on one particular scene of the film to demonstrate Kong as ethnography, though it should be noted that numerous other approaches are viable and worthwhile, and are exceedingly well presented in Rony’s work.
First and foremost, I would like to describe the ethnographic film in general—what it is, what it means, and how it works or is made to work. Rony defines ethnographic cinema as that “broad and variegated field of cinema which situates indigenous peoples in a displaced temporal realm” (1996:8). She goes on to include in this wide category the artistic cinema, scientific and educational films, films of colonial propaganda and commercial entertainment, choosing to use the word “cinema” as opposed to “film” so as to “stress the institutional matrix in which the images are embedded” (ibid). The ethnographic cinema is a social institution, encoding race in the collapsing vertex of anthropology, nationalism and popular culture (1996:9). I refer to Kong as an ethnographic film, recognizing that it operates within the institution of American cinema while insisting on its uniqueness as an institution in and of itself, spawning a handful of sequels, re-releases and a fully different kind of spectacle at Universal Studios theme parks (2003).
Rony further posits that “cinema appears to bring the past and that which is culturally distant closer” (1996:9), at odds with classical anthropology, which relies on the formulaic and implicit spatial and temporal distancing of its referents (Fabian, 1983:xli). This is deeply problematic however, as this same cinema represents and removes from dominant discourse the indigenous objects it spectacularizes. Furthermore, Rony writes that this is “especially dangerous because of the perception that film is a window onto reality” (1996:13), turning the viewer and critic alike into “unwilling propagator[s] of a new postcolonial form of fascinating cannibalism, a reification further entrenching the categories of Same and Other” (ibid). As I mentioned earlier, the ethnographic cinema must be interpreted as really made up, a staged show rather than a picture of the really real. Taussig provides a telling example. In examining Robert Flaherty’s classic ethnographic film Nanook of the North, and specifically the scene in which Nanook is first exposed to the phonograph, he reminds us, “Shouldn’t we assume that this look and this eating is a contrivance not of the ‘primitive’ but of the primitivist film-maker?” (1993:200). Interpreting the ethnographic “documentary” as really made up dampens, or at least complicates, the hegemonic discourse of alterity that is so strongly put forth via the films of this category, and King Kong in particular.
Having said all this, what makes King Kong an ethnographic film? This is a hugely broad question that has several different types of answers. The what of the question can be read as the narrative devices and formal structure of the film, the mise en scene of Skull Island, and so on. Before travelling down that road, however, it is worth noting that the question posed can be asked in a slightly different way, and produce a whole set of equally interesting answers by replacing the “what” with “who.” Kong is based on English mystery writer Edgar Wallace’s unfinished fictional efforts, which were completed by his assistant Leon Gordon, and transformed into a screenplay by James Creelman and Ruth Rose, director Schoedsack’s wife (2003:4). Of course, Cooper and Schoedsack can be credited with a fair amount of authorship as the directors of the film. The story of the film’s production is remarkably complex, drawing on a great deal of other cinematic resources, chronicled in the American Film Institute’s Production Notes (2003). The authorship of the directors is of particular interest due to their prior filmography, notably Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), both ethnographic documentaries (2003:3). As ethnographic producers, it is arguable that the directors’ styles and methodology carried over into their creation of Kong.
King Kong itself is a veritable store of ethnographic material. Rony writes that it “is not merely a classic Hollywood film, it is a work which in significant respects builds on and redeploys themes borrowed from the scientific time machine of anthropology” (1996:159). Before drawing this out, I preface this portion of my investigation by stating that unless otherwise noted I am citing the film-as-text directly. In the first ten minutes of the film, we learn that a “jungle film” is to be made. Director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is a reputed wild man, intrepid in his film-making, having traversed the globe in the pursuit of spectacle. Indeed, he states that he will “give [the audience] what they want,” and is willing to travel to an uncharted island in the deep Pacific to find it. He recruits the down-and-out Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) as his actress, and a ship’s crew to transport him to his imaginative geographic destination that one “won’t find on any chart.” In this sense, King Kong is a film about the production of an ethnographic film, deriving its power from its presentation of the production of ethnographic production, serving almost as a how-to manual.
