King Kong · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Jackson's King Kong builds its tragedy around the gaze, and does so with a structural honesty unusual for blockbuster cinema: Carl Denham, the film's internal villain, is a director himself, and his crime — dragging Kong to Broadway to be exhibited — is the same act Jackson performs in assembling his three-hour spectacle. The Depression-era New York sequences, shot in a desaturated, sooty palette that Lesnie's anamorphic frame renders period-correctly, establish Denham's world as one where poverty makes spectacle a commodity and living things become attractions. Against this transactional machinery, Jackson builds the film's emotional core through the affection-image: Kong's face in sustained close-up at the Manhattan climax, the creature rendered in close enough digital detail to hold grief and longing in its manufactured eyes before the violence forecloses action. This emotive-creature register — feeling before the sensory-motor — is the craft inheritance from Mighty Joe Young (1949), where O'Brien and the young Harryhausen first showed that a fabricated animal's tenderness could read as true. Jackson's most audacious move is to make the relation-image his governing mode: by giving us a filmmaker-protagonist whose guilt is inseparable from our pleasure as an audience, the film folds the spectator into its indictment of spectacle, leaving no outside position from which to enjoy Kong's destruction innocently.