I.
One of the greatest movies ever made opened in New York City ninety years ago, on 2 March 1933.
Directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, it starred Fay Wray as out-of-work actress Ann Darrow on the lookout for love and excitement; Robert Armstrong as wildlife filmmaker Carl Denham; and Bruce Cabot as rugged first mate on board the SS Venture Jack Driscoll.
The film also featured astonishing special effects by the stop-motion animation pioneer Obie O'Brien.
I'm referring, of course, to King Kong ...
II.
There are many, many reasons to fondly recall this film, in which a giant ape - captured on Skull Island and brought back in chains to America, so as to be exhibited on stage as the Eighth Wonder of the World - runs rampage in New York, climbing the iconic Empire State Building whilst carrying a lovely young woman in his huge paw.
But the reason I'm reminded of it now is because I have just returned from a 6/20 meeting at the London home of Christian Michel [1], in which a guest speaker presented her thoughts on the subject of beauty, seemingly oblivious to (or unconcerned with) what we might term the politics of the subject - even though, as the French philosopher Jacques Rancière puts it, aesthetics is that which ties together art, thought, and issues to do with how we choose to live together as a culture and a people.
I'm not criticising the fact that Miss Hasan [2] chose to mount a conservative defence of beauty (informed by the work of Roger Scruton) against what she regards as the disenchanted utility of our modern world. But I do think she might, in future, consider how beauty itself can turn very ugly - and even murderous - when, for example, it is written with a capital 'B' and conflated with other ideal notions of Goodness and Truth.
Plato famously made this mistake. And failed artist Adolf Hitler also acted not in the name of hate, but in the name of Love informed by Classical ideals of what constitutes Beauty; harmony, wholeness, purity, etc.
Indeed, one is almost tempted to say that just as it wasn't the airplanes that killed Kong - It was beauty killed the beast - neither was it the military-industrial complex of the Third Reich that resulted in genocide; it was, rather, the Nazi aesthetic and their totalitarian desire to eradicate all they deemed ugly, monstrous, degenerate, alien (i.e., all forms of otherness) [3].
Notes
[1] Christian Michel is a French polymath who has graciously hosted the twice-monthly 6/20 Club at his west London home for almost twenty years, during which time an impressive assortment of speakers have presented papers on a huge number of topics.
[2] Born on the southern coast of Pakistan, Mariam Hasan is a London-based writer who runs discussion groups in pubs and parks. Her academic background is multidisciplinary, stretching from Frankfurt-style critical theory to explorations of collective memory.
[3] As the Swedish film director Peter Cohen says:
"Defining
Nazism in traditional political terms is difficult. Mainly because its
dynamic was fuelled by something quite different from what we usually
call politics. This driving force was aesthetic. Its ambition was to
beautify the world through violence."
Quoted by Matthew Gault in the online artcle 'The Nazis Obsessed Over Beauty', on medium.com: click here.
Readers who are interested in this might like to watch Cohen's 1989 documentary The Architecture of Doom (originally released in Swedish as Undergångens arkitektur).
The film explores Hitler's obsession with his own neo-Classical (and yet paradoxically Romantic) vision of what was and was not aesthetically acceptable. The Nazis didn't just eliminate enemies of the State, they killed anyone whose very existence conflicted with their ideal of what they deemed Good, True, and Beautiful.
For those who can bear to watch, click here for the final tragic scene from King Kong (1933).
