In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness - the novel that was the model for that great Vietnam movie 'Apocalypse Now' - the protagonist Marlow essays an excursion that takes him not only into an uncharted jungle but into the primordial nature of man itself. And Conrad leaves us in no doubt: the latter is the real heart of darkness.

Wayne Brown

So, near the end of the first hour of 'King Kong', there's a crucial little scene. The ship's boy - on land a homeless orphan, he's Jackson's copy of Moby Dick's Pip - looks up from Conrad's novel, which he's been reading, and asks the black first mate who's become his surrogate father: 'Why didn't Marlow turn back?'

Well, the first mate tells him, a part of him wanted to; but another, bigger part needed to go on, needed to know - what lies in the heart of darkness.
And the first mate goes on, in words I thought I recognised and later located in the novel:

'We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign - and no memories. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.'

Now, on the surface those lines are merely premonitory: they herald the impending appearance of Kong. But when the first mate speaks them - and the reader versed in such things will have registered that director Peter Jackson here follows a great American literary tradition, beginning with Moby Dick's Queequeg and running on through Huckleberry Finn's Jim, of reposing both wisdom and humanity in its black characters, by contrast with its variously 'crazy' white protagonists

- the tramp steamer the Venture and its financially desperate crew have run aground on the forbiddingly iconic rocks guarding the uncharted island (they look like smudged sculptures of a monstrous ape). Moreover, the island itself has been christened Skull Island.

Jackson means to leave us in no doubt that the ensuing action is to be an interior drama as well, a journey back into the lost primordial heart of man - and of woman.

Joseph Conrad

'It's not an adventure [story], then?' the ship's boy asks sadly; and the black first mate tells him somberly: No, it isn't.
We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember.

And nothing that ensues on the island has the effect of making any of the male white characters 'remember'; they - meaning, male white America, all caught up in that promethean quest that has brought them 'to the top of the world' - have traveled too far from the roots of their nature.

Led by the monomaniacal moviemaker Carl Denham, they are there at Skull Island for one purpose, to make money; and the majestic and marvelous ape is to them a bread ticket, to be captured and exhibited for money; nothing more.

By contrast, the elemental call-and-response that develops between the solitary Kong - the 'last Mohican' of his kind - and Ann Darrow, the young blonde whom he abducts, releases, and then repeatedly rescues, redeems Ann from the sleazy glitz and unreality of Depression-era Broadway and reunites her with her essential self. In a word, it makes her whole.

And 'King Kong' is a tragedy, not only because the ape must die, but because such human (in this case, female) wholeness cannot be permitted by the (unseen) empire-builders, the creators of New York, with their denaturing triumphalism.

Might as well ask George Bush today to see how far he would get with his imperial wars without first terrorising the American electorate into quiescence with his 'war on terror'.

There's something ghastly about such promethean mirages. The Empire State Building! New York! Sandra Dee, in real life a routinely raped child-victim, but on screen the Virgin Blonde!
And so to the central scene of 'King Kong'.

Jack Driscoll, Denham's scriptwriter, who's in love with Ann, has succeeded in 'rescuing' her from a sleeping Kong. (The inverted commas are there because, far from being in danger, Ann was sleeping peacefully in the crook of Kong's arm, less like his beloved than his sleeping child.) The two arrive at the landing boats, pulled up to the island's inhospitable shore, where Denham is directing the crew's preparations for capturing Kong (whaling harpoons, anchor ropes, gallon bottles of chloroform) when - as Denham rightly deduces - the great ape comes crashing after them in search of Ann.

Out-of-breath, Ann nonetheless sees what's happening. Here Jackson cuts to slow-motion, close-up, no sound track - and we see the slow outrage dawning on Ann's face as she looks at Denham while - soundlessly! - passing by him and looking back at him (Denham glances at her and ignores her). And we know there's an awakening, old hatred there. To Ann, what Denham is preparing to do to Kong is somehow also something he's preparing to do to her.

Kong comes - as he must, for Ann is his future, as he is her past- crashing towards the island's fortress-like walls. Driscoll grabs Ann to drag her into the boat, and - 'Don't touch me,' Ann tells him. She says it without hysteria or shrillness. She says it as a command.

Moments later- in the course of a wild struggle, in which Kong puts paid to several of the crew - Ann struggles to get to Kong. 'Leave him alone!' she yells. 'He wants me!' For that is the unstated premise of the love story at the heart of 'King Kong'- a premise so hideously politically incorrect these days, it's just as well no reviewer, so far as I've read, has thought to 'go there'.

