Movie fans still go ape for Kong

[Dave Monroe]

Movie fans still go ape for Kong
A decades-long love affair with the lovable monster
goes on
BY STEVE DOLLAR

December 13, 2005

What a piece of work is Kong. The big ape with a heart
of gold has been hanging around America's popular
consciousness for decades now - almost like it was the
Empire State Building. Now in his third official
cinematic incarnation, thanks to director Peter
Jackson, the supersized simian is just another lonely
guy with a tragic weak spot for the blondes. Or is he,
somehow, symbolic?

"Kong has emerged in the last decades as one of our
great culture heroes," wrote critic Elliott Stein in
"Cinema: A Critical Dictionary," "an absorbed and
central personage of the American mythos."

[...]

... the character has been the star of comic books and
popular slogans ("King Kong died for our sins" was au
courant in the 1960s) and took a key role in Thomas
Pynchon's mind-boggling 1973 novel "Gravity's
Rainbow." ....

[...]

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/ny-etlede4549737dec13,0,3034220.story?coll=ny-entertainment-headlines

King Kong & the Like

Fay Wray look, 57; Fay Wray, 57, 179, 275; "You will
have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood,"
179; "headlights burning like the eyes of" 247; "the
black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer," 275;
Mitchell Prettyplace book about, 275; "the Fist of the
Ape," 277; "orangutan on wheels," 282; taking a shit,
368; "The figures darkened and deformed, resembling
apes" 483; "a troupe of performing chimpanzees" 496;
"on the tit with no motor skills," 578; "Negroid
apes," 586; "that sacrificial ape," 664; "a gigantic
black ape," 688; Carl Denham, 689; poem based on King
Kong, 689

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/k.html

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.

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

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.kong isking.net

http://www.aboyd.com/kong/index2.html

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