You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

What King Kong Has Taught Me About NYC



Lesson Learned: If someone offers to give you your big break on an Exotic Location Shoot ... think twice, dude. You may be hungry, but there may be something even hungrier out there waiting for you.

I always feel kind of sorry for Ann Darrow that six weeks on the open sea is the most exciting thing in her life. But then again Depression-era New York can't have been a nice place to live for someone like her. Still, I can't help thinking she's incredibly naïve to run off at a moment's notice for an extended trip to who knows where with who knows what kind of people. I mean, there's gutsy and then there's just dumb, am I right?

Don't get me wrong - I love Fay Wray, and she's such an amazing icon of movies and one of the great beauties of the silver screen. But something I loved about Peter Jackson's remake was how he fleshed out the character of Ann. Making her much more dubious about the island outing, giving her something besides her fair hair and white skin for Kong to love about her, and showing us that she was able to stand on her own once she got back and able to show some integrity by refusing to be a part of Denham's exploitation of Kong. That, to me, makes her much more consistent with what I associate with the (admittedly incomplete and ignorant) picture I have of the people of New York.


No Really, Here's the Real Lesson: New York is a tough cookie, and there's nothing you can do to destroy it.

King Kong was perhaps the first in a long line of films that centered around the destruction of New York City. There's something inherently dramatic in seeing those iconic streets and landmarks threatened. One of the things I think was less than ideal about Peter Jackson's remake is that is was a period piece, where the original was set at the time it was made. Those were the streets and places that the audience in 1933 knew, and the Empire State Building (which is essentially a co-star in the climax of the film) was brand spanking new. It's always more shocking to see Bad Things happen to things that resemble what you know and love, because it forces you to think about the possibility of those things in your own life not always being there.

But I think the thrilling part of most disaster movies, especially the ones that pretend to destroy the familiar, is the knowledge that even though these horrible things are happening, it's usually not the end of the world. It may seem like the end of the world at the time, but life will ultimately go on, no matter what a giant gorilla/lizard/marshmallow man destroys in its path. Life goes on and the city goes on. I'm thankful that a lot of movies gave us that and that we as a culture had those movies wedged into our consciousness when real life disaster hit New York on (you know, I hate even saying it, because it's such a saturated term it's almost feels like meaningless noise - I mean, don't you just kind of sigh heavily whenever someone sucks the air out of the room by saying it) September 11. We as a nation and New York as a city would have picked up and carried on anyway, I'm sure, but I think it's Something that in the 70 years or more before that, it was an established motif in movies that New York could take a beating and maybe even get knocked off its feet, but it would always get up again and say "Is that all you've got, punk?"

New York may be a prickly and sometimes brutal place, but it gives me an odd sort of comfort to think of jumping into a place like that and learning how to survive.