Page 50 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

On a sliding scale of plausibility, this is a pretty straightforward reading and only mildly
unscrupulous interpretative pressure yields the insight that the film is locked into racial fantasy and
especially the delirious imaginings of white men about the sexual possibilities of black women. If
on the one hand it is a terrifying vision of blackness out of control, on the other it is a reassuring
fable about how the racial and sexual Other can be tamed by white men, in whom fear of and sexual
fascination for black women are confused and intermingled.
On the face of it Queen Kong is 'about' feminism and the threat of women running wild. Queen
Kong is a big woman, and as in Attack of the 50 Ft Woman (1958; the feminist television remake was
1993) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), size is everything. Images of enormous women and
pocket-sized men speak volubly of threats to patriarchy, and these are films terrified about women
expanding beyond the domestic sphere. Need we delve far beneath the surface of Queen Kong to find
this out? Not at all. The obvious symptomatic reading of the film will do quite nicely, and can be
grasped in a sentence or two. As Ray says in his defence of Queen Kong, which ensures her return
to Laganza (or, to keep up the hidden racial implications, benevolent repatriation) - 'You cannot
destroy her, for she represents women everywhere', a cry accompanied by a montage of women
liberating themselves from domestic and sexual drudgery. This satirises feminism, of course, because
it is ridiculous that laddish Robin Askwith should be the spokesperson of female emancipation. And
it is entirely true that as a result Queen Kong might be charged with appropriating and triviliasing
the discourse of feminism. When Ray comments, as Queen Kong lays waste another chunk of the
capital, that 'I don't know what I'm going to do with her', he, the film and the chortling audience
disavow the power and meaning of her actions: she is out of control, the poor dumb animal, and in
need of male protection. But, on the other hand, the feminist discourse is unmistakable there, openly
articulated (albeit from rhe ample, child-bearing lips of Askwith) and diegetically effective - women
momentarily throw off their chains and Queen Kong is saved. All ends happily. So, while feminism
is mocked and abused in the film, its call for liberation still gets through; that the film must deal
with, reproduce and bother to appropriate it is a measure, in fact, of its success. Almost without their
wanting to, the filmmakers are obliged to acknowledge that because of feminism even the silliest
movie about a giant female gorilla turns into a fable of women's liberation. The film makes its subtext
explicit and Queen Kong is deliberately transfigured into a symbol. Unlike, say, Digby, in which the
allegorical significance of the monstrous titular sheepdog remains elusive, Queen Kong knowingly
presents us with a manifestation of female liberation at its most challenging, an outrageous Id monster
terrorising Englishmen who, the film insists, are mostly enfeebled, confused or homosexual: 'She
might have been a queen on the island, but in London half the men you meet are queens.' (Here
the filmmakers buy into the popular foreign stereotype of the queer Englishman.) The result is a
highly schematic vision of Britain's sexual economy in the mid-1970s: Britain is emasculated, its men
sexually indeterminate and under the thumb of Mother, and women are on the verge of revolution.
By the film's zero-sum logic, if women are getting more powerful, men must be turning into women
or becoming homosexual (Queen Kong was made at the end of the glam rock period, when gender
roles did seem unusually ambiguous). Britain is undergoing a gender reversal so comprehensive that
even Robin Askwith has signed up for feminism. Soon the country will resemble its fantasy double,
the matriarchy Lazanga.

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