“When the man comes to rescue her, the woman is reluctant to go… Beauty knows that she is safe with King Kong. But she also knows that she will have to leave its big, reassuring palm, go and live in the land of men and manage there alone. She decides to go with the man who has come to find her — rescue her from this safety — in order to return her to the city where she will once again be under constant threat… she realizes that she has been used. She was only bait to capture the animal… her choice of heterosexuality, and life in the city, is… [t]o sacrifice all that is wild and powerful within herself, the part of her that laughs and bangs its chest.
“In the city, King Kong crushes everything in its path... the force that was not tamed, respected, or left where it was, is too great for the city, which it crushes just by walking.
“Then the men in uniform, the world of politics, of the state, intervene to kill the beast. Scaling buildings, fighting with mosquito-like airplanes. Only the sheer number of them allows them to kill the beast… the director, wide-eyed next to the animal's body, photographed as a trophy, says, ‘It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty who killed the beast.’ Typical lying film-director's speech. Beauty didn't choose to kill the beast… it was assassinated… she wasn't able to stop the men either from bringing the beast back, or from killing it… she is cut off from her own essential power. That's our modern world.”
- King Kong Theory, Virginie Despentes. Pages 107 - 109 (2010 Printing).
King Kong (1933) dir. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack.
Photographs by Eddie Linden, Vernon Walker, and J. O. Taylor. Art by Mario Larrinaga and Byron L. Crabbe. Photocopied from The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner and George E. Turner.
