01.12.06 BEFORE YOU GONG KONG
Yes, Peter Jackson’s remake of King Kong is longer than necessary. Or as one critic whined, “Peter Jackson may have lost weight, but he hasn’t lost his gluttony. There is no excuse for the 3 hour and 7 minute running time of King Kong. Hollywood needs an enema, and Peter Jackson needs an editor.” (Someone’s cranky because his Ritalin just ran out.) And yes, the story is old and therefore predictable. Yes, it’s mindless pop culture with no real deeper meaning, message or point, nothing profound.
Wait a minute. Not so fast. Nothing profound? I don’t think so. Here’s some of the meaning and message I saw on the screen with Kong:
1) De Vitoria would have liked Jackson’s Kong. A gargantuan monkey held captive and worshipped in a primitive land where he’s the biggest thing in the skyline is infringed upon by visitors with loud weapons who take him to a strange kingdom where he’s dwarfed by concrete pillars and confused by frozen streets and a cacophony of urban noises. He feels attacked and justified in fighting back. A group of humans encounter Kong, who eats people and peels back flesh with his screams. He’s wagging a beautiful blonde one of them around like a rag doll while smashing trees and then street cars. The humans feel attacked and justified in fighting back. A conflict ending in death results from the reasonable perception by both sides that they are the victim. De Vitoria in metaphor.
2) How many movies have been made in which the human race is portrayed as hateful. We’ve been portrayed in music, literature, painting and film as a species that kills what it fears and fears what it cannot control or understand. Yet we continue to dismiss this portrayal by artists as fiction. The original King Kong was made before the race riots of the 60s, for instance. As were thousands of other pieces of art laden with this simple message: love and try to understand what you fear before you kill it. Yet the killing of “negroes” still happened. This must mean that our hostility and stupidity are a deep central part of what it means to be human - the way we are born. It also points to the need for a solution art alone cannot bring - a solution that will have to go deeper.
3) We’re all in trouble if perception is reality. Peter Jackson took a repulsive man-eating orangutan and made us cry when he was killed by people just like us, people reacting as we would: freaking out and opening a can of smack down on his hairy butt. How’d he do that? Are we so gullible that our loyalty can be so easily swayed from our own frail species to mighty mean Kong in only three hours? Wow, that’s power. Scary power if applied to reality and not fiction.
4) It’s beauty that killed the beast. How true is this? How many artists have been madmen? How many madmen ended their lives because of their obsession with a woman or an aria or a thrill in a bottle? It’s the beauty of life, the pleasure and goodness that so often trips me, acts as the bait on the Devil’s hook. It’s a lie we tell youth groups that sin is a horrible experience isn’t it? A lie. Hate to admit this but sex, even in the back seat at sixteen, feels pretty amazing...beautiful even. Drugs? They don’t call it a high for nothing. That small lie that let’s you keep participating in the conversation about the book you actually never heard of? Feels good to be included doesn’t it? If the devil always had a forked tail he’d probably never get a date. As he is, beautiful and all, he’s never home on Friday night.
5) Jackson said in an interview I read, I believe in Rolling Stone or Wired, that he didn’t want “anatomically correct” dinosaurs a la Jurassic Park in Kong. He wanted them to be cool instead. And that would be cheaper as it turned out. There’s something inspiring about Jackson’s ability to recognize what his audience cares about and what they don’t. They want cool. A story full of it. And if the story is thrilling enough the audience will be so pleased they’ll never analyze the length of that big fella’s tail anyway. Jackson could have forgotten that the story is what I came for and obsessed over details I don’t understand or care about as much as Spielberg, but he didn’t. Inspiring. How often have I obsessed over the inversion of a chord when all my audience wants is the line and melody sung on top of it? How many times have I been in a church that chooses to be anatomically correct at the expense of just telling the story? Why do pastors, for instance, not talk like people? Why complete sentences read from a lecturn? Because the anthropologists of the church - the seminary professors - told us too? Does the audience care? Is the audience focussed at all on what we’re most focussed on getting right? How about the countless Boomer churches (what I call the Willow Creek Association churches) I’ve been to with their service producers, usually on head sets, vibrating from Starbucks, holding spreadsheets showing that the service will start with 13:23 of music followed by 2:13 of prayer followed by 1:45 of welcome followed by...And they’re seriously distressed when the lighting cue, written on their spreadsheet in a different color ink, is missed by ten seconds or the lapel microphone cuts out once. I’ve seen these type A’s flipping out like someone just went to hell because Spence the volunteer hit play on the DVD a second too late. And they have weekly meetings just to talk about how such details were blown the Sunday before. And I’m in the audience waiting to be awed by the adventure, wanting the story and I don’t care if the dinosaurs wrestling the big monkey have too many toes or blink incorrectly. The story is too cool to care. The lesson to me then is: Think like an audience, not an accountant - like a storyteller, not a scientist. Invest in what people truly came for, what they need, the Story.
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