In the Flesh: King Kong (2005)

No one could accuse Peter Jackson’s 2005 adaptation of King Kong of being a perfect movie. Its racist Adventure Film of Yesteryear elements look worse now than ever, some of its CGI feels unfinished and iffy, and it is without a doubt overstuffed in that lovingly nerdy way only Jackson can really pull off. What it does do well, though, it does with so much verve and craftsmanship that it’s easy to see why movies like this were once beloved mainstays of cinema. Forbidding crags and cloying jungles, dashing and unscrupulous sea captains, a cast of flavorful ne’er-do-wells and flamboyant hucksters led by the opposing moral poles of Barnum-esque Carl Denham (Jack Black, his naturally likeable impishness playing beautifully into his eventual heel turn) and wide-eyed down on her luck actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts, whose Fay Wray scream is jaw-dropping). There’s peril, monsters, slapstick, suspense, romance — the whole kit and kaboodle. There’s also the bug pit.

A little about me. I watch Audition to relax. If I’m having a crummy day I’ll put on Hellraiser or Natural Born Killers. I can hardly make it through the bug pit scene. Shot in near total silence except for the occasional faint click or chitter and the screams of the people fighting and dying in the midst of a tide of chitin, feelers, and gooey, bloated biomass, the scene stretches on longer than one might think possible while still building tension. There is a repulsive sense of closeness to it, an abhorrent intimacy with things which express no recognizable emotion or sensation, things which at a thousandth of their onscreen size already inspire us to shriek and flee. The blunt simplicity of it makes it no less effective. Crickets the size of Welsh corgies seethe over Adrien Brody as he thrashes, their barbed limbs stroking him, threatening to penetrate, to violate.

Fear of the insect, as I’ve written before, is fear of penetration, fear that something other will reveal to us the awful permeability of our bodies, our essential helplessness to prevent transgression of our most intimate boundaries. Here rather than stealth our assailants have brute force on their side, and unlike a rapist they have no goal but nourishment, no emotional relationship to us beyond the relationship we might form with a grilled cheese sandwich. Their eyes are dead and alien, their bodies devoid of readable movement. They perform that simplest and most elemental of horror film transgressions: pressing us close to the hot burner of a hundred thousand years of instinctual fear of venomous spiders and centipedes and seething, biting ants buried deep in our own reptilian hindbrains. They aren’t merely frightening, but hateful on a level we’re hardly capable of analyzing. It’s the worst thing in the world.