Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong

Abstract

This chapter argues that the American corporation in the 1920s and 1930s was undergoing an “ontological” crisis, negotiating its ambivalent identity as both a nebulous legal fiction and an expanding, ever more concrete force in American life. Artifacts of corporate power and self-representation from the period, such as skyscrapers and radio towers, risked exposing corporate influence as a physical embodiment of exploitative business practice and therefore subject to the counterthrusts of labor activism, antitrust legislation, and public criticism. McGurl interprets the 1933 film King Kong as an “elliptical” allegory of such corporate self-representation, a text that fruitfully displays the ambivalent aims of business to promote a “corporate theology” through large-scale, visible iconography but simultaneously maintain an invisible, semi-mystical status.

The gist of it is, I take it, behind every form we see there is a vital something or other which we do not see, yet which makes itself visible to us in that very form. In other words, in a state of nature the form exists because of the function, and this something behind the form is neither more nor less than a manifestation of what you call the infinite creative spirit, and what I call God.

—Louis Sullivan , Kindergarten Chats

And so . . . the legend of the black scapeape we cast down like Lucifer from the tallest erection in the world has come, in the fullness of time, to generate its own children.

—Thomas Pynchon , Gravity’s Rainbow

Note from the editors: This essay was first published in Critical Inquiry in 1996. Professor McGurl has added a brief postscript commenting on the development of scale studies since the original publication.