"The Guy in the Gorilla Suit"

[Dave Monroe]

Oh, and, er, of course, cf. ...

"To insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine
at least some of its claims on us, to assert the
limited wish that living things, earthly and
otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough
to take part in transcendent doings. By this theory,
for example, King Kong (?-1933) becomes your classic
Luddite saint. The final dialogue in the movie, you
recall, goes: 'Well, the airplanes got him.' 'No . . .
it was Beauty killed the Beast.' In which again we
encounter the same Snovian Disjunction, only
different, between the human and the technological."

Thomas Pynchon, "Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?," New
York Times, Sunday, October 28th, 1984

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

And see as well, on KK in GR ...

Cowart, David.  "'Sacrificial Ape': King Kong and
   His Antitypes in Gravity's Rainbow." Literature
   and Psychology, 28, Nos. 3-4 (1978): 112-119.

And/or ...

Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion.
  Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980.  pp. 40-8.

And here's a coupla other things that came up whilst I
was hunting down the original publication of
"Sacrificial Ape" ...

__________.  "Pynchon and the Sixties," Critique 41
   (Fall 1999): 3- 12.

Which first appeared in Danish as ...

__________.  "Pynchon og tresserne."  Trans. Tore
   Rye Anderson, Passage 26 (1997): 55-68. 

And as someone asked about M&D ...  

__________.  "The Luddite Vision: Mason & Dixon."   
American Literature 71, No. 2 (June 1999): 341-36.

http://www.cla.sc.edu/ENGL/faculty/bios/cowart/vita.htm

Hope something there's of use, at least ...

--- Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Also from the new issue (#16, "The Stockholm
> Syndrome") of Hermenaut, "The Guy in the Gorilla 
> Suit" by Gavin McNett (pp. 58-68) ...
> 
> "It's King Kong, released in 1933, which seems best
> to mark the dilatory transitional point in the
> metaphorical finction of the GGS [Guy in a Gorilla
> Suit] in American society.  Although still
> transported to civilization in a cage only to escape

> and wreak havoc, Kong's gorilla-as-African-demigod 
> had become impossibly huge: a stop-motion model of 
> a monster who would have been physically unable to 
> ravish the blonde Venus he carried off.  King Kong  
> also emerged in the film as a surprisingly
> sympathetic character--an innocent who by all rights
> should have been allowed to remain in the jungle,
> and who, ultimately, wanted only to be loved.  In
> 1962, Japanese audiences cheered on King Kong
> (a GGS, not a model) as he saved Tokyo from
> the radioactive Gojira (trans. 'gorilla-whale,'
> a.k.a. Godzilla [Guy in a Godzilla Suit?]), in
> Godzilla vs. King Kong.  Godzilla, of course,
> represented the destructive forces of man-made 
> technology; thanks to Hiroshima, by the 1960s the
> GGS had come to seem downright lovable." (p. 161)


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