“No. I said no! That’s all there is... There isn’t anymore. “
- from King Kong Film
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King Kong
This is a freewrite about 3 characters: Jack Driscoll, Ann Darrow, and Kong and the possible significance of them.
Screenplay-writer (Jack) - He makes up stories for the entertainment of large crowds. He makes money by selling what he writes down. It is his profession to entertain not just by envisioning an interesting series of events, but by producing the dialogue that actors and actresses will later change and revise and accentuate in ways he didn’t intend, and that might be great or suck terribly. He’s primarily a screen-writer for hire. Give him the gyst, and like Joss Whedon he’ll write something to fit the constraints. Jack has a particular relationship to language. Everyone on the ship uses language too, they talk about stuff, they just don’t bother writing it down. They have rooms of their own, human rooms. His room is down in the basement though. He doesn’t fully want to be on this actual ship on an actual journey. He wants to be at a rehearsal. He wants to be at a practice, he doesn’t want to be actively performing / adventuring, he wants to practice and he wants to record. He writes on the ship in an animal cage and as he’s writing the story of a fictional journey, his story unfolds in reality. A sign says “animals inside”. The ships captain keep animals in the basement, they also keep the writer in the basement. Is that meaningless or meant to indicate that a part of the writer is caged up and trapped. So what part is it? Is it his violence that is caged, or by “animals inside” do they mean that which animates a normal life, are they going back to the original Latin, trying to imply that its the life force itself / the soul / anima which is locked down and caged. Is it meant to suggests that he himself is caged because that’s just the way he is, too bad for him, or is the act of writing what’s keeping him caged, or is writing what helps him escape. Or like Jim Morrison’s said, “Words got me the wound and will get me well, if you believe it.” That’s an obvious distortion though. Nothing works just because you believe it, it works because you know it, or because even though its hopeless you accept that possibilities still exist. Or it works because other people exist and are familiar with your language and your voice. Or it works because dreams sometimes intermix? Or it doesn’t work ever and that’s why life is a constant struggle? Full of new and different problems? Is belief in the saving power of language a necessity, the starting point, to be followed by whatever a life requires?
The actress (Ann Darrow) - What is the symbology of a struggling or unsuccessful actress. She does not have a safety net. She just recently lost her job and isn’t getting the money she is due from that. She desires to entertain crowds and be loved for a designated period of time. What are Anne’s characteristics? She’s not respected by those with power. She has a dream for herself that she believes is too big for her. She doesn’t think she can succeed, but also she can’t seem to stop wanting to succeed, and so this dream that she has is forcibly pulling her into the future like gravity. And she’ll either be torn apart, or some synchronicity will occur at the moment when she has no belief anymore.
Animated Graphic (King Kong) - Kong is everyone’s projection of the animal inside that exists within a fog, behind a wall, on an island that isn’t even there according to the map. But Kong is there, and thus the island must be real. In America, we project our darkness, all our ugliness, on others. In the film, the others are the villagers on Kong’s island, when we look at them they have to appear as demons, because we’re seeing them through the eyes of the main characters. The villagers are symbolic of the darkest ugliest parts of the psyche, much more so than Kong is, they’re just fucking crazy and kill for the thrill of it apparently, and what they do in order to stay true to character is separate themselves, separate the absolute dark aspect from the absolute light aspect. They hear Anne’s scream, and they hear Kong’s response. And its their tradition to separate themselves from her presence immediately. They sacrifice the woman Anne by placing her on an island over the top of a chasm. And Kong is created by that act. Maybe Kong is the desire to reconnect light with dark. He is the storm that tries to bring order to the psyche. He is the end of days, the final judgement from god, that proceeds idiotically, he doesn’t know how to help reconnect light with dark because as long as he, Kong exists, such a thing isn’t possible. His existence is the split between light and dark, he is the energy created by their seperateness and only his death can bring the light and dark back together, the masculine and feminine together in one mind. So maybe King Kong film is ultimately about establishing that unity of the psyche on one level, and on another level, the ability to appreciate the significance of other people, and to express appreciation, to consider every moment ideal for being truthful to your own full identity and also respectful of any things about life that make you happy to be awake. When life events force you to stop practicing and recording, and actually go forth on a search for darkness. That’s when you know that Kong is alive and hungry, or else incredibly pissed off about something. Maybe Kong starts out as a projection of our inner darkness. And then as the story progresses, and we see his other qualities, then Kong’s symbolic importance changes. But at first, he was the projection of a certain type of darkness, powerful, selfish, and eager to be entertained by the newest novelty item. On the island they see it: they project their inner darkness all over some massive black primate. There it is. That is the terrible thing. That is the darkness come to kill me in my sleep. It’s out there and its coming towards us. Its bounding over this way, and that is terrible. It is strong like a dinosaur, and it is crazy, it doesn’t know how to live in a city. When the beast falls to its death from the empire state building, the two people embrace for the first time in their lives because their projections have ended. It was their projection that caged them inside. What is left when the image of Kong is destroyed is the willingness to stop dreaming and experience relationships again.
“No. I said no! That’s all there is... There isn’t anymore. “
- from King Kong Film
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Also, and this is interesting… At the beginning of the film, Anne is in a theater play and she wears a mustache, man’s suite, and a top-hat in the play, which is a strange choice, unless it serves to reference the whole masculine/feminine in one person idea, united together, or playing at being united together, and not really achieving it seriously until the end of the film.