Lessons from Kong

            What surprised me most about another King Kong remake was learning that there have been over a dozen Kong remakes and spin-offs in film and television over the last seventy years. I realized some time ago that nothing keeps its pop-culture staying power except that it means something to us (even if we don’t know what). I concluded that King Kong is a parable of Modernism: the story of Modern man’s vision of what human kind is: a mighty god who turns out to be a lovesick gorilla.

Transcendence or Ascendance

            The difference between Pre-Modern and Modern thinking can best be described like this: Pre-modern thinking was dominated by a belief in Transcendence. This isn’t merely a belief in God and religious faith. Plato’s philosophy, foundational to our culture, argued that everything from abstract ideas (like Reason, Truth, Justice and Goodness) to physical objects themselves was rooted in a higher, Transcendent reality. But in the 1800’s, three thinkers so completely changed our culture’s view of things that their influence is still felt today. King Kong is a parable of the dangers of the Modern vision created by Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Darwin and the Ape

            Carl Denham, filmmaker, takes an expedition by ship to the South Pacific and comes to Skull island, a Jurassic world where only the strong survive. Kong, this world’s king, is described as “neither beast nor man.” That’s what Darwin gives us: humanity no longer born by Divine spark in a paradisal garden but by survival of the fittest in the jungle slaughter house of natural selection. Humanity descends from its special place in God’s creation but rises from the slime to stand on his own two feet, a king of the natural world.

Nietzsche and the Giant

            Nietzsche’s contribution to the Kong parable was the death of God (which doubtless came as a surprise to the Almighty). Nietzsche saw, in Darwin, the foundation for the destruction of what people had before considered Transcendent, unchanging morality. In a biological explanation for existence, a whole new ethical system was required. Every Transcendent thing—God, Ideals, Morality—was human invention. Reality was survival of the fittest which meant that some must rise above the masses as Supermen. Aggression and ascension meant the few would rise above the masses, would step on common men to do so (as Kong literally does).

            The parable of Kong, then, is a parable of a giant, kicked up from the average by Darwinian processes, a giant among men, a god. The ship’s Captain, Englehorn, calls Kong a “god or a spirit….” In Kong’s Modern vision, the human spirit is elevated to godhood but only by eliminating humanness and spirit. Humanity may be a giant in the world, but he is only a giant animal.

Freud and the Animal Desires

            And according to Sigmund Freud the animal is driven by sex. As Darwin believed that humanity ascended out of creatures less complex, so Freud believed that human personality ascended from unconscious regions of the brain. At the base of human personality were subconscious desires from early human evolution which were chiefly concerned with survival and procreation. Freud said all human behavior could be reduced to sex and aggression: dominate your environment and continue your species. Morality and civilization, then, were mere products of a more evolved conscious brain which struggled to keep the animal desires in check.

            Freud’s idea of the human animal is a perfect example of Modernity’s rejection of Transcendent vision, of choosing to see things from the bottom up instead of the top down. Where, for example, does love come from?  Do human beings love because love is an evolutionary inflation of the instinct for sex, or do they love because Love is a quality of Spirit that permeates the universe from the heights of heaven down to the very act of biological procreation?

Beauty and the Transcendent

            One of the best arguments for the existence of a Transcendent Power governing human being is the desire for Beauty, a hunger which a bottom-up approach cannot explain. The controlling theme of King Kong is the taming of the Beast by the Beauty. In the parable, the beautiful woman symbolizes the longing for Transcendence that defies the wisdom of Modern Man, even his sense of self-preservation. Backstage before the New York show Denham tells reporters, “Kong could’ve stayed safe where he was, but he couldn’t stay away from Beauty.” Modern Man rejects Transcendence and then risks captivity in his quest to have it back.

            Ann Darrow is the symbol of Divine Presence at her marriage to Kong: In the original Kong film, as we look back through the doors at the altar to which Ann is tied, her outstretched arms and S-bent form mimic the figure of Christ in traditional crucifixion images. Ann is the symbol of longing; she is heaven come to an earth which has written heaven from its rational belief.

Hear Then the Parable…

King Kong is a parable of Modernism, specifically of the definition of humanity handed to the Modern world by its nineteenth century intellectual forefathers. Kong is Modern Man, rejecting Transcendence and God and thereby elevating himself to the place of godhood (of power) by reducing himself to the place of an animal. Simultaneously he loses those Transcendent concepts—Beauty, Divinity, Goodness, Love—which gave his life meaning while longing to have them back.

The parable culminates atop the Empire State Building, the Babel-like tower built by Modern Man to his own godhood. There Kong climbs to the edge of heaven only to find that heaven is gone, replaced by a naked sky populated no more by winged angels, but by demonic bi-planes, lifeless machines, now inhabiting his cosmos; he cannot defeat the world he has created where all life is but machine and thus the strongest machines shall claim godhood over him. Having rejected Transcendence, he can neither keep his throne of Divinity, nor join in marriage to his Beauty. He cannot save her, and so he leaves her atop the unconquerable tower. Like Lucifer, he falls to a hell of his own making, there to die and become meat for the survival of the fittest worms.

In an age of religious terrorism, many have forgotten that far greater terror was unleashed upon the world by the Modern rejection of the Divine: Hitler’s fascism, Stalin’s communism, the killing fields of Cambodia—forty million dead and more born on the backs of belief systems that said mankind is all there is. In the Kong parable, Beauty is a vision of faith that God is there and goodness is not a matter of survival of the fittest. To reject Beauty (faith), then, is what will kill us. Such is Denham’s profoundly sappy conclusion: “Oh no; it wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.”