In the original 1933 release, Kong was a god to the people of Skull Island looked on with awe. The Americans who captured him only saw him as another resource to exploit for money's sake, of course.
In the post-atomic age though, Godzilla is instilled with all of the destructive fury of tornadoes summoned from a firestorm. Godzilla is destruction. Kong by comparison, fell in love with a blonde.
Godzilla simplifies and explains America firebombing Tokyo and every other city in Japan during the war as pure indiscriminate wrath. Kong is taken from his environment and taunted with visions of Fay Wray seeming to be attacked and then he coins the phrase "ape-shit" to describe breaking loose in one of the largest cities on earth.
Kong is emotional while Godzilla is methodical. Kong's motivation is clear while Godzilla isn't even bothering to eat all the people killed in his wake. At this point you can almost wonder if the Japanese asked themselves after the first bombing raids on their cities the American equivalent of "Why do they hate us?" Constraint and control of information has an odd way of sheltering such naiveté...
In any case, it is fitting that these two monsters would be forced to clash as they represent a dividing line between two distinctly different times. I can't remember specifics to the film (and I'm not paid to write this shit by the way goddamnit - it's done out of love...) but I do recall a semblance of a happy ending. Possibly a stalemate between two world powers...
I wish Godzilla was gone - you'll recognize it in phrases like "shock and awe", but Kong as a force of nature is barely beyond our periphery, peering in & searching for his trophy wife.
I am becoming a goddamned doomsday prophet wanna-be. Yuck. I guess if more of these damn scientists preached through Leviticus rather than explain basic goddamn facts, people would have more appreciation for what we are doing to nature.
1 comment:
Here I was all poised to include some moving text by Jospeh Campbell about man's desire to conquer nature, vs. man's inner contentment with the natural word, and I can't find what I was looking for. So suffice me to sum it. Campbell states somewhere in his discussion of "The Power of Myth" with Bill Moyers, that one of the conflicts in Christianity, is that the Christian myth actually encourages man to look at nature as something that MUST be conquered. It is at its essence evil and should not be trusted (to quote Werner Herzog "..the universe is full of hostility, chaos and murder."), rather it should be dominated and destroyed in an attempt to reach the divine. You might elude this to the analogy of Godzilla. Man's drive to conquer and destroy nature in the quest to achieve some sort of divine presence. Conversely, King Kong, much like the natives that worshipped him represents the divine as it exists in the natural world. There is on contrivance, no man mad construct; just raw, unadulterated nature in it’s most violent and murderous. This is representative of your more nature based mythos. The idea of the divinity simply being. There is no control, it is just there.
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