The Beast Unleashed: Various Networks of Association

“Don’t worry, ladies and gentlemen. Those chains are made of chrome steel.”

            -- Carl Denham, King Kong

Universal City Studios, Inc. would have done well to remember Denham’s famous words when they tried to sue Nintendo over the release of their King Kong-esque video game, Donkey Kong, in 1981 (read story here). The irony is fantastic – just like Denham, Universal attempted to use King Kong as their private money monkey. And, like Denham, their meagre shackles couldn’t hold him from entering the public domain and inflicting severe financial and social embarrassment upon their empire. The only difference is that in real life, Kong has since been steering well clear of tall buildings, choosing instead to make an honest living by appearing in various movies, games and the like.

One of the concerns of this course is “networks of association” (a famous network of associations, Wikipedia, brought me to the Kong vs. Kong anecdote). I would like to wrap up this blog with a look King Kong as an intertext with which to associate previous films I’ve talked about, but also as an allegory for revolutionary changes in both modern and contemporary cinema/media.

As a symbol, King Kong is intertwined with what the course outline refers to as “the ruins of the movie palace”. Today, copyright and ownership issues are centrally related to the network through, for example, legal and illegal peer-to-peer file sharing, just as the Internet has blurred the distinction between the jungle of the private sphere and the metropolis of the public domain. American lawmakers caught on to the correlation between modernity and morality early on, retroactively censoring the naughty bits of King Kong to accord with the Hayes Code. But the law today finds itself as irrelevant as Denham’s “chrome steel” in relation to the intangible Kong of intellectual “property”.

These issues have been nagging at the periphery of my previous entries. The psychoanalytical lens I used to discuss Joseph Cornell’s little monkey in Rose Hobart could be similarly applied to Cooper and Schoedsack’s Kong. But there’s also the fact that Joseph Cornell made Rose Hobart out of the aesthetic scraps of East of Borneo, a precursor the YouTube fan films that have generated so much discussion in class. Similarly, King Kong drew cast members and images from The Most Dangerous Game. The most interesting link between the contemporary fan film and the modern collage is that both challenge authorship by contributing to what is today part of the remix culture.

Manovich (1998) notes how many new media objects subvert traditional cinematic narrative structure and influenced the introduction of “database” cinema as “collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.” This is a large part of what makes Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera “avant-garde”. Rose Hobart, in a way, is also a kind of pioneering database film. The city symphony, the dream and the modern experience in general are thereby interconnected. Of course, King Kong adheres to the traditional narrative structure tightly. But my point is that database cinema isn’t just about the way movies are made; it’s also about how they’re watched. 

King Kong also finds corollaries in The Fountainhead, namely the use of the skyscraper as synecdoche for the city, embedded with various connotations in writing and film. The text also brings up the issue of intellectual property through Roark’s foray into the demolition business and Rand’s control over the screenplay.

This problematic authorship/auteurship between Vidor’s and Rand’s The Fountainhead is related to Astruc’s camera stylo concept. While the cinema challenges old ways we think about property, we may indeed be seeing cinema evolve into a language similar to the written word today in the sense that images are being used to constitute something new, with artists taking liberties with images as if they were words. Having watched movies both with the class and alone on my computer this semester (as per Astruc’s prediction that everyone would one day have “personal projectors”), I would argue sociality is given new meaning through the network, which, like cinema itself, folds time and space upon itself to bring certain things closer together.

 Thus, just as the virtuality of the film destroys the physicality of the movie palace, the act of watching films is becoming more like reading a book, taking on another dimension of intimacy that wasn’t quite there before, whilst also introducing new elements of experience. We constantly have to figure out a “lot of new adjectives” in respect to both the cinematic image itself and the way we think about it.

If anyone feels I’ve neglected the extensive racial/gender etc issues gorillafied in King Kong’s massive clay bulk I apologise. But I think it’s appropriate that at the end of this course I have both an image and a word burned into my mind (drawn respectively from King Kong and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis) that for me captures many of the reflexive feelings toward technology that exist today as they did 80 years ago. Kong’s horrifically comic head is bearing down on the pure, white world of modern and contemporary art, and underneath the image is a single-word subtitle: “Moloch!”

Ozu’s Sleepover

As if to affirm my entry on dreams and the cinema, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story put me to sleep the first time around. The movie wasn’t boring (it’s one of my favorites from the cinmod archives), just peaceful. I’ve noticed other students have commented on the hypnotic/calming effect of this movie, and it’s nice to know that, even though I watched it alone, I was able to partake in what Jean Cocteau terms “collective hypnosis”.

Some of the best films are great to fall asleep to. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind. It was released in 1968, right in between Tokyo’s Japanese (1953) and American (1972) release. Maybe 2001 helped soften American audiences up with the awesome slowness of the final frontier, so that they could more readily recognize the sublime back home.

Ozu’s use of doorways to frame shots also reminds me of American frontier imagery, and how Japanese/American movies make different use of spatiality as idiom and metaphor.  In the final scene of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), John Wayne walks out into the expansive Western landscape, which is highlighted by the underexposed interior of the house. There’s a similar nostalgia and ambiguity to it that is reflected slightly in the way Koichi walks out to go to work in Tokyo, leaving his parents behind. The fragments of Tokyo shown are quite different to the picturesque spaciousness of The Searchers - the simple wholeness of the domestic interior locates the frontier contrastingly within the home, where the effects of modernity are given sentimental meaning.

