but then Charley discovers a cowrie bracelet on the deck and sounds the alarm, declaring: “Crazy black man been here!”
The modifier black, in the Chinese cook’s broken English, does not identify the absent kidnapper as African or Negro. Rather, it signifies his racialized capacity to violently assert masculine heterosexual prerogative—unlike Jack or Charley, who are not man enough to act upon their natural desires to possess the white woman. This racialized capacity is merely transferred to the kidnappers as the agents of Kong, to whom the white woman will be offered; at a further remove, it transfers from the islanders to Ann and Jack via the drumming that aurally conditions their previously blocked embrace. While Charley’s own interest in Ann is laughable—in a comic bit of business, he tries to join the search party, waving his meat cleaver and babbling, “Me likey go too. Me likey catch Missy,” before the white men, armed with guns and explosives, wave him away—he provides a cautionary tale for Jack’s white manhood. Just as the decline of Asiatic civilization resulted in emasculated, servile “Chinamen,” Western modernity risked falling into decadence through its supposed disruption of traditional gender roles. The figure of a beautiful young woman, driven by ambition to venture, without husband or father, first to New York City and then to a savage ocean on a boat of rough men, is terrifying enough to send the valiant, virile Jack scampering to the company of other sailors. What might forestall this collapse into decadence is a tonic infusion of primal, violent sexuality, the essence of a blackness embodied by Kong—“neither beast nor man,” Denham puts it, but “monstrous, all-powerful.”
Kong’s blackness thus emerges through careful differentiation from all existing racial categories to embody the ideal blackness posited by U.S. imperial desire. His dominion is the fabled blank spot on the map that eluded all previous empires, an untouched state of nature, abstracted from all the ongoing “race problems” left over from historical iterations of the civilizing mission—genocidal conquest, enslavement and Reconstruction, colonial rule in the Philippines. By implicit contrast to such historical complications, Kong’s blackness appears as a fictive distillate of the longed-for real: the primal essence that might rejuvenate a U.S. whiteness imperiled by the perversions of overcivilization.
This essence must therefore be captured and carried to the metropolitan center, its violent mastery enacted before an excited public. When his film is ruined and his crew ravaged, Denham redoubles his ambitions, capturing and exhibiting not the image but the creature himself. Back in New York, before a packed theater, he displays Kong in chains: “He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive, a show to gratify your curiosity.” This performance is heightened, for the cinematic audience, when Kong escapes, seizes Ann, and runs amok in the city.8 Finally, he climbs the Empire State Building, symbol of modern U.S. ascendancy, and briefly fights off a squadron of planes before falling to his death below.
By the rules of the narrative, Kong’s death had already been assured, if not by his status as a figure of terror, then by the notorious scene on Skull Island where he partially undresses his blonde captive. In staging a fantasy of white womanhood imperiled by black sexual violence, which calls forth an overwhelming retributive violence to destroy the black threat in public spectacle, the film unmistakably repeats the logic—or the training in an aesthetics of rationality—that structures ritualized lynching. This structure manifests as a narrative trajectory from prehistoric to modern, vertiginously captured in the iconic image of the great ape battling airplanes from the top of the skyscraper, and mediated by the white woman’s body, as Dunham famously concludes: “It wasn’t the aviators. It was Beauty killed the Beast.” The sacrifice and consumption of a primal essence redeems a white nation threatened by overcivilization, restoring its organic capacity for growth and regeneration: civilization’s sublimation of the savage is a life-giving act of sexual violence. Kong’s capture and killing make Jack more of a man, Ann more of a woman, and their resulting heterosexual union more normatively white. This ritualized narrative, what you might call the lynching form, miraculously births whiteness through the violent incorporation of blackness, a ceremony of communion whose celebration constitutes a white—that is, imperial—nation.9
The resemblance between spectacle lynching and other communion rites has long been noted, an analogy highlighting both the desire invested in the sacrificial object and the endless repetition of ritual. Because the reproduction of whiteness is the effect of a ceremonial performance constituted by the screening of the film, it is not actually represented within the narrative: the conjugal union of Jack and Ann takes place only after the story ends. If audiences tend to forget Jack, who is largely superfluous to the climactic sequence in Manhattan and never achieves normative masculinity on screen; if their desires tend to fix on Kong and his captive, a primitivized figure of female sexual vulnerability not yet restored to a properly gendered norm; if the film reads as a tragedy whose hero’s death is rescinded in the afterlife of innumerable remakes and new adventures across genres and media—all this may be a consequence of the lynching form’s ritual temporality: it is cyclical, mortal, always insufficient, requiring repetition, again and again and again.
Just as Filipinos and African Americans do not actually appear in the film, as signifiers rendered “nonfictional” by troublesome histories of racialization, the fictional Kong appears extraneous to historical analyses of U.S. imperialism and its production of racial categories. But Kong, you might say, is the fabled “missing link” that makes the logic of U.S. imperial racism coherent: because the black Pacific did not exist, he had to be invented. His story portrays the logic, or aesthetic, of the bond between discrepant racial subjects forged by the violence of the U.S. civilizing mission, held together by the abstract ideal of a primal essence posited by imperial desire. In seeking the embodiment of its sexual fantasy, this violence functioned to conflate Negro and Filipino racialization, and yet all its ritual recurrences, whether in cinematic and literary representations or in grisly live reenactments, could never conjure the fantasy into existence.
Indeed, for those African Americans who journeyed across the ocean, on ships or in the pages of print or the shadows of the cinema, and for Filipinos across empire, writing at the seam of metropolitan and colonial racial formations, it was the discrepancy between racial forms, the disjunctive doubling of savage stereotype in the superimposition of Negro and Filipino, that provided motive and mobility. Drawing on Brent Edwards’s theorization of décalage as the discrepancy or gap in articulations of diaspora enabling movement, understood as the absence of some artificial “prop or wedge” (“Uses” 65–66), you might say that it was the removal of the black Pacific “missing link” that allowed articulations of Negro-Filipino relations to be set in motion. If the identity posited by the fusion of these racial forms could only be a trap, the incitement of violence, the difference between them might serve as a pivot in another direction. How this difference was operated, in what manner and toward what ends, I will take up throughout this book.
freedom from love
To state that King Kong is a celebratory reenactment of lynching is merely to express an open secret, one consistent with lynching’s own logic: as Jacqueline Goldsby has shown, the simultaneity of spectacle and secrecy is crucial to understanding this violence. In the film and its remakes, audiences are called upon to simultaneously see and not see lynching’s manifestation, the same training of perception that made the perpetrators of spectacle lynching disappear before the sight of the law. Yet this history of violence seems incompatible with the curious love adhering to the character, in all his unlikely vagabondage through global popular culture. Where audiences’ love for the renegade ape largely serves to dissociate their narrative investment in lynching’s reenactment, it is the perceptual foregrounding of lynching, the insistent calling of attention to the visual, olfactory, and kinesthetic evidence left in its wake, that banishes explicit recognition of the erotic dynamics suffusing Billie Holiday’s performance of “Strange Fruit.” To love Kong, viewers of the film must all but forget they are enjoying a lynching; to attend to lynching, listeners to the song must all but forget that its performance gathers in a space consecrated to love.
As a reader of such reenactments, learn not to forget there
