Page 52 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

1970s. One striking fantasy of male insignificance and engulfment is elaborated in a text roughly
contemporary to Queen Kong: the 'Joan Crawford' sketch on Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's 1977
album, Derek and Clive Come Again. The combination of misogynistic terror, helpless masochism and
infantile regression makes for a suggestive parallel with Queen Kong.
Clive: And I look around, and I saw someone lying on a bed. I thought 'that's a
fucking familiar face'. And it was Joan Crawford.
Derek: Gawd. Fucking hell.
Clive: And I'm cleaning the windows, and this fucking wind blew up, tropical storm
invaded the bedroom, and I was swept away by this huge gust of wind, straight
up her fucking cunt.
Derek: O h no.
Clive: Yeah. I went straight up through the nylon underwear, tore through the
diaphragm she was wearing, and there was no exit.10

All this Oedipal madness raises the question: how big is Queen Kong's vagina? King Kong's erection
was once calculated to be 20 inches long - impressive but not so as to make sex entirely out of the
question if Fay Wray were sufficiently limber and game. What about Queen Kong, though? Ray is
happy to shack up with her at the end of the film, his role some indefinable combination of acolyte,
lover, colonial overlord and zookeeper. Queen Kong turns out to be the perfect woman, in whose
ample symbolic form diverse fantasies of weird sex and masochistic submission are embodied and
catered for. The implication is that Ray becomes a kind of human dildo. In the spirit of Derek and
Clive he persistently attempts to return to the womb and thereby fulfil an Oedipal fantasy of the
highest order - fucking Mother with one's entire infantile body.

CONCLUSION

Is it, as Marxists used to say, any coincidence that a few years later, to satiate this subconscious yearning
for matriarchal control and with the promise of arresting national decline, a woman should indeed
come to rampage across and dominate Britain? Mrs Thatcher - mother, matron and dominatrix, the
'Great She Elephant' - was the Queen Kong of politics. Sex symbol, icon and white goddess (crucially
she is bleached of Queenie's disturbing racial connotations), Mrs Thatcher spoke to and answered
fantasies of desire and control submerged deep in the political unconscious, fantasies given ridiculous
but comprehensive expression in an unreleased exploitation film about a 64-foot female gorilla.

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