The dizzying intersection of ethnographic production comes to a head as Denham, Darrow and the crew sail into the fogs surrounding Skull Island, the home of Kong, and his indigenous keepers. The film establishes the island as far from civilization in any sense of the term, and certainly far from the West and its anticipated audience. For a short duration, Denham’s map of the island fills the screen, not unlike a figure from an ethnographic text, locating the referent of its analysis to a specific and distant spatial realm. Denham later describes what little he knows of the island and its inhabitants: “On that island is a wall, built so long ago that the people who live there have slipped back, forgotten the higher civilization that built it. They keep that wall in good repair; they need it.” It’s unlikely that Denham would interpret the society that constructed the wall as a “higher civilization,” and ridiculous to suppose a de-evolutionary passage of time and culture on such an isolated (and made up) island.
This is a prime example of what Fabian terms allochronism, the implicit practice of anthropology to place its objects in different times from the producers of ethnographic knowledge (1983: xli). Monstrous as Kong may be, it can not be supposed that he is immortal. Logically, the wall could not have been constructed more than one hundred years or so before Denham’s arrival on Skull Island, and the first contact between the islanders and the crew. The construction of Skull Island as lost in both space and time is further demonstrated through the anachronistic, and thereby allochronistic, placement of dinosaurs behind the wall with Kong. By including leftovers from the silent film of 1925, The Lost World, Cooper and Schoedsack are able to push the natives back into universally recognized prehistory (2003).
A formal analysis of the scene of first contact between the explorers-cum-ethnographers and the natives demonstrates the role of the ethnographic cinema in creating referents and otherizing indigenous peoples. Before we are allowed to see the spectacular tableau of the sacrifice of the Bride of Kong, we hear the ceremonial drumming, around which the rest of the diegesis seems to be constructed. We hear the natives speaking what the Skipper identifies as the language of the Nias islanders, the really real referents of previous ethnographic study (1996:176). In this manner, the natives are not permitted their own mode of expression, allowed only to communicate meaningfully through the speech fragments of others, and through gestures, a racist ethnographic theory which Rony describes in great detail (1996:4).
Upon viewing the sacrifice, Denham remarks “Holy mackerel, what a show!” at once solidifying the spectacular quality of the fictional ceremony, and reducing a meaningful practice to a show for the explorers and the presumably white audience of 1933. As the crew peeks around the fronds of a palm, we see as though we are them, taking in the full panorama, thoroughly kinetic, savage, and ultimately unknowable. Denham then activates his camera, recording the spectacle and suggesting that we are watching found-footage and not the fictional production based out of a sound stage in Hollywood.
Upon revealing his kino-eye, his machine of ethnographic production, Denham causes his party to be found out by the natives. The drumming stops, the show stops. Instantly we see through the eyes of the natives, presumably the chief, and turn the gaze back upon the crew, all too briefly. With the exception of one or two short shot-reverse shot sequences, we are placed solidly in the midst of the crew, watching the chief as he plods down towards them/us, mickey-moused all the way by playful yet ominous extradiegetic music. The show has stopped, but we are still in awe of the natives. The film grants this, though it does not express the fascination the natives must have with the explorers, let alone their technology. The film is not a two way street. Indeed, the natives have no means of capturing their invaders on film, resorting instead to physical abduction, mirrored later by the acts of Kong himself.
Ah, yes. Kong, the “fifty-foot ape.” How does he fit into all of this? Kong is in a particularly complex position in this film. He is at once the racialized other, the dilated species other, almost human, but undeniably monster. Kong is the only inhabitant of Skull Island to whom the directors bestow a gaze of his own. In a scene following the initial abduction of Darrow from her crucifix/stage, a series of shot-reverse shot sequences unfolds, we view Kong from Darrow’s perspective, Darrow from Kong’s, and the two of them from Driscoll’s (Darrow’s hero and future husband). Kong slowly and gently undresses his captor, eliciting an unsettling moment of sexual tension, and culminating in what can be interpreted as both the naïve olfactory exploration of beauty, and as the lewd sexual reference of sniffing the fingers with which he undresses the lady. Kong is almost human—more so certainly than his indigenous counterparts.
