Mellard, Lacan and King Kong

I’m considering writing about the relationship between King Kong and Wise Blood from the “film leads writing” week in my essay, so I thought I’d consider those texts in a blog post. Specifically, I’m interested in how James Mellard’s Lacanian reading of Wise Blood might approach King Kong. I want to consider three quotes from Mellard’s article in particular.

Mellard argues that Hazel Motes “has no ordinary sense of sociality, no ordinary understanding of sexuality, no ordinary grasp of the immorality of murder. He operates by a code of values and behavior entirely his own” (51). This invites comparison to Kong, who is definitively unsocialised even while these terms remain relevant to him. It is Kong’s desires (and their frustration) to which the audience relates and this is actually increased by his responses to desire being supposedly untempered by socialisation. He functions as the “real” or natural at that level, except that he does clearly have values of his own. Kong grabs Ann and runs off, indiscriminately attacking both the men who try to rescue her and the creatures that try to harm her. Kong’s desires are centred on Ann, and her relationship with Kong is repeatedly described by Denham as a “beauty and the beast” narrative. This casts Kong as animal, but also in a story about becoming human. This desire ultimately leads to his capture. As Denham insists, “She’s the story, without her we couldn’t have gotten near Kong. He followed her back to the village”. That “she’s the story” might lead directly into a Lacanian reading in which the idealised Woman as object defines the subject’s self-comprehension and place in the world.

Mellard also argues that self-destruction in pursuit of meaningful experience is a “sacrifice” that “has meaning nonetheless, for it says what kind of Other exists out there in the emptiness”. He elaborates with a citation from Lacan: “‘The sacrifice,’ Lacan says, ‘signifies that, in the object of our desires, we try to find evidence for the presence of the desire of the Other that I call here the dark God’” (64).

There are several ways of thinking about Kong as “other”. Modernity’s privileging of novelty and the commodity are directly employed to represent Kong. King Kong is partly a text about modernism, centring on crucial modernist oppositions between the civilised and the primitive, the banal and the spectacle, the nation and the tribe, science/technology and religion/ritual. Denham’s reputation as an “adventure” filmmaker, his selection of shooting location, and his marketing language all foreground trying to provide a shockingly novel experience for an audience now less impressed by “ordinary” films: “I’m going out to make the greatest picture in the world, something that nobody’s ever seen or heard of. They’ll have to think up a lot of new adjectives when I come back.” What he displays in the end is Kong as a story about humanity and animal “other” at once. Adventure and novelty are still his selling points for this show. 

Lacan’s idea of the “other” is related but different. Lacan’s other is not just another being, however exotic, but a “big” other (often capitalised to make this point), definitively opposed to the subject as it enters the social or “symbolic order”. Mellard stresses the role of the Mother in this for Lacan but, as many readings of King Kong suggest, racial difference can also function in the place of the Other. Mellard stresses “the gaze” in this relation to the Other. And Kong works, at one level, as absolutely Other for the film’s audience, and for those that look at Kong’s gaze within the film. But, in another sense, Kong is also not radically Other, as the film’s suggestion of the possibility of human feeling emphasises the ways in which Kong’s desires are identifiable for the audience. Thus, as Mellard says of Motes “He becomes the screen on which others can project their gaze, the surface on which they may search for the object, the gaze, that represents them in their wholeness, the wholeness that always escapes on in life, but that in death. . . will not.” (64)

Didacticism in The Fountainhead

Earlier in the semester I did my class presentation on melodrama in The Fountainhead—in the book, in the film, and in Rand’s Objectivism.  Here I want to talk about Rand’s didacticism, but I am particularly interested in some of the subtler ways in which The Fountainhead conveys its message, as opposed to the already-discussed melodramatic aspects like Roark’s impassioned speeches and Toohey’s evil manipulations.

A particularly interesting way in which Rand conveys her ideology, and one repeatedly cited in scholarly work on the novel, is the manifesto claim of modernist architecture (to which both novel and film refer) that “form follows function”. This claim cites an essay by architect Louis Sullivan:

It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. (111)

Although Sullivan isn’t directly quoted in Rand’s novel, and instead his words are re-interpreted and attributed to various characters, the tone of Sullivan’s statement is as relevant as its sentiment. As Nancy Levinson points out, the manifesto claims of modernist architecture were as grand and world-forming as Roark’s (30), and clearly part of the inspiration for his vocation.

For Melissa Hardie, Rand’s “extraordinary didacticism is mitigated by the function of readerly persuasion and consent: Rand’s libertarian philosophies, above all, suggest the interrogative participation of her reader in the formulation of her novels’ complex rhetorics”. Thus, she claims, the “uncanny appeal of the cult text” is an effect of what exceeds its “polemic” (371). Hardie and Robert Hunt agree that Rand “generates ironic humor in her texts precisely at the point of hyperbolic sincerity” (377). Aspects of The Fountainhead that might be seen as camply funny are often also central to the ideological impact of the narrative: its silhouette cast of extreme types, highlighted in the movie by stagy performances and extravagant sets that strive to further type the characters with which Roark interacts and to which he is evidently superior. Levinson also stresses the ideological force of casting Gary Cooper as Roark given that he was, by “the late 1940s, a screen icon identified with the portrayals of. . . legendary Americans” (Levinson 30). And costumes, Levinson points out, work to reinforce this as a kind of architecture of character: “Dressed in a plain suit or, more often, in physique-flattering shirtsleeves, Cooper/Roark is too confident and good-looking even to need the crutch of costume; this is in pointed contrast to his adversaries”, notably Wynand’s various costumes for different roles and Toohey’s dated dressiness (31).

Hardie and Levinson both use Sullivan’s “form follows function” to make their point, and Christensen uses the quote to open an essay on the film of The Fountainhead. He argues that The Fountainhead is a film about corporate/studio authorship in which Roark stands for Warner Bros. To make this argument he dwells on a contradiction between Sullivan’s “form (ever) follows function” and Rand’s/Roark’s “a man has a right to exist for his own sake” (Christensen 24). Christensen draws on a now long architectural debate to argue that “functionalist architecture was more symbolic than functional. It was symbolically functional. It represented function more than resulted from function (17). This is an argument that could be used to discuss Roark’s ambivalent relationship to the practice of architecture but also to discuss how Rand’s message is conveyed through her blunt use of symbolism while trying to remain independent from its form. This explains the problem of Rand’s attempts at controlling the film, on which Christensen focuses, and the slippage Melissa points to as open to “camp” reading.

Christensen, J. ‘Studio Authorship, Warner Bros., and The Fountainhead’. The Velvet Light Trap, no. 57, Spring 2006, pp. 17-31.