In one of my (many) favorite scenes in Tokyo, Shige wakes up to a knock on her door (a man bringing her drunken father home). Someone is outside, silhouetted by exterior light. After a moment she flicks the light switch, an action that turns the scene into a negative image of itself. The silhouette fades. The interior space is transformed, the relationship between the exterior and the interior re-negotiated. There’s a sense that the characters are trying to grapple with competing modes of existence.  We flip from a conception of the interior as inseparable from or looking outward to the exterior, to the interior as a private space fragmented or penetrated by outer modernity, personified ironically as a very un-modern old man, driven to drunken disorientation by a very modern form of disappointment. 

I am reminded of Ayn Rand here, and the way she transforms Wynand’s glass room into a private, walled-in penthouse to show his moral evolution. But it would be a trap to get too allegorical or sociopolitical with Tokyo Story.

It is contemplative rather than evaluative, ambiguous and not particularly judgmental. Tomi’s drunken bar conversation reveals that, while parents expect their children to accommodate them, they also expect them to be something other than a disappointment in the modern era. Maybe this is why we Ozu’s camera is always situated at child’s height… the innocence and omniscience of Ozu’s outlook balances the observation that “life is disappointing” in a way that makes disappointment part of life itself, and therefore beautiful.

Tokyo has the inviting stillness of a painting. I’m especially reminded of films that use painting as inspiration such as Manhatta or Bill Viola’s The Passions. Viola said that he was interested in the “moments between the paintings of the masters”. By cutting out some of the main events, such as Koichi’s death, Ozu similarly leaves us with the transitory nature of modern existence, symbolised in the recurring image of the train in the films we have studied. 

Stillness is also achieved through both the lack of camera movement and distance – e.g., the distant sounds, the way words seem to reach Tomi a moment too long after they are spoken, and the distance of the camera from Shukichi and her grandson in the field, fore-grounded by the nostalgic symbol of the home. The temporal and spatial experience of modernity is thereby contemplated. The tragedy of Koichi’s death is blunted, rearranged and delayed by the telegram and the time it takes to arrive. It is appropriate that we, like the children, do not see the mother’s actual passing, obscured as it is by Ozu’s ellipsis in a manner similar to telegraphy. The observation that Koichi seems to be “becoming smaller” is thus emblematic of modernity. 
 

The Fountainhead of Words and Images

I drew some of the more interesting implied questions from my presentation, and realized that in succession they read like headlines from Wynand’s The Banner:

Is Howard Roark a hero, a rapist, or both? Are uncompromising egoists really sociopaths? Does Roark have a secret male lover?

These questions inevitably crop up because The Fountainhead is an imagined battleground upon which Rand (and arguably King Vidor) tries to redefine many literary and cinematic symbols. The most obvious is the skyscraper. To Rand, the skyscraper is the big, in-your-face capital “I” (Schleier, 2002) inherent in Rand’s various “isms”. It reaches beyond the depraved “us” of the Cortlandt Homes, which Roark destroys in a decided act of ego-terrorism.

The skyscraper’s phallic symbolism is also worth mentioning, with its connotations of virility, dominance, masculinity, passion, romance, life, ego, etc. Rand is being self-referential when she has Wynand tell Roark that he uses “words in such strange ways”. By using the skyscraper as a symbol for all of these things and more, she counters what she sees as a hegemonic, socialist discourse that employ it as a metaphor for corruption, superfluity and sterility. In the same way, the irony of Roark’s nickname – “red” – is diminished as Rand equates it with passion, strength and vitality rather than communism.

But the ideological warfare underpinning Western discourse penetrates deeper than the capitalist/communist dichotomy. For instance, Rand uses contrasting structural symbols and characterizations often associated with taxonomies of queer discourse (Sedgwick, 1990). Keating’s buildings, for instance, reflect stereotypes often associated (then) with homosexuality. They are ornamental, superficial, artificial, lacking in integrity. Likewise, Keating is hysterical and impotent, while in the novel, Toohey is feminine, sickly, unnatural and somewhat camp.

Sedgwick’s analysis holds that “many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured – indeed, fractured – by a chronic, not endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition.”  In my presentation I also alluded to Eve Sedgwick’s “Axiomatic” in reference to the plutonic yet somehow also homoerotic tension between Roark and Wynand, and Melissa touched on the concept of homosociality.

Gladstein and Sciabarra (1999) write that “to maintain the value of the homosocial, she [Rand] finds it necessary to exclude homosexuality, while at the same time the similarity between the relation and an erotic relation is unmistakable.” Thus, we have the “triangulation of desire”, whereby Roark and Wynand desire each other in every respect except sexually, in which case their urges are displaced onto Dominique, who can barely contain her jealousy. It makes further sense that sexual desire would be displaced like this in a world where love is treated like capital. Howard Roark, like Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged, is “a trader” in all aspects of life, including love.

These elements are toned down in Vidor’s film, but Rand’s cinematic writing links the image and the word in a way partly envisaged by Astruc’s camera stylo concept. However, it’s ironic that such a visual writer could ignore the particularities of the film medium by producing such a flat screenplay, saved only by Vidor’s impressive and expressive images. I’ll leave it at that.