Cinematic Sadomasochism: Affective Grotesque in King Kong

Weston: Is this the moving picture ship?
Dock Worker: Yeah, you goin' on this crazy voyage?
- King Kong (1933)

Indeed, the moving pictures – cinema – have the power to take the spectator on a crazy voyage. Cinema, writes Anne Rutherford (2002), is not only about telling a story; it's about creating an affect, an event, a moment which lodges itself under the skin of the spectator. Taking queue from Rutherford, the objective of this entry is to discuss the affective power of King Kong. But prior to such discussion, we shall take a detour through Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood (1952) in order to compare two episodes of cinematic magnitude.

In the first of these episodes, Hazel recalls attending a carnival at ten years of age. Here, Hazel pays for admittance into a tent which is “so SINsational that it would cost any many that wanted to see it thirty-five cents, and it was so EXclusive, only fifteen could get in at a time” (p. 41). In the tent Hazel looks down, with other men, “into a lowered place where something white was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he thought it was a skinned animal and then he saw it was a woman” (42). Hazel leaves the tent, presumably due to fear of being seen by his father.

The second episode takes place subsequent to Enoch stopping “in front of a movie house where there was a large illustration of a monster stuffing a young woman into an incinerator” (94). After telling himself (eight times) that he would not watch such a movie, he finds himself sitting down for three films. The first two pictures – “The Eye” and “Devil’s Island Penitentiary” – seem horrific, yet Enoch sits through them both. The third picture – “Lonnie Comes Home Again,” a film about “a baboon named Lonnie who rescued attractive children from a burning orphanage” – is conducive to such affect that Enoch “made a dive for the aisle, fell down the two higher tunnels, and raced out the red foyer and into the street” (95).

Now, these two episodes echo one another in several respects: the subjects of each story pay money in order to see a grotesque spectacle, whether it be pseudo-necrophilic voyeurism or a film in which a monster forcibly inserts young women into an incinerator. However, it is where the episodes differ that is of interest.

In the first episode, Hazel expects to see something to the effect of men “doing something to a nigger” (42), yet encounters the more a grotesque tableaux that is simultaneously conducive to libidinal object cathexis and abjection. As grotesque as this image is, its affect is not half as powerful as that caused by a “nice looking girl” giving Lonnie, the baboon, a medal. The reason for the powerful reaction in the second episode is a subversion of desire: Enoch’s sadism toward the grotesque is defused by the humanisation and adulation of its object. This notion – the subversion of sadism – is something I shall now discuss in regards to my own experience of King Kong – my own “crazy voyage.”

To break formality and to speak anecdotally: I first saw King Kong at a bona-fide cinema – one in which the walls of the foyer were plastered with movie bills ranging from Spartacus to Oz from Rosemarie’s Baby to Endless Summer. The café at which I was working – not one hundred metres from the cinema – had been promoting and selling tickets to the cinema’s monster-movie double-bill, in which Werewolf of London was followed by King Kong. Upon closing up for the night, I collected one of many left over tickets and sauntered over to the cinema to catch the second picture. And, just over one and half hours later, I found myself leaving the cinema not in a rage like Enoch, but very much affected for the worse.

About half an hour into the film, if I recall correctly, Kong makes his first appearance, taking the form of a grotesque monster, and is juxtaposed to the nice-looking girl who he drags off into the jungle. My desires may not have been as sadistic as those of Enoch, but I was hoping for the men to fall this monster and rescue Ann. But in spite of this, as the film progressed, my semi-sadistic desires were subverted as the grotesque figure of Kong becomes more and more human.

Consequently, when Kong is transported to America, I found myself in possession of an affect cinematic New York was unaware of: I had traded in my sadism for pathos or, rather, the cinema had forced the exchange.

And here, my viewing experience took on a masochistic colouring. In New York, the desires I held not an hour earlier were enacted against Kong: bullets tear into his flesh until he sets down Ann and gives one final roar, then plummets to his death from atop the Empire State Building. Then, in the film’s most famous line, Denham sums up the sympathetic appeal of the grotesque monster as he states “It wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty that killed the beast.” At this point, the pathos of the cinematic spectator is defeated by the sadism of the film, and utter masochism prevails. Thereby, King Kong had taken me on a crazy affect-laden voyage – one that was so powerful for me it has rendered King Kong one of very few cinematic experiences the entirety of which I can still recall.

Works Cited:

O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. London: Faber and Faber, 1952.

Rutherford, Anne. “Cinema and Embodied Affect”. Senses of Cinema, 2002. Retrieved 22 October. 2007 from www.sensesofcinema.com