In an article for intellectualconservative.com, Lisa Fabrizio remarks on the dramatic changes in cinematic depictions of masculinity that have occurred over the decades.\u00a0 While the extent to which such depictions have become \u201cfeminized\u201d has been greatly exaggerated by right-leaning commentators\u2014not only is the \u201ctough guy\u201d at least as visible a character in contemporary cinema as it has ever been in the past, this generation\u2019s movie macho men are typically bigger, stronger, and more aggressive than their counterparts from yesteryear\u2014it is hard to avoid the verdict that the popularity of the figure of the strong and silent man has indeed been eclipsed by that of the man who is sweet and sensitive.<\/p>\n
Masculinity<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n No where is this truth more clearly born out than in the relationship between the original King Kong <\/em>(1933) and its remakes (1976, 2005).\u00a0\u00a0 Having been a diehard fan of this story for nearly all of my life, I recently had the opportunity to once again watch all three films consecutively.\u00a0<\/p>\n King Kong 1933<\/em><\/p>\n In the original, Bruce Cabot portrays Jack Driscoll, the first mate of the ship that sails to Kong\u2019s Skull Island and the hero that, upon falling in love with Fay Wray\u2019s Ann Darrow, eventually rescues this damsel in distress from the lair of the giant ape.\u00a0 Although not remotely as popular an actor as his real life friend John Wayne, Cabot\u2019s silver screen persona is cut from the same cloth as that of the latter.\u00a0 Cabot\u2019s Driscoll is abundantly possessed of honor, courage, and strength, but these virtues are severally imbued with and united by a ruggedness that is not always easily distinguishable from a lack of couth.\u00a0 While a man of few words, the Jack Driscoll of the 1930\u2019s can be counted on to say what he means and mean what he says, whether he is referring to the ritualistic practices of Skull Island\u2019s natives as \u201cevil,\u201d explaining to the woman to whom he would soon thereafter confess his love that \u201cwomen can\u2019t help being a bother,\u201d or calling his de facto boss, Kong\u2019s captor and film maker Carl Denham, \u201ccrazy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, in spite of his character\u2019s lack of refinement, Cabot\u2019s Driscoll is wise enough to know that the excursion to Kong\u2019s Island is not one that promises to end well for the love of his life, and his resolve to risk all to protect her proves that whatever he lacks in intellect he more than makes up for in heart.<\/p>\n But as the attacks against John Wayne definitively established, the Baby Boom generation and its posterity have no patience with this conception of masculinity\u2014a fact that the \u201976 and \u201905 remakes of Kong <\/em>reflected in no uncertain terms.<\/p>\n King Kong 1976<\/em><\/p>\n In the \u201976 version of King Kong, <\/em>the hero is portrayed by Jeff Bridges. This time, though, his name is Jack Prescott, and far from being a simple, meat-and-potatoes first mate, he is a professor of paleontology from Princeton University and the author of a book on primates.\u00a0 Unlike his counterpart from \u201933, Prescott\u2019s heroic deeds are performed for the sake of rescuing, not just Beauty (Jessica Lange\u2019s \u201cDwan\u201d), but, more importantly, the Beast.\u00a0 Bridges\u2019 character sharply reminds the villainous oilman\u2014Charles Grodin\u2019s \u201cFred Wilson\u201d\u2014who sets his designs upon Kong\u2019s island that \u201cthis is no longer the nineteenth century\u201d when whites could take the lands of indigenous peoples with impunity; charges him with being an \u201cenvironmental rapist\u201d while implicitly threatening him with the promise that in response to his action \u201cthe kids\u201d would \u201cburn every Petrox gas station from Maine to California\u201d; and steadfastly refuses to be complicit in Kong\u2019s exploitation, even when that means forgoing the woman that he loves, reneging on his contract with Wilson, and donating his advance pay to the SPCA\u2019s fund for \u201csending Kong home.\u201d\u00a0 Moreover, Jack Prescott, anticipating Kong\u2019s move toward the World Trade Center from which he will be shot down in the film\u2019s climax, agrees to share his knowledge with the authorities only under the condition that they in turn agree to capture Kong \u201cwithout injury,\u201d and when they go back on their word, Bridges\u2019 character cheers as Kong sends a handful of his attackers to their deaths.