Poor Little Giant Monkey

I finally got around to watching King Kong last week, so this is a belated review. It only just occurred to me that I hadn’t talked about it.

It seemed to me that The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe and King Kong suffer from opposite problems. Narnia was too rushed at the expense of moving from action scene to the next, not giving much time to develop characters in the last half of the film, whereas Kong spent entirely too much time on both characterization and action sequences, and honestly could have had anywhere from 45 minutes to a full hour cut out without really doing the picture much harm.

I enjoyed the movie immensely. I thought it was incredibly fun, moving and watchable and I didn’t see anything particularly bad about any of the film’s content. However I did question how much of it was entirely necessary. I sort of got the feeling that Peter Jackson must’ve had the same dilemma most writers have when a novel is finished, that being you put so much into it and then it comes time for the painful pruning. But in this case, he just didn’t have the heart–and the studio didn’t have the desire–to cut any of his hard work out.

I can understand that impulse, although I don’t think it’s always a good idea to follow it. For the last novel I wrote, The Pale Summer I had to do a major hatchet job to get the thing to approach 100, 000 words, and I threw out a lot of stuff that I liked quite a bit, but I also knew the story would survive without it, no matter how much fun it would have been. Sure enough, once the deletions had been made, no one would’ve known they were in there at all, except me, and the story just moves along at a much faster pace.

It’s situations like this–and, far more notably, George Lucas–that really make me question whether having total creative control really IS such a good idea, to the point that when people are telling you something is extremely problematic, you can still ignore them and go on to create an ungainly, bloated thing… that has your fingreprints all over it.

I know it’s extremely hard to judge when you think something is essential to the story, and when it’s simply an emotional attachment to a piece of story you’ve crafted, but increasingly I’m coming more and more under the viewpoint that you really HAVE to have other viewpoints (obviously with sensibilities you respect) take a look at your work and honestly tell you what is working and what isn’t. It does no good to a storyteller to praise every single thing, and it does even less good to say something stinks with no explanation or possible solutions.

I guess it’s just that delicate question, “Can you make the distinction between your sense of story and your ego?”

I don’t think George Lucas can anymore. I think I’ll try really hard to maintain it. So far I’ve been pretty good with criticism–both good and bad–of my novels, and I’ve made changes when the reasoning seemed sincere and compelling. Of course there have also been times when I’ve ignored advice, but then you have to do that as well, I think. In the same way that you can’t ignore every criticism levelled at your work, you can’t incorporate every single suggestion or criticism either.