Someone's always smarter than you....

Last night during KING KONG, I was intently studying just what Peter Jackson was trying to say with this film. Some films are total crap and aside from sociological readings, there's not much to glean from them. But I simply refuse to believe that anyone as intelligent as Peter Jackson just makes "movies." That being said....some spoliers may lie ahead. if you haven't seen the movie, you may not want to read this...

The first thing that jumped out at me was how the character arcs and their objectives were clearly and well defined. All the characters are completely obsessed by something. Ann Darrow wants to be an "important" actress...or at least a popular one. She'll stop at nothing to become one. This sets her on the adventure. Carl Denham wants to make amazing movies...or at least very popular ones and he will truly stop at nothing to do this. He, next to Kong may be the most obsessed. King Kong is incredibly lonely...he's a misunderstood king...the very last of his breed. When he goes, there will be no more gigantic gorillas. These three are the dynamic character, the antagonist and the protagonist of the film. However, everyone in the film is obsessed. Jack Driscoll is obsessed with writing. The ships captain is obsessed with the desire to be the greatest live animal captor around. The movie producers in the film are obsessed with money. Everyone has their bugaboo and it's perfectly laid out. All that being said, we will now get into the conspiracy theory-esque portion of this mini-review.

There's no doubt KING KONG, both now and then, is a parable for racism. White people go to faraway island, capture a native, chain it down, sail back and proceed to make money off of it while denigrating and harming it. That's all as obvious as can be. However, from about the 3rd scene in the movie and on, the racist element kept leaping out at me in a new and certainly intentional way. On the way home, I kept piecing it together as best I could on one late night viewing and I was going to post on someone else's blog or on Film Threat but I figured I'd do it here. This is what I noticed...