From King Kong Thorie, by Virginie Despentes (in French), pp. 119-123.

King Kong Girl

translated by alain kessi/code flow The version of King Kong directed by Peter Jackson in 2005 starts at the beginning of the last century. At the same time, industrial, modern America is being constructed, it says good-bye to the old forms of entertainment, the burlesque theater, theater companies unified by a feeling of solidarity. It is getting ready for modern forms of entertainment and control: cinema and pornography. A megalomaniac director and liar, a man of the movies embarks a blonde woman on board of a ship. She is the only woman on board. The island they are interested in is called Skull Island. It does not exist on the maps, for no one has ever come back from it. Primitive peoples, fetal creatures, little girls with her hair tangled up, menacing old women, toothless, are howling under torrential rain. They kidnap the blonde woman in order to offer her to King Kong in oblation. They tie her together, and an old woman puts a necklace around her neck before delivering her to the big ape. The previous humans bejeweled with this necklace have all been munched like little aperitif cubes. This King Kong has neither dick nor balls nor tits. There is no scene by which a gender could be assigned to it. It is neither male nor female. It is just hairy and black. Herbivore and contemplative, this creature has a sense of humor, and of the demonstration of its power. Between Kong and the blonde, there is not a single scene of erotic seduction. Beauty and the beast tame and protect each other, are sensually affectionate one with the other. But not in a sexed manner. The island is inhabited by creatures that are neither male nor female: giant caterpillars with viscous and penetrating tentacles, but clammy and pink like a womans cunt; larvae with heads like dicks which oven up and become toothed vaginas that bite off the heads of the fellows of the crew Others call up a more gendered iconography, but drawing on the field of polymorphous sexuality: hairy spiders and grey and identical brontosaurs, comparable to a hoard of clumsy spermatozoids King Kong functions here as a metaphor of a sexuality from before the distinction between genders as it has been imposed politically around the end of 19th century. King Kong is beyond the female and beyond the male. It is at the hinge, between human and animal, adult and child, good and bad, primitive and civilized, white and black. Hybrid, before the compulsory binary. The island of this film is the possibility of a form of polymorphous and hyperpowerful sexuality. What cinema wants to capture, exhibit, adulterate and then exterminate. When the man comes to look for her, the woman hesitates to follow. He comes to save her, to bring her back to the city, to hypernormed heterosexuality. Beauty knows that she is safe with King Kong. But she also knows that she will have to leave its reassuring palm in order to go to the humans and to cope by herself. She decides to follow the one who came to look for her to rescue her from security and bring her back to the city in which she will once again be threatened from all sides. In slow motion, close-up on the eyes of the blonde as she understands that she has been used. She has merely served to capture the animal. The s/heanimal. Merely to betray her ally, her protector. That with which she had affinities. Her choice of heterosexuality and life in the city is the choice to sacrifice what in her was shaggy, powerful, what in her is laughing while beating her chest. That which is ruling over the island. Something had to be offered in oblation. King Kong is then put in chains, exhibited in New York. It has to terrorize the masses, but the chains have to be solid, so that the masses can be tamed in turn, like in pornography. They want to touch the brutish from close up, tremble, but they do not want the collateral damage.

Damage there will be, because the beast escapes his exhibitor, just like in the spectacle. It is not the recuperation of sex or violence that pose a problem today, but on the contrary the irrecuperability of the notions on which one has drawn in the spectacle: violence and sex cannot be domesticated through representation. In the city, King Kong crushes everything he finds on his path. The civilization that was being built at the beginning of the movie is destroyed in very little time. This force that they wanted neither to tame nor to respect nor to leave where it was, is too strong for the city, which it smashes merely by walking. With a great calmness. The beast is looking for its blonde. For a scene that is not erotic, but refers rather to childhood: I shall hold you in my hand and we will skate together, like for a waltz. And you shall laugh like a child in an enchanted merry-goround. There is no erotic seduction here. But an obvious sensual relationship, playful, in which force does not aim at domination. King Kong, or the chaos from before the genders. Then the men in uniform, the political, the State, intervene in order to kill the beast. To climb buildings, to fight with planes that are like mosquitoes. It is their number that allows them to slaughter the beast. And to leave the blonde alone, ready to marry the hero. The director, his eyes wide open in front of the animals body, photographed like a trophy. Oh no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast. A directors word: false. Beauty has not chosen to kill the beast. Beauty has refused to partake in the spectacle; she has come looking for it as soon as she knew it was breaking free; she has enjoyed herself in its hand when they had to slide on the frozen water of the park; she has followed it to the summits where it was massacred. Then, eventually, beauty has followed her beau. Beauty has been able prevent the men neither from bringing back the beast, nor from killing it. She puts herself under the protection of the most desiring, the strongest, the best adapted. She is cut off from her fundamental power. This is our modern world.