Re: Kong Review: Jaw-droppingly Brilliant

["Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>]

Pat Norton (ptnorton@suscom-maine.net) wrote:

<In moving from a state of nature to civilization (aka, NYC), however, he loses
the freedom to possess whatever he wants and is eventually destroyed by
civilization, which Rousseau believed drove men to all sorts of bad behavior in
the pursuit of commercial interests.>

  The story may also be interpreted as a story of the rape and destruction fo
western industrialization and exploitation of the "unsettled" lands and the
islands in which Kong is found, the fight with the native peoples who revere
their Kong as a god or nature spirit, and the subsequent acts of the western
corrupt to destroy their god by stealing him away to a city-wide prison. The
power of deity, as described by Pat, can also be extended to seek the purity of
Ann and the subsequent revitalized attempt to eradicate this nature spirit. It
is a story I am most reminded of Hayao Miyazaki's _Mononoke-hime_ (aka,
Princess Mononoke), which is the story of a cursed warrior attempted to save
nature from the industrialists who seek to exploit it and in the end, destroy
it, for greed and country, as well as the imperialists of the outer edges to
possess the spirit of nature and it's power. This is an old story, but Freud
and Jung need not be invoked, because while Jung's collective unconciousness
can be invoked, the simple marker of the fact that the story appeals to
EVERYONE has led to its preservation and retelling in new and imaginitive ways,
Kong being a memorable American version, and Miyazaki's _Mononoke-hime_
another. A similar story exists in Tolkein's _Lord of the Rings_, who developed
his tale out of a perhaps Christian tradition, of similar levels. Frodo is the
cursed hero seeking an end to the greedy industrial sweep of the
anti-religious. In the same mein, others have even noted that the very tempo of
the stories, raising from darkess into light only to be plunged into peril once
more, is symbolic of the never-ending fight for good versus evil, which we also
see in Kong, and in fact most stories. It capitvates and holds you, sets a
pace, and devours the book in the process. This is storytelling at it's best.

  Cheers,

Jaime A. Headden

"Innocent, unbiased observation is a myth." --- P.B. Medawar (1969)


                
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