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.
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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.