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April 28, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:28
215 King Kong Review Part 1
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Oh, my friends, I have been pillaged.
How are you?
I was reaching for my shoelaces and felt a direct jarring from behind.
Subtle. Yet still invasive.
I just got my check for my sales.
I sold a couple hundred K worth of stuff in March, so I just got my commission check for it.
So I just got my check, as I mentioned.
Sorry, I was interrupted by a phone call.
But I got my check, and I got, I guess, my pay plus my commission was $25,500.
And after paying off my federal tax, my Canada pension plan, my provincial sales tax, which is like your state sales tax if you're in the States...
And my contribution to employment insurance and so on, I am left with the princely sum of $13,600, which I think is 47% or 48% taxation.
Now, the wonderful thing is I get to take my $13,000 and change home And carve off another $4,500 of it for my property tax.
And then I'm going to go out for dinner with Christina tonight.
We will pay a massive tax on our wine, a massive tax on the gas to get there.
And we will also pay 15% on everything that we buy at the restaurant and a further 10% tax on alcohol.
So really, when you get right down to it, the amount of money that changes hand between me and the restaurateur is about 10 cents on the dollar.
The rest of it all is just taxation.
And of course there'll be a tip, but I don't mind the tip at all because that is for services rendered as opposed to the other stuff.
Which is really just a complete rape and pillage for the vanity and greed of politicians and bureaucrats.
And this is the money that they use to get the next generation into debt and to pay for the war.
We're now of course at war in Afghanistan because we believe in it so strongly and blah blah blah.
And so this is the kind of raping and pillaging that occurs up here in the Great White North.
So the next time someone tells you about how wonderful Canadian-style socialism and public health care is.
You just tell them that it really is just a ream.
And the reason that I'm sort of shocked at this is because I have never experienced this before.
I mean, of course, I pay taxes and hell, but...
I have never experienced this level of direct taxation because in my last company, where I worked for quite some time, of course, the company that I founded, I was a consultant.
And so I was paid, and then I had all the deductions of my car and my house that I used as a home office, and so I was able to get by on pretty much much less taxation.
But this salaried stuff where they just deducted its source, it's just a rape and pillage.
It really is. And so it's kind of shocking for me.
I think I felt my motivation just dip a little bit to work so hard to close these software deals because I'm really making, I guess, my nominal is 6% commission, which is not great, but, you know, I'm still negotiating that.
But after it, it's all said and done.
I'm getting about 3% commission.
And it's a lot of work.
It's some travel. It's, you know, pretty stressful at times.
And I just, you know, for another 3%, I could care less.
So, anyway, I'm just in the process of redesigning my own compensation package at the moment, so this has been fairly instructive, I guess you could say.
And this is why, you know, to continue the conversation we were having this morning before, I do absolutely will and get to my...
A movie review. Get the corrupt people out of your life.
Get the greedy and corrupt people out of your life.
Because when you look at your taxes, there are already so many people with their hands in your pockets who are completely corrupt anyway.
Why give away an ounce more of time than you have to, right?
So I'm working about sort of five hours out of eight.
I work five hours out of eight for the government.
And that's not even counting the national debt.
It's probably six or seven hours out of eight for the government.
And so, given that...
A good two-thirds to three-quarters of my productive day is slavery.
I'll be goddamned if I will spend one more hour than necessary around corrupt people who are pillaging either my ideas, self-esteem, integrity, virtue.
I already am pillaged enough during the day, as it stands, that I won't spend one extra minute being pillaged in my private life.
And that's why, from my standpoint, I think it's also important to get the corrupt people out of your life.
But enough of that. Let us go on a journey, my friends.
A journey to the vast unknown of Skull Island.
This is going to be half a movie review of half a movie.
I watched King Kong, the new version.
Last night and Christina, God bless her pure and beautiful soul, let me watch it.
I know she wasn't that keen on it, but she was okay to let me watch it.
The reason I wanted to watch it is that I like Peter Jackson and also because...
I'd heard that there was a cool fight between King Kong and some Tyrannosaurus Rexes, and I am still in touch enough with my childhood to think that that's kind of cool, and it was, and so I'm glad.
I mean, the movie's really slow, and it's a bit ponderous to begin with, and it's not very believable, and so on.
But I couldn't help but...
Every time I look at a movie or read a book, what it is is a dream.
And you can analyze these things as much and as consistently as you can analyze any other kind of dream.
Because it's a projected extrusion of fantasy and so it's exactly the same as what goes on every night in our dreams.