Kong is a monster in shape, in disposition, and primarily in action. Rony brilliantly analyzes the role of the monster in the horror film, and Kong’s specific ways of being (made) an ethnographic monster:
As a monster, he embodies the collapsing of the future into the prehistorical, the “primitive” into the technological, the Ethnographic into the Historical. King Kong is a meditation on ethnographic realism, on the audience’s desire to believe and disbelieve, to travel backward and forwards in time. King Kong creates both a monster object and a monster viewer.
(1996:188)
Kong seems to function as ethnography in reverse, troubling practice and ideology with his very monstrosity. Anthropology, as was seen earlier, establishes distance in space and time, marks the primitive as devoid of technology, and accords no historic capacity to its objects.
Discussing King Kong as a horror film, Rony writes that “the horror film genre works because the audience is fascinated by the monster’s impurity, its hybridity” (1996:170). This fascination is alluded to in the block quote above. Not only has a monster object been created (literally out of bear fur and metal framework [2003]) but so has a monster viewer been constructed. The interested patrons of the cinematic spectacle, the audience of the film is mocked, aped, if you will, and parodied through the film, cannibalizing Kong as he is splayed out on stage, in a pose reminiscent of Darrow’s earlier mock-crucifixion. In his original review of the film, Mordaunt Hall notes the fright rippling through the early audience in New York: “Needless to say that this picture was received by many a giggle to cover up fright” (1933). What is not mentioned in the review, however, is what exactly the audience feared: the “fifty foot ape,” or their own capacity for savagery, mirrored excellently by both the depicted natives, and by the intrepid explorers.
This is the last example of King Kong qua ethnography I would like to examine—its message, where it leaves us, how we are made to feel as an audience. In viewing our internal others, the audience at the exhibition of Kong in New York, we are given a healthy dose of reflexivity. Indeed, in the epistemic murk of Skull Island, or for that matter, the concrete jungle of New York, who are the savages? (Taussig 1993:79). Kong is a most interesting example of an ethnographic film, as it reminds its audience of its role in the powerful comodification of entertainment, and to a greater extent, culture. While I may be reading too deeply into this, I equate such a self awareness with Michael Taussig’s prescription for the living of life “subjunctively,” as “neither subject nor object” (1993:255). Through recognizing the savage side of oneself, perhaps in one’s status as a member of a fascinated yet devouring audience, as a complex force which interacts with the depiction and construction of the native as savage, a static perspective is complicated. Neither subjects nor objects, the audience and the viewed can both exercise greater freedom when the strictures of ethnographic interpretation and representation are loosened, and recognized as constructed.
Understanding that the ethnographic cinema as an institution exerts force over its referents and its audiences enables both the signified and the observers of the sign to break out of the system of fictional spectacle, of suspension of disbelief. This facilitates the recognition which is perceived so often as the real being really made up. Rony writes that, “King Kong is the ultimate carnivalesque version of early ethnographic cinema” (1996:160). Indeed, “carnivalesque” is quite an applicable term, evoking images of the House of Freaks, Siamese Twin acts (which served a pre-screening entertainment in early showings of Kong [2003]), and caged natives, and justifies the construction of a larger-than-life ape as a sexual threat to the white women of the world. As Denham announces to the eagerly awaiting crowd at Kong’s physical spectacular debut,
Seeing is believing… I’m going to show you the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization. Merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiousity.
Perhaps the only way to fully recognize the ethnographic spectacle of King Kong is to watch the film attentively, as both entertainment and as a propagator of anthropologic discourse. A reading such as this could be the most instructive way of understanding just how beauty killed the beast.




works cited
The American Film Institute Online Catalog. “King Kong.” 2003.
http://afi.chadwyck.com/film/4005
Fabian, Johannes. Time and The Other. Columbia University Press, New York. 1983.
Hall, Mordaunt. “The Screen.” The New York Times 5 March 1933 p 3.
Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle.
Duke University Press, Durham. 1996.
Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity. Routledge Press, New York. 1993.