The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [272]
The one exception is the hero who, as Kong fights off the third monstrous attack, rescues the heroine and together they make a'thrilling escape', by abseiling down a sheer cliff into the sea. Kong comes storming in pursuit of the woman he loves, bursts through the gates into the tribal village (unconscious elements irrupting into consciousness) and smashes up the houses while crunching several tribesmen in his jaws. He is finally knocked unconscious by the white men's gas bombs, enabling him to be taken prisoner.
The scene then switches to New York, where `King Kong' is to be put on show in a Broadway theatre, as the `Eighth Wonder of the World'. In some ways this provides an echo of another film, 50 years later, in which Mick `Crocodile' Dundee, the integrated `natural' man from the Australian outback, is also brought to New York, the supreme symbol of modern American civilisation, to highlight by contrast everything its effete, unnatural inhabitants have lost by being cut off from their instinctive roots. A fashionable crowd flocks into the theatre to see Denham unveil his prize. As Kong, imprisoned in steel chains, sees the photographers' flashlights popping round his beloved heroine, who is due to marry the hero the following day, he angrily bursts his shackles, storms out into the darkened streets of New York and runs amok, while vast, anonymous crowds flee before him in panic.
Having smashed an elevated train to pieces, and eaten more people, Kong finally climbs half way up the wall of a hotel where, through a lighted window, he sees the prize he is looking for, the anima. Seizing her, he climbs to the top of the highest tower in New York, the Empire State Building, which had only just been completed when the film was made as the supreme emblem of the hubris unleashed in America by the 1920ss boom (which, as Scott Fitzgerald noted in his essay The Jazz Age, crashed into depression just when New Yorkers could climb that tallest tower in the world and see on the distant horizon open countryside, showing that their city did not comprise the entire world after all). Then America's ego consciouness hits back, when five aircraft are sent up to kill Kong, who has gently placed the heroine on a ledge at the very top of the tower. Again and again these anonymous little representatives of modern man, his pride inflated by the power of his technology, zoom down on the helpless monster with machine-guns blazing until, as he sways, mortally wounded, he reaches down to the heroine in a last gesture of tender farewell. He then topples down to become a lifeless heap in the street below, surrounded by the usual goggling crowd.
The hero emerges at the top of the tower to embrace the heroine saved from the monster's clutches, so that the story can end on that familiar archetypal image of man and woman united in love, with the monster/shadow finally overcome. Except that here we are left with a profound sense that we have not seen the proper archetypal ending at all. In his touching love for the anima, the monster was by no means wholly a monster; in some respects less so than those little modern men, trapped in their limited ego-consciousness, whose strength was all projected outward through their machines, while their sense of the feminine was non-existent. At the end of the story, the `King' is dead. Despite the ritual coming together of the pasteboard central couple, there is no other King to take his place.
Overcoming the Monster: The sentimental version
If the sentimental version of any archetypal story shows us its outline, complete with happy ending, but drained of its deeper significance, the Overcoming the Monster plot certainly lends itself to such treatment as much as any other. There are countless modern stories where we see `goodies' setting out to challenge `baddies' in the name of the community, humanity and life. When they