<\/p>\n King Kong 2005<\/em><\/p>\n But if Bridges\u2019 Jack Prescott can be said to represent a more sensitive and intelligent conception of masculinity than Cabot\u2019s Jack Driscoll, then this is even truer in the case of Adrien Brody\u2019s Jack Driscoll in Peter Jackson\u2019s 2005 reimagining of Kong.\u00a0 <\/em>Like Bridges\u2019 Prescott, Brody\u2019s Driscoll is an intellectual of a sort; but unlike the hard nosed scientist from the \u201976 incarnation, the Jack Driscoll of \u201905 is a playwright, an artist <\/em>(can\u2019t get much more sensitive than that!).\u00a0 And while Kong doesn\u2019t incite his affections as the ape managed to do with his \u201976 counterpart, the expression to which Brody\u2019s Driscoll gives this new male archetype <\/em>is not only unambiguous, it is asserted with an intense self-consciousness.\u00a0<\/p>\n This Jack Driscoll bears no <\/em>similarities to his predecessor from \u201933, and Brody is at pains to remind audiences of this.\u00a0 Interestingly, Peter Jackson, the author of Kong <\/em>\u201905, claims that it was the original film that initially inspired him to become a filmmaker.\u00a0 However, on numerous occasions throughout his telling of this story it is difficult to elude the impression that he relishes in mocking it.\u00a0 And Brody\u2019s Driscoll is the key device through which he accomplishes this.\u00a0<\/p>\n The lead male role for the film for which Driscoll is writing the screenplay stars actor \u201cBruce Baxter,\u201d a caricature of Bruce Cabot.\u00a0 During the filming of a scene, Baxter \u201cimprovises\u201d upon the lines that Driscoll has written for him by repeating what Cabot had said to Fay Wray in the original Kong: <\/em>\u201cwomen are a nuisance,\u201d etc.\u00a0 Brody\u2019s Driscoll, clearly upset by the chauvinism that Baxter foisted upon his script, admonishes him to \u201cresist\u201d the \u201cimpulse\u201d to \u201cimprovise\u201d in the future.\u00a0 Later, when the going gets really tough (and deadly) for the rescue mission for Ann Darrow, Baxter makes it painfully clear that his \u201ctough guy\u201d image is just that, an image.\u00a0 Upon charging him with cowardice, Brody\u2019s Driscoll continues in pursuit of Kong and Darrow, even when there is no longer anyone behind him.\u00a0 Thus, if there remained any doubts as to whether the conception of masculinity to which Cabot gave expression in the \u201830\u2019s was any longer a viable alternative to the idea of masculinity incarnate in Brody, Kong <\/em>\u201905 put them out to pasture once and for all.\u00a0<\/p>\n Race<\/strong><\/p>\n So, from whence springs this hostility on the part of the left to the John Waynes and Bruce Cabots of the world?\u00a0 From what I am able to discern, it seems that Lisa Fabrizio typifies the right-leaning cultural critic who, in spite of recognizing both the left\u2019s revulsion of the model of masculinity emblematized by Wayne as well as its preoccupations with race and gender, refuses to make the connection between these two insights.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The truth is that from the left\u2019s perspective, it isn\u2019t an idea of manhood as such <\/em>that elicits its wrath toward the John Waynes and Bruce Cabots; it is a Euro-American <\/em>ideal of manhood that so incenses it.\u00a0 More specifically and to the point, it is an account of manhood that the left associates with \u201cracism,\u201d \u201csexism,\u201d \u201ccolonialism,\u201d \u201cimperialism,\u201d \u201cjingoism,\u201d and, in short, all of the evil of which it longs to rid the universe of its imaginings.\u00a0<\/p>\n Leftwing cultural critics have long waxed indignant over the \u201cracism\u201d in King Kong.\u00a0 <\/em>Some have even gone so far as to characterize it as a story about <\/em>\u201cracism.\u201d\u00a0 In the original Kong, <\/em>after all, white men set their sights on an island inhabited by black natives.\u00a0 Airs of nuance and sophistication aside, this is ultimately the spring, the only spring, from which the reasoning of these critics takes flight.\u00a0 In Kong <\/em>\u201976, this plotline is replicated, but unlike in \u201933, the black natives are treated sympathetically while the white men lack self-assuredness and self-righteousness.\u00a0 White guilt, of which the original Kong <\/em>had not a trace, pervades the characters of its first remake.\u00a0<\/p>\n The natives in \u201933 placate Kong with human sacrifices; they don\u2019t worship him.