The Latent Ideology in Entertainment: King Kong versus Narnia

King Kong (2005)
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

Every review I come across on film and movies takes its object of study as a neutral piece of entertainment and then evaluates it on how well the subject (reviewer) was entertained. These writings are interesting but often very confused because they cannot articulate or even become aware of the grounding for their own subjectivity.

They neglect to understand the ideological nature of film—whereby entertainment assumes participation in an ideological value system that has transcended argument and passed into the substance of a fictional reality. So it is often the case that where one disagrees with the fundamental premise of the fantasy at play, one will become disgruntled and overly critical. If one is eager to accept the latent values, on the other hand, than the imagination is lulled into harmony with the screen and is entertained.

Of course elements of technique and execution make films more convincing or more engaging. These qualities include particular determinations on special effects (how they should blend into the story) and good acting (where quality is premised on plausibility). Yet it is important to note that all these things are solely cultural, implying that different cultures—leaving the term in the abstract—would have different preferences for special effects, cinematic technique, and even different ideas on the plausibility of an actor’s performance. In any case, a film that aims to present the greatest implausibility in performance, for instance, should not be immediately discarded. This type of experimental play is the thing of art—it pushes the limits of our crude habits.

I have recently watched two films that I will use to expose the ideological basis for the fictional reality as presented by film, and the very real compliance with given message that entertainment implies. These are King Kong and The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

King Kong is a very interesting film for many reasons. In terms of an ideological base, we should take note that it parodies American values through the embodiment of Jack Black’s character, the deranged filmmaker whose sole drive is a kind of appropriation and pacification of the wild and exotic for the consumption of Americans and the enrichment of himself. The movie thus plays on an idea of the natural and civilized, while at the same time using the film itself to problematize these simple categories. By the end of the film, as the broken King is crudely prodded by New Yorkers eager to take a picture with the shattered corpse, we cannot but feel that these ignoble and leering people are the barbarians.

Similarly, those moments of empathy shared between the magnificent animal and Naomi Watts’ character dissolve, frame by frame, the stark ideological boundaries erected in our minds between human and animal. (Our minds similarly dam the flow of empathy according to race, nationality and other systems of inclusion and exclusion.) The end result is that humanity itself—the quality that commands respect and empathy—becomes detached from the condition of being human, and therefore dehumanized. Thus is the imperative of empathy and respect un-dammed from the strict conditions of the idea of humanity and spread across all the living.

It should be noted that much of human history has been a re-working of these systems of exclusion. Prominent examples are the perennial Judeo-Christian insistence that mankind is meant to rule over the natural kingdom—a view that enables industrial cattle-farming, cramming chickens in very small cages and force-feeding ducks for economic productivity. Indeed, a CEO of one of these companies recommended that the animal be viewed as merely an economic producer. This view makes the natural world something that has no value but what the market dictates—so that as long as the pain or pollution of nature does not come with a monetary price, it is not to be considered.

The era of Slavery in the recent history of the west should be aligned with this cultural instinct to greater and greater material wealth at the expense of nature. Slavers conceptualized their captives as something beneath human—because humanity was fixed to a concept of race. Hence it was because of an ideological category, which we now consider obsolete, offensive and dangerous, that a group of people was deprived from social worth and reduced to that of beast of burden. This all goes to show that the concept of the human has been a mutable one through history, and been used to justify slavery, genocide, and rampant exploitations.

King Kong makes us see greater humanity in a non-human character than in most of the other Americans in the film. It is thus an example of the ideological play that challenges the contemporary human/non-human boundaries that permits the onslaught of greed and exploitation. This is certainly an element of the latent ideological content of the film, and will have a lasting impact on the attitudes and behaviors of people. It is hard to speak of effects without tacitly suggesting that film and the arts are valuable only in so far as their direct impact, a view I would like to avoid. Nevertheless, this film does mark a powerful discursive tool that considers, if not propagates, a critique of western capitalism premised on a reworking of civilized/barbaric and human/non-human.

Watching this film was not my initiative; I expected little else than blockbuster banality. I was pleasantly surprised to say the least, as well as moved to indignation by it. Yet it is nonetheless true that I carried beforehand a similarly veined critique. A part of me was comforted in having a kindred ideology mirrored on the silver screen.

On the other hand, my experience with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, was one of incredible distaste and annoyance. This film seems to drive into my bone and prod the nerve. In many ways it can be seen as an ideological opposite to King Kong, filled with an innocence and naiveté that many are bound to find satisfying and compelling. Where King Kong dehumanizes humanity so that the giant animal can become sympathetic, Narnia humanizes the non-human to support the view of mankind ruling over the natural kingdom. This is taken to gruesome proportions, culminating in the crowning of four children at the end of the film, bringing to mind how adult black men were called “boy” by their white betters.

First of all, Narnia is a world of animals. Being devoid of humans, it can be understood as the idealized realm of the natural, despite being nothing but fantasy. What is interesting, is that the natural is not conceived as mere existence, but rather presupposes a certain moral value-system. CS Lewis thus is able to take his accultured morality and paint it onto the idea of nature. He therefore justifies his beliefs by embedding them into the firmament of existence in a fictionalized world. The animals of Narnia are therefore divided into good and bad—and this world is wrought by a moral battle between the good lion and the evil witch.

The entry of the four children is something like the “white man’s burden”. The four are somehow fated by the scripture of some manifest destiny in the prophecy to overthrow the evil witch and save the natural kingdom. What is even more perverse is the superimposition of British schemes of royalty and nobility onto the scene, echoing the arguments of “divine right” of old.

Films like these present a mixture of the familiar and the uncanny, to the extent that the uncanny becomes familiarized; it is anchored through familiarity as a point of entry into unknown discourse. In this way, such extreme representation of reality—that even human children lord over the natural world—is anchored by a good dose of old fashioned British snobbery. The film enthralls its audience with a rags to riches story, where fortune is dependent on the immersion into a foreign world. This structure is familiar and therefore credible, all the while the film indulges in the sodden fantasies of the west.

Another parallel might be useful in fully outlining the very real political implications of movies like these—that the four children are colonizers. For this reason it becomes particularly ironic when people in say, Mexico, flock to see this film and are thrilled by it. They are consuming the retrospective justifications of brutal colonization—unaware that the Indigenous are made beavers that are ruled by white witches, and that genocidal killers like Cortes are represented as innocent children come to save us.

For all these reasons, I am much more sympathetic to King Kong than the delusions of Narnia.