#41 ‘King Kong’ (1933)
Beauty, the Beast, and the Birth of Cinematic Misogyny on a Soundstage
King Kong (1933) isn’t just a monster movie—it’s the cinematic origin story of the male gaze dressed up in fur and roaring from the Empire State Building. Marketed as a groundbreaking tale of adventure, spectacle, and tragic wonder, what it actually offers is an uncomfortable stew of colonial fetishism, racial panic, and the oldest narrative in the book: blame the woman.
Let’s start with Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), the original scream queen. She’s poor, blonde, and rescued from starvation on the mean streets of Depression-era New York—not with a job or shelter, of course, but with an offer to be objectified by a film crew on a “mysterious” island full of racist tropes and thinly veiled savagery. Her role in this film? To look terrified, faint beautifully, and exist as a symbol of purity so irresistible that not even a 50-foot ape can resist violating it.
And Kong? Kong is not just a beast—he’s the embodiment of every anxiety white men have ever had about desire, dominance, and the threat of the “other.” He’s black-coded, monstrous, and obsessed with the white woman he can never have. He’s both animal and victim, villain and scapegoat. The film frames his obsession as tragic, yet lingers far too long and lovingly on his giant paw fondling a half-naked Ann to pretend it’s not also deeply, deeply voyeuristic.
Director Carl Denham, the blowhard who drags everyone into this disaster, is the original white male “visionary” who bulldozes ethical boundaries in pursuit of “art.” He captures Kong, exploits him, parades him through Manhattan like a sideshow—and then acts surprised when it all goes to hell. He doesn’t learn a lesson. He delivers the final, famously awful line—“It was beauty killed the beast”—with smug moral finality, as though a woman being desired is somehow the root of all destruction.
The island natives? Painted in thick racist caricature, used as primitive foils to the white explorers’ “civilization.” Their only function is to worship Kong and throw women at him like offerings. They are nameless, voiceless, and entirely disposable—props in a colonial fantasy where the white man always gets to decide what counts as human.
Technically, yes, the stop-motion animation by Willis O’Brien is groundbreaking. The score is thunderous. Kong’s expressions are haunting. But let’s not pretend that King Kong is some innocent popcorn thriller. It’s a mythic spectacle of domination—man over beast, white over Black, masculinity over femininity—and it’s all wrapped up in the lie that “beauty” was to blame.
2.5 out of 5 biplanes
(One for the special effects. One for Fay Wray’s commitment to being perpetually imperiled. Half a star for the sheer audacity of climbing a skyscraper to escape your own metaphor. The rest fell from the top of the Empire State Building, crushed under the weight of imperialism, exploitation, and the world’s most undeserved closing line.)
