King Kong

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—8. Production Notes
—9. Spiritual Connections
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Let me address the obvious criticism first: Was this movie an over the top, overly long, self-indulgent piece of filmmaking? You bet it was. And thank God for that. After all, this is a story about a 25-foot gorilla that winds up on top of the Empire State Building batting planes out of the air. This is no time for restraint. It’s also a project that director Peter Jackson has dreamed of working on since he was a kid. Peter Jackson, boys and girls—the man who is to directing what Jim Carrey is to acting—so what else did you expect? Sure, doubters will complain that some scenes, such as when Kong fights three dinosaurs while falling through a web of vines, go on for too long. But that only shows lack of appreciation for the sheer breath of imagination and industry required to create such moments. As for me, about midway through the cavalcade of brontosaurs and humans, I wanted to stand up and cheer. King Kong is the blockbuster of all blockbusters. It’s the reason why megaplexes exist. It’s Hollywood at its best. Its all systems go. It’s $207 million well spent. And I loved it!

What made me love this film even more was the depth of insight and emotion Jackson managed to extract from his source material. Like Jackson, I’ve been a huge fan of King Kong since I was a kid. I even stayed home from a family camping trip one summer so I could catch the 1976 remake on TV. Despite my fascination, I never really thought of Kong as anything but a cool, effects-driven monster flick. However, in Jackson’s hands, King Kong becomes a powerful parable about our schizophrenic relationship with the environment, a dire warning that we ignore at our peril.

The parable begins when filmmaker Carl Denham—played with delightful panache by Jack Black—speaks boldly and eloquently of his desire to “view the beast unshackled” in the wilderness, something only a few brave souls like him are willing to do. But after a brief, firsthand taste of Kong and Skull Island’s other monstrous, unshackled inhabitants, Denham’s romantic ideals are quickly scuttled by the drive to survive, subdue, and, perhaps, to profit.

Meanwhile, Anne Darrow, the woman offered up to Kong by the terrifying natives of Skull Island, begins to develop the strangest case of Stockholm syndrome you’ve ever seen. And who can blame her? The blustering, bellowing ape is irresistible. A triumph of animation and characterization, to see Kong is to love him. Whether he’s ripping dinosaurs in two, beating his chest in triumph or taking time out to enjoy the sunset, Kong is truly a king among beasts. Despite his ferocity, Darrow is uniquely able to appreciate him as such.

Sadly, Denham and his companions are not similarly gifted. Rather than respond to Kong with the awe and respect he deserves, they seek only to subdue him, to tame him, to kill him if they must. That they are able to bring him down at all is truly a triumph of Man over Nature. But for some reason, this accomplishment evokes little urge to celebrate. “We’re millionaires, boys,” says Denham as he stands over Kong’s unconscious form. Perhaps, we wonder, but at what cost? Nothing less than the wonder and awe that drew Denham to Kong in the first place.

Listless and lifeless, when Kong is put on display in New York, he is nothing but a grim shadow of his former self. The fire that drove him previously has all but gone out. Tragically, when that fire is reignited again, we know it can only lead to his doom. New York is no place for an artifact of unbridled nature like Kong, after all. And it is only a matter of time before Kong meets his fate atop the pinnacle of humankind’s triumph over the very essence of what he represents.

As I see it, Darrow and Denham signify two sides of our split personality regarding the environment. On the one hand, we love and appreciate nature in all of its unfettered beauty and power. But few of us can leave it at that. The drive to subdue and exploit is irresistible. While we tend to celebrate our ability to do so, this film seems to question whether or not we’ve gone too far. King Kong is a call to repentance, a call to return to a sense of wonder and awe in the face of nature. It is also a warning that if we continue our attempts to shackle nature, as Denham attempted to do, sooner or later it will come back to bite us.

With such a strong environmentalist message embedded throughout the film, I was a little confused about why Jackson retained the original film’s final line about how it “’twas beauty that killed the beast.” Clearly, it wasn’t beauty but greed that was responsible for Kong’s death. Or, as another character put it, it was Denham’s “unfailing ability to destroy the things he loves.” Perhaps this was simply a case of sentiment trumping theme. The real question though is where our unfailing ability to destroy comes from. Why this love/hate relationship with our environment? Why are beauty and wonder so often overcome by fear and greed? As I pondered this, I was drawn back to another classic tale of Man and Nature—the Garden of Eden. If you pay close attention to the curse God utters to Adam and Eve just prior to expelling them from the Garden (Genesis 3:14–19), you will note that their disobedience ruptured their relationships on three levels: God and Man, man and woman, and Man and Nature. Where there used to be harmony, trust, and love, there was now conflict, distrust, and hatred. Where Man used to be able to sit back and enjoy the bounty of Nature, now he had to work and toil for every scrap.

