The meaning of King Kong's Enigmatic Chicken Cage

King Kong Island natives: why did they have that chicken cage?

Interesting questions for the ecologist, and for any open minded anthropologist, are:

• Who were the natives and how did they get there? 
• Why did they have a chicken cage?

In the story they were Sumatrans, but in the movie the actors were African Americans because Sumatran actors were not easy to find in Hollywood (Haber, 2005). Anyway, there is a mix of African and Asian DNA in the Pacific region, and the fact remains that for the typical American viewer the requirements for “natives” are not stringent. 

In the first ceremony, the skipper says that their language is related to that of Nias (a real island which does have its own language despite its tiny size: Zimmer, 2006).  Their culture also matches what used to exist in Nias, with villages run by chiefs, large constructions −megalithic, not made of wood− and the concept of selling human beings (Kennedy, 1943; Zimmer, 2006).

 Source: Movepins.com

Is the demographic structure of the village reasonable? 
Yes, if you look carefully you will see a variety of ages and types, including children, elders and overweight people. They have basic human technologies such as pottery, basketry, ladders and torches, and are even more advanced than many Latin American countries of the time, where rural people were barefooted, my grandfather included; Kong’s natives wear sandals (not the small children, in accordance with custom in primitive societies, who are often nearly unclad). In a realistic way, they also use different clothes for ceremonies (grass skirts) and daily life (fabric skirts that in the case of young women are short and show the legs).

The culture looks African if you consider the oval war shields and the headdresses. On the other hand, the flower and feather ornaments, royal cloaks, canoe stabilizers and houses are consistent with Pacific island cultures (see Kennedy, 1943). The cloaks reminded me of Hawaiian ahuúla feather cloaks, but the coconut brassier worn by actress Etta McDaniel is pure Hollywood fiction (see McAvoy, 2012).

Source: monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com

I may be said that the natives could not survive in real life because they did not have access to most of the island and because you see no fishing boats or crop fields. But when Kong goes through the door, one of the villagers falls on a cage, setting free more than a dozen hens. This led me to wonder how the natives fed themselves and I noticed that their village looks like the very viable and real villages of Amerindians that I have visited in Central America. 

For many years Amerindian groups made a living in coastal rainforest, without large crop fields, thanks to a combination of forest plants and animals, and they fished from land (not from boats); these resources were complemented later with introduced animals like chickens like the ones in the film. So Kong’s islanders had an advanced economic system marked the ownership of chickens.

"Kong’s islanders had an advanced economic system marked the ownership of chickens."

Before King Kong, directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack had shown villagers building high walls against dangerous animals in their 1927 documentary Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, so it is not surprising that in King Kong they present a tall wall, rather than moats or other defenses.

Source: Wikipedia.

In the next post:

The dinosaurs of Skull Island: how did they get there?

Surprise: we know exactly where King Kong's Skull Island is located

Sorpresa: sabemos exactamente donde está la Isla de King Kong

Surprise: we know exactly where King Kong's Skull Island is located

There is no question of where the island is located or about its shape, because a map with coordinates appears clearly in the 1933 version; it is west of Sumatra and the film even mentions a monsoon season:

 Source: kingkong.wikia.com

Can an island in that location look like the one in the film? 

Well, yes. Because of the location, the monsoon that would affect Skull Island is the Indo-Australian Monsoon, a seasonal change of wind direction that starts in September, bringing stormy weather and floods; even though it is not common in tropical Pacific coasts, the fog that hides the island is a geographic possibility. In real life, islands in this area have large populations of mosquitoes, which we do not see in the film pestering Kong or villagers: there the film is not realistic.

The 1933 map shows a coral reef ring around the island; a sand bar in the south, where people live protected from Kong by a wall; and a larger area that is mostly lowland but has Skull Mountain in the northwest. The coral reef is typical of the region and heavy rains explain the erosion that produced the skull image when softer material was eroded from volcanic rock (Lindsey, 2011). All of this makes scientific sense, and if you look at the lower right of the screen in Kong’s cave you will see that the volcano that built the island is still active and has boiling mudpots. 

Source: Californiaherps.com
 

Also correctly, the lowlands have thick undergrowth and the highlands grow mosses; the island’s vegetation includes bananas, ferns, palms and bamboos, and differs from lowland to highland. Overall this island is credible even though a botanist might notice particular species that do not naturally grow on Pacific islands (have you ever asked why Tarzan rides Indian elephants in the films, instead of African ones? If you have, it shows that you have never tried to tame an African elephant!).

Even if we feel satisfied with this analysis about the ecology of Skull Island, bear in mind that the sets were not made specifically for King Kong, they were from The Most Dangerous Game, a film about an adventure in South America (Dohm, 2007).

In the next post we will find out why the Island natives had a bamboo cage full of chickens; and then move on to the DINOSAURS.

