Word in Edgeways

Kong's people

One of my favorite blogs is Pharyngula, where there was recently a perceptive, and to my mind, spot-on critique of the film King Kong. Most people I know who've seen the film -- the under 13 year olds aside -- agree that while it was moving and extremely well-acted, the island scenes were tedious and silly. The odd humans who inhabit the island do conform to all the usual, offensive stereotypes of "the natives" although they are shoved out the way pretty quickly to make way for the numerous examples of animal gigantism the place has to show for itself (I refer here, obviously, to Kong, and to the big bug pit into which the crew fell -- for no other reason that I could tell than to gross the more delicate members of the audience out (not me; I laughed heartily), and to finish off those annoying mariners who hadn't managed to get killed yet.)

It was hard to get a fix on the exact model for the dark-skinned charmers who waylaid the gallant, pasty-skinned crew of the doomed ship (first mate excepted). The nouveau-primitives from Mad Max II came to mind. Then the real-life Ilongot and Yanomamo, on grounds of physical appearance and their reputation (subject to serious and important debate) for violence. Who were these actors, I wondered? Light-skinned people made-up to be dark? (I'd recently seen something like this from the files of a make-up artist in the Hindi film industry, wherein an entire supporting cast was rendered several shades darker with body paint to become "tropical primitives" for a song sequence).

None of this speculation would mean a whole lot if it were not for the briefest moment, towards the film's end, in the midst of the performance that Carl Denham (Jack Black) has composed to showcase the giant ape. Miraculously, the bedraggled, fearful, and belligerent island natives have turned into athletic, handsome, well-dressed, consumately choreographed ... Africans? This visual shift suggests to me that Jackson has a lot more insight into the stereotypic representations of "natives" than the islander scenes, by themselves, suggest. After all, Denham wasn't just restaging Kong's abduction of Ann; he was staging Skull Island, and absent Tyrannosaurus Rex and a posse of raptors, the only other resource to hand to create the spectacle was "primitives." The challenge for Carl, one assumes, was coming up with the kind of primitives that would be convincing, decorative, and above all, harmless (unlike the memorably harmful Kong).

The anthropologist part of me would have loved to explore this part of the film more; the ordinary film viewer rolls her eyes and complains that the thing was long enough already, you'd want it to go on for another hour? Not that I didn't enjoy seeing the film, on Christmas Day, in a Bombay multiplex, seated in leather reclining seats for the princely sum of five bucks. It's amazing how comfortable chairs can make a long film pass quite tolerably. A few days later, I read that some provincial theater operators -- unblessed with upholstered seats and laz-y-boys for the butts of the hoi polloi and deeply frustrated at the running time of King Kong (even most Bollywood productions clock in under three hours these days), decided to take matters into their own hands. Chopping off the credits saved fifteen minutes; allegedly they trimmed some other parts too, although I've no idea what, or even how they did it. One owner boasted he got the film down to "two hours and twenty minutes, and it's just as good."

No doubt it was. I can't help thinking what a great study it would have made to see the different edited versions these enterprising theater owners created; imagine if we could have, as well as the self-indulgent "director's cut," the pragmatic "theater owner's cut." One thing you could be sure of: it wouldn't take over three hours.

posted by Sylvie @ 3:10 PM