destruction, metropolitan greatness and morality

These last few months have been like a gold rush for Whitebait in terms of personally discovering exciting new blogs to read. Among these he now includes the amazingly informative asiapundit (aka myrick). Based somewhere in China, though having to find roundabout methods to read his own blog due to government internet censorship, asiapundit is a prolific and sharp chronicler of the broader Asian region.

Some of this is heavy stuff: recent posts about the shooting of Dongzhou villagers protesting against compulsory government acquisition of their land have been really disturbing. And this post about contemporary slavery.

Also see this post (via Frog in a Well) about two agents from US Homeland Security paying a visit to the home of an  undergraduate student at UMass Dartmouth who requested a copy of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book via inter-library loan for a paper he was preparing in a course on fascism and totalitarianism. May you live in interesting times indeed.
UPDATE: debates are occurring as to the truth of the original newspaper story.

But the lighter post Whitebait especially wanted to mention--which sparked this one in the first place--concerns a rumination, originally by imagethief, about Beijing's lack of a filmic monster to confirm its metropolitan greatness. As imagethief observes:

I've come to the conclusion that Beijing cannot be a great, global metropolis until it is attacked by its own giant monster. Thanks to the encyclopaedic reference information contained in two invaluable websites, Stomptokyo.com and Giantmonstermovies.com, I've been able to research some of the cities that have been on the receiving end of giant monsters. Sure, you all know that Tokyo has had a fifty year kaiju infestation that has included Godzilla, Gamera and friends. New York got King Kong on multiple occasions plus, as a bonus, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (by the way, that's 180,000 feet, or about six times deeper than the deepest part of the ocean). London was attacked by Gorgo. San Francisco got the five-armed octopus of It Came from Beneath the Sea. The list has also has some surprises, including some of Beijing's key, regional rivals and a few cities you'd never expect [...]

A similar topic was also on Whitebait's mind somewhat as he went and saw the immensely enjoyably (but maybe a shade long) Peter Jackson remake of King Kong last weekend. The cgi sets of depression/skyscraper boom-era Manhattan are quite amazing. As might be expected, Whitebait ended up thinking a bit about the original film which is an old favourite which he has seen a few times and used in the occasional course. If considering the urban context, the older film is hard not to read as grappling with some strong conscious/unconscious anxieties about the large African-American migrations to the northern US cities at the time. Additionally, it is also hard not to read the older film at one level as a startling illumination of the astonishing gulf that existed between the depression-era desperation of street life versus the boom and the grandness and ambitiousness of the skyscrapers that were being built at roughly the same time.

But the question that came to Whitebait's mind here (more in regard to the original film where the vibe is stronger he thinks) is one about what New York is being temporarily punished for (before King Kong is toppled)? Why does he ask? Well, Whitebait poses this question after reading the delightful writings of Japanese-based film and culture critic Donald Richie. In his essay 'Attitudes toward Tokyo on film' (1988) reprinted in A Lateral View: Essays on Culture and Style in Contemporary Japan, Richie observes that there always is a strong moral edge to the destruction of western cities on film whereas,

... Tokyo has been destroyed on film any number of times, but never, I believe, because it deserved to be. Usually, Tokyo seems chosen for earthquake or fire or monster-quake simply because this is a place where the most people can be gratifyingly gotten rid of. (192)

In the case of the original Kong film, W's somewhat obvious reading here is that there are some pretty heavy vibes present in the film about the tough urban capitalism that is being/has been embedded as the key social structure in cities like New York. And that issue of race and the sizeable concurrent arrival in the city of southern Black migrants (who are represented as a threatening sexual presence) won't go away. Overall, then, the moral is a Freudian-framed one about not letting the 'primitive' bodily unconscious get out of control in the city. What's quite interesting in the more recent film is the clever way in which Jackson decides to effectively de-sexualize the relationship between Kong and Anne Darrow by re-figuring it as that of one between a big, dumb spoilt kid and his fragile, new toy.

OK, so if all that first draft theorising has turned you off why not listen to some delicious snippets of the incomparable dialogue and actors from the original film. Just to make it weird, and because we are venturing in to the silly season, Whitebait has laid them on top of some incongruous beats and riffs grabbed in haste from his sample drive (but not done as a proper whole track as there is not enough time). Download Leaving New York.mp3 (about 2 MB) here. BTW, the 'I've never been on a ship before ...' snippet  gets a nice reworking in the Jackson film.

Comments

[elsewhere]

Hi...I just watched the original for the first time the other night (c/- margaret and david). I'm waiting for the appropriate moment to watch the new version (probably a 40 C day in Alice) but wondering if Peter J does a take on 9/11 re: New York at all?

[whitebait]

Whitebait's brain is total mush at the moment (can't even remember what he had for dinner last night) ... but he'll take a punt and say no. Maybe what's relevant to your query here is that the 1976 remake of the 1933 original film actually had King Kong going up the twin towers. But most of the references of Jackson's films are to the 1933 version as far as W. can discern.

Overall the film doesn't overdo the meta-commentary thing too much - though it has one good reference to a famous modernist text with imperialist concerns (which I probably shouldn't reveal here despite a certain obviousness).