"It Was Beauty Killed The Beast" (OLD)
Peter Jackson’s King Kong is one of the best movie remakes ever. While there are some issues with the film such as its overly long run time, lack of payoff for several characters that are built up over the course of the film, and its sluggish opening, I still find it to be a more enjoyable watch each time I see it as I get older. The CGI which is over a decade and a half old now still holds up despite its age, and Jackson’s version of Skull Island is my favorite out of the myriad versions of King Kong’s home since its existence in 1933.
Spoiler alert: Kong Dies in pretty much every version of the 1933 story, including the 2005 version directed by Jackson. I’m sorry to burst your bubble for people who have been living under a rock all of their lives, but it dovetails into a fantastic quote which can be seen in the title of this article. No matter whether it is uttered by Robert Armstrong or Jack Black, it remains a point of contention with many viewers of the film who watched both versions. My focus will not be on the 1933 original but on the remake, as I feel that has a more interesting universe, and Kong’s motivations in that film I feel are more complex than most give it credit for. So while he was looking at the corpse that had just fallen off the Empire State Building, Carl Denham was correct when he uttered the words, “It was beauty killed the beast.”
The reason I say he was correct is that when one looks into the lore of the setting, you find that Jackson and his team did a lot of prep work into making Skull island feel like an actual honest-to-god ecosystem. I won't go into the lore very much, but anyone who has seen the movie can tell that the island looks sunken and half-drowned. That is because it is situated between two tectonic plates that are slowly driving apart from each other, causing the island to sink slowly piece by piece. It is also why the island is so violent and seemingly the reason why everything wants to kill the humans who set foot on it. People who have taken 10th-grade biology know that as a habitat gets smaller, species start to die off and resources start to dry up, the wildlife can and must get more ruthless if they want to stay alive. This bottleneck effect nurtured by the shrinking island is why it is almost cartoonishly brutal. Add dinosaurs and giant bugs into the mix, and you have one of the most incredibly well-thought-out settings in a movie. The smartest inhabitant on the island aside from the primitive humans is the giant apes with the fake scientific name of Megaprimatus Kong.
King Kong was the last of his species by the time Carl Denham and his crew arrived on the island. Essentially a combination of disease, V-Rex attacks, and a small gene pool led to the slow demise of his kind. Kong was obviously based on a gorilla, and like other primates, they are a highly social species. Take away that meaningful companionship and family-orientated way of life that their brains are hardwired for, and you get an extremely antagonistic and misanthropic creature. As a person who lives in the modern West, I can tell you as many others can that being an atomized loner is not a good long-term prospect for living a full life. But at least in almost every case, you can make the decision to come out of your shell and interact with people, build relationships, and fulfill your goals.
Now try and see the position in which Kong found himself. Your instinct on a primal level is to have relationships and to build on them because that is what your reward system banks on. To achieve something on that island is to survive another day with your tribe still intact. Yet that tribe is gone. The only thing keeping you going is survival instincts because you can’t grasp the concept of the fact that everyone you know is dead, and when you die that is it. Even if Kong could not comprehend that concept, that does not mean that from the outside looking in, it is so incredibly tragic when you conceive yourself in that situation.
When Kong found Ann Darrow, she slowly but surely changed him from a hostile loner to a protector once more. Near the end of the movie, Kong is captured, caged, and brought to New York as a showpiece in front of all the gawking denizens of the city that never sleeps. Of course, he inevitably breaks out, finds Ann, and climbs to the top of the Empire State building. In what is possibly the most famous sequence in cinematic history, Kong faces down six bi-planes with mounted machine guns, and is ultimately brought careening to the streets below after an excruciatingly large amount of bullets are fired into his body. The 2005 version is especially poignant in my opinion as he non-verbally comforts Ann before dying
(As an aside, one detail that I feel does not get pointed out is that right before he dies, Kong’s eyes dilate to absorb more light. So as he is staring at Ann, his vision grows dark as he loses consciousness before the light in his eyes leaves and plummets off the building. I just thought that was an extremely subtle and tragic way to show his imminent death.)
A good question you the reader might pose is why am I spending so much time writing about a fake ape, on a fake island, in a fake (albeit iconic) monster flick. Because it wasn’t the planes that killed Kong, it was beauty that killed the beast. Through no fault of her own, Ann reawoke a paternal instinct in Kong. A creature that for years on end lived alone on the most hostile island on Earth. An island that was slowly sinking, driving the predators he fought against every day further to his home. Over the course of time, everyone and everything he knew was gone, with him sleeping by the skeletons of his family and no hope of ever rekindling any form of relationship with anyone until Ann came along.
His desperation to never be alone again led him to his doom, with Ann inadvertently being the catalyst of his demise. In an increasingly isolated existence, we all live in a world in which our institutions crumble away day by day. It seems that through no fault of our own, the world we live in takes more and more away from us. Now a second chance arises that while not being the same as it was before, is better than your existence at this very moment. It makes sense then that Kong would die over that second chance. Maybe plenty of us would do so too.
Keep Trucking.
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