Before we watched Peter Jackson’s King Kong, my friend asked me, “I want to know what you think about the portrayal of the natives.” So I was looking for them, hoping to see something juicy.
I wasn’t disappointed.
In the original King Kong, the natives have an interesting civilization. They live on one portion of the island, and they sacrifice young women to Kong in order to appease him as the lord of the jungle. Besides taking the woman off of the ship, however, the natives are basically harmless. Sure, they may worship Kong as a deity, but they also go about their daily lives. We don’t see any of that, of course, but their part of the island seems just as lush as the rest, and the people have to survive.
In Jackson’s version, we get numerous hints that this civilization is doomed. We see absolutely no infrastructure or evidence that the people actually live decent lives. There are a few rotting fish on a stick, which shows that they probably get their subsistence from the ocean, but the overall view of these people is completely bleak. I hope a group of explorers don’t visit my town or come into my house and say, “it’s obvious that this civilization died out years ago” when in reality, I’m just laying down in a back room taking a snooze. Jackson takes great pains to make this village seem completely foreign to us:
- Nothing but jagged rocks
- No visible communication among residents
- Murder of all they contact
- Creepy girls who greet visitors by slowly raising their arms
The list could go on, too. But my real question about this society is where do all of the skulls come from? The island is supposedly the last blank space on the map. So is it feasible that other tribes still go and the tribe fights wars? The rest of the island is huge, but it’s inhabited by the dinosaurs, and this seems to be the only tribe on this side of the wall. So are these just the skulls and bones from their own dead? Or do they routinely kill off half of their citizens?
No matter what the truth is, we’re meant to think it’s weird and scary. Is Jackson meaning to make this tribe out to be a bunch of bloodthirsty incomprehensibles? It sure seems like it. They aren’t too tough, of course, because we don’t see them again after the initial killing. Even though there is only one person guarding the gate, he’s enough to ward off the entire tribe.
The fact and problem is this: the people on the island don’t appear to be any kind of viable civilization. How they have survived so long is a mystery, and they’re probably about to die off, if their surroundings are any indication. We aren’t meant to have pity them, and we certainly aren’t meant to think about them after they disappear and their primary deity is seized. In the original, we see Kong kill some of the natives, and we see them as real people. Here, they're monsters.
An interesting minor plot point to say the least.
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