It's just a bit more formalized and there's more craft involved and there's more choices involved and so on.
But when great art works really well, then it really has the same kind of power as a dream that has us waking up, weeping with beauty or crying out in terror or whatever.
And so a great piece of art works that well, I think.
And the idea behind King Kong, I've never seen any other versions of King Kong, and I don't even know if it came from a book, I doubt it, but...
So this is sort of my first version, and I saw it up to the end of the fights between King Kong and the Tyrannosaurus Rexies, the two of them.
And so I thought that I would talk about some ideas that I had while I was watching the film that are fairly inescapable, and I guess I was having many ideas until the big fight scene, after which I was just going, ooh, ooh, how cool!
And... So this is my basic idea, that you can look at art this way.
This is sort of an example of how I might look at art, and I can talk about other things.
If you have a movie or whatever that you've always been curious about or has had an emotional impact for you, then just send it to me, and if I've seen it, I'll be happy to tell you what my thoughts are for what they're worth.
But this is sort of my thoughts about King Kong.
Now, I don't know the central character's name.
I'm just going to call him Jack, because his name is Jack Black, and Naomi is the screaming blonde.
And so let's just talk about Jack and Naomi, and And the King Kong.
Now, when the movie opens, and there may be some spoilers, but trust me, it's not spoiling that much, because the plot is pretty secondary.
But... When the movie starts, Jack Black is playing a complete narcissist insofar as he just wants to go and make this movie, wants to make his mark, wants to be a big shot, and is portrayed as being addicted to alcohol and addicted to stress and a liar and, you know, just somebody who manipulates others for his own gain with no sense of empathy towards those around him.
And this character is not that uncommon in movies, but I think Jack Black plays him quite well.
But somebody who is infantile in his needs, right?
Like an infant cries when, like, two o'clock in the morning, the infant's hungry, they just start screaming, right?
A, because they can't do anything differently, and B, because they haven't learned empathy yet.
And so this kind of narcissistic personality is an infantile personality structure.
It's someone who never grew beyond an infantile personality structure.
And so all they are aware of is their own needs, and other people are just means to satisfy their own desires, needs, wants, and preferences, and they can't conceive that other people might really have different viewpoints, or if they do, they're just irritating things to be batted away.
So that is the character of Jack in the movie, which shows up a little bit later in sort of my analysis of it.
And so he gets this woman who is the saddest woman around.
She's just a vaudeville actress being thrown out of work, and she's wandering the streets, and she steals something, and then he comes in and rescues her, and...
He then convinces her to come and to star in his movie because he thinks she's a great actress.
Well, of course not. No, she's a size four, which is what they need.
This is the size that they need the actress to be to fit into the costumes for the original actress who's now dropped out of the role.
So, he talks up about how she's perfect for the role.
She was born to do it. He's very convincing.
He's very passionate. And it has nothing to do with his evaluation of her in any way, shape, or form.
It's just that. She's the right shape, and she's got a sad face, and she's pretty, and this is right for the role, or whatever, right?
And so, he just manipulates her into coming along, and...
In the movie, there are all of these rules, regulations, and his accountant is saying, well, we don't have any foreign currency.
We don't have the permits. We don't have the visas.
We don't have... The ship's captain is saying, we don't have the manifest.
We can't leave. And so this guy is just...
He just makes promises, empty promises.
I'll double... I'll pay you $4,000 instead of $2,000.
The guy's like, well, you haven't paid me the first $2,000 yet.
So what the hell does that mean? But he just makes empty promises to move everyone along in his own particular fantasy, in his own particular need, the director of this Jackfellow.
He'll just say anything to anyone to get them to take one step further in his crazy need fantasy world of whatever it is that he wants to do.
Now, they end up...
So he blows through all these regulations and visas and so on.
And it's important to understand that from an anarcho-capitalist standpoint, it's like, yeah, great, he's a hero, but...
From the standpoint of most people, they consider visas and manifests and so on, I guess, a fairly good thing.
So he just blows past all rules.
All rules are just impositions and irritating and things to be blown aside with empty promises and, you know, this sort of showy, wild, crazy, aggressive self-assertion.
And then he tricks Adrian Brody, who's a writer who hands him a short script and then has to leave.
He tricks him into staying on board, so he gets trapped on the ship and ends up coming along with them.
And then he lies to this person, he lies to that person.
He just tricks everyone into following him.
So it's their own gullibility and their own inability to see this narcissistic personality structure.
They're all getting swept up in the storm of Jack's narcissism and Jack's needs, and everyone's complying and going along.
