Abstract
The four most important King Kong films (1933, 1976, 2005, and 2017) contain religious sentiments that are related to the numinous and mysterious fear of Nature and death that gives meaning to life, and to the institutionalization of society. In this way, as observed in the films, the Society originated by religion is a construction against Nature and Death. Based on these hypotheses, the objective of this work is to (a) show that the social structure of the tribal society that lives on Skull Island is reinforced by the religious feelings that they profess towards the Kong divinity, and (b) reveal the impact that the observation of the generalized alterity that characterizes the isolated tribal society of the island produces on Western visitors—and therefore, on film viewers. The article concludes that the return to New York, after the trip, brings an unexpected guest: the barbarism that is installed in the heart of civilization; that the existing order is reinforced and the society in crisis is renovated; and that the rationality subject to commercial purposes that characterizes modernity has not been able to escape from the religiosity that nests in the depths of the human soul.
Highlights
Skull Island is reinforced by the religious feelings that they profess towards the Kong divinity, and (b) reveal the impact that the observation of the generalized alterity that characterizes the isolated tribal society of the island produces on Western visitors—and on film viewers
The article concludes that the return to New York, after the trip, brings an unexpected guest: the barbarism that is installed in the heart of civilization; that the existing order is reinforced and the society in crisis is renovated; and that the rationality subject to commercial purposes that characterizes modernity has not been able to escape from the religiosity that nests in the depths of the human soul
The approach to King Kong comes from the Sociology of Cinema, which defends the value of the seventh art as an analytical prism of society and highlights its active symbolization of reality (Francescutti 2012, p. 225)
Summary
I will rely fundamentally on three perspectives of Sociology: the comprehensive one of Max Weber, the symbolic and imaginary of the Sociology of Cinema, and the one of the Sociology of Religion, which are linked to two methods—the philosophical hermeneutic and the visual hermeneutic. 2) explains the germ of the religious in the association of the fight against the fear of nature and death, since one of the most powerful psychological elements of what he calls “the tamed death” would be the defense of society against wild nature In this way, the reactualization of mortality constitutes a particular case of the global strategy of the human being against Nature, made up of prohibitions, concessions, and atavistic fears. At the same time that religions are determined by fear of Nature and mortality, they try to print a sense of life and death, to move the feeling of absurdity away from the mind of the human being Death is inexorably linked to life, while mortality constitutes, according to Heidegger, the fundamental hermeneutical principle of human existence. It is precisely in death where the human being conquers the totality of life, the authentic existence (Heidegger 1963, pp. 233, 274–75; Pienda 2001, p. 101); it is where “being is freedom towards death” (Carse 1987, p. 436)
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