Spring 1996
Volume 22, Number 3

I will suggest, in what follows, that we step into the gap between truth and legend and read King Kong as a confessional text, an entry of sorts in the spiritual diary of the corporation. If this seems odd at first glance it is only, it will turn out, a way to take hold of the particular strand I would like to follow through a much larger and more familiar tapestry, that of corporate self-representation. In the twenties and thirties the task of "business expression"--in the terse phrase of a Westinghouse executive--was experienced by corporate authorities not merely as an opportunity but as an ontological necessity. Self-representation was a way for the corporation to lay visible claim to a privileged, indeed dominating, place on the landscape of American market culture, to be sure, but it was also, I will argue, a way to quell the corporation's anxieties about its odd identic status as a legal fiction. The "fictionality" of corporate identity has been a theme since the late nineteenth century for critics of the corporation, suspicious of this entity vested with the privileges of personhood but not its responsibilities. But what has been less widely noted is that a declared corporate identity is a potential source of anxiety for the corporation itself. From this perspective self-representation may be, among other things, a way for the abstract body of business, corporeal but invisible, to convince itself of the "reality" and sturdiness of its own existence. On the other hand, perhaps predictably, the self-representation of the corporation produces its own anxiety, complementary to that attaching to invisibility: the anxiety of embodiment. In other words, to the extent that critics of the corporation were right, to understand the invisibility of the corporation as a pervasive and disturbing form of power, the ontological certainty vouchsafed by self-representation may seem, for the corporation itself, to carry its own heavy price. To be visible is, after all, to be, for example, a glaring target: of public criticism, or federal antitrust legislation, or the actions of organized labor. Embodiment may carry with it a risk of admission; the bases of the corporation's existence may be merely material in nature, comprised less by abstract, spiritual entities than by, for instance, the bodies of the laborers it absorbs. Hence the mode of self-envisioning deployed in some of the corporate artifacts I will discuss is what we might call an elliptical one, a visibility that expresses the aspiration to disappear all over again.

The imperative of corporate self-representation, operating between the equally dangerous poles of pure spirit and pure matter, spills over in documents like King Kong as a sort of spectacular confessional excess. With the application of sufficient interpretive pressure the "truth" revealed at the base of the corporate "legend" will be something other than what was intended for public consumption. The elaborate investments in public relations and advertising by corporations of the twenties and thirties occasioned the thorough intertwining of selling things and selling corporate self-image, but these activities were only the humblest forms of the imperative to self-representation. Witness those fantastic, phallomaniacal monuments to corporate identity, the skyscrapers, soon to emerge from the morning mist before Ferriss's "imaginative spectator." Witness, too, aloft the tallest building in the world, the unruly symbolic employee, the enormous African social climber, King Kong. The corporation's most colossal self-assertions, though they are declarations of a truly titanic power, might as well be taken, at the same time, as opportunities for an appropriate, analytical ridicule.

A shorter version of this essay was delivered in April 1995 at a conference titled "The Hollywood Studio as Auteur," sponsered by the Film and Media Studies Program and the English department of Johns Hopkins University. The author would like to thank the several individuals who offered useful commentary on that version, including Matthew Berk, J. D. Connor, Mark Miller, and Dan McGee, and would especially like to thank Jerome Christensen, whose commentary and advice has been indispensable at every step, and Michael Fried, who offered incisive criticism of the essay's penultimate version.