Peter Jackson’s King Kong (2005): A Critique of Postcolonial/Animal Horror Cinema

Abstract

The current study examines the fictional screen figure King Kong-as envisioned by the New Zealand director Peter Jackson in his 2005 remake-to question European ambivalence towards the Self/Other binary division. The modern 2005 Kong acts as a counter visual icon to the Eurocentric version of colonialist ideologies to expose their hypocrisy and myth-making colonial history. The present study is an attempt to integrate the visual narrative of King Kong (2005) into the framework of Postcolonial paradigm and within the theory of Adaptation to highlight the points of departure undertaken by the Postcolonial director Peter Jackson. The study seeks to establish Jackson's revisit of a prior work as a "willful act" to reinterpret the screen figure Kong as a "Subaltern" subject whose quest for a voice is central to the film's message. The dialogic relationship between the old and the new cinematic narratives is investigated to challenge Essentialist Western View of "Othering" so as to provide a Postcolonial revision of a fluid relationship between a prior work and a belated one. Thus, the aim of the present study is to deconstruct stereotypical representations, to historicize and contextualize Kong as a cultural and historical metaphor in Postcolonial Cinema. Animal Studies can offer new interpretations of how nonhuman animals can deconstruct the ontological Western discourses of rationality and capitalism within Postcolonial Cinema to rethink the boundaries that separate human and nonhuman.

Ecogames

“…Beyond this, however, one needs to observe that whenever nature has been considered untameable or uncategorizable within the archival thinking of colonialism, it has always been rendered monstrous. The Leshen is perhaps a more recent video game equivalent of colonial monsters such as King Kong (see Fahmi 2017), who are uncategorizable hybrids whose monstrosity is probably the product of the colonial encounter with those natural elements that cannot be controlled in the colonial process. In this the environmental monster in the video game is not different in conception from what was conceived as monstrous by colonial powers-be it human or nature.…”