King Kong · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the fur. Kong is standing still on the plateau with Ann in his fist, and his pelt is crawling. The reason is unglamorous: between exposures, the animator's fingers disturbed the rabbit fur glued over an eighteen-inch armature, and the disturbance stayed on the film. Audiences in 1933 took it for breathing. They were wrong about the cause and right about the thing, and that small productive error is the best door into what this picture actually did.

Deleuze begins his cinema books by separating two ways of getting movement. The old way builds it out of privileged instants: the pose, the tableau, the sculpted climactic attitude, movement inferred from the noble forms it passes through. Cinema does something else. It takes movement from any-instant-whatever — ordinary, equidistant samples, none of them special, none of them chosen for beauty. Deleuze insists that animation belongs fully to cinema for exactly this reason, because an animated drawing is never a pose but a figure caught in the act of forming. Kong is that claim in its purest form. Every instant of his existence was made by hand, one at a time, by Willis O'Brien's unit working in seconds of screen time per day. Not one of those instants is a posed climax. What we call his life is happening in the gaps between them, and the fur is where you can see the gaps.

This is not a decorated way of saying the animation is good. It explains a thing about the film that is otherwise mysterious. Kong's effects have been superseded a dozen times over and the creature still holds, because his movement was authored at the level of the instant rather than at the level of the shot. That is what lets him carry a temperament the screenplay never states: curious, irritable, vain, and at moments tender. A demonstration can't be vain. A performance can.

Which brings you to his face. For close-ups the production built a full-scale bust with articulated features, and the film's most consequential technical decision is when to cut from the eighteen-inch armature to that mechanism. Deleuze calls the close-up the affection-image: a feeling registered on a face and not yet discharged into action. He separates two kinds. There is the reflecting face, immobile, holding one quality like wonder. And there is the intensive face, where small movements mount across a surface toward a threshold. Kong's is the second kind, a face of appetite gathering. The joke of the medium is that it is literally assembled out of micro-movements; the concept and the craft are describing the same thing from two directions.

There is also a hand. A full-scale arm rig was built so it could hold Fay Wray aloft, and the scene it exists for — Kong picking at her clothing, cut by censors for the 1938 reissue — is a scene in which the story stops. Nothing is decided. He looks; he fiddles; he sniffs his fingers. Deleuze's name for a living thing is a centre of indetermination, a gap between a movement received and a movement performed. A rock transmits force. A creature hesitates. This production built an expensive machine whose only purpose was to let a monster hesitate on screen, and that hesitation is why the ending hurts.

Skull Island is laid out as a system of thresholds: sea, beach, village, wall, gate, jungle, plateau, Skull Mountain. Every barrier crossed is a level down. For roughly the first third of the running time Kong is not seen at all; he lives in the out-of-field, one gate away, announced by drums and by a legend that he is neither beast nor man. Deleuze's impulse-image describes precisely this arrangement: a derived milieu, a concrete social place with customs and trades, revealed to be the thin surface of an originary world of raw drives. Skull Island doesn't imply that structure, it maps it as geography. And the film is more honest than it is usually given credit for about where the drives are, because Carl Denham's appetite for footage nobody has seen is on the ship's side of the wall, and it is the appetite that starts and finishes the story.

The originary world is a formal category, empty until something fills it. What fills it here is specific and ugly: an island of Black islanders staged as ritual terror, a Black-coded giant killed for wanting a white woman, the whole thing crowned on the newest skyscraper in the world. The formal machinery — descent, threshold, the sense of a world older than law — is exactly what makes that content feel like nature instead of authorship. Naming this is not an appendix to admiring the craft. It is a description of the same architecture.

Structurally the picture runs Deleuze's large form: an encompassing situation presses until an act transforms it. What makes it breathe is the alternation he calls respiration-space — enormous milieu-space, then the taut single line of the duel. Mario Larrinaga and Byron Crabbe's vistas, layered mist and silhouetted crags lifted compositionally from Doré, give you the vast lungful. Then the log over the ravine narrows the world to one line and men come off it. The fog is doing two jobs at once: atmosphere, and camouflage for the seams where painted, animated, and photographed elements meet.

The Empire State climax is where the cutting becomes the special effect. Kong on the mast, biplanes banking in, pilots in cockpits, Ann on the ledge, the city below, each shot short and each from a different technical register. The shape is Griffith's convergent montage with its last-minute rescue. The mechanism is closer to Eisenstein, because incompatible materials collide and the third thing produced is the space itself: a continuity that exists in no single element and only in the joins.

Then Denham chains the creature to a Broadway stage and sells tickets. Deleuze's attraction-image is action transposed into spectacle, the figure exhibited rather than the deed done, and the film puts its own exhibition inside itself. Cooper sold this picture to RKO the same way, by shooting a test reel: prove the impossible thing on film, then argue budget. Denham's showmanship is held at just enough distance to be readable as Cooper's.

After that, only the slope. The impulse-image always ends in descent, and Kong's climb is his fall. Frankenstein, two years earlier, had supplied the whole shape: the reveal withheld through a first reel of talk, the one tender scene that converts menace into pathos, the pursuit that kills the creature at the top of a structure. Kong exchanges torches for biplanes. From The Lost World come the same animator, the same model-builder in Marcel Delgado, and the same third act of a captured prehistoric animal breaking its restraints and climbing a modern city. From The Ghost of Slumber Mountain comes the method itself, armatures under sculpted flesh matted into live plates so that actor and creature occupy one image. From Metropolis comes scale manufactured by lens height rather than set size, which is why Kong is shot from below in New York and from slightly above in Ann's eyeline on the island. And from Cooper and Schoedsack's own Grass and Chang come the expedition grammar Denham borrows to make the island read as somewhere a man actually reached, the stockaded village with its great log gate, and the showman's habit of physically enlarging the picture for the animal climax.

What it seeded is bigger than the monster movies that formalized its withheld reveal into doctrine. Linwood Dunn's optical work here, and the Acme-Dunn printer developed around this period, turned frame-accurate recombination of separately shot elements into an ordinary studio capacity. After this film a shot no longer had to have been photographed at one time, at one scale, in one technique. That is the founding assumption of nearly everything since. But the harder lesson took longer to learn, and some very expensive pictures still haven't: an effect becomes real when it is given an interval, when the thing stops and considers before it acts.

So watch the fur. Watch the cut from eighteen inches to the full-scale hand. Watch where the picture stops dead to let its monster think. And keep an eye on Denham, the only person in the film who gets everything he wanted, and who is handed the last word. It's not obvious the film agrees with him.