A Typology of Islands - Part Three

Barbarism, Hubris, and the Celebration of Uncertainty

King Kong - Cooper/ Shoedsack, Jurassic Park - Spielberg, Caro Diario - Nanni Moretti, The Tale of the Unknown Island  - Jose Saramago, 'Utopia'  - Wislawa Szymborska

Barbarism comes to/from Manhattan King Kong 1933

Poor acting. Wretched screenplay. Ridiculous plot. What a movie. What an island. 

The film begins in depression-era New York. A film maker called Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), under pressure to introduce some romance into his movies, happens upon a beautiful, down on her luck, would-be actress – Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). He signs her up for his trip to the island where he’ll film his latest movie.

How does he get her on board?

“It’s money and adventure and fame, it’s the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o’clock in the morning!”

Ok, then.

They sail from Manhattan. Manhattan is an island, of course, but it has lost its magic, its apartness. It has not, however, realised its barbarism. Not yet.

This is quite early in the history of New York as home port. It had been and continued to be for some time a destination; a place as fantastic as any island of the imagination projected offshore. Perhaps this film is a part of this gestalt shift? Manhattan  is a home island (similar to Ithaca in the Odysssey or England in Robinson Crusoe. Familiarity has worn away its novelty. 

More importantly its recent migration to centre of the western world - the Omphalos of the 'Free World' - has robbed it of its self awareness. It sends forth fools looking for the exotic and tries to hide its own barbarism.

All in good time!  

The crew sets sail and when they arrive at a certain latitude Denham shows the captain a map of a secret island.

He points out a giant wall separating a peninsula where the natives live from the rest of the island. Seeing the incredulity of the sailors he goes on; lays it all out for them.

“The natives keep that wall in repair – there’s something on the other side something they fear…Have you ever heard of the legend of Kong?...I tell you there’s something on that island that no white man has ever seen”

As they approach the island the ship moves through fog. A photographic staple that would be used to symbolise and effect a transition from one set of rules to another, from one world to another in 2010’s Shutter Island.

They hear the island before they see it – the sound of drums  breaks through the fog. The island is represented as a sinister, barbaric place.

It is just that: the natives are complete barbarians. Grass skirts, bones through their noses, wild dancing and sacrifices to the monster beyond the wall.

This is very definitely an island of terrors, and, terror of terrors in the imagination of white Americans;  the black savages very quickly develop a taste for a white woman.

The credulity of the sailors when they see the fauna native to the island is something to behold. At the sight of a dinosaur their response is: “Look at that...keep quiet so he doesn’t see us”.  This is followed by “Give me one of those bombs” They shoot and kill an animal that was supposed to have been extinct for 60 million years.

Their complete idiocy is underlined when they’re walking past the prostrate, dying beast:

“What do you call this thing?.....Why, something from the dinosaur family…a dinosaur, eh?....Yes, Jack, a prehistoric beast!”

This has to be some of the silliest writing ever to make it into a final cut. It beggars belief that this was intended to be anything other than a comedy!

The jokes are over when they encounter next creature:  a lake dwelling long-necked monster. This time the beast comes off much better.  Sure, they shoot it, but this member of “the dinosaur family” is seriously bad news. With Scylla-like ferocity it devours and drowns crew members and chases the terrified survivors out of a foggy swamp.

What happens next immortalises this island as a place apart – a land of unbridled fantasy and endless possibility. The fight scene between King Kong and the Tyrannosaurus Rex – for the love of a good woman! – is a defining moment in the history of special effects. Although this film was to be remade in the mid 1970s it was not until Jurassic Park sixty years later that an island of such fantastic possibilities would appear.

At any rate, King Kong  is captured and eventually slaughtered.

“Well, Denham, the airplanes got him…oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes, it was beauty killed the beast!”

Who are the barbarians, then? If anything, King Kong has shown himself to be capable of moral behaviour. The humans can’t  make the same claim. ‘Beauty’  - the construction of beauty on the silver screen has killed the beast.  The humans in this film have shot, stolen, kidnapped and slaughtered.

If anything it is the island of Manhattan - not the monster’s home island – that is the home of barbarism.

Speilberg’s Scaly Golem -  Jurassic Park

This island – Isla Nublar – like the island of King Kong is populated by dinosaurs. Unlike its antecedent, however, Isla Nublar is the territory of a crackpot scientist (Richard Attenborugh) who has cloned these prehistoric animals in order to set up a theme park.

Unlike its antecedent in King Kong the visitors to Isla Nublar greet its wonders with slack-jawed astonishment.  

Not only this, they have deeply held ecological values; they are decades away from the shoot first ask questions never fools of King Kong. Their grave misgivings about what is taking place here give rise to some interesting philosophical debate:

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should”

“How can we stand in the light of discovery and not act?”

“What’s so great about discovery? It’s a violent, penetrative act; that scars what it explores. What you call discovery I call the rape of the natural world”

The ecological arguments advanced point to an island that shares the same symbolical neighbourhood as that in the King Kong. Both islands are part of an archipelago of death.  Neither place is safe; particularly for the unthinkingly vain.

Both islands punish hubris.

King Kong shows the motion picture industry’s particular brand of acquisitiveness being devoured by forces that are far more powerful than it had expected.They came to make a movie and most of them got eaten by horrible monsters.

