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| Kong: Skull Island (2017) |
Gareth Edwards's
Godzilla was something of a revelation for me. I left that Chicago theater back in 2014 having witnessed a kind of renaissance of the monster myth on the big screen. Somehow, Edwards had taken an icon of film lore and imbued that familiar character with an ancient, unknowable dimension that worked to draw viewers "further up and further in" to the world of myth. Three years later, in 2017, I was sitting alone in another theater on the other side of the country in Dallas, and witnessed another movie icon undergo the same treatment.
I walked away from
Kong: Skull Island knowing that Edwards's
Godzilla wasn't a fluke. Instead, it became very clear that what Legendary Entertainment seeks to do with these movies is to tell the preeminent monster myth of our time. Standing in the tradition of the great mythic stories like
Paradise Lost,
Frankenstein, and
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and dealing with themes of forbidden knowledge and the loss of myth, these films have much more in mind than big-budget carnage and monster smackdowns. Instead, what this interconnected film series does is bring cosmic forces to bear on a world that man has done his very best to ruin in his pursuit of forbidden knowledge.
Kong: Skull Island opens with a shot of the blazing sun, a recurring motif in the film. In the film's commentary, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts states that this opening shot is done with the specific purpose of establishing
myth. As we stare at the fireball, a lone silhouette comes spiraling out of the blinding light, a WWII pilot plummeting toward earth—a nod to the myth of Icarus and another recurring motif. As the 1973 expedition formed by Bill Randa (John Goodman) plunges into a violent storm onboard helicopters in attempt to reach the unmapped "Skull Island," earth's very own final frontier, Lt. Col. Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson) reassures the passengers, "Remember the tale of Icarus, whose father gave him wax wings to fly. But he flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted, and he fell into the sea. But our wings are not made of wax, but of Pennsylvania steel, guaranteed not to melt!" Packard's words are hugely ironic, as he misses the
point of the Icarus tale: that man's hubris is his own undoing.
This is a lesson as old as time itself. The tree in Eden of which man was commanded not to eat was of the knowledge of good and evil. In the creation, man was made good, with the prerogative toward a good God and His value system. But the moment man sought to attain that which he considered to be "pleasing to the eye" and "desirable to make one wise," he reached beyond his grasp and stumbled over into sin. And, like echoes from Eden, this theme has resounded through the ages in our mythic storytelling. Man's greatest adversary has always been himself and his unwieldy, sin-ravaged spirit. In
Kong, Packard is convinced that the triumphs of technology and modernity have moved man beyond those old stories. He all but says, "We are not like Icarus, we are better." And the helicopters made of "Pennsylvania steel"
do indeed pass through the storm, and continue on to the uncharted island unscathed—right up until the moment a tree spears one of them from the sky.
And in a moment of horror intermingled with wonder, the proud humans look for the first time upon the awesome sight of Kong, a hulking mountain of a figure emblazoned against the light of the sun—the point being that Kong is a monster straight out of myth, a symbol of the great unknown that is bigger than both man and his machinations. And suddenly Packard is eating his words. That Pennsylvania steel might have gotten them through the storm, but it isn't much use against a monster that can—and
does—swat them from the sky like flies.
Interestingly, in an interview with the popular entertainment industry news source
Den of Geek, Vogt-Roberts was asked whether he saw movie monsters like Kong and Godzilla carrying on the tradition of the ancient Greek myths. He responded, "I think we live in a time in which people have lost myth in their lives because you can go on Google and google anything and find the answer to something. As opposed to wonder. As opposed to being okay with not knowing. I think that a big part of this movie for me was about confronting people with myth, reminding them myth exists and what happens when you are put in the presence of myth. What does it do to you?" What's important here is how he links myth with this notion of wonder.
