eng304sp11

Hi all,
I’m enjoying the Tati posts and you can continue to post them since I got the lecture up late last week. This week’s is ready, though, so I’m going to post it now for those of you who are ready to move on. First, please read a brief except from James Snead’s essay “Spectatorship and Capture in King Kong” by opening the PDF file here:
http://web.pdx.edu/~sberry/snead001.pdf

After you’ve read that, here’s my overview / summary of his main points (sorry for the colorized clips, but that’s all that was handy). The discussion prompt is down below the lecture text.

http://s0.videopress.com/player.swf?v=1.02

Race and gender in King Kong

I’m having you read a few pages from James Snead’s analysis of King Kong for this week’s discussion of race and gender representation because his piece uses a range of analytic approaches we’ve looked and combines them in an interesting way. I’ll review much of his argument here, but it will probably make more sense if you read the excerpt first, before watching this video.

Snead mainly does a textual analysis of the film, meaning that the essay doesn’t look at the film’s production or reception history, he just looks at the film itself, and how it relates to the social and formal codes we’ve talked about in relation to semiotics.

Snead notes that semiotics came not just from linguistics, but also the structuralist anthropology of Levi-Strauss, who I talked about a little in our week on genre (because genre structuralism looks at genres as being similar to myths – they’re repeated narrative patterns that are culturally specific).

Snead points out that, for Levi-Strauss, myths were a unifying force in society because they turned social tensions and contradictions into repeatable narratives with resolutions. But Snead points out that poststructuralism has revised the way we can think about semiotics, and not just because connotative meanings are unstable and culturally specific.

He argues that modern myths actually illustrate social divisions, and expose fantasies that are not communally shared. He writes, “in a pluralistic society, myths – especially where they rely on the subordination of particular groups in society – are inevitably political and cannot enforce or sustain a uniform scheme of mythic reconciliation.” And I think that’s a really interesting argument. Unfortunately Snead, who taught English and German literature at Yale, died when he was only 35 so he wasn’t able to fully develop his ideas, which is a real loss.

For his semiotic analysis, Snead uses three categories of signification to describe the inscription of race in King Kong: mythification, marking, and omission. In the Metzian terms we’ve been using, mythification deals with the social and cultural codes used in the film, marking is about the film’s formal, cinematic codes, and omission is about literal or cultural censorship (i.e. the significance of what’s not represented in the film).

Snead argues that the film doesn’t openly display its representational agenda. He suggests that the romance plot of the film is basically a cover for the real story told by the film, which he sees as essentially an “allegory of racial and sexual exploitation” that is coded in terms of romantic conflict and resolution.

This approach, which uses a semiotic framework of reading semiotic connotations, or what’s sometimes called a “subtext” in the film, is sometimes called a “symptomatic” reading. It’s what Stuart Hall would call a “negotiated” reading based on a critical analysis of how the film’s representation relates to broader social issues.

There was an influential article in the French Cahiers du Cinema in the 1970s about John Ford’s film Young Mr. Lincoln, which popularized this way of reading “against the grain” of a film. For example, critics who like Douglas Sirk’s films often argue that, as we’ve seen, the expressivity of his style often says much more than the fairly generic romance plots do.

The most obvious aspect of this in Snead’s essay is the way he sees African-American stereotypes encoded in the film in a variety of ways, from the island natives to the ape itself. In his introduction Snead specifies that, while what he describes could apply to a range of other non-white groups (Latinos, Asians, etc.) he focuses on what W.E.B. Du Bois described as the way the “Negro” “is the metaphor of the twentieth century, the major figure in which these power relationships of master/slave, civilized/primitive, enlightened/backward, good/evil, have been embodied in the American subconscious.”

In addition to his “symptomatic” reading of the film’s formal and representational patterns, Snead also looks at how King Kong uses stereotypes that are also found in countless other films. He argues that King Kong simply epitomizes ways of representing race and gender that were already extremely familiar at the time through repetition and intertextuality.

Like the Cahiers piece on Young Mr. Lincoln, Snead also argues that films are structured not only by their overt form and content, but by there “structuring absences.” The unsaid, which is implied by and necessary to what is said.

And this is based on the idea that that there is a kind of cultural repression around issues like race, but one that’s never totally successful and results in a kind of unarticulated but still visible anxiety, where cultural power struggles are displaced onto other objects, like a giant ape.

You can see the influence of Freudian theory here, and one of the problems with this notion of films revealing “symptoms” of cultural repression is that the whole concept of repression is unfalsifiable – if you disagree, it’s just because you’re repressing your own recognition of the matter at hand.

On the other hand, as we become farther removed from films historically, it’s often much easier to see how they related to social and cultural issues at the time. And this is just the benefit of hindsight, because it’s hard to have perspective on your own culture’s obsessions when you’re in the midst of them. So to us, for example, the relationship between 1950s science fiction films about alien invaders and Cold War paranoia is pretty obvious, but probably wasn’t for a lot of people at the time.

