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“Translator, traitor” goes the Italian epigram. Naive psychoanalytic criticism often betrays the subtle purposes of art by asserting that a simplistic “translation” of latent psychological themes will explain a work's impact—ignoring the skillful manipulations of medium, the formal devices, that surely recommend Hamlet's Oedipal drama over Superman's.
The artist as armchair analyst analogously betrays his purposes when, armed with a trendy smattering of analytic knowledge, he insists upon making latent dynamics blatant. It was, after all, Freud who observed1 that art is likely to pleasure us most when it most intricately conceals motifs that work potently on us outside of awareness.
Recently, a dismal madness to interpret has afflicted the producers of a number of remakes of vintage horror and fantasy films. By ingenuously seeking to enlighten the viewer about the psychological subtext of the original, the new versions curiously succeed in obviating the eery tension that made weird classics classic. One is, in effect, being told that one has nothing to fear, since what really is going on is—fill in the Freudian blanks.
Dino DiLaurentis' staggeringly awful rehash of King Kong provides an encyclopedia of the pitfalls attendant upon rendering implicit themes too accessible at the movies. I've elsewhere suggested2 that there is much of the moonstruck, pubescent male in Kong, as he flails about, struggling to master his burgeoning sexuality and aggression in a bewildering world he never made, yearning for possession of an Oedipal love object who views him with unconcealed repulsion. The original version skillfully cloaked these propositions: Kong was always a monster picture, never a love story. (However, some of the “out-takes,” showing Kong plucking off Fay Wray's clothes with adolescent curiosity and then sniffing his fingers, indicate something more manifest in the film's original design.) The giant ape was chiefly conceived as a harbinger of unremitting terror, so that