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COLUMN: IS 'KING KONG' RACIST? Thu Dec 15 2005 08:59:16 ET Is KING KONG racist? asks Jim Pinkerton in his Thursday NEWSDAY column. "Lots of people say it is. And, if it is, why does the film keep getting remade? What does it say about us if the new KONG is a huge hit?" Pinkerton writes: Any movie that features white people sailing off to the Third World to capture a giant ape and carry it back to the West for exploitation is going to be seen as a metaphor for colonialism and racism. That was true for the original in 1933 and for the two remakes: the campy one in 1976, and the latest, directed by Peter Jackson. (In addition, a KONG wannabe, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, has been made twice.) Movie reviewer David Edelstein, writing in SLATE, notes the "implicit racism of KING KONG - the implication that Kong stands for the black man brought in chains from a dark island (full of murderous primitive pagans) and with a penchant for skinny white blondes." Indeed, a GOOGLE search using the words "King Kong racism" yielded 490,000 hits. Comparing the new film with the original, the WASHINGTON POST's Stephen Hunter observed, "It remains a parable of exploitation, cultural self-importance, the arrogance of the West, all issues that were obvious in the original but unexamined; they remain unexamined here, if more vivid." And by more vivid, Hunter might be referring to the natives of mythical Skull Island, where Kong is discovered. Director Jackson took people of Melanesian stock - the dark-skinned peoples who are indigenous to much of the South Pacific, including Jackson's own country of New Zealand - and made them up to look and act like monsters, more zombie-ish than human. Indeed, one is moved to compare these human devils to the ogre-ish Orcs from Jackson's mega-Oscar LORD OF THE RINGS films. The bad guys are dark, hideous and undifferentiatedly evil. Developing... |
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