The Tragic King - from infantile to noble beast

The 3 hours of Peter Jackson's King Kong didn't feel any longer than the typical movie. The film just kept roaring ahead, full of captivating visuals, characters that we've met many times over in different guises, with different names, in different stories....not so much as stereotypes, but as archetypes.

The overriding image I have of the film is that of a creature, at first feared, reviled....later pitied and perhaps a little admired, falling down, down, down to his end in slow motion, having fought for and beheld, for too short a time, his.....precious. Now where have we seen this before?

The other image that comes very much to mind is from the first time I beheld the wallpaper downloads from the movie site. The closeup of Kong's face, showing the scar on the right side of his face. This was a creature that had not led a peaceful life. Skeletons near the top of the mountain ledge from which the sunset view gives Ann an excuse to say and gesture "beautiful" suggest there were others like Kong. It would have been wonderful to discover if Kong was the last of his kind, or if there were others still roaming the island.

There is also the parallel of the sheer cliffs and canyons of Skull island and the buildings in the city of New York. This is reminiscent of a comic series Steve Englehart did many years ago for Marvel called "Coyote" in which the main character, a young hothead with american indian shamanic powers, was able to shift to an alternate dimension in which he would "see" man-made cities as being like the cliffs, canyons and plains of the desert.

It's easy to watch the giant fanged bats swooping around Kong, distracting him as Ann and Jack sought their escape, and see them as the bi-planes with their machine guns and teeth of steel swooping around the beast as he made his last stand on the summit of the empire state building. In the latter case, instead of fleeing Kong, Ann persists in making her way to where Kong is, away from the safety he tries to win for her, believing she can protect him.

Up till this time, it's been Ann that needed protection from Kong. She starts the film as a person with hopes, but also a person who's lost. She needs a protector. Her life is about make believe - in the theatre, reading scripts in the hopes of getting parts in plays and movies. Just like Jimmy, the boy on the ship. Found as a baby on the ship, he was lost too, and had the Black sailor, Hayes as his protector. He lived in his own little world too - that of the ship. And to get beyond that, he reads....like Ann, a piece of fiction. There is a scene on the boat where Ann and Jimmy are dancing on the deck - and you can see then that they are in the same situation. Just as Jimmy's protector, Hayes, dies in the film, so does Ann's protector, Kong. Which reminds you of the words of the old man when the actors find the theatre has been closed down and they won't get the wages they were counting on... he said something like this to Ann, "Everyone whom you've ever depended on has let you down".

I enjoyed the absence of proper characters, apart from Kong and Ann Darrow. This was an epic film, and epic films, like fairy tales, are full of archetypes. Carl Denham, the man who destroys and debases everything that means most to him. Captain Englehorn, the dutch sea captain who knows more and is more than he seems, deep and dark and mysterious as the oceans he traverses. Jimmy, the boy impatient to become a man, and Hayes, the man who is like a father to him. Choy, the chinese crewman and Lumpy, the cook who loves him.