Now, as you go along through a narcissistic or sociopathic, I mean, he's not quite sociopathic, although he does seem to evince certain or display certain traits of the sociopathic personality disorder later on, but as you begin to go along with the narcissist, Then you see sort of a lot of initial charm and personal energy and you see confidence, right?
I mean, if all my investors say no to me, I don't sort of steal the boat and go anyway, right?
So it looks like mad, crazy confidence and there's this joviality and ha-ha, what an adventure kind of thing.
And so that's, I think, something that's quite important to understand, that when you first meet these people, they do appear quite confident.
And I know this because I worked with one in my last company.
They appear very confident, and to a certain degree, I found myself drawn into and admiring that level of confidence, because...
As somebody who was a tactical operator in the business, there's strategic and there's tactical.
Strategic is where are we going to be in five years.
Tactical is how we're going to deliver this project three months from now.
So strategic is big picture, whiteboard stuff, and tactical is project reports and so on.
And so because I was a tactical guy, I didn't have a lot of confidence because having a lot of confidence when you're a tactical guy is a bad thing.
If you're a project manager, you've got to have a pessimistic streak and you're a mile wide.
We can talk about this another time, but...
The people who are strategic and big picture and they talk big and this and that, they look like they have a lot of confidence.
And the same thing is true with this Jack Black fellow.
Part of you is saying, like, yeah, you know, I wish I could just do that.
Like, if people said to me no, I'd just go and do it anyway.
Like, wouldn't that be free?
And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, I mean, I certainly feel that way at times when I look at these people who seem to have no doubts and they just sail on and they just manipulate everyone to get what they want.
And so what happens?
Well, they're sailing on and they sail into this fog.
And this is sort of the metaphor.
And again, I don't know what works in the original book, but this is how it sort of struck me in the movie.
When you continue to deal on with these narcissistic people, you enter into a place where nothing seems real.
So, I remember that the guy I was working with started coming up with these, we'll use a factory up here by my cottage to produce the software product that we sell.
And, you know, it was all customized, so we were selling like, you know, 10 of them a year kind of thing.
And so it just never made any sense.
It wasn't shrink-wrapped anyway, and you just had all these ideas that never made any sense.
So you start to go into this sort of fog where it's like, am I missing something?
Something seems like there's some disconnect here that's pretty significant.
And then from that fog, if you keep sailing along with this person, then you will begin to doubt them.
And what happens in this movie is that the Jack Black character says, you know, we're gonna...
I don't want to go back.
I don't want to... His needs are being thwarted or frustrated.
And... Adrian Brody says, well, how else did you think this was going to end, right?
Does this kind of thing that there are consequences to your actions that...
And the reason that this is occurring is because he's wanted for...
There's a warrant out for his arrest for stealing the boat, and that's radioed to the captain, and the captain picks it up and says, that's it, we're going home, and...
The captain says to the Jack Black character, we're going home and it's over.
And then Jack Black says, but I've risked everything that I have.
And the captain says, no, you've risked everything that I have.
Which is an example of the narcissist, right?
He only thinks in terms of himself and his own consequences to his own.
He has no idea and can't fundamentally process that the captain is also...
He's risked everything on the captain's behalf because it's the captain's ship.
He's the one who sailed without a manifest and so on.
And, of course, the truth of the matter is the captain has a narcissistic streak as well, otherwise he wouldn't have been greedy for this empty money and so on.
So there's lots of indications back and forth, and if you watch the film or watch it again, you can see this stuff going on quite a bit.
I don't know if it's conscious or not in the writer's minds, but if so, if conscious, great, but then I'll sort of have to see the second half of the film to let you know if it pays off.
And so a consequence has caught up, and they're turning around.
But what happens is then they begin to, the bottom of the sea begins to rise towards them, and they're in this fog, and so as consequences begin to catch up with these narcissists, they put out this fog, right?
So in my business ventures in the past, or one of them, when I was working with a narcissist, as it all began to catch up with him, crazy overspending and vainglorious self-aggrandizing and advertisements that were more about him than about the product and all this and that, Then he began to put this fog out.
You know, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, there's this opportunity, that, we're going to do that, and it all became very sort of confusing.
So there's a fog, and you continue down the road of the narcissist, and as consequences begin to, sort of, repercussions begin to collect around the narcissist, they'll put out this fog.
And so they're sailing through this fog, and then...
They hit this wall, and it's an interestingly phrased.
It's called a wall, not just a crag or some cliffs or some whatever, right?
