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)
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