Black and Beauty and the Beast.
Paul O’Kane August 2003
“Only as an aesthetic phenomenon can the world be justified.” Nietzsche.
It would not be controversial today to assert, not that ‘Black is Beautiful’ but that ‘Beautiful is Black’. The recent ‘Beckham affair’ confirms this. A cultural revolution, motivated by an inseparable blend of moral / aesthetic forces, has progressed stealthily through the post-WW2 period, to approximate - after many highs and lows- a near reversal of dominant Western cultural aspirations. It is as if the flash of the ‘A’ Bomb and the unfathomable hangover of the holocaust set in play an irrevocable overturning of every polar orientation by which Western culture was conceived and implemented. Now, light-skinned men and women bronze on Mediterranean beaches performing in their millions a sacrificial display of admiration for the beauty of a darker hide, while amidst a downshifting milieu the cutting edge of upper middle-class England, embarrassed by its exposed privilege, dons mockney accents and acquires working-class interests.
Blackness has been associated with cool for as long as anyone interested in reading this might remember, but cool and justice are worlds apart. Post-WW2’s progress may have witnessed ‘X’ and King, Afro’s and Africisms, Funk, Soul, Reggae and Hip-Hop along with excellence in Black sporting achievement and a gradually winning war against mis- and under-representation in media, but such pluses are weighed in balance against damming statistics like those regarding imprisonment and police treatment. According to a recent BBC Radio 4 essay concerning the privatisation of American and British prisons, 1 in 4 young Black Americans can expect to spend time in (a profit-making) jail compared with 1 in 23 of their white counterparts. So, the desire to acquire and admire blackness remains at a superficial level, unwilling to confront present (nor historical) realities shut away beneath a desirable surface.
It’s the 70th anniversary of the 1933 movie classic ‘King-Kong’ and, having viewed a special screening its narratives wind their way into these thoughts on blackness and beauty. The film tries hard to push through a hammy agenda whereby beauty proves fatal to all that is beastly. Beauty of course, takes the particular form of Fay Wray, the white American, “golden woman”, while beastliness is portrayed as variously: foreign, black, animal, primitive, prehistoric etc. The compound layers of sexual and racial paranoia displayed here now barely amuse sophisticated, ‘media-studied’ audiences and could scarcely stir the pens of tired psycho-semioticians, nevertheless this ‘classic’ does serve as a monument to the very 20th Century discovery that nations, like all 20th century personae, have a subconscious.
The subconscious of the US has been extraordinarily productive and Hollywood is the visible product of its disturbed and overpopulated sleep. Kong, along with the obscure race from who’s island he is removed, represents white, male America’s terror, both of fantasticised black virility and of a potentially vengeful black power, stomping around behind its walled-off history, threatening to rise-up on the legs of a moral mandate and surmount, not just the city, but the ‘homeland’.
Post September 11th, King Kong’s climax -with droning planes attacking the beast atop the (then) world’s tallest building- pre-plays the same ingredients that branded themselves on our memory on that infamous autumn day, though shuffled in the way that everyday events become within the tumbola of a dream. On September 11th, Republican America’s monstrous Other piloted the planes, bringing down US Capital’s most celebrated buildings along with their inhabitants. In the movie, the paranoia of the 1930s plays out a wishful denouement in which the damsel -and by implication the nation, the city and monocultural white pride- is rescued with the help of new technology able to clearly identify the enemy as an unmissable target.
With the beast dead, and the ‘golden woman’ rescued, the hammy lead rams home the film’s kitsch motto in a barely speakable line “It was not the aeroplanes that killed the beast, it was beauty killed the Beast”. Thus a moral/aesthetic agenda is clumsily tacked-on to the preceding farce of phallo-xeno-phobia in a vain attempt at justification.
We might extract from the foregoing that September 11th -an apotheosis not only of horror and terror but also of spectacle- marks a turning point in the fortunes of two Kong-like beasts who’s language we barely speak and who’s unharnessed power we also fear - i.e. global capitalism and US foreign policy.
But we can also now return to our opening assertion armed with various possibilities. One, is that the cool or beauty awarded to blackness by white culture appears as a compensatory response for a formerly imposed beastliness. Such a gift may appear to arm black culture with the ability to throw-off its own oppressive beast but all this cool and beauty looks suspiciously like a superficial salve offering only a further commodification of blackness and proffered in place of justice. Neverheless, it may yet provide a lever with which to begin lifting the lid off all that a spectacular society hides behind the ‘MTV Base’-style image of a sexy, ‘Bling’, black.
As in the 30’s movie, beauty is certainly capable of bringing about the downfall of beasts, but it is the responsibility of artists first -and politicians second- to vigilantly identify and modify what best serves as beauty and what as beast. Thus, in spectacular society, art is certainly politicised, but the responsibility for beauty correspondingly becomes a more urgent and charged agenda.
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