Roars of Defiance

I may have made an oversight in my discussion of Kong. My girlfriend turned me on (ha-ha) to the possibility of such during a recent re-viewing of Peter Jackson’s Kong. “Any discussion,” she told me, as we watched the ape meet his death at the hands of the twentieth century, “should include something about that image. That one, right there: Kong standing on the top of the Empire State Building, the highest point in New York at the time—correct me if I’m wrong?

(She was not so I had no need to. It was, indeed, the highest point at the time of this picture’s progenitor (1933) and may, in fact, be so again today. As Kong climbed the spire and Peter Jackson chose to shift scenes to a wide angle, establishing shot of Central/Lower Manhattan I pointed to a piece of sky at the island’s southern tip and said, “Right there. In about forty years—from the time this picture’s set in—that’s where they’d be. Right there. That piece of sky. And thirty years after that…bang. Jericho’s walls came a-tumblin’ down. Walls, floors and ceilings.”)

“Okay,” she said. “The highest point in New York. The highest point in the world, right?” Indeed. The top of the world; just like the song that plays over Kong’s opening montage says. “Okay. So no discussion would be complete without that image of him, at dawn, on top of the world, beating his chest.”

As the bi-planes congealed themselves into strafing formation I saw exactly what she meant. “The King of the world he knew, who up ‘til now had toiled and battled in utter obscurity, escapes the captivity imposed upon him by the modern world and literally pulls himself up to a point where everyone must look up to him. They have no other choice. He’s reached the Absolute Height, and at dawn no less. Can’t get much more symbolic than that. The formerly obscure, the blackest of the black, this God of the fog jungles and 'the last blank space on the map' has surmounted the straight-line, ninety-degree-angled world of ‘civilization’ in the most ironically obvious of ways. The unknown, the ignored, makes himself impossible to ignore. So he has to die. We kill him.”

Legions of monsters have followed Kong’s example and his journey has become the formula slavishly followed by all who share his cinematic heritage. Even Godzilla, who in many ways remains Kong’s dipolar opposite (Kong is a “person”, Godzilla a “force”; Kong is mortal, Godzilla nigh-invulnerable; Kong is destroyed by a civilization that cannot accept him on any terms but the slave master’s, Godzilla, being nigh-invulnerable, has the power to set his own terms), began life as a God of unknown regions. Jungle, sea, the depths of space, or the frozen waists of an arctic ice berg: it makes no real difference in the final summation. The giant monster always propels itself (or is propelled, usually through short-sighted human actions) into a position of absolute prominence. The Deadly Mantis climbs the Washington Monument. The Locusts in The Beginning of the End blot out the skies over Chicago with the sheer size of their swarm. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms runs riot through Manhattan’s fish markets, its blood poisoning thousands, even those who escape its more direct attacks. And Godzilla, high father of them all, torches millions in a single night’s rampage, and returns to torch more, again and again, writing declarations of his own existence in the charred remains of entire cities.

I would counter my girlfriend’s statement with the idea that any giant monster discussion is incomplete without mention of these critical elements, these crucial events. In them, the monsters reveal their true motivations, rarely anything more complex than mere existence. These creatures do not want (in so much as they can “want” anything in any human sense) to participate the straight-edged world of the civilized. In many cases they could obviously care less that such a world even exists. The fact that it does, coupled with their stature, forces giant monsters everywhere to acknowledge it in one form or another, even if only with a roar of defiance or a casual blast of radioactive breath. This mutual acknowledgement, with its inherent antagonism, is at the heart of all these tales of terror and destruction. And while these may not be revolutionary realizations they may, in their own slow time, point the way to some that are, providing a much-needed skeleton key to my Finnegan’s Wake and allowing me to draw something positive from the countless amount of hours I have otherwise wasted on these fun but often frighteningly bad films.