What’s interesting about seeing a film as having a “subtext” or being “symptomatic” of some cultural tension is that you can see how much that has do do with our own background and “negotiation” of the film’s meaning, in Stuart Hall’s sense. For example, as a feminist it seems obvious to me that the representation of women in films like Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Disclosure, and so on, is symptomatic of anxiety about women gaining more equality in the workplace, just as the film noir cycle after WWII showed the same kind of anxiety about women who were no longer dependent on men.

So the main qualifier I would add to a reading like Snead’s relates to the concept of “structured polysemy.” A subtextual reading of a film is like saying that its “preferred” meanings are not just in the surface plot and characters, they are also formal and connotative. But that’s only going to be persuasive to the extent that you describe good textual or intertextual evidence for those associations.

And of course we now also need to acknowledge that viewers with different backgrounds may have very different associations. So with interpretation in general, especially when it’s based on what’s “not said,” or how social tensions are “displaced” in a film, you simply have to kind of “own” you own cultural perspective and not assume that everyone will have the same cultural associations that you do.

The real power of Snead’s reading of King Kong, in my opinion, has to do with the way he draws out the interrelationships between the film’s references to sexual, racial, and political codes. For example, the script draws a parallel between Jack’s masculinity and Kong’s; in the case of Kong, however, this masculinity is clearly excessive and has to be disciplined.

But how is that excessiveness conveyed? Snead argues that it’s not just in terms of size and monstrousness, but by his analogy with the black men in the film. So black men become a crucial part of the film’s anxiety about excessive masculinity and its valorization of a kind of self-disciplined (and implicitly white) masculinity, which is associated with Jack, who is initially aggressive and clumsy, but is tamed by his attraction to Ann, becoming both possessive and protective of her.

And I think it’s important to keep in mind that this film was made and released in the early years of the Great Depression, at a time when traditional gender roles were thrown into chaos by male unemployment, at the same time that women were increasingly able to work in service sector jobs. And we know that white unemployment historically exacerbates racism, but I think anxiety about women’s independence, and a desire to see them as kind of objects of exchange among men rather than financially independent, is fairly clear in the film.

At this point I’d just like to list a few of the primary codes Snead mentions in his analysis, beginning first with the issue of blackness, and then I’ll talk about gender.

1. The history of slavery and colonialism (and this is represented both economcally, in terms of Denham’s greed, and in the capture of Kong and his transportation in chains on a ship with the explicit goal of making money.)
2. The analogy between blackness and primitive masculinity (the natives dressed in ape costumes).
3. The ideology of manifest destiny and the inevitable dying out of indigenous peoples. African culture is aligned with ancient history in the film, and as such, it is, as Snead points out, “futureless” – it’s already dead.
4. The film has a racial hierarchy defined on a scale from black to white, which structures other forms of racism. So, for example, the character of Cookie, the Chinese sailor, who steps in to perform a crucial narrative task (finding the African beads on deck), is then told that he can’t join the other men in their search for Ann because it’s “no job for a cook.” So, where the native black men are represented as animals, the Chinese man is defined in terms of his subservient, domestic labor. And this “feminization” of Asian men, in relation to dominant masculinity, has been a very common racial code in Hollywood films.
5. Another interesting thing about the representation of the island natives is that they are not only represented as animal-like, but also in terms of rural Americana, which was a common milieu in Hollywood film at the time. So you get a shot, for example, of little kids sitting in the dirt and chickens running around in the background in a couple of shots, both of which were standard cliches of African-American rural stereotypes, with the so-called “pickininies” and chickens. Hollywood in this period frequently linked blackness to white nostalgia for the plantation and its power structure. And this was combined, as Snead points out, with an absence of representations of African-Americans in the context of urban modernity or professionalism, outside of their roles as entertainers.
6. And last but not least, Snead notes the use drum music, which links the island natives to a whole range of characterizations of African-American music, most obviously the description of jazz as ‘jungle music’, etc. I’m sure there are a number of other representational codes and associations with racial politics in Kong, but these are some of the central points made by Snead.

Turning, now, to the representation of gender, there are a number of ways that the film focuses on masculinity and femininity as visual spectacles, and ways that discourses of race and gender are interrelated. Already I’ve mentioned how excessive masculinity is associated with Kong, and also the way that Kong acts as a potentially comforting spectacle of masculine strength in a period of great anxiety. And again, I’ll just list some of the main points that Snead makes on gender:

1. Like Kong, Ann Darrow is subjected to the will of Carl Denham and visually associated with enslavement. She takes the job because she’s starving, and because of this initial economic powerlessness she is more or less taken possession of by Denham, then taken captive by the natives, and then Kong. It’s only Jack’s possessiveness that is sanctioned in the film, however, when Ann says she’s glad that he feels protective of her. So, again, marriage is seen to resolve the “problem” of the potentially independent woman and the incredible chaos her presence creates as she is circulated among the various men in the film.