In his brilliant piece, "When Our Souls Stand on Tiptoe," the late theologian Mike Yaconelli says: "I would like to suggest that what a pagan culture does first is steal the wonder and mystery from life. A pagan culture methodically takes away risk, danger, spontaneity, intuition, passion, chance, threat, and peril. We become the slaves of predictability, rules, policies, uniformity, and sameness." I can hardly think of a better description of the age in which we live. With the rise of modernity and the philosophy of the "self-made man," whose ultimate goal is something of a quiet life lived happily with his loving wife, two children, and a dog in the yard, all hemmed in by a white picket fence that separates them from the neighbor next door who lives more or less the exact same life, Christians have found subtle ways to erode the risks that come with living an authentic life of faith. We suddenly never have to talk to our neighbors about the gospel of Christ, because it becomes an inconvenience, a disruption to the routine that is so clearly the hallmark of the life well-lived. As our children grow, we tell them to put aside those old storybooks in favor of participation and conformity—because those old storybooks won't pay one's way through college, which is an absolute necessity if one hopes to have enough money to live a comfortable life devoid of suffering—a life which looks a lot like having a loving spouse, two or three kids, maybe a dog in the yard, all hemmed in by a white picket fence separating them from the neighbor next door...the cycle repeats itself.
If Yaconelli's diagnosis of the current cultural climate is accurate—and I believe it is—then stories like
Kong: Skull Island aren't just temporary distractions from the "grind of life." These stories are, in fact, doing the hard work of replanting that sense of wonder in a culture that is unashamedly pagan. Director Vogt-Roberts explicitly states that the purpose of
Kong: Skull Island is to confront a modern culture consumed by technological innovation with
myth all over again. And it was the great conviction of C. S. Lewis that the story of Christianity, the story of the God who comes to earth in the form of a man, dies and resurrects so as to assure those whose faith is found in Him that they, too, will be raised up at the end of all things, works on us in the
same way that those mythic stories do—with the key exception being that it
really happened. Imagine, for instance, if I were to tell you that
Kong: Skull Island is a story that
actually happened. That there
was a lonely, morose ape-like creature lording over a forgotten island discovered by an expedition in the 1970s. If you believed it, your paradigm would shift. Your world would come undone. Everything you thought you knew about reality and what was possible would be smashed to pieces, and you would be forced to re-contextualize everything you understood to have meaning in life.
This is the power that Christianity wields. And though we try our hardest to reduce wonder to the ones and zeroes of binary, every so often a story comes along that works in the same way those old stories of myths and legends used to. Stories that jumpstart the imagination, that spark a sense of wonder and rekindle the fire that leads us to search for worlds unknown. That catch us up in a sweeping story because, when we just get right down to it, we all intuit on some fundamental level that there
is something greater than what man can dream up out there just beyond the horizon, on the other side of the gray rain curtain that is the edge of our dimension, that secret place to which all of our longings point us.
Because, the truth is, there
is something strange and mysterious lingering out there in a dimension just a little higher than our own. And there
is something familiar about that strange and mysterious thing—familiar because it wears the face of a man, a man who has already been here. All our lives are lived in the wake of his first coming, and the seismic shift that occurred in the world when that man was put to death for bringing the power of that strange and mysterious dimension into our own. But the image of that dead man haunts us because the dead man is no longer dead. Because the dead man came back to life and, with a word of promise, returned to that strange and mysterious place to let the clock continue to run in our dimension, letting the hands turn so that you and I would be born, and in our own ways come to be haunted by this strange man of history.
Haunted by his word of promise: that things aren't always going to be this way, that the pain and suffering we experience in the here and now has a purpose—and that purpose points to why we
need him to come back. Why we
need that strange and mysterious dimension of reality to become one with our own—a dimension in which death itself begins to work backwards, a dimension in which
myth becomes
fact, where a sense of
wonder is
normative, where all of this is possible because that strange man is not merely a man, but a cosmic man, a God-man, whose final act is to pull all of reality together into himself to banish doubt, to judge evil, and to rescue those whose spirits rage against the predictability, the rules, the policies, the uniformity, and the sameness of a world in which Jesus Christ is nothing more than another myth to be scrubbed out by man's hubris.
This is the power of mythic storytelling at its finest. This is the power of
Kong: Skull Island. We watch this big ol' monkey smashing the little helicopters out of the sky knowing that what we're watching isn't
really about a monkey smashing helicopters. It's about man, who thought he could wipe out the world of myth. It's about the power of a cosmic, mythic being judging man's hubris. We watch these movies knowing that characters like Kong, like Godzilla, aren't
just oversized monkeys and lizards, but are actually
symbols. Symbols of something strange and mysterious. And the moral of their stories is that when the strange and mysterious comes breaking into our dimension of reality, everything we know is undone. The paradigm shifts. Our knees knock together at the thought of it.
And when we come to see that strange and mysterious thing looks more and more like the cosmic man upon whom the universe waits, we fall on our faces.
