Cooper turned to filmmaking in 1923, in collaboration with fellow Russo-Polish veteran Captain Ernest B. Schoedsack. Looking for “danger, adventure, and natural beauty,” they went to Turkey and filmed the annual migration of the Bakhtiari tribe to Persia (Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life); next, in Thailand, they filmed Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), about a resourceful Lao family who dig a pit outside their house to catch wild animals. All kinds of animals turn up in the pit: leopards, tigers, a white gibbon, and finally a mysterious creature called a chang, eventually revealed to be a baby elephant. Cooper claimed that, while filming Chang, he was able to predict the cast’s behavior based on phases of the moon. A passionate aeronaut, Cooper often looked to the sky for answers: among his papers I found a letter from the 1950s outlining his plan to colonize the solar system, in order to both stymie the Soviets and solve California’s impending crises of human and automobile overpopulation.
In 1931, the year Babel published “The Awakening,” Cooper devised the premise for King Kong: on a remote island, a documentary filmmaker and his team discover the “highest representative of prehistoric animal life.” The documentary filmmaker would be a composite of Cooper and Schoedsack: “Put us in it,” Cooper instructed the scriptwriters. “Give it the spirit of a real Cooper-Schoedsack expedition.” The team would bring the prehistoric monster to New York City to “confront our materialistic, mechanistic civilization.”
I borrowed King Kong from the library that week. Watching the gigantic ape hanging off the Empire State Building, swiping at the biplanes, I realized that Babel had painted an analogous scene in “Squadron Commander Trunov.” At the end of the story, Trunov stands on a hill with a machine gun to take on four bombers from the Kosciuszko Squadron—“machines from the air squadron of Major Fauntleroy, large, armored machines . . . The airplanes came flying over the station in tighter circles, rattled fussily high in the air, plunged, drew arcs . . .” Like King Kong, Trunov has no plane. Like King Kong, he goes down. From the DVD notes, I learned that the pilots in the close-up shots of the Empire State Building scene were none other than Schoedsack and Cooper themselves, acting on Cooper’s suggestion that “We should kill the sonofabitch ourselves.” In other words, King Kong and Commander Trunov were both shot down by members of the Kosciuszko Squadron.
The other fascinating detail of King Kong’s production is that the set for Skull Island was used at night to represent Ship-Trap Island in Cooper and Schoedsack’s The Most Dangerous Game, an adaptation of Richard Connell’s 1924 short story. The Most Dangerous Game finds the two stars of King Kong, Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray, again marooned on a tropical island, where they must again contend with a primitive monster: a mad Cossack cavalry general who hunts shipwrecked sailors for sport, attended by his mute sidekick, Ivan. (“A gigantic creature, solidly made and black bearded to the waist,” Ivan “once had the honor of serving as official knouter to the Great White Tsar.”)
I reported these findings to Grisha Freidin. “Well look, there he is! Squadron Commander Trunov!” he exclaimed, peering at the film still I had brought, showing King Kong and the navy planes. “The image must have been in the collective unconscious,” he mused. “You know what we should do? We should go back to Hoover and look at all the anti-Bolshevik posters. I am certain that we will find one representing Bolshevism as a giant ape.”
He telephoned the archive directly and asked them to run a search for ape and propaganda in the poster database. The eighteen-page printout was waiting for me when I got there. Unfortunately, it included not just the keyword ape but any word beginning with ape- in any language.
The actual apes, once isolated from items such as “Apertura a sinistra” and “25 lat Apelu Sztokholmskiego,” proved to be few in number. First was a German poster of an ape in a Prussian hat, grabbing a woman in one paw, and holding in the other a club labeled “Kultur.” I had no idea how to interpret this image, but decided it wasn’t related to Bolshevism. Next was a Hungarian poster whose central figure, described in the catalogue as an “ape man,” looked more like an extremely ugly human, covered in blood, which he was attempting to wash off in the Danube at the foot of the Parliament.
Just as I was starting to wonder how I would break the news to Freidin, I happened upon an Italian World War II poster: “La mostruosa minaccia torna a pesare sull’Europa.” The monstrous menace of Bolshevism was represented as a bright red, embarrassed-looking ape, standing on a map of Europe and brandishing a sickle and hammer. The artist, possibly concerned that the ape hadn’t come out menacing enough, had taken the precaution of representing a masked figure of Death standing behind its shoulder.
One ape on a map of Europe, the other on the Empire State Building. I took off the white gloves; my work here was done.
Or so I thought. First, my copy was sent back to me with a note: “Please call ASAP regarding portrayal of Cossacks as primitive monsters.” I tried to explain that I myself wasn’t calling the Cossacks primitive monsters—I was only suggesting that others had felt that way. The exhibit coordinator disagreed. Others, she said, didn’t consider Cossacks to be primitive monsters: “In fact, Cossacks have a rather romantic image.”
I debated citing the entry for Cossack in Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas—“Eats tallow candles”—but instead I simply observed the likelihood of any Cossacks actually attending the exhibit was very slim.
“Well, that’s really not the point. Anyway, you never know in California.”
A few days later, I began to receive phone calls about the “three-dimensional objects.” “Elif, glad I caught you! How would you feel if we put a fur hat in your Red Cavalry display case?”
I considered this. “What kind of fur hat?”
“Well, that’s the thing, I’m afraid it’s not quite authentic. Someone picked it up at a flea market in Moscow. But it looks, you know, like a Russian fur hat.”
“Thanks so much for asking me,” I said, “but I really think it should be up to Professor Freidin.”
“Oh,” she said. “Professor Freidin is not going to want that hat in the display case.”
“No,” I acknowledged.
The next day, the telephone rang again. “OK, Elif, tell me what you think: we’ll put, sort of lying along the bottom of your display case—a Cossack national costume.”
“A Cossack national costume?” I repeated.
“Well—well—OK, the problem is that it’s child’s size. It’s sort of a children’s Cossack costume. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. I mean, because it’s in a child’s size, it will definitely fit in the case, which might not happen with an adult-size costume.”