Some rocks sticking out of the ocean.
It's called a wall. And of course, walls, for those who know they're Pink Floyd, are psychological manifestations of defenses, right?
Whenever you see a wall, someone's got to get over.
If you watch a film called The Good Father, I think it is, with Anthony Hopkins, he builds a wall at the end because he's unable to connect to people and so on.
Walls are defenses.
I mean, it's all pretty... Pretty fundamental, right?
As the song goes, all in all you are just bricks in the wall.
Everyone I meet just builds my defenses because they're cold and unavailable and so on without, of course, recognizing that the guy pink himself is cold and unavailable.
So, of course, he says you're all just bricks in my wall, never saying, of course, I am just a brick in your wall, right?
Because that's the narcissistic problem.
It's a narcissistic personality problem.
Fundamental lack of reciprocity and empathy.
The basic issue.
So they then run into this wall.
And, of course, this is what happens when you continue on the journey with the narcissist, right?
You're sailing along.
Everyone sort of believes him, the lies, and so on, although they have evidence, right?
That means people are saying, what do you mean you're paying me another $2,000?
You haven't even paid me the first $2,000.
So they have evidence that the narcissist is lying and making things up, and yet they continue on anyway because of their own narcissistic tendencies, and they get caught up, and then the consequences begin to accrue, and then you get this fog, and then they keep going, and they hit this wall.
Now, the wall in the narcissistic personality disorder is something like self-hatred and shame and so on, right?
I mean, it is that it is all a lie, and if the fog doesn't work, then you run up against the wall, and the wall is destructive, inflexible.
There's no resistance to any kind of continual, any sort of truth that goes on.
So the narcissist I knew, not a week before the company really did sort of hit the wall, so to speak, we're out at lunch with my brother and I was saying, you know, the company, I don't know, finances, the company can't be making money, we've got too much expenses, I feel worried, I feel nervous, I feel concerned.
He's like, no, no, no, don't worry, there's no problems, I understand your concerns, blah, blah, blah, right?
It keeps putting out the fog.
It keeps telling me that I'm wrong.
And then you hit the wall and there was a lot of angry resistance.
A lot of, damn these guys who were holding me to account.
I mean, who are they to? I'm the founder.
I'm a co-founder. I'm a this.
I'm a that. Lots of really a blank kind of reactive resistance to the truth and to any kind of judgment.
A complete inability to handle criticism.
A complete inability to To handle any kind of correction or any kind of skepticism, right?
I mean, the narcissist is enraged by skepticism and sentimentality and other kinds of things, but they just can't handle any contradiction from anybody else.
And that's indicative of a false self.
The false self can't be corrected because the false self is nothing but a falsehood.
It's a lie, right?
So if you correct a lie, the lie ceases to be.
And if you correct the false self, the false self ceases to be.
And since it's a psychic energy which has taken on a life of its own, like a possession of a demon, then the false self resists any kind of correction because correction eliminates the false self.
It's survival for that psychic energy or that aspect of the personality.
And so they run up against this wall, and this causes the ship to ground itself, and they sort of can't get free, and so on.
And then Jack Black takes a bunch of the actors and the cameraman and so on, and he goes to the island.
Like, he wants to go to the island.
He's being driven on. And then there is a meaningful exchange between the magnificent black first mate guy and his sort of weedy, younger sidekick guy.
Who's reading, in a very subtle metaphor, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
And he says, well, why doesn't Marlow turn back in the river?
Like, why doesn't he just turn back?
And the magnificent squared-jawed black first mate says, because he must go on to face the demons or to face his demons or something like that.
And that's, of course, a pretty standard interpretation.
And what it says, of course, is that this is not a movie about these guys going into the jungle.
It is about a man driven onwards to confront his own demons, and he's driven on by his own demons and so on.
The term confront is sort of ambiguous to me at this point, so I haven't seen the end of the film.
I don't know what happens, but I'll sort of tell you how it goes along as it plugs along.
And then the young guy looks up and says, so it's not an adventure story, is it?
And the black man says, no, it's not an adventure story.
And this is a pretty important thing, right?
I mean, there's sort of saying in the movie, consciously or not, this is not a film about a bunch of guys going into a jungle.
This is a film about confronting demons or going into your own personality and so on.
So the people who...
The skipper who wants to turn back, he is not going onto the island.
He just wants to get his boat off the big wall, off the big rocks, and he wants to go and just get back, just leave.
He's not interested in exploring the island.
