The Nightmare Vision: King Kong as Captivity Narrative

This holiday season the dreams and nightmares of Western culture are apparently battling for dominance at the Hollywood box office. The Disney studio’s film adaptation of the C. S. Lewis classic Chronicles of Narnia, with its Christian message of redemption, is being challenged for financial supremacy by director Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which continues to draw upon the dominant culture’s fear of the “other,” dating back to the captivity narratives of colonial America. Kong’s current status as number one at the box office suggests that cultural fear of the primitive “other” may outweigh the redemptive powers of a muscular Christianity.

Jackson’s King Kong, unlike the 1973 remake and various low budget cinematic reincarnations of the giant ape, is an attempt to do a faithful adaptation of the 1933 classic film; albeit with the flash of computer technology and contemporary special effects. Like his lavish Lord of the Rings trilogy, Jackson’s King Kong is an entertaining film, but what is perhaps most interesting about the continuing cultural fascination with the giant ape from Skull Island is how the legend of King Kong plays upon the racial insecurities of white Americans.

Kong represents both the brutality and nobility of the savage, while blond Ann Darrow (with Naomi Watts reprising the role played by Fay Wray in the original) as Kong’s captive symbolizes both the purity and vulnerability of white civilization. The mythology of King Kong draws much of its power from the contrast between Kong’s blackness and Darrow’s whiteness. Darrow is both repelled and attracted to the primitive Kong. The sexual ambiguity is titillating, but in the final analysis whiteness and civilization must be rescued by an appropriate white savior (in Kong this role is played by Adrian Brody as the writer Jack Driscoll) to remove the threat of miscegenation posed by Kong. It is no wonder that the 1933 version of Kong was reportedly Adolph Hitler’s favorite film and played into his racial theories outlined in Mein Kampf. The cultural appeal of Kong to Americans, however, probably resonates best with the history of race relations between white settlers and Native Americans as well as black and white Americans dating back to the brutal institution of slavery. These images of conflict are, of course, also apparent for the threat to white culture posed by the Asian and Latino “other.”

American colonials were enthralled with tales of white women torn from their communities by Indian raids. Perhaps the best known of these early accounts is that of Mary White Rowlandson, the wife of a Congregational minister. She was eventually ransomed and returned to her husband, while the narrative of her captivity became a best-seller in colonial America. In Regeneration Through Violence, historian Richard Slotkin asserts that in the captivity narrative “a single individual, usually a woman, stands passively under the strokes of evil, awaiting rescue by the grace of God. The sufferer represents the whole, chastened body of Puritan society, and the temporary bondage of the captive to the Indian is dual paradigm—of the bondage of the soul to the flesh and the temptations arising from original sin. . . .” Perhaps Narnia and Kong are not really so separate in Western mythology.

The popular captivity narratives soon found their way into American literature with James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. In the twentieth century, numerous Hollywood films employed the frontier experience to exploit the nation’s racial and cultural fears. One of the most classic examples of this genre is director John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) starring John Wayne as Ethan Edwards, searching for his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), who was captured by the Comanche. Since she became the wife of Comanche chief Scar, Edwards plans to kill her and eradicate the sin of miscegenation. Instead, Edwards kills Scar and restores Debbie to white civilization.

By making Native Americans a product of the nineteenth-century frontier and generally ignoring them in contemporary American culture, filmmakers have reduced white racial anxiety regarding the Indian “other.” The racial implications of white and black, however, remain at the core of American society. Sexual exploitation of black women by white men was an integral part of the slave experience, but with the institution of slavery available to control the black population, fears of liaisons between black men and white women did not dominate white concerns. With the end of slavery and increasing efforts by black men to exercise the suffrage, whites became threatened by images of black empowerment. Culturally, these fears of black political power were often manifested in assertions that black men were preying upon white women, the symbol of white civilization and privilege. Accusations by white women of rape by black men were the excuse given for numerous lynchings and race riots, ranging from the violence against the black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma during the 1920s to the murder of Emmett Till in the 1950s. The racial divisions over the O. J. Simpson murder trial in the 1990s must be viewed within this context.

Early twentieth-century culture reflected these racial anxieties regarding miscegenation with Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman and its film adaptation by D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation. In Griffith’s classic film, black men prey upon pure, white womanhood. In the image of blacks binding the blond Elise Stoneman (Lillian Gish) and the black brute Silas Lynch (George Siegmann) attempting to carry her off under his arm, we have King Kong and the blond Ann Darrow. In the case of Elise Stoneman, rescue comes through the formation of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who save white womanhood, civilization, and political power. Although not as crude as The Birth of a Nation, the film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1939) perpetuates similar themes when poor Southern whites and freedmen attempt to rape Scarlet O’Hara, symbolizing the rape of Southern civilization during Reconstruction. And efforts at integration during the early days of the Civil Rights Movement were met with the refrain that racial mixing would lead to miscegenation or as it was more crudely expressed by some Southern whites, “How would you like one to marry your sister.”

It is within this cultural context of racial relations and captivity narratives that we must place the powerful mythology of King Kong. Jackson attempts to offset the racial implications of the story by introducing a heroic black sailor Hayes (Evan Park), who is paternalistic in his caring for the young white Jeremy (Jaimie Bell) rather than sexually aggressive toward Darrow. Nevertheless, the natives of Skull Island, which is supposedly located near Sumatra, still tend to resemble the stereotypical Africans of an old Tarzan film, and they seem to enjoy placing the helpless young blond woman in bondage. Peter Jackson’s film is an entertaining high-tech action picture, but it is well worth remembering the powerful and dangerous cultural myths which have clouded our history and are embodied in the legend of King Kong.