Page 51 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

To return to the imagery of race: why should fear of women's liberation be expressed in terms of
blackness? The loaded racial interpretation of Queen Kong herself implies that symbolically she is not
just a monstrous woman but a monstrous black woman - an oversized manifestation of the savage,
insatiable, over-sexed black woman of the racist imagination. Most importantly, she is therefore also
the untamed dark Other who lurks inside white women, which white men must disavow and keep
repressed. According to Rhoda Berenstein, there is a representational affinity between blackness and
white women - women (all women) are in continual danger of slipping back into blackness, which is
coded as sexually excessive, uncivilised, undomesticated and beyond male control. 7 By this reading,
Queen Kong is an entirely logical symbol of liberated white women. For, as Berenstein points out,
in films such as King Kong and 1930s jungle exploitation, white women are doubled not only with
black men but with apes.8 Like them white women are hierarchically subordinate to white men.
Once the hierarchy is threatened - by male weakness, for example, or female independence - white
women tumble down the symbolic order to become like black women and finally apes. No longer
safely under male control, they become entirely Other to the hysterical male imagination. Again, this
clarifies the logic of a black ape symbolising (white) female liberation and victimhood - unleashed,
all English white women would become as monstrously Other and 'un-English' as black women and
apes. 'Bloody foreigners', a British Asian says of Queen Kong. 'You wouldn't see an English gorilla
behaving like that.'
At the same time, as Berenstein says, the black ape in films can be a figure of desire and envy for
white men. King Kong, she argues, construed as a black man, is unsettling not least because 'apes
and black men also signify all the white man imagines he is but should be, as well as all he believes
white women desire and resemble'.9 Kong's strength, sexual potency (despite his invisible penis) and
hypermasculinity are, to the racist white imagination, threateningly desirable and 'manly' as much as
they are repulsively ape-ish. There is a similar ambivalence about Queen Kong. She is not altogether
to be feared, but on some level to be welcomed and even secretly desired; the promise (or pretence)
is that she can be tamed, as Ray tames her at the end of the film, and fear of her is mingled with
a colonialist desire for black women's imagined sexual plenitude. Queen Kong is, after all, strong,
protective, an ideal matriarch and archetypal in her iconic simplicity. In Jungian terms she is a fusion
of Shadow and Anima, and her appeal strikes deep into the white male (and, specifically, postcolonial
English) unconscious. Capable of swallowing a man whole - at either end - she embodies a fantasy of
sexual submission that corresponds to the stereotypical Englishman's masochistic desire for punishing
from a dominant matronly authority. From a certain point of view, if female liberation means women
becoming more like Queen Kong - big, sexy, strapping and dark - then Ray has the right idea: give in
and enjoy it. Her monstrous sexiness is celebrated in one of the film's occasional musical numbers:

She's a queenie who ain't a weenie,
When I'm feeling mighty spunky,
I want to do it with my hunky monkey.

Although an ever-present theme of the English male psyche, desire for correction and control by
a powerful woman found some interestingly novel and urgent forms of cultural expression in the

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