And that's because he's a guy who's finally realized that this Jack Black is a narcissistic liar and he just doesn't want to continue to follow him anymore.
He's giving up on everything. He's going to go back.
And face fines and jail time and the probable loss of his vessel.
But just to get back, he recognizes that if it continues on, he's likely going to die.
Because it's what happens when you keep going with a narcissist, right?
And so he stays on the boat, but Jack Black and a bunch of the actors...
It's a great line in the movie, actually, where they say, Actress, you take them all around the world, and all they end up looking at is a mirror.
Ha! And this is a narcissist too, right?
I mean, this is a metaphor for narcissism.
No matter where you go throughout the world, all you're doing is looking at yourself, right?
So when people talk about politics, and they're actually unconsciously talking about their families, and they've got the state standing in for their father, this is an example of a narcissistic, right?
You're looking at the world, and you're mistaking the world for yourself, right?
You're projecting yourself onto the world, and you think you're talking about the world, but you're not.
Actress, right? Actor being the false self, right?
You take an actor or you take the false self anywhere around the world, all it's doing is looking in a mirror.
It can't see reality because all it can do is project, right?
Project into the world and pretend that it's thinking about the world or observing the world when it's observing itself, right?
So a simple example of this is that you get, say...
I don't know, like a libertarian who's really aggressive and rude and so on, right?
And then they go out into the world, and they're aggressive and they're rude, and everyone's aggressive and rude back.
And he says, you know, can you see the world is populated with assholes?
And, you know, it is to some degree, but, you know, it may not be entirely that they're spontaneously coming out of the woodwork, but, you know, that it may be that an aggressive libertarian or a socialist or whatever...
It's actually creating these people through being aggressive.
That's an example of the false self.
You're mistaking the world for yourself.
You think that I'm just being assertive and honest and blunt, and then everyone just gets really aggressive at me.
And that's an example of mistaking the world for yourself.
So the actual aggression is in the person going out into the world, but all they do is think that the world is being aggressive back at them, and that's sort of an example of this kind of problem.
So... The Jack Black and the actors and the cameraman and so on, they go onto the island.
And there's lots of signs of warning.
I mean, this is the funny thing about these kinds of stories, right?
Warnings are everywhere, right?
It's not just the foreboding drums and horns of doom.
It's, you know, the human skeletons and skulls and, you know, people flayed alive, rotting in the reeds and so on.
And people sort of strung up in these bizarre semi-crucifixion style split sapling kind of arrangements.
And there's lots of signs that, you know, there's some fairly bad stuff going on.
And, you know, to push on and be blind to all these signs is interesting, right?
But, of course, the narcissist doesn't notice the signs.
The narcissistic part of the personality doesn't notice the signs, right?
I mean, in the same way that we can have terrible dreams for five years and never analyze them, we don't look at the signs, right?
We don't look at our own feelings, our own instincts, whether we feel good around our family, whether we feel bad around our family, whatever, right?
We don't notice the science.
We keep plowing on, right?
And in life, basically, things just keep getting worse and worse until you learn your lesson, and then they get better.
And if you don't learn your lesson, they'll just keep getting worse and keep getting worse.
Like, if you don't figure out that you're an alcoholic, Things will get worse and worse and worse.
And then finally, one day, when things are bad enough, well, you'll figure out that you're an alcoholic.
And life just keeps making the lessons harder until you learn them, right?
I mean, that's been my experience.
So they go onto this island, and they're sort of wandering around this scary tomb-like area.
And then you see this terrifying little girl.
And she's muddy or whatever.
I don't know what her pigmentation is.
But she's really scary.
And Jack Black, no sense of danger whatsoever, right?
Again, no capacity to recognize danger is the hallmark of the narcissist.
So what looks like confidence is not confidence.
It's just a complete inability to recognize danger because there's no empathy to surroundings whatsoever.
They don't have courage.
Because they don't feel fear.
The narcissistic personality does not feel fear.
They feel rage.
They can't feel any shame because they're entirely shame-based.
Whatever the false self is based on, it cannot feel.
If you were shamed into creating a false self, like if you were just shamed for being who you were, and you create a false self to pretend that you're something other, you will never be able to experience shame.
So, obviously, this Jack Black character as a child was terrified and bullied and brutalized.
So, the false self is now built on, I don't feel fear.
I completely have cut off my access to fear, which is not healthy.
You really do want to be able to feel fear in your life.
And so... He goes up to this kid and says, you know, have some chocolate.
I mean, this is completely inappropriate, right?
