Kong, Ivan, and Me: Finding Humanity in the Non-Human
By Brian Keiper
I was so young that I can’t remember who I met first. The memories have blurred and commingled like a child’s sidewalk chalk drawing after a fall of rain. The real world and fantasy do not separate for children like they do for adults so both King Kong and Ivan the gorilla were as real as the air in my lungs when I was five. Ivan was legendary to all residents of the Tacoma Washington area, including me, and hundreds of visitors stopped by the B & I shopping center each year to see the great ape. Ivan wasn’t thirty feet tall but to my young eyes, he might as well have been. His size and undoubtable strength were frightening to me. I was prone to nightmares as a child and had a few about Ivan; I remember one of them vividly despite the passing of forty-plus years. There was also something very sad about him. It wasn’t until years later and the wisdom that comes from the experience of the world that I knew what that sadness was. No creature as majestic as Ivan should have been confined alone for so long to such a small space — a mere 14 by 14-foot concrete enclosure with a glass wall where he could be observed by hundreds of gawkers, including me. I think it was Kong who helped me realize that.
My first experience with King Kong was the 1976 film produced by Dino de Laurentiis, starring Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange, and Charles Grodin. Looking back, it was not the most auspicious introduction to the iconic ape as it is one of the weakest to feature him, but what made it magic was Kong himself. Designed and fabricated by Carlo Rambaldi, with help from sculptor Don Chandler and a gifted up-and-coming makeup artist on the film, Rick Baker (who also played Kong), it is really Baker’s uncredited performance that made the difference. A life-long lover of gorillas, he imbued Kong with the kind of empathy that Karloff brought to Frankenstein’s Creation, Lon Chaney brought to the Phantom and Quasimodo, and his son Lon Chaney, Jr. brought to Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man. Some may call that hyperbole, but I say give the film another look. Ignore the silly aspects of the film (and there are more than a few) and watch Kong’s eyes, which are in fact Baker’s. Watch his body language, the tenderness he expresses, and the fierceness with which he defends his territory and Lange’s character, Dwan (that name being one of those silly elements I mentioned). But as a boy, I could not help but feel for Kong and understand that capturing and caging him for the purposes of entertainment and profit was a grave sin.
This became even more apparent when I saw the original 1933 film and, many years later, Peter Jackson’s excellent remake. I remember reading about the original film extensively before ever seeing it. I purchased a few monster books from the Scholastic Book Fairs at school but much more often checked them out from the local public library and the surprisingly well-stocked one in my elementary school. It was in these books that I learned about the great Willis O’Brien, the man that made Kong come to life. I could not have dreamed that the gigantic gorilla fighting dinosaurs (another early obsession of mine) and holding the terrified Fay Wray in the pictures I saw in books like Movie Monsters by Thomas G. Aylesworth, Things You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Monsters but Were Afraid to Ask by Tony Tallarico, and King Kong from The Monster Series (those wonderful slim volumes with the orange covers) by Ian Thorne, could be an eighteen-inch-tall puppet. Even armed with this knowledge I was swept up by the story when I finally saw Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack’s King Kong. I was too old for it to scare me by that time but not too old to fall in love with the film and especially with Kong.
Lord of the Rings was all the rage in my friend group in the early 2000s, so there was no doubt that I was going to see Peter Jackson’s King Kong in 2005. It was that magical time before kids came along that my wife and I were able to see the movies that intrigued us most in the theater together, though still too strapped for cash to see everything. She didn’t have the same kinds of connections to Kong that I did, having never seen the original or the remake, but we were both moved by the depth of the bond formed between Kong and Naomi Watts as Ann Darrow. The scene that still elicits the scoffing of cynical fanboys brought tears to both our eyes as the two take a moment to slide on an ice-covered pond in Central Park, knowing full well that Kong’s final doom was only a few minutes away.