1. As Snead points out, the parallel between the sexually-coded capture of Ann and the racially-coded capture of Kong suggests a relationship between the kind of fantasy of white male power exercised in both sexual and racial oppression. So the display of Kong in chains, as a trophy of Denham’s power, is paralleled by Ann’s display in bondage as she is offered as a sacrifice to Kong.
2. Ann’s function in the film as a sexual spectacle is underscored in the scene in which Kong somewhat innocently tears her clothes off, his curiosity acting as an alibi for the obvious pretext of photographing Fay Wray in her undies. This clearly supports Mulvey’s claim that female characters are often objects of sexual spectacle rather than subjects: they don’t act, they are acted upon.

 And part of that narrative passivity has to do with women simply being there to be looked at for the pleasure of male viewers.

   One result of this, for Mulvey, is that there are these moments in Hollywood films where the action just sort of stops and the woman is put on display (for example, whenever Hayworth sings in Gilda). The woman’s function in those moments as a sexual spectacle actually goes against the driving force of narrative in Hollywood film, because these scenes usually have nothing to do with moving the narrative forward. 

So by that definition, the scene in which Kong tears off Ann’s clothes is simply a sexual spectacle.

3. So Snead concludes that Kong can function in relation to a number of presumably male sexual fantasies: the fantasy of omnipotence, the fantasy of becoming the primitive black male, and the fantasy of abducting a woman. 

Snead sees Kong’s death as a necessary rejection of these taboos, so that Kong functions as a kind of cautionary figure.

   But the anthropomorphization of Kong also works to eulogize Kong as a kind of elemental masculinity that has been destroyed by civilization. Like the representation of Native Americans as noble savages, this aspect of Kong is clearly connected to a kind of white eurocentrism that mourns the “passing” of primitive races as if it was a matter of fate. And the appeal of hypermasculinity is clearly visible in contemporary popular culture, where it’s now usually associated with technology, as in Ironman or The Terminator. So Kong is a specific instance of a kind of racialized nostalgia for primitive masculinity, but that kind of hyper-gendered fantasy can take a lot of other forms, too.

Gilda

I’ll just close with a little commentary on Gilda, which is a film that pretty much wears its subtext on its sleeve in the sense that, narratively speaking, the “problem” in the film is Gilda and her elusiveness, but for contemporary viewers it’s pretty clear that Johnny is the one struggling with identity, sexuality, class and male power issues. The film is so unresolved on these issues that its pseudo-happy ending seems to make it more of a critique of gender and power relations than a typical Hollywood romance.

In some ways the film is a textbook illustration of Mulvey’s theory of the Male Gaze, since Gilda is presented as an icon of desirability and torment for the male protagonist rather than a rounded character with whom we can identity or even understand.

Even though we might not like Johnny, it’s his voiceover that guides our view of events and his struggle with his Oedipal and possibly sexual relationship to Mundson (and in the film’s script Mundson was clearly bisexual although this is coded more “discretely” in the film due to censorship). So if Johnny and Mundson’s first encounter looks a lot like a pickup scene to you, that’s not an accident.

Gilda is presented as a kind of enigma and a spectacle of desirability to be looked at, rather than as a rounded character. This illustrates Mulvey’s description of the way women’s sexuality is almost anti-narrative, because, as in the scene where King Kong pulls Fay Wray’s dress off, movies often just come to a halt in order to fetishize the female body for a few minutes (and even sometimes even the male body).

It’s interesting to note that the film was made by one of the only female producers in the Hollywood studio system (Virginia Van Upp) and that the original story, adaptation, and screenplay were all written by women. And I don’t want to invoke the intentional fallacy because as we know, thanks to Roland Barthes, authorial intentions aren’t always relevant, but I do tend to see this film as a kind of meta-critique of the “femme fatale” stereotype, which makes Gilda’s song “Put the Blame on Mame” intentionally ironic.

I really see it as a love triangle that, on the surface, points to Gilda as the narrative problem, because she chooses the alpha male over the romantic lead and then has to be punished for it. But the subtextual relationship is between Johnny and Mundson, with Gilda as the sanctioned  love object that they compete over.

Blog discussion prompt:

For you post I’d like you to think about the concept of the “symptomatic subtext” — an aspect of a film’s meaning that is possibly more cultural than intentional. To me the difference is this: in All That Heaven Allows, there is a coding of class/cultural difference that is very visual (Ron vs. the Country Club), so it’s connotative but clearly an intentional part of the film’s art direction and hence it’s “preferred” meaning. On the other hand, the director of King Kong probably didn’t intend to draw clear parallels between his representations of Kong, the native Islanders, and racist stereotypes of African-American men — and yet that doesn’t mean that those connections aren’t there on a cultural level. For example, back in the 1980s many viewers found the film Gremlins to have racist subtext because of the way the creatures were coded as African-American urban youth (“loud breakdancing little monsters who devour fried chicken and destroy property,” as one review describes them). Do you think Snead’s “symptomatic” reading of King Kong is persuasive? Do you see any possible subtextual meanings in Gilda?