He's got chocolate in a wrapper.
I mean, the kid is not going to know anything to do with chocolate whatsoever.
Because, I mean, this is some savage kid who's, you know, raised on an island, doesn't have any idea what he's supposed to eat it.
And he's talking to this kid and getting irritated, right?
So this is his relationship to children.
That he just tries to bribe them as he tries to bribe everybody else.
And he doesn't recognize that the kid can't speak English, so he just snaps and gets irritated at the kid.
And he tries to hand the chocolate to the kid without recognizing that the kid's going to have no clue.
And actually he gets aggressive with the kid.
So again, no sense of danger, no sense of the other, no sense of empathy, no sense of what it's like to be the other person's shoes.
So he basically tries to stuff the chocolate into the kids' hands, and this provokes an attack.
I mean, they see some old people, and they're like, oh, don't worry, it's only old people and women and so on.
Without, of course, recognizing that when you have old people and women, there's probably going to be some men around and so on.
Again, no sense of danger, no sense of the ability to connect cause and effect.
And so he's dismissive, he's contemptuous, he's aggressive with the kid, and then one of his crew gets a spear through him, right?
And then they basically start, these howling men come out attacking this, that, and the other, right?
And... So, this is a scene of horrendous violence and so on, and I found that a little tough to take, but I was relatively okay with it.
At least they didn't go total graphic.
And this is sort of the result, right?
So, if you keep going with a narcissist, then you hit the wall.
If you go through the wall...
Then you see all these danger signs, but there's like an eerie calm around the personality, right?
If you've ever been in an abusive relationship, this may ring true to you as well, right?
So if you disagree with the person, you'll hit a lot of resistance.
If you keep going, there'll be this weird, dangerous, sort of blank-eyed, eerie calm.
Although, I mean, that itself has lots of warning signs.
And then you'll see a vulnerable aspect of that narcissist's personality, right?
This is the child, right?
And then if you treat that child at all roughly, then you get a savage counterattack, right?
Because the false self is based on the shame or the horror of what you experienced in childhood, what the narcissist experiences in childhood.
And so when you break through the narcissist's defenses, you go over the wall, you go into the beach, you go through the outskirts of the personality, you will then come across a child.
And then if you treat that child roughly, you bribe them, you snap at them, you try and force them to eat candy that they don't understand...
Then you get all of the howling demons of the narcissist's rage, and it's kind of like a bait-and-switch.
We can go into that another time.
There's almost no way to get around this unless you're a really skilled therapist.
But you will get all of the counterattacks, all of the howling destruction, whether it's emotionally abusive, verbally abusive...
Physically abusive or complete withdrawal or whatever punishment is in the offing, you will get a hysterical level of rage.
And that doesn't mean screaming at you.
That can just mean absolute cold shutdown of the personality.
But if you do that, if you catch a vulnerable aspect of the narcissistic personality and then treat that without incredible kid gloves, so to speak, then you will get this narcissistic rage coming back, right?
And then what happens is the woman is snatched, right?
The woman is snatched.
Now, this is important.
And, you know, I mean, I know that I'm going out on limbs all over the place here, but, you know, just bear with me.
I think it'll work out for the best.
But the woman is stolen, right?
So the narcissistic personality, of course, this occurs generally very early on, right?
There's no connection with the primary caregiver.
Let's just call the mother. It's 95% of the time.
That's what it is. There's no emotional connection with the primary caregiver who's cold and withdrawal and punitive and whatever, right?
And so you don't develop empathy because you learn empathy through connection with your maternal figure and so on.
And so you don't develop empathy.
And so as these narcissistic personality defenses are broached, a great hunger for the feminine arises.
I mean, we're talking about a male here.
I have no idea to what degree it works with the feminine.
I sort of have to ask Christina about that.
Not because she's narcissistic, but just because she's an expert on the subject and I'm just an amateur of sorts.
And so there's a great hunger for the feminine.
So these savages steal the woman, right?
She's the mother, right? They need the mother.
They want the mother. And then what they do is they hand the mother over.
To King Kong. Now, King Kong, oh so obviously, is an infant, right?
This is the infant aspect of the personality.
Incredibly strong, incredibly brave in a way, right?
But this also comes from a kind of narcissism.
Incredibly loyal, and we'll sort of get into that in a second, but basically the savages take the woman, they steal the woman and hand her over to King Kong.
And... King Kong takes the woman and carries her off and doesn't kill her.
It hangs onto her.
And... She then tries to get away, and he sort of catches her, and he's really angry.
