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King Kong

The tender-hearted monster

King Kong is a particular monster, frightening in appearance but incredibly human in his feelings. He entered our imagination with the famous 1933 film of the same name, which was a huge success immediately and remained one of the most important titles in the history of cinema

A success that has lasted for more than seventy years

The adventurous plot of a film crew who enters a mysterious island inhabited by prehistoric animals and a giant ape, Kong; the tragic story of the monkey's love for the beautiful actress; the terror of the scenes in which Kong frees himself from the chains and begins to wander the streets of New York destroying everything that happens to him within reach; the wonder of the special effects that were revolutionary at the time were the main ingredients that amazed and moved the public. This was the film King Kong, released in 1933 in the United States, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack.

But King Kong's fame was not limited to those years: his story remained in memory, was re-proposed on the screens in 1976 by John Guillermin and in 2005 by Peter Jakson, and will surely return again to appear.

One wonders why such a story is destined to enjoy such a long life. The answer is perhaps in the final scene of the film. The monster that destroyed subways, crushed passersby, collapsed entire buildings, climbed America's tallest skyscraper, shot down warplanes, is now a huge dead body, the only target of the cameras of curious journalists. A policeman at the foot of the gigantic corpse sighs with relief: "The airplanes have succeeded", but receives a strange answer: "Oh no, it was not the airplanes ... It was the beauty who killed the beast!". In fact, the story of King Kong is first of all that of an impossible love, the one between Beauty and the Beast, just like in the famous fairy tale. Here, however, there is no magic that can transform the monster into a prince:

Monsters no different from us

The great and powerful Kong dies for love, but also because men do not have the sensitivity to understand and accept their behavior and emotions. They only know how to catch him and take him away from his island, put him in chains and exploit him as an attraction in theaters, to get money and success. Monsters are so different from us that they certainly cannot have feelings and do not deserve special attention! One can only imprison and eliminate them. So it happened to the creature born from the experiments of Dr. Frankenstein , so horrible to be seen to be condemned forever to solitude; so happens to Edward Scissorhands, the protagonist of the homonymous film directed by Tim Burton in 1990, he too was born in the laboratory and immediately considered dangerous for his diversity.

King Kong is a living being much closer to us, indeed of all the animals he is the most similar to us. These similarities have become kinship since, in the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Darwin discovered and revealed to the whole world that man and apes have a common ancestor. It was a revolution that upset the widespread opinion that man could not descend from animals.

Since then the figure of the monkey has started to become the protagonist of numerous stories: from the yellow story by Edgar Allan Poe The Murders of the Rue Morgue , to the Tarzan by Edgar Rice Borroughs to The Books of the Jungle by Rudyard Kipling . And The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevensonisn't it the story of a doctor of good society who finds a way to transform himself into a bestial creature whenever he wants? King Kong is therefore not afraid because it is gigantic and very powerful, but because after all that monster was also us, many years ago, perhaps with a little reduced size. Our attempts to keep away those who are different have so miserably failed: cages and chains are no longer enough, monsters have freed themselves and roam the streets of our cities. Rather than running away, we should perhaps learn to talk to them: we may find that the real dangers lie elsewhere.

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