Not a pretty picture. But the story doesn’t end there. If it took an act of disobedience to rupture these relationships, it follows that an act of obedience may be all that’s required to make them right again. So perhaps our inner “Carl Denham” doesn’t have to win the day after all. All we need to do is unleash our inner “Anne Darrow.”

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Shadowlands

With all the hype surrounding the movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it seemed fitting that I finally got around to viewing Shadowlands (1993), a touching, intelligent film about Narnia’s creator, C. S. Lewis, and his brief but tragic love affair with Joy Davidman Gresham.

The film takes place just as Lewis is winding down the Narnia Chronicles—and receiving his fair share of ribbing from his colleagues about his love of “magic” and potential Freudian overtones in his work. World famous as an author and lecturer, Lewis and his brother Warnie have settled into the comfortable albeit insular life of Oxford academia. The happy equilibrium of their world is seriously rocked, however, with the arrival of Joy Davidman Gresham, one of Lewis’s most ardent American admirers. Claiming to be on vacation in England with her son Douglas, Joy writes Lewis asking if she might pay him a complimentary visit. Little does Lewis realize that honoring her request will seriously alter the rest of his life.

Brash, witty, and intelligent, it quickly becomes clear that Joy is no wide-eyed groupie. Despite her frankness, Lewis is quite taken by her, to the point that he invites her and Douglas to spend Christmas with him and Warnie. It’s during this time that he learns Joy isn’t really on vacation; she’s left her husband, who is an abusive alcoholic, and is trying to start a new life. When Christmas is over, Joy and Douglas head back to America to sort out her divorce, and Lewis returns to his work. Without Joy around, however, things just aren’t the same. That situation is rectified a short while later when Lewis discovers that Joy and Douglas have returned to England, this time for good. There’s just one problem: To maintain her residency, Joy needs to marry an Englishman. Would Lewis be willing? Always the gentleman, Lewis complies, and the two undergo a secret civil ceremony.

Though bound together legally, Lewis and Joy maintain a relationship as friends who claim to have no romantic intentions. This uneasy truce is shattered when Joy is diagnosed with an advanced case of cancer. Suddenly, all of the emotions Lewis has been suppressing leap to the fore as he realizes how much Joy means to him. Her illness also calls Lewis to account on other levels.

Throughout the early part of the film, Lewis is shown blithely lecturing on the topic of suffering, referring to pain as “God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” “We are like blocks of stone,” says Lewis, “out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of His chisel, which hurt so much, are what makes us perfect.” Although his argument seems to sew things up neatly from a logical point of view, one senses that it will do little to comfort those in the midst of grief. Lewis discovers this firsthand as he struggles to make sense of Joy’s illness, going through a full range of emotions, from anger, to shock, to grief. When the blows of God’s chisel begin to fall, for perhaps the first time in his adult life, Lewis, the Oxford don with all the answers, realizes he still has a lot to learn after all. And this time experience—not books—will be his teacher.

I was surprised by how much Shadowlands moved me emotionally. The way people have canonized Lewis today; it is difficult to imagine him as a romantic being—much less a sexual one—so it is good to see him humanized in this way. His relationship with Joy is tender, touching, and real. The viewer’s sympathies also go to young Douglas, who not only loses his mother but also does so in a strange land amongst people he barely knows. That said; it’s difficult not to see the hand of God in this situation, placing Douglas in the home of Lewis, who went through exactly the same sort of loss as a young boy. The two provide much needed support and understanding to each other during their time of grief.

On another level, I found this film is a good example of how the church should and should not respond to pain and suffering in the world. In the recent past, the church has felt the need to provide quick and sometimes easy answers to the problem of pain. But through Lewis’s journey, we come to realize that while developing a theoretical response to pain is important and necessary, sometimes the best thing we can do for those who are suffering is come alongside them and share in their grief. The time for answers will come, but even then we need to realize that there are things the heart can know that the mind will never understand.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

