King Kong · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Picture the frozen lake in Central Park. For two hours Kong has roared, smashed, and killed; now, with the city's lights ringed around him and Ann sliding toward him across the ice, the ape simply stops. He looks up at the sky. Nothing happens, and it is the best scene in the movie. Hold onto that, because it tells you what Peter Jackson's King Kong actually is: a blockbuster engineered for nonstop action that earns its tears only in the moments action quits.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it — perception flows into action, and the cutting serves that chain. In the time-image, action stalls; the protagonist can only watch and endure, and time stops being the measure of movement and becomes something we feel for itself. Almost the entire machine of King Kong runs on the first regime, at full throttle. It is, in Deleuze's finer term, the action-image in its large form: a global situation bears down until a decisive act transforms it. An uncharted island, a creature to capture, a city to terrorize — and at each turn somebody must do something or die.

Skull Island is a textbook synsign, Deleuze's word for the encompassing milieu that calls action into being. Jackson stages it as a rotting Gothic ecosystem — cyclopean ruins, a food chain of dinosaurs and oversized vermin, the insect pit rebuilt from the 1933 film's lost spider sequence — a world that exists to be survived. And the set-pieces are pure binomial, force against force: Kong wrestling three V-rexes with Ann clutched in one fist, the brontosaur stampede pouring down a ravine. This is the grammar of the American adventure picture, and Jackson knows exactly whose grammar it is. Willis O'Brien animated the 1933 ape and The Lost World before it; Ray Harryhausen carried the emotive-creature tradition through Mighty Joe Young and the skeleton duel of Jason and the Argonauts; Jurassic Park gave digital animals convincing mass; Gollum gave Weta the keyframe-plus-capture pipeline that becomes Kong. The whole lineage is one of bodies in motion, perfectly integrated into the same frame as live actors. Jackson's island is a love letter written in that language.

But the language isn't where the film lives. Watch what happens to Kong's face. Deleuze reserved a whole category for the affection-image — the close-up, where a feeling is registered but not yet discharged into action. Its purest form he called the qualisign: an immobile, reflecting face expressing a single quality, wonder or contemplation held for its own sake. That is the sunset on the cliff, and it is the lake. Serkis's performance and Weta's animation are celebrated for fur and muscle simulation, but the real achievement is smaller and stranger — they built a synthetic face that could hold an affect with no line to speak and nothing to do. When Kong watches the light go down, the movie's entire industrial apparatus has been bent toward a single immobile expression. That is not a monster movie's instinct. That is the time-image smuggled into a creature feature.

The relationship is built almost entirely from looking, which Deleuze would file as a dicisign — the camera perceives a character who is perceiving, and we feel the camera there inside the exchange. Ann looks; Kong looks back; the rapport is wordless because it is made of gazes, not events. And the ice sequence tips fully over into what Deleuze called a pure optical situation, an opsign: a moment where the characters, and we, can only look, because no action is available or wanted. Ann is no longer an agent but a seer. Kong goes still — and the world keeps moving around his stillness, the ice spinning beneath him, the city alive behind him. Deleuze had a name for that too, the movement of world: the figure grows quiet while motion migrates to everything around it, the dance absorbing the dancer.

There is one more turn, and it's the film's sharpest idea about itself. King Kong is a story about showmanship — Carl Denham hauls a living thing back to Broadway and chains it before a paying crowd. That display is an attraction-image, Deleuze's term (after Eisenstein) for action transposed into spectacle, staged to be figured rather than acted. The film thus exhibits its own first regime as a crime: the movement-image as exploitation, the creature reduced to a number on a marquee. "It was beauty killed the beast" is Denham still selling tickets over a corpse. Jackson lets the spectacle indict the spectacle.

What does this do to the form? It proposes that a $200-million action machine can locate its soul precisely where the action stops — that the most expensive movement-image of its year is quietly an argument for the time-image. Next time, don't wait for the V-rex. Watch the face. Watch the moments when Kong has nothing to fight and simply looks at the sky, and notice that the whole enormous film was built to make you feel those seconds of doing nothing at all.