What is America About?
Over at Ain't It Cool News, they asked every single contributor, in honor of the 4th of July, to come up with a list of the top ten films that best desribe America. Now, a lot of the list is pretty silly, but we think this description of King Kong sums things up pretty great. There's a moving speech somewhere in the following paragraph:
KING KONG (1933)
Exploitation. The entire country was built upon it.
Exploitation of the land, the resources, the indigenous peoples, the animals and the people you claimed to be exploiting it all for. To me – this film is a metaphor for the very thing that so often dooms us. Best intentions gone wrong. The dream of capturing something that nobody had ever dared to dream of, and unleashing the nightmare on the world. It’s the A-bomb, Capitalism, Showbiz and the poeticizing of it all. They trap the noble, the truly unique, the magic and the foreign with the promise of the All-American Woman. And then there’s the pomposity to believe that our military engineering and technological advantage will save our “All-American Women” – because we believe we’ll always endure, no matter the size of what we face. In the end, the All-American Woman is meant to be with the All-American Man… And no matter the weight of what we as a country have killed, exploited and destroyed the spirit of… We’ll always have our women and the manufactured heights that we believe we sit upon.