Verse
Stefanile, Felix
fusillade, this primate Kong suddenly becomes that other Cong whom we tried to kill off the same way. He becomes the enemy who opposes us with the same guerrilla tactics Christ used against...
...Kong therefore remains the same tragic figure he was in the 1933 version of King Kong...
...He is a victim of their world of publicity and celebrity...
...In a way the papparazzi are what have killed him, too...
...In all the ads, for example, far from being shot down b y a couple of helicopters, Kong is shown crumpling up a whole jet fighter in one hand like a beer can...
...In this reincarnation De Laurentis has given him...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FELIX STEFANILE SAYING SORRY TO YOU Saying sorry to you is like climbing the stairs to the landing, where the little table is, and the vase with one flower in it, your match in the dark...
...When Kong starts raging just as Jack is about to score with Dwan, she rushes off to sooth Kong instead...
...He becomes the enemy who opposes us with the same guerrilla tactics Christ used against the Romans, the enemy who, though slaughtered in the flesh, lives on in the spirit and wins in the end...
...Great myths come, like Kong himself (or Christ), out of nowhere...
...With an advertising blitz like this, De Laurentis's film is perhaps too central a document of our time to become a genuine legend...
...Consequently, Dwan and Jack remain true to Kong, and a part of his personality, even after he's dead...
...In this closing note, as elsewhere, De Laurentis shows himself a producer with considerable restraint and wit...
...De Laurentis rolls out no artillery heavier than those few helicopters to kill Kong because he wants us to recognize that Kong's fate is in truth self-inflicted...
...What topples him off the World Trade Center is not finally either the helicopters or the papparazzi, but the fact that his own passion knows no bounds...
...Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes...
...The heroine is Dwan (Jessica Lang), who has only a single, peculiar name like Kong, and the first time we see her, since she is adrift in a lifeboat as mysterious and unexpected as Kong's island, we realize that her fate too must be tied to his...
...For all that, however, the new film will never have the same sway with us that the old one has...
...Kong is that "throttled and pitiful giant" L.B.J...
...But when he lies dying later, those same papparazzi storm up his chest like the Marines onto Iwo Jima to photograph his death agony...
...Like his kingdom, his only real enemy is within...
...Yet at the same time that Kong is the enemy, he is also we ourselves...
...Their origins are obscure the way the authorship of the Bible is, or of the 1933 King Kong, which almost certainly didn't originate with the writer, Edgar Wallace, who shares the screen credit for it...
...The one place where De Laurentis has shown neither wit nor restraint is in the promotion of his film, which began over a year in advance...
...Nevertheless, De Laurentis's film never allows us to lose sight of the fact that Kong is also the victim of himself...
...He contains, for instance, both the hero and heroine, who are but aspects of Kong's own personality...
...Again, we feel that they are all somehow only part of him to begin with...
...When papparazzi swarm around Dwan, Kong breaks out of his cage because he thinks she's in danger...
...They begin in some hinterland and take us by surprise...
...His omnipotence lies to a large extent in an omnipresence, in being utterly protean...
...As they confront one another in the crowd beside his corpse something in them seems to have gone dead too, for they are not able to fall into each other's arms...
...4 February 1977:86...
...We can't deny he has such staying power considering that he has now been resurrected, like Christ, over forty years after we first killed him...
...De Laurentis's version is limited in this respect by its own financial resources and spectacularity...
...once warned us we would become if we fought a war in Asia...
...And there you are in the room, sewing by the open window, humming to yourself...
...To have made it a second time, maybe even to have made it better in some ways, required only intelligence...
...Kong is the all-possessing American hero who yawps in Whitman's "Song of Myself," Do I contradict myself...
...Whoever came up with the original idea for King Kong, to have made the film the first time required real inspiration...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...And in the same vein, while De Laurentis realizes he must make his characters smaller than life in order to make Kong seem bigger, he doesnt make them so small that their feelings are non-existent or arbitrarily changeable...
...The hero is Jack (Jeff Bridges), a zoologist who stows away on the oil expedition, and the first time we see him we are struck by what a hairy ape he is with his untrimmed hair and full beard...
...Having been seduced by Jack, she makes love to Kong as if they were, man and beast, one and the same...
...Containing the multitudes of the world at large, Kong of course contains all the characters in De Laurentis's film as well...
...Outside, the mourning dove has just picked up his flute...
...It is as though, having attacked Dwan, the papparazzi have killed Kong...
...The momentous events in Kong'S story all occur through a kind of transference between him and the other characters, a kind of animal magnetism which always seems to draw down upon him the consequences of their actions...
Vol. 104 • February 1977 • No. 3
