King Konsumer: Menippean satire, spectatorship, sacrifice and consumption

Abstract

Menippean satires (Bakhtin’s ‘spoudo-geloion’) satirize their audience(s) directly. By playfully attacking the sensibility and/or perceptions, Menippean satires seek to reveal readers to themselves enabling them to see themselves and their world(s) more clearly. To date, however, the study of the Menippean tradition has largely been restricted to works of literature and canonical authors such as Lucian, Varro, Rabelais, Swift, Joyce, McLuhan and Pynchon. Relatively little has been said about Menippean theatre or cinema. Here, we seek to explore Menippean satire, beyond the book, through the lens of King Kong (1933). We argue that spectators can come to discover that the meaning of King Kong resides in the audience’s own spectatorship and participation and, therefore, complicity in ritual(s) of consumption and sacrifice. Spectators also, potentially, come to ‘see’ and recognize, through and beyond their individual viewing experience(s), wider patterns of consumption, sacrifice and scapegoating that prevail under the sign of modernity.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance and input of Dr. Eric McLuhan and Dr. Simon Sigley in the preparation of this manuscript.

Notes

1. This is not to say that the directors should be afforded primacy in terms of determining what are and are not valid modes of interpretations. However, it seems viable to afford them something of a privileged perspective if it is only on the grounds of their intimacy with the creation and making of the work.

2. The following discussion of Menippean satire might also be read, albeit indirectly, as problematizing (or at least nuancing) prevailing understandings of postmodernity and its relations(s) to earlier periods. Many of the qualities and characteristics of postmodern aesthetics and/or discourses are, here, indicated as belonging to this (anti-) genre that has its roots in deep antiquity. This matter, however, can only receive mention here.

3. A point, perhaps, not lost on Quentin Tarantino who wove this signature into the title of his Menippean masterpiece, Inglorious Basterds (2009).

4. Perhaps, if this article is successful, King Kong’s antecedents ought to be expanded to include earlier self-reflexive films such as The Countryman and the Cinematograph (1901), Uncle Josh at the Moving Pictures Show (1902), and Those Awful Hats (1909) and Sherlock Jr. (1924). Seen in this light, King Kong might be repositioned, in stark contrast to earlier reflexive works, as one of if not the first reflexive films that foregrounds the disservices of emerging patterns of film spectatorship and consumption.

5. It is relevant to note that Jackson also increases the distance between the in-film audience (twentieth-century New Yorkers) and the Skull Island natives by depicting the latter as zombie-like. While this may be more intellectually and/or conceptually accurate (pending one’s diagnosis of the twenty-first-century mind), it occludes the relations of equivalence between Skull Islanders, early twentieth-century New Yorkers and spectators that are central to the operation of the ‘original’.