Para regresar periodicamente, guarda la dirección en tu calendario digital:
https://skullislandandkingkong.blogspot.com

The One and a Thousand Nights version of King Kong / El King Kong de Las Mil y una Noches

In this post I set King Kong in the historical context from the Epic of Gilgamesh, through Emmanuel Frémiet’s sculpture, until the 1933 film. In future posts I will explain how −despite the deformations of the era− the island’s vegetation and the culture of the natives have some plausibility, but not the existence of  large animals on such a small island. A 20-ton gorilla is at the limit for mammal biology but would work in real life, as evidenced by the existence of Paraceratherium bugtiense during the Oligocene. Furthermore, I will show how gigantism makes sense on an island with large predatory dinosaurs.
_________________________________________________________________
El King Kong de Las Mil y una Noches

Aquí ubico King Kong en el contexto histórico, desde la Epopeya de Gilgamés, pasando por la escultura de Emmanuel Frémiet, hasta la película de 1933. Concluyo que −pese a las deformaciones propias de la época− la vegetación de la isla y la cultura de los nativos tienen cierta verosimilitud, no así la existencia de animales tan grandes en una isla tan pequeña. Un gorila de 20 toneladas está en el límite de lo posible pero podría funcionar en la vida real, como lo prueba la existencia del Paraceratherium bugtiense durante el Oligoceno; además, el gigantismo tendría sentido en una isla con grandes dinosaurios depredadores. __________________________________________________________________

The story of Kong, widely remembered as the gorilla with the woman in his paw, was a cinematic success the three times it was filmed, and became a part of popular culture worldwide (Erb, 1998). Besides inspiring a large number of cultural products (some described by Erb, 1998), King Kong has been  the subject of many analyses, including its geography, biomechanics, ecology, archaeology, history, and sociology; these analyses are scattered among many printed and digital publications dating mostly from a decade or more ago and sometimes difficult to find. 

Source: hellhorror.com

The geographic setting of Skull Island, with its particular geology and climate, has been imagined by the Weta team (Workshop, 2005) which designed the miniatures, make-up, native costuming and weapons of 2005’s version. The island’s ecosystems and their evolution were superficially treated by Silverberg (in Haber, 2005), who shows an good knowledge of biological principles even though he is not a biologist (but he is one of the most important names in science fiction history). 

 

Source: everydayislikewednesday.blogspot.com

The biomechanical properties of film monsters were considered by LaBarbera (2003) and specifically for Kong by David Ewalt (2005); the archaeological origins of the island’s “tribe” were developed into a novel, Kong: King Of Skull Island, by author-illustrator Joe DeVito and by Brad Strickland, a professor of English at the University of North Georgia (DeVito & Strickland, 2005).

Sociology and Psychology have abundantly considered King Kong, which depending on the authors is a representation of imperialism, racism, capitalism, nature versus civilization, sexism, male subconscious, female libido, and several others (Snead, 1991; Jense, 2002; Haber, 2005). But in my opinion after reading as much as I could bear about King Kong, is that it is not about imperialism, racism, capitalism, sexism, or female libido: it is about a giant gorilla who dies trying to keep a woman that he received in an impressive ceremony; the rest are just the worries and prejudices of writers projected on a story that was made far from their own realities (“in the land of myth, speculation is king”, Harry Harrison in Haber, 2005, p. 112).

 

Source: simonandschuster.ca

King Kong: actually a thousand year-old story?

Both the film and the gorilla-loves-woman concepts have precedents. Peary (1976) listed the films with similar plots and scenes before 1933’s King Kong, and explained which scenes are more likely to have directly influenced the film. The basic idea is that almost every scene in King Kong has a precedent in literature or cinematography; what was special about the movie is that it blended them in a way that continues to attract a public decades after it premiered. Actually, the story of the giant ape and the beautiful woman is far older than you may think (unless you are a historian of literature, of course), but how old it is depends on how stringent we are when looking for similar plots.

Of course, if you want a narrow interpretation, King Kong −the story of the giant gorilla killed on top of the Empire State Building− has no precedents before the twentieth century. If you prefer to see things sensu lato, the origin of King Kong may be a thousand years old, because a giant ape and a princess appear in The One and a Thousand Nights and continued well into the European culture of later centuries (Jensen, 2002). 

Source: uncommonbooks.blogspot.com

And finally, if you are even more open to overall similarities, you can conclude that the basic story is more than 4000 years old, and for this we must first consider the observation that we feel sorry for Kong, victimized and chained by civilization, because the people who made the films humanized him (Haber, 2005). In other words, we would not feel the same if Kong were giant spider, for example.

A humanized but powerful wild being that attracted by a woman abandons nature, marks the beginning of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Enkidu, like Kong, is a large, powerful anthropomorphic character who ate plants and lived naked in the wild. This wild being is lured into civilization by sex, a basic plot that appears explicit in the Epic and toned down in later versions such as R. Kipling’s The Jungle Book and E.R. Burroughs Tarzan. In the Epic, the sexual element is provided by Shamhat, who not only captures him through marathon sexual sessions but also educates him, taking Enkidu away from nature and into the grandest city of her time (the equivalent of New York), where he dies. The Empire State Building scene in King Kong also resembles the Epic‘s end, when Enkidu realized that his death was precipitated by following the woman, yet he still ends up wishing her the best (i.e. being desired and given valuable goods; see Dalley, 2000, and Ditmore, 2006).


Epic of Gilgamesh. Source: ancient.eu

But certainly it does not mean that King Kong is based, or even inspired, in The Epic of Gilgamesh, it could also be just a coincidence: after all, the more you summarize a story, the more it looks like other stories.

In the next post we will check if the island where Kong lived makes ecological sense.