Snead: Spectatorship and Capture in KING KONG

James Snead in his article "Spectatorship and Capture in KING KONG" states that blacks have been consigned to a minor significance on screen by the acts screen by the devises of mythfication, marking and omission. These devises** (F-1) can be understood only if we think that filmic codes describe an interrelationship between images. ** (F-2)

Mythification replaces historical facts with an ideology of idealized elevation or demotion. Mythification also implies identification, and thus spectators who can identified with the mythified person or thing. Thus, people elevate, through mythification, those who are racially like them and demonize those who are different from them. Because film constitute us as a community or audience it has the power to use mythification effectively in order to elevate those who are dominant and to degrade those who are subordinates. Soon through the repetition of mythyfication, white and black filmed images become large-scale models for behavior.

Marking. To mark is to point for identification, and remembering. In film, marking makes it visually clear that blackness is a "natural' condition turned into a man made sign. (8). Black skin is over-marked obsessively so as to eliminate ambiguity. Marking is necessary because "the racial terms "black" and "white" refer to a wide range of hues. (8)"

The third devise is omission. Omission is the exclusion by reversal, distortion or some other form of censorship, of black characters in the movie

Mythification in KING KONG ..... It occurs by making the blacks as exotic. The inhabitants of Skull Island (supposedly located in the Pacific Ocean), should have been Polynesians, yet, they are mythified and marked as the "Other" known in the USA: Black Americans

Ann is mtythified as the beautiful blonde who is also a damsel in distress. She is also mythified (along with KONG) as erotic energy. "Only a violent abduction of a girl by the two blacks (small-scale surrogates for Kong), who later abducts her, can shock Jack out of his male-centered fantasies and into an active concern for the heterosexual bond. (17)

The black natives in the movie KING KONG receive the kind of cinematic marking of "jungle blacks". In this film black characters function as "props" for white characters. They are figuratively own by the whites mainly through the White men obsession to look at them curiously. Eventually they are also owned by the white man's modes of exploitation. (technology, ships weapons).

The natives are optically colonized (taking the picture of the beauty and the beast!). Their home land is almost literally invaded by the film-ship crew. Kong's rule is overthrown. The first cinematic marking of the natives in KING KONG takes the form of drums that can be heard but cannot be seen. The "jungle blacks" are also marked by music. In genral, blacks in KING KONG are marked as primitive, unproductive, and above all, desiring all that is white (the golden girl).