\u00a0 Thus, they don\u2019t feel deprived when Kong is taken from them.\u00a0 In \u201976, however, matters are otherwise.\u00a0 As Bridges\u2019 Jack Prescott explains, Kong was \u201cthe mystery\u201d and \u201cthe magic\u201d of the natives\u2019 lives.\u00a0 \u201cWhen we took Kong,\u201d he says, \u201cwe kidnapped their god.\u00a0 A year from now that will be an island full of burned out drunks.\u201d\u00a0 Dwan (Jessica Lange) replies: \u201cIt\u2019s scary.\u00a0 It\u2019s as if there\u2019s a curse on all of us.\u201d\u00a0 Kong <\/em>\u201976 is designed to repudiate the older model of Eurocentric masculinity on display in Kong <\/em>\u201933 as well as to replace it with a newer, improved version.\u00a0 In so doing, it also, by necessity,<\/em> had to substitute new images of race and race relations as antidotes to the old.\u00a0<\/p>\n This \u201cnew image,\u201d however, is by now all too familiar.\u00a0 The black natives have been transformed into \u201cnoble savages,\u201d Third World innocents who fall prey to the predatory greed of white \u201ccapitalist oppressors.\u201d\u00a0 Over night, a people that had survived and flourished under unimaginably harsh circumstances, a community and culture that had arisen within the midst of a remote but pristine island, was destroyed as their god\u2014the apex of their scale of value, the point and purpose from which they derived their identity and meaning as a distinct people\u2014was wrenched from them.\u00a0<\/p>\n Peter Jackson\u2019s 2005 Kong <\/em>goes even further than this: Jackson supposedly selected the actors who would depict the natives from a variety of racial backgrounds and then had them painted in the same shade.\u00a0 The criticism, then, that his version of Kong <\/em>was \u201cracist\u201d seems particularly overwrought, for while the natives are dark, they are not <\/em>black.\u00a0 In fact, they are all racially ambiguous.<\/p>\n There is, however, a black face in Kong <\/em>\u201905, and it belongs to this version\u2019s first mate, \u201cHayes.\u201d\u00a0 It is doubtful that it was through inadvertence that Hayes\u2014the only person of African ancestry aboard the fateful ship that sails to Skull Island\u2014is made to appear as the most heroic character of the film.\u00a0 Unlike Driscoll, whose love for Ann Darrow drives him to pursue her at all costs, it is from sheer goodness that Hayes risks and eventually loses <\/em>all to save the latter.\u00a0 He has personal emotional investments in neither Darrow nor, for that matter, anyone else, save the members of his crew.\u00a0 Yet in spite of his prior awareness of the dangers that dwell on the island as well as his lack of attachment to Darrow and the film crew to which she belongs, Hayes resolves to continue the rescue operation until his bitter end.\u00a0<\/p>\n That Jackson had an acute consciousness of the racial dynamics of the original Kong <\/em>and a steely resolve to subvert them is amply born out as well by the scene in which Kong is first revealed to audiences in a Broadway theatre.\u00a0 Dejected and in chains, the gigantic ape is surrounded by black actors dressed as stereotypical natives reminiscent of those that appeared in Kong <\/em>\u201933.\u00a0 With Bruce Baxter\u2014Jackson\u2019s caricature of Bruce Cabot\u2019s Jack Driscoll\u2014who is fitted in safari attire, they engage in dance to the jungle music against the backdrop of which Fay Wray\u2019s Ann Darrow was offered to Kong in \u201933.<\/p>\n Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n Lisa Fabrizio\u2019s thesis regarding the left\u2019s hostility to America\u2019s pre-1960\u2019s ideal of masculinity and the toppling of this paradigm to which it lead is sound enough.\u00a0 Yet it needs to be supplemented by a treatment of the racial sensibilities from which this shift in gender models is inseparable.\u00a0 And for this, there is no better place to begin than with an analysis of the contrasts <\/em>between the three versions of King Kong.\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In an article for intellectualconservative.com, Lisa Fabrizio remarks on the dramatic changes in cinematic depictions of masculinity that have occurred over the decades.\u00a0 While the extent to which such depictions have become \u201cfeminized\u201d has been greatly exaggerated by right-leaning commentators\u2014not only is the \u201ctough guy\u201d at least as visible a character in contemporary cinema as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n