Apocalyptic apes and an apologist

[hazelk]

Dark clouds looming over London following an oil refinery fire in Hemel Hempstead. Not really where I 'd imagined the Dark Lord to start his next assault on Minas Tirith but the sky looks the part.

Papers are full of King Kong reviews and features, with the consensus seeming to be that Jackson has succeeded brilliantly in what he set out to do but it's hard to generate much enthusiasm for it. Partly because the idea of a giant gorilla falling in love with a small blonde human female just crashes my personal suspension of disbelief barrier and the more realistic the CGI performance the harder it's going to break. It just brings back too many memories of all the female aliens who would inevitably fell under Captain Kirk's thrall as if humanity were the universal standard of beauty. For we are made in the very image of God. Gorillas are traditionally thought to be the most faithfully monogamous of primates (although DNA testing may have changed that), but they fall in love with other gorillas. So would they compare each other to a summer's day? Or a sweet-smelling nest or the first taste of ripe papaya? Someone should rewrite Kong in the vein of Max mon Amour. But in any case the whole Beauty and the Beast thing is hard to parse without coming up against the idea that it's the natural and ordained role of the passive, female beauty to bring out redeeming qualities in the big, black very male Beast. Which kills him, so patriachial jam either way.

The other film in review is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which again I'll probably miss, despite a serious longing to see Tilda Swinton playing Jadis. Of the Narnia books it and The Magician's Nephew are probably the ones I could still enjoy reading, it's really not the overt Christian themes that are off-putting. In several of the later books it feels as if Lewis's insecurities have got the better of him and he's started using the stories to launch one-sided attacks on various bete-noires from liberal parenting and progressive education to girls caring about their appearance. I'm not really being fair. I think a lot of the reason I read is to get inside someone else's head, to come away from the book momentarily feeling their responses to the world rather than my own but there are some people you just don't want to be in the heads of. truepenny had a recent post that oursin linked to about her very personal and not entirely rational, gut-level hatred for John Milton Well Lewis is my Milton. Other authors can be just as opinionated and ever present, George Eliot for one, but I like the old bat and secretly enjoy listening to her up on her high horse. Of course she wasn't writing for children so the tone is necessarily different. Likesay, not fair.

Comments

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Well there's a strong connection bewteen women and apes.

Think of Diane Fossey and her Digit! That was a true love story.

In Max Mon Amour Charlotte Rampling had an affair with a chimp...

King Kong isn't that unbelievable. Of course with him being a giant Gorilla, and being the one falling in love (and not the other way round) it sounded a little bit more fantastic and thus less zoophilic! At the end of the day, behind the fantasy, King Kong story talks about some pretty subversive stuff.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

My problem is really that being a biologist I find it hard to think of animals symbolically. Too much time at work is spent trying to grasp what they do from their perspective and it's hard to switch that off. I mentioned Max Mon Amour precisely because it wasn't treated as an unproblematic affair, a pure enobling love on Rampling's part. So I think King Kong is subversive in the sense of embodying some quite disturbing assumptions but I think that about Beauty and the Beast as well.

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

I do want to see the Narnia film, because the trailers looked beautiful. I read the Narnia books as an adult, once. I enjoyed them as a fantasy series, without even really seeing the whole Christian theme. At the time I didn't know much about Lewis as anyone other than a writer of a children's series of books. It wasn't until later that I tried to read the Screwtape Letters, and really got hit on the head by his theme. I don't have the big Narnia love that others on my flist do, I suppose because I didn't read them as a child. I certainly didn't have the same reaction I did to the Lord of the Rings..total and complete love for the books.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I agree about the trailers, if the boys show an interest (they see all the adverts and McDonalds are promoting it) we'll probably get the DVD eventually.

I read the books quite young but they never realy grabbed me like the Tolkein did either. I think it was partly the derivative thing, I was into all the kids versions of greek myths so I already knew about fauns and centaurs but the Christian thing sailed over my head untill the last two books or so - we didn't get much religious instruction at school and most of it was comparative.

[ninerva.livejournal.com]

Are you right under that smoke cloud? I can't believe how ferocious it is. Crazy! Hope it clears away soon for you.

I didn't realise till the other night that Sirkis is doing the monk...er...gorilla. *grin* Which kind of makes the thing a bit wierd for me too knowing that. I don't know why.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

It started over Dagenham and by sunset half-filled the sky so it looked pretty dramatic.

Sirkis is good but he's not BIG. Now I'm going to imagine him inside a giant gorilla shell driven by emphatic gesturing.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I have no idea if gorillas fall in love, but they're not what I call monogamous, at least not the males. Individual silverback males have harems - say three-four adult females and their young. (Obviously the numbers will vary). I'm not sure if the young males hang out in gangs while they fight it out, or are solitary.

I think it's gibbons that are considered more or less monogamous.

But yes, I can't watch movies like King Kong as a biologist, and if the director keeps trying to remind me this is biology, I'm much less happy than if it just becomes a fantasy monster that can be taken on its own terms.

Oops!

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I think it's gibbons that are considered more or less monogamous.

Facepalms. That'll teach me to mentally file things under 'some monkey that begins with a G' :-)