'If,' thinks the woman - and this is the pure instinct of her elemental heart - 'If he's willing to die for me, then I must be his.'
And then, as Kong succumbs to the chloroform and Ann in desolation cries, 'Noooo!' the camera cuts to Driscoll - by now in the water - and the dawning understanding and sorrow on his face as he watches her.

Ann, Driscoll sees, is not his; she is Kong's. Or - to put that more precisely - the Ann who, with Kong dead, will be his in the end, will be a half-woman, a woman 'in a free state' (in the rootless, adrift sense in which Naipaul meant that phrase, the title of one of his more despairing novels): a woman severed from her own depths; incapable of serenity; needful always now of consolation.

DH Lawrence again. 'What then is Moby Dick [or King Kong]? He is our deepest blood-nature. And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by[our] maniacal fanaticism.into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will.'
Or, as Jackson has the utterly amoral moviemaker Denham gloat: the world's greatest mysteries can today be laid bare to any cinemagoer with the price of a ticket.

As the awesome struggle ends and Kong sinks unconscious at the feet of ruined Ann, Denham spins around and shouts to the surviving crew: 'We'll all be millionaires, boys!'

Here, a correction. In last week's column I described a moment when the great ape picks Ann up, 'incidentally suspending her over the abyss' - notwithstanding which, 'she sits in his palm in perfect serenity, hands clasped in her lap, looking calmly into his eyes - and that is the crowning moment of the film. Female beauty as serenity!'

That was indeed the scene, but I misremembered its moment; it comes, not on the island, on Kong's cliff-face ledge where the bones of his kind lie around - and where Ann has just watched him silently considering a sunset - but much later, atop the Empire State Building, where Ann has just watched him contemplating what she knows will be the last sunrise of his life.

It is all she can give him, of course: the gift of herself. But that image, of her perfect serenity, looking calmly into his eyes while he suspends her over the abyss, is her bestowment to him in the hour of his death - just as some poets have hoped to be visited by the 'muse' in the moment of their own deaths.

And so to the denouement, with Kong swatting at fighter planes from on top of the Empire State building while Ann, whom he has stashed away to safety two floors below, emerges and climbs towards him, with - literally and figuratively - nothing below her but the abyss. 'No!' she shouts in futile desperation at the zeroing-in planes, 'No!'

But promethean American was built - and this is the theme of many of the great American 19th and early 20th Century novelists, from Fenimore Cooper to Melville and Twain, from Hemingway to Fitzgerald and Faulker - not on the natural union of beauty and the beast, but on the vigilant murder of one and the consequent denaturing of the other.

So, now, the chatter of the State's machine guns provide their lethal response to Ann's soul-deep calling. They are the guns of the unseen people who built and own this magnificent and horrifying city, this Tower of Babel, this towering tombstone over the 'Red Indians' collective grave; and they don't stop until Kong is dead.

Whereupon, down in the street below, Denham, pushing his way through the crowd gawking at Kong's giant corpse, overhears a reporter opining, 'The airplanes got him,' and issues his famous rebuttal: 'It wasn't the airplanes; it was beauty killed the beast.'

Sounds good; but Denham was wrong, of course. It wasn't 'beauty' that killed Kong. It was the State - it was the guns of New York - that killed him.
But that's been a constant of promethean America. Someone else, or something else - the 'paganism' of the native Americans, the 'depravity' of the African slaves, or 'sectarian strife in Iraq' today, - has always been responsible for the blood on its hands.

As created by that genius out of New Zealand, Peter Jackson, 'King Kong' is a seriously conceived, wonderfully layered, and psychologically and historically resonant film. It both feeds off and adds itself to those major (and interconnected) works of the elemental imagination, Shakespeare's 'The Tempest', Melville's 'Moby Dick', Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' and Francis Ford Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now'.

Moreover, it constitutes such a radical revision of the 1933 original (replete with its American racial and sexual hang-ups - Sandra Dee!) that it's hardly surprising that almost no American reviewer, so far as I've read, has treated it as much more than 'a rollicking good yarn', or as the occasion for such condescending witticisms as, 'Meanwhile, there are period cars to be stomped'.

(A notable exception: Peter Travers, writing in the Rolling Stone: 'Jackson's 'King Kong' makes you believe, not in an erotic fantasy, but in tenderness and longing.')
Well! We all take from great art what we can.

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