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If you were a beaver and four humans showed up on your doorstep wearing fur coats, would you let them in? I certainly would have second thoughts. Funny how that idea never occurred to me before, even though I’ve read about the Pevensie children’s first encounter with the talking beavers of Narnia countless times. It just serves to illustrate the difference between experiencing a work of literature in your imagination and viewing it on the big screen. Suddenly things look a whole lot different—some better, some worse. It also raises the question as to whether such stories are best left to the imagination. I’m still trying to decide in terms of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Perhaps the choice would have been easier if I had enjoyed the film more than I did…

It’s difficult to put my finger on exactly why I failed to connect with this movie. It certainly wasn’t for lack of solid visual effects. They were everything a Narnia fan could hope for—centaurs, fauns, Cyclops, minotaurs, talking beavers and horses—all looking as real as the humans with whom they interacted. Aslan, in particular, exceeded expectations, as well he should have. With more than five million individually rendered hairs and up to fifty animators working exclusively on him alone, anything less than virtual realism would have been a tragic disappointment. But as stunning as Aslan and a number of the other creatures were, most of them were really nothing more than beautifully rendered extras—fodder for the battle sequences, background actors with one or two lines or a brief close-up to add a sense of realism. They looked great, but we never really got a chance to connect with them emotionally, and so I found it difficult to care what happened to them in the end.

The same could be said for most of the human characters. For the most part, the acting was serviceable, but at times it felt like the performers were struggling within the confines of a mediocre script. Surprisingly, Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch, seemed to have the most trouble. After seeing Swinton’s scintillating performance as the quasi-evil half-angel Gabriel in Constantine, I was eager to see her go all the way over to the dark side in her portrayal of the White Witch. While she definitely looked the part, whenever she spoke, it seemed like she was reaching for a sense of significance that the lines just couldn’t give. The one exception is the scene where she kills Aslan. This was one of the rare moments when she came close to realizing the full potential of her character. Even then, however, the scene lacked the sense of cosmic significance that undergirded nearly every moment of Narnia’s literary and cinematic cousin, The Lord of the Rings.

I think that is the real problem with this film: It lacks gravitas. Even at 132 minutes, it just didn’t seem long enough for us to really get to know the main characters or the underlying mythology of Narnia. The best it can do is tell us that four human children are needed to fill the thrones at Cair Paravel, but it never tells us why. We’re left wondering why four children are required, who sat in the thrones before the children arrived, who built Cair Paravel, and how the White Witch gained control of Narnia in the first place. I fully realize that these same answers are missing from the novel. But couldn’t the filmmakers have taken a few liberties with the text to clarify things, much like Peter Jackson did by inserting some of the background material into The Lord of the Rings to flesh out Aragorn’s identity? Surely Lewis addressed these questions elsewhere in his writings, and I don’t think too many people would have objected if his explanations were introduced into the film.

As it stands, without these answers on screen, it’s difficult to become caught up in events like the epic battle sequence that forms the climax of this film. We know the good guys are going to win, and we know that will be a positive thing for Narnia. But it would mean a lot more if, as with The Lord of the Rings, we knew what was at stake if they failed—and that there was a good chance they might do just that. I realize that some people may think that such comparisons to Tolkien’s epic are unfair, seeing as Tolkien wrote for adults and Lewis wrote Narnia for children. However, I see no reason why children’s literature or movies should be held to a lesser standard. Good storytelling is good storytelling no matter who your target audience is. If anything, books and films aimed at children should be held to a higher standard, because they become a child’s primal reading/viewing experience.

Despite my overall disappointment with this film, one aspect of my past reading experience that it did manage to tap into, at least momentarily, was the sense of wonder and excitement I felt about the possibility that there might be more to the world than I originally assumed—far more, in fact. Not only that, this story was one of the first to make me hope that there might also be more to me than I originally thought. Like Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan, I may have a sense of purpose and destiny far beyond anything I had ever imagined. That is the true power of stories like Narnia or Harry Potter, I think. While we all sense there’s more to life than meets the eye, the characters in these stories actually get to witness this deeper reality firsthand, and that fills us with a sense of hope and excitement that we can make the same sort of discovery one day. And I definitely believe that we can.

That said, when adapting such a universally renowned book—probably the best piece of children’s literature ever written—you can’t be content to make a good film. It has to be a great film, or not at all. Unfortunately, the makers of this film didn’t seem to be aware of that fact. I have no doubt that someone could have made a cinematic masterpiece out of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. However, that someone just happened to be too busy adapting another work about a fifty-foot ape. Too bad, because I doubt we will get this chance again. Perhaps it’s for the best though, because rather than letting some filmmaker do the imagining for us, if we want to experience the true magic of Narnia, we will just have to read the books for ourselves.

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