King Kong

Reading Snead's article about King Kong, I was struck by a few things.  His article made many assumptions, one of which I find to be particularly important because I feel that most of the articles on film we have read so far rely on this assumption: that of a viewer who enjoys and is engaged in the film, but who does not watch it critically.  In the instance of King Kong, Snead makes many arguments that rest on this assumption--such as his assertion that we identify with Denham despite his negative qualities, and are thus implicated in his optical colonialism (and later, his abduction of Kong).  Watching the movie, I did not feel an ounce of sympathy or identification with Denham--I found him to be a rather unlikeable person, and one who I very much did despise.  

In addition, another problem I have with Snead's argument is that he does not address the fact that the white male characters in the movies, and not just the "others" he speaks of, are complete stereotypes.  Denham is the embodiment of capitalistic greed, and a desire for adventure.  Driscoll is the archetypal man, heroic and brave, but emotionally immature and rather sexist.  While the stereotypes of the black tribespeople, Ann, and Charlie are more apparent because they are so blatantly offensive and negative in nature, in reality, the white characters in the movie are no less stereotypes--they just happen to be positive, or at least not negative, stereotypes.  

These two ideas are rather connected: the reason Snead does not recognize characters such as Denham or Driscoll as being stereotypes is because he assumes a viewer who has internalized the mainstream myths.  If the viewer indeed does identify with these archetypal roles, then these characters will not seem like one-dimensional stereotypes, but rather as the embodiment of the "hero."  I guess the problem I had in general was that Snead made an implicit assumption that the viewer agrees with the standard social myths--and while that may be true in many cases, it is not necessarily, and I feel like Snead ignores that fact.  Granted, he does mention that a black viewer would probably be more inclined to identify with Kong--however, in that statement, I feel he was making the same error he accused the movie of making: he is making an assumption about black viewers.  Now, that assumption does make a lot of sense, as it would be far more likely for a black viewer to notice the racism and hypocrisy of the movie.  However, it is not the person's race that determined their negative reaction to the movie, but rather their lack of acceptance of the standardized societal myths.  Black people, being an "other" in our society, often find that these standardized myths are detrimental to them, and are therefore far more likely to reject them.  The fact they black people are more likely to identify with Kong is a larger result of the fact that they have rejected the social norms, not of their blackness itself .  Thus, it could be said that any viewer who is critical and does not necessarily accept social norms will identify with Kong more than say Driscoll--a fact which Snead ignores.