He's really angry, and terrifyingly so, right?
I mean, this is the infant, right?
I mean, this is the infant within the personality, right?
Within the personality, the infant personality is lord of the ecosystem, right?
In very early childhood.
And so, he's the big ape who rules the island, right?
And... So the villagers, the savages, give the mother figure to the infant, and then she's frightened of him.
The reason that you end up with narcissistic personalities is that mothers are terrified of infants, and therefore, because they're immature, the mothers themselves, they're terrified of the needs of the infant, the authentic, genuine spirit of the infant, because they're nothing but false self themselves.
And so they withdraw and they view also the uncomfortable feelings that the infant produces in them to be kind of like rage.
And because they're infants themselves, or worse than infants, they respond with rage and coldness and manipulation and anger and so on.
And you can talk to mothers about this when they're very young.
I mean, they're not always filled with this glowing, soupy love for their infants.
And quite often it's quite the opposite.
And so the savages hand over the mother to the infant.
And then the infant takes the mother.
And this is sort of what mothers feel when they have a baby, right?
That they're carried off by their infants because their entire schedules are dominated and dictated to by their infants.
So they feel like they're carried off by their infants in the way that King Kong carries off this Naomi Watts character.
So they're totally at the mercy.
And so what they want to do is get away from their children.
I'm talking about the narcissistic parents here, right?
So they want to get away from their babies.
And so they ignore them.
They're punishing. They're punitive.
They're contemptuous. They're unavailable.
They're whatever, right? They don't bond with the children.
They don't interact with the infants and so on.
And the infant experiences this, this manipulation, and it causes great rage and frustration in the infant, which is what you see with King Kong.
So when the Naomi Watts character tries to get away from King Kong during a break, right?
So, I mean, the mother wants to run out of the house when the baby's sleeping, or something like that.
It's to be free, free of the baby, the baby's endless needs and requirements and demands.
And I'm talking a lot about all mothers.
It's narcissistic, and it can be fathers too, right?
So... I think that when you see the scene where the mother figures try to get away from the infant King Kong figure, then the infant becomes incredibly enraged.
Right? And then I think it's quite a wonderful scene where the mother figure then plays with the infant.
And it's quite touching and quite moving and so on.
And what happens then is she's sort of joking with him, she's doing her vaudeville pratfalls and trips and so on, and he enjoys this, right?
He actually has a connection, the infant has a connection with the mother figure.
So he's enjoying this, he's laughing and so on, and he's rough, right?
Babies are rough in that way, in this particular sense.
There's their own strength and so on.
They don't understand. They're just learning empathy, right?
So she's obviously pretending to have fun falling over, so then he tries to knock her over and so on.
And she lets that happen a few times, and then she stands up and she says, no, that's enough.
No more. And you see this wonderful thing, right?
So when you have a narcissistic personality, and this is a good therapist, right?
A good therapist will interact with the brutalized and lonely infant in the narcissistic personality structure, and will sort of play, and then the narcissistic person, like the infant, because it's untrained and unschooled in empathy, will then become too aggressive, and the therapist has to say, has to set boundaries, right?
Has to set boundaries. This is what good mothers do at the beginning of an infant's life, and this is what bad mothers don't, and good therapists, very good therapists, have to do it later.
So she says no.
That's enough. So she sets a limit.
And there's a great scene.
Like all narcissistic personality structures, when limits are placed on them, they get enraged.
And so he gets enraged and he hurls and throws things around and so on.
And then one of the rocks that he throws up on the cliff sort of lands on his head, right?
So he gets some sort of interesting moment here.
And again, I'm not saying all this is conscious on the part of the screenwriters, but I think it's very interesting to look at, right?
So he's raging. He's throwing all these rocks around because...
but he's not harming...
The woman, right? This is how you know it's an infant-maternal bond that's being worked out in the movie.
So he's not harming the woman, because this is the infant can't harm the mother, right?
I mean, she's the source of life, right?
So he'll get angry, he's having a tantrum, he's throwing things around.
He throws a rock up a cliff, and then that rock rolls down and hits him on the head and kind of dazes him, right?
Which is the very first beginning of reciprocity, right?
So I get angry, and I throw things, and then, bonk, it hits me back, and that's painful, right?
So anger causes pain.
This is an example of the beginning of the growth of something like empathy.
And so then he wanders off.
Again, quite fascinating.
He doesn't return to play with her.
He just wanders off.
And the Naomi Watts character is kind of relieved.
Okay, I survived that.
I played with him. I set limits.