No matter the version, there are two sequences that never fail to move me. The first is the revelation of the captive Kong, paraded in chains before an audience. In the original, he is on a giant platform on a Broadway stage with Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) assuring the audience that the “chrome steel” chains are unbreakable. The filmmakers of the original having been changed to oilmen in the 76 version, Kong is trapped inside a gigantic cage fashioned to look something like a gas pump. It’s a little strange, but it has always worked on me, especially the closeups of Kong with the giant crown placed on his head. In these moments, Baker’s eyes once again make all the difference, and we can be grateful that the full-scale robotic Kong of the wide shots was cut down to an absolute minimum. In Jackson’s version, Kong is again chained on a Broadway stage, this time with a reenactment of the native scene from the first film staged in front of him. His face is filled with sorrow and longing for the sight of Ann, the one human he has ever encountered that showed him anything other than fear or cruelty.
The second is, of course, his final demise. In the original, Kong touches the blood seeping from his wounds, and we watch him grow weak until his strength finally gives way. In this moment I always forget that this is a stop motion special effect and only see the pain in Kong’s eyes and the confusion on his face. In 1976, the location is shifted to the newly built World Trade Center towers, which remind him of stone pillars on his Skull Island home. Jackson’s version is particularly poignant as he locks eyes with Ann atop the Empire State Building and the life drains from his gaze. He slowly slides off the dome atop the massive skyscraper to the street below. Originally, an elderly woman was to come from the crowd and deliver the iconic final line, “No, it wasn’t the airplanes. T’was beauty killed the beast.” The woman would have been played by Fay Wray, but when offered the role her family asked if she was going to do it. “I don’t think so,” replied the long-retired legend. This all turned out to be moot as she passed away during the film’s pre-production, but what a moment that could have been.
The key to all three great King Kong films is the humanity infused into the title character: Willis O’Brien manipulating the 18-inch armature puppet, his primary focus given to the realism of Kong’s performance; Rick Baker lending his eyes and movements to the suit in the 1976 version makes us feel the tragedy of Kong so deeply; Andy Serkis’s revolutionary motion capture performance for the Peter Jackson film removes any sense that Kong is a computer-generated creation. That is the strength of Kong. Though all three are representative of the cutting-edge special effects of the time each was made, they all understand that a human being must inhabit the character to make it real to us as movie-goers.
I am well aware that Ivan was not human but a majestic silverback Gorilla. Beautiful and terribly frightening at the same instant, not unlike Kong. But like his film counterpart, there was also a kind of humanity in Ivan. He seemed to have an artist’s soul. He painted and drew and many of his creations are in various locations around the U.S. including zoos and even art museums. I think it was this humanity that gained him his freedom. It should be noted that the stories of Kong and Ivan are not directly parallel. Ivan’s owners cared for him deeply and did their best for him with the resources they had. But a creature like Ivan was not meant to be pent up in such a small space for so long.
In the 1990s, local citizens began petitioning for his transfer from the B & I shopping center to a more suitable habitat. In 1994, after 27 years of life in that space, he was moved to Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo before being transferred permanently to Zoo Atlanta. It took him quite some time to adjust to life with other gorillas, having spent so much time with humans, but eventually, he claimed his role as a silverback. Sadly, in 2012 at the age of 50, Ivan died while under anesthesia during a medical examination. It was later revealed that he had a large tumor in his chest which accounted for his failing health. Though he spent nearly the last decade of his life on the other side of the country, Ivan has never quite left the hearts of Tacoma residents. A bronze statue of him now stands outside the Point Defiance Zoo on the edge of the city near Puget Sound.
Ivan and Kong’s stories are about not having to be human to have humanity, a basic dignity shared by us all. Yes, they are animals, but there is something intangible that connects us to them. It is the humanity in them that connects to the humanity in us. It moves us to feel for an articulated puppet, a man in a suit, a motion-capture CGI creation. Seeing this in Kong also helps us to see the need for compassion in the real world. Roger Ebert famously called movies “empathy machines.” I can’t help but think that maybe seeing the humanity in the fictional Kong helped us see the longing for freedom in Ivan and do what we could to give him back a little piece of his dignity. And if we can find the humanity in a gorilla, perhaps there is hope we can find it in each other. 🩸
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Brian Keiper is a featured writer for Manor Vellum. Brian’s also written for Bloody Disgusting, Dread Central, F This Movie!, Ghastly Grinning, and others. Follow him on Twitter @Brianwaves42.
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