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Article Excerpt
King Kong achieves mastery over Manhattan atop the Empire State Building before his ineluctable fall. This essay analyzes the Empire State Corporation's textual and visual propaganda, much of which was displaced onto Kong, concluding that both giant ape and skyscraper were dual ciphers of the Depression era's heroic and exploited multiethnic construction workers.
The famous closing scenes of the film King Kong (1933) feature the enormous, human-like ape atop the mooring mast of Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon's Empire State Building (1931) in New York, then the tallest building in the world. Before arriving at its crest, a long shot shows him scaling its flank as a tiny speck, foreshadowing his ultimate demise (Illus. 1). His arrival at the summit with blonde Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) in his grasp announces his temporary mastery of the mammoth structure and ocular possession of the entire city. This is corroborated by a preliminary script: "Holding the girl aloft in one hand, he beats his giant breast with the other. He, Kong of the World Before Man, defies the mightiest city ever erected by the hand of man" (Cooper, Wallace, and Creelman 4). In spite of his fleeting triumph and virile presence, Kong's transgressive love is never consummated (Illus. 2). After placing Ann on an adjacent ledge, Kong is shot by men in fighter planes, causing him to plummet helplessly to his death.
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These incidents are among the most memorable, not simply because of the dramatic star power of Kong, but because of his contest and identification with the Empire State Building, which also suffered a fall from grace during the Depression. While diverse scholars have long acknowledged the iconic skyscraper's significance to the film, there has been no sustained effort to interpret Kong specifically in the context of its physical properties or the publicity created for it, nor to explain the fusion of ape and sky-scraper in light of changing views on lofty architecture and construction work from the Machine Age to the darker days of Depression (Gottesman and Geduld; Mayne). The film's story commenced at a time when the viability of the ever-larger skyscrapers that had multiplied in the nation's urban centres was a hotly contested topic, and was completed when tall buildings were regarded as tombstones of capitalism. An anonymous writer in the New Republic summed up the dominant sentiments during the economic debacle, while underscoring the implied spatial dynamics in the last scene of King Kong, referring to skyscrapers as "the material embodiment of the late bull market," which "soar boldly above a mesa of roofs, very much as the spire-graph of 1929 equity prices," but now serve as "ironic witnesses of collapsed hopes" ("Bull" 192).
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Other Depression-era films such as Skyscraper Souls (1932), Baby Face (1933), and Counsellor-at-Law (1934) also render skyscrapers in problematic terms, as sites of charged eroticism and class tension, where rapacious businessmen prey on their subordinates with gusto, and where suicide and murder lurk, occasioned by financial ruin and betrayal. For example, the establishing shot of Skyscraper Souls consists of a long shot of the tombstone-like Dwight Building and a dwarfed Empire State Building, a dystopian scene of a skyscraper city that served as a reversal of the urban sublime (Illus.3). Surveying the dual pinnacles from above at the outset of Skyscraper Souls foreshadowed the "skyscraper suicide" of a professional "fallen woman" who, like Kong, plunges to her death. The appearance of these two lofty edifices underscores the degree to which the film was informed by changing views of the Empire State Building and the debates swirling around speculative, seemingly limitless skyscrapers, here used as a way to warn of the perils of constant upward striving. This view is echoed in Baby Face, in which Lily Powers (Bette Davis) sleeps her way to the top, seen literally in the panning of a Manhattan office building's exterior, only to lose it all before returning to her working-class roots in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she seeks her redemption. These films were made largely for the Depression's disenfranchised audience, members of which were encouraged to renounce greedy capitalists and materialism in favour of an adherence to their class affiliations and traditional gender positions, as a way to restore stability and normative values.
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The scholarship on Kong is voluminous. He has been variously interpreted as a nightmarish monster, an image of coded blackness, an exotic other, libidinal energy gone awry, and a symbol of Depression-era anger. As Roger Dadoun points out, Kong is evocative because of his suggestive emptiness, or his capacity to be both a purveyor and producer of so many different identities (107). In order to more fully understand Kong, film historian Cynthia Erb suggests in a recent study an interdisciplinary movement outside of Film Studies (22). In response to Erb's appeal, I seek to unpack the manner in which aspects of the Empire State Building's mythic and material properties, including its commanding size, and the Empire State Corporation's publicity campaign, including commemorative books and pamphlets, public events and spectacles, and Lewis Hine's commissioned photographs of construction workers, are displaced onto the giant ape in the film's final scenes. This previously unanalyzed extra-architectural discourse surrounding the Empire State Building will shed new light on the manner in which its ersatz manliness is transferred to Kong as he tries to dominate the city. One must also view Kong's literal and figurative ascension and fall in the context of ideologies concerning masculine success epitomized by the "human flies" who climbed skyscrapers for fame and fortune during the post-World War I building boom and the multiethnic construction workers who fabricated them, but who subsequently lost their livelihoods and sense of manly purpose during the Depression.
My decision to categorize Kong in dialectic terms as both antagonist and analogue to the Empire State Building is prompted, in part, by Judith Mayne's pioneering article, in which she identifies the film's structural symmetries (Skull Island and Manhattan), its asymmetrical thematic approach (e.g. savagery versus civilization), while acknowledging the shared "otherness" of the giant ape and New York. Extending Mayne's methodology, I argue that Kong's fusion and duel with skyscrapers, and the Empire State Building specifically, are overdetermined, and the rhetoric surrounding them are an integral part of his identity. Indebted to the work of Jacques Derrida, I evaluate Kong through the lens of the Empire State Building rather than basing his identity solely on the aims of those who "constructed" him. For example, in the film's final sequences, issues of victory and defeat are enacted in the relay of shots that picture a small ascending Kong, a triumphant giant, followed by a plummeting speck, which are redolent with ideologies concerning manly work, the effects of "sky-scraperization," and the misfortunes occasioned by the Great Depression.
A crucial aspect of the Corporation's parable was the valorization of construction worker's seminal energies, which were supposedly absorbed into the body of the Empire State Building, and later Kong, forging an architectural image of both primeval and rational masculinity. This strategy was offered, in part, as a ploy to promote a positive vision of instrumental, manly labour at a time when so many citizens had lost their jobs and the nation suffered from increased labour strife. Historian Barbara Melosh has pointed to the valorization of manly, working-class labourers...
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