The hubris of Jurassic park is that of the scientific mindset that would seek to transgress the most ancient taboo: to create life anew, to short circuit the prerogatives of the divine. They created dinosaurs for tourism and most of them got eaten by horrible monsters.

Spielberg's scaly golems show what can happen on an island where morality is jettisoned.

Celebrating Uncertainty - Caro Diario - Nanni Moretti

Nanni Moretti’s movie has none of the smug sententiousness of Jurassic Park.  It shares some of King Kong’s anarchic fun, though. Human weakness is explored but Moretti’s vision is life affirming and forgiving.

This film comprises three episodes. The second of the three is entitled Isole (Islands). It is set on the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily.  Moretti and his friend have a fog/darkness/storm – free approach to their destination.  How could it be otherwise? Instead of their classical heritage, their topographical beauty, and peaceful remove from the hustle and bustle of modern life, these Islands are revealed to be, by and large, noisy tourist traps. By the time they get to the one island remote enough to resist the commodification it is too late: Moretti and his friend have sold out: they become more interested in the goings on of the trashy American soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful than in what they thought they had come looking for: peace and quiet to help them with their writing.

So ,The Aeolian Islands that the two friends find are not refuges from the modern world. They come looking for peace but they do not find it - not only do they not find it; they find that they do not actually want it!

They reach Alcuidi. A local tells them “I don’t like other islands. They are compromised there. They don’t know how to live in isolation. Here we all live alone”

The problem is that not only do they not have electricity they do not, consequently have TV. No TV; no The Bold and the Beautiful. Moretti and his friend run – literally – screaming away from this place. These islands have lost their magic, lost their apartness lost their status as islands. An each of these things has happened objectively and subjectively.

The two men have themselves become just as compromised and post-lapsarian as the islands they have visited. Despite this, Caro Diario is a joyful, celebratory, life-affirming film.  Moretti makes an interesting observation on his way back to the Italian mainland:

“Dear Diary I am only happy when I am on the sea on the way from one island to another that I have yet to reach.”

Moretti uses the islands as vehicles for the insight that stasis equals death.  Where the islands of Jurassic Park and King Kong expose hubris and vanity and those Gulliver’s Travels expose every conceivable human failing his islands do not make a moral point as much as an historical/existential one. It seems to me that Moretti’s elevation of the journey above the arrival is a description of how life is to be lived in an era where there are no certainties: myth, religion, even Swift’s ethical certainty that human beings were essentially wretched; none of these things can be relied upon.

The Journey as Destination - The Tale of the Unknown Island by Jose Saramago.

This elevation of the process above the product; of the journey above the destination. This idea is very succinctly expressed in another story about islands: The Tale of the Unknown Island by the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago.

This story is non-temporal parable and tells the tale of a petitioner to a king who asks for a ship so that he can find an unknown island. The petitioner will not be put off by the King’s geographers and the sailors near the port who tell him that all of the islands have already been discovered. In the end, he and a cleaner from the royal palace are the only two who take to the ship to find the unknown island.

The unknown island, it turns out is the ship itself:

“Then, as soon as the dun had risen, the man and the woman went to paint in white letters on both sides of the prow the name that the caravel still lacked. Around midday ,with the tide, The Unknown Island finally set to sea, in search of itself”

The journey is all; arriving is nothing. One thing is becoming clear: in fiction based on islands, arrival at an island is quite often the beginning of the end. Staying there is death itself.

This is why Odysseus took two decades to come home from the Trojan War!

(Surely this basic unit of the grammar of fictional islands was one of the most common thoughts at the back of the minds of the viewers of the execrable American TV show Lost?)

 The Island as Death - 'Utopia'  - Wislawa Szymborska

One thing is for sure, Wislawa Szymborska understood this equation. Her poem, Utopia takes one of the most famous islands of the imagination, probes it and finds it to be a place of death. The final stanza with its shocking imagery of the footsteps in the sand all leading to the ocean underlines the truth that Prospero grasped: an island – even one as perfect and subject to the will as his was,  is a not a home. 

How can it be? If it offers “solid ground beneath your feet.. access…proofs…valid supposition...Understanding….[and]…Now I Get It”  then something has to be awry. Or rather , everything is awry. The acquisition of all of these things is the death of the imagination, the stifling of the intellect, the numbing of emotion, the intimidation of curiosity; aka death.

Szymborska’s Utopia is More’s Utopia, through a glass darkly.

Hers is a space where pre-enlightenment hope meets post-Auschwitz realism. If there is any truth it is that human beings are more bestial than King Kong or any of the prehistoric monsters imagined on the other islands I mention in this post.

This is, after all is said, a beautiful poem . The only thing missing from my point of view is my inability to read it in the original Polish! The final stanza, in particular is a wonderful counterpoint to Moretti’s paean to vagrancy at the end of Caro Diario:  

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,

and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches

turn without exception to the sea.

If only Crusoe had felt the same way a few weeks into his ‘England in the Caribbean’ project!

If only Sergeant Howie in The Wicker Man had turned around straight away.

Utopia

Island where all becomes clear.

Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here

with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,

sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:

the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned

and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.

Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.

Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,

and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches

turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave

and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.