1022021, issue 2
The Eyes of the Ape
Matthew Noble-Olson
What life is implicated in the question: ‘Is life still damaged?’ How do we reckon with
the question of a damaged life in the face of global climate catastrophe and the sixth
extinction, which threaten much of the earth’s animal and plant life, in addition to
human life? In the seventy-fourth aphorism of Minima Moralia, titled “Mammoth,”
Adorno notes the discovery of a fossil in Utah from an animal that had survived mil-
lions of years past any previously known similar species. For Adorno, the interest in life
long since extinct expresses a hope that something might survive humanity: “The desire
for the presence of the most ancient is a hope that animal creation might survive the
wrong that man has done to it, if not man himself, and give rise to a better species, one
that nally makes a success of life” (§ 74). The life that survives past its moment provides
a hope that a better version of life might still appear even in the face of catastrophe
and suering. Do we still desire the hope provided by such ancient creatures? Does the
presence of such monstrous nature still oer the hope of a better species? One of the
exemplary expressions of this desire identied by Adorno is Merian Cooper and Ernest
Schoedsack’s 1933 lm, King Kong, which combines “gigantic images” with the desire
for the ancient.1 What can we learn of the present condition of the damaged life in the
shift from the earlier portrayal of natural monstrosity to more recent instances of such?
One recent example appears in Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s 2017 lm, Kong: Skull
Island. The lm follows a team of scientists on a mission to nd Kong. As in the 1933 lm,
Kong is not the only ancient life on the island. In the earlier lm, he battles dinosaurs
and other creatures in defense of his romantic interest before being subdued, kidnapped,
and taken to New York, where his inability to survive the violence of humanity is cast as
a tragic sacrice to progress. In Kong, Kong is enlisted as a defender of humanity against
more vicious and dangerous monsters, which are no longer simply sideshows on the
way to the grand spectacle. While in King Kong (as well as the 2005 remake by Peter
Jackson), Kong is aorded a tragically romantic and spectacular end atop the Empire
State building following his kidnapping and imprisonment, in Kong he communes
with the male and female leads, who decide to save him from the more vicious human
intruders on the island. Rather than falling to his death amidst heartbreak and bullets,
he deantly watches as the humans with whom he has reconciled secure their escape,
waiting to be called upon to protect humanity again in the already expected sequels.
Kong portrays a humanity that saves Kong and is, in turn, saved by him. Each
relies upon the other in this version of the myth. The harmonious relationship between
humanity and Kong stands in stark contrast to the violence and domination portrayed
in the earlier versions. But Adorno reminds us that the solace oered in this semblance
of reconciliation is illusory: “The more purely nature is preserved and transplanted by
civilization, the more implacably it is dominated” (§ 74). The tragic portrayal of human-
ity’s violent domination of nature in King Kong has been reformulated as a tenuous
alliance, where enlightened humans must defend Kong against the violence within
humanity so that a now civilized Kong can survive to repel the threat that nature poses
to humanity’s self-exception.
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The mutual recognition reached between Kong and the enlightened element
of humanity involves a forgetting of the original and ongoing violence which puts
Kong at the service of his own domination. In contrast to the closing shot of King Kong,
where the audience is left with the dead, lifeless eye of Kong in the foreground after
his nal fall, the audience of Kong leaves Skull Island by way of a zoom into Kong’s
face and ultimately his eye as he deantly roars and beats his chest. This con fron tation
with the eyes of the monstrous ape invites a reconsideration of what life is damaged and
how some species might make “a success of life” under the conditions of the present
catastrophe. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno associates the expressive capacity of the artwork
with the eyes of animals: “…there is nothing so expressive as the eyes of animals—
especially apes—which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human” (Adorno
1997, 113). In this understanding, the ape’s eyes serve as a model for those elements of
the world that are external to humanity and yet exist in its thrall. It is telling, then, that
as Kong survives, waiting to defend humanity, the confrontation with his eyes is not
the nal image but merely a prelude to the lm’s nostalgic imag ination of humanity
reconciled to itself. In this revision the hope for survival beyond extinction is lost
amidst an imagined repair of the past itself, and the moment when such a hope for
the survival of something beyond the damage of humanity could still be rendered. The
tragic death of Kong which served as a reminder of humanity’s damage done to nature
is no longer tenable. The fate of nature is now understood as tied to our own. Humanity
now welcomes Kong as an honorary ape among men, a benevolent defender against the
violent threat of nature; he will not survive us.
Notes
Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Doane, Mary Ann. 2021. Bigger Than Life: The Close-
Up and Scale in the Cinema. Durham: Duke
University Press.
For a recent consideration of such “gigantic
images”, see Doane 2021.
References
Biography
Matthew Noble-Olson is a scholar of visual culture
with interests in film theory, avant-garde cinema,
digital cinema, moving-image installation, and
aesthetics. He is currently completing a manuscript
titledExile, Trauma, Ruin: The Forms of Cinematic
Lateness, which theorizes lateness in twentieth-
and twenty-first-century cinema. His writing has
appeared inDiscourse, Modernism/Modernity,New
German Critique, andCultural Critique.He teaches
film studies at the University of Michigan.
