Kong!

Last night, I rewatched the original 1933 King Kong  and... wow.  It's one of those movies that you can watch over and over when you're younger: hey, monsters!  A Giant Gorilla!  Dinosaurs!  A Giant Gorilla vs a Tyrannosaurus Rex!  What's not to love?

But then, you watch it with older eyes, and the stuff you miss as a kid becomes evident- the parts of the story in New York City at the beginning and the end.    Anne Darrow, stealing an apple,  Bread lines.  An attendee at the unveiling commenting that he'd payed twenty dollars for his ticket.  In 2015 dollars, that $20 in 1933 would have been equal to over three-hundred and fifty dollars.  Disaster on an elevated train, and, of course, the Empire State Building.  All in glorious black and white,

In fact, I rewatched the first NYC sequence tonight and then re-read Caitlin Kiernan's short story The Ape's Wife from the

collection of the same title,  It's a remarkably melacholy meditation on Ann Darrow's life of maybes and could haves in the wake of the the movie, punctuated with clips from songs Brother Can You Spare A Dime and Life Is Just A Bowl of Cherries, incorporated into the story so seamlessly that you can hear them, scratchy and tinny across the years.

"She sits alone in the Natural History Museum off Central Park, a bench all to herself in the alcove where the giant ape's broken skeleton was mounted for public exhibition after the creature tumbled from the top of the Empire State, plummeting more than twelve hundred feet to the frozen streets below. There is an informative placard (white letters on black) declaring it Brontopithecus singularis Osborn (1934), only known specimen, now believed extinct. So there, she thinks. Denham and his men dragged it from the not-quite-impenetrable sanctuary of its jungle and hauled it back to Broadway; they chained it and murdered it and, in that final act of desecration, they named it. The enigma was dissected and quantified, given it's rightful place in the grand analytic scheme, in the Latinized order of things, and that's one less blank spot to cause the mapmakers and zoologists to scratch their heads. Now, Carl Denham's monster is no threat at all, only another harmless, impressive heap of bones shellacked and wired together in this stately, static mausoleum. And hardly anyone remembers or comes to look upon these bleached remains. The world is a steamroller. The 8th Wonder of the World was old news twenty years ago, and now it is only a chapter in some dusty textbook devoted to anthropological curiosities."

The story is available here,  Kiernan works similar magic with her short story “From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6", exploring The Creature from The Black Lagoon,