I let him have his rage.
And now he's wandering off, right?
Because he's had some kind of security, right?
He has had interaction.
He's had limits set. He's got intimacy.
And he's developed a little bit.
So the baby has security, right?
Like if you want to get free of your baby, you interact with them and you give them security.
And then they're not clingy, right?
That's... That's one of the basics.
The more you invest in your children when you're young...
Sorry, when they're young, the more you're going to be free of them, in a sense.
So they'll be free of you and free to grow and develop and so on as they get older, right?
It's sort of been proven that children who bond well with their parents have more comfort roaming around than children who don't, who are sort of desperate and clingy and don't want to leave the parent's side.
So it's one of these vicious circles, right?
If you're not intimate with your kid because you don't like being intimate with your kid, because you don't like the clinginess, then you'll just get more of it, right?
As I say, life makes lessons harder until you learn them and change your behavior.
So then, in a pretty remarkable display, I think, the woman is then going through the jungle and so on, and you get these just amazingly.
Compared to something like Jurassic Park from, I guess, five or six years ago, or maybe seven or eight, who knows?
I'm going to be 40 this year.
I don't have to differentiate anything by time that wasn't within the last two weeks anymore.
But then the Naomi Watts character is going, not exactly trying to get away from King Kong because he's already left her, but she's trying to make it to, I guess, the boat or the sea or something, other people.
And then she is attacked by the Tyrannosaurus Rek'Sai-ish, two of them.
Three, I think, at one point.
And here you see the effects of her interacting with King Kong, playing with King Kong, setting limits, standing with him...
When he has his temper tantrum, right?
Because the baby has to learn that the temper tantrum doesn't get the desired effect.
This is called reparenting in therapeutic terms, right?
You're trying to reparent the original infant within the personality structure.
And so by standing in the face of his rage, she doesn't rage back.
She doesn't scream at him to stop throwing stuff around.
She just stands there and looks at him.
So she accepts the fact that he's angry.
She doesn't react to it.
He's obviously in a pre-verbal stage, so she can't say to him, gee, what's making you angry, right?
I mean, this is why... You know it's an infant, right?
And so he's had a calming effect on his personality, but now there's been a bond.
Now a bond has been created.
So this infant personality has now had...
He's got the mother.
The mother has tried to get away.
He has expressed his rage at the mother trying to get away.
And then he bellows his rage at her.
And instead of bellowing rage back at him or fainting or throwing herself off the cliff, she plays with him.
And then he tries to play back with her, and she accepts it for a little bit, and then she says, no, that's enough.
Stop. And he has his temper tantrum, and she accepts that, and he learns that he gets pain for himself from his temper tantrum, so he gets some sense of empathy and connection that there's a self and there's an other.
That's the most important thing to teach babies.
There's you and there's me.
We both have needs. You're the primacy because you're the baby.
You're pre-verbal, so you get deferred to in a lot of ways, but there is a me and there is a you.
And you can get angry at me, and that's fine.
I'm not going to rage back, and you can whatever, be frustrated, and so on.
But I am going to have to set limits, and I will play with you, but if you're too rough, I'll have to not play with you, and so on.
This is the back and forth that teaches an infant personality structure empathy.
It's all pretty important, and it's all very healthy, and it's all very good.
And so what happens then is that when the mother is in danger...
The seemingly indifferent personality structure, like the infant King Kong, then absolutely puts his life desperately on the line to save the mother figure from whatever assault, right?
So this could be the fantasy of the infant if the father's abusing the mother, who knows, right?
The young toddler or whatever.
But this is an important thing to understand from a sort of psychoeducational development standpoint that loyalty towards the maternal arises out of intimacy and interaction with the maternal, right?
So empathy breeds loyalty.
So when somebody plays with you and they're enjoying your company and then they set limits, it means that they actually respect you and think that you can take it and they're not frightened of your rages and so on.
And it does take an enormous amount of courage with a baby who's raging and with King Kong in particular, who's a rather large and aggressive baby to stand there and to be empathetic towards that, right?
And this also, I think, has something to do with what is mentioned about the Naomi Watts character, that she is the saddest woman that Jack Black has ever seen, right?
Which is partly projection because she doesn't have a false self in the way that Jack Black does.
and And so she can feel her own sadness.
She's also a comedian who's very sad, so she obviously gets both aspects of the psychological journey or reality, which is that laughter and sadness and so on.
So she has a much more developed personality than Jack Black's character.
And so she's able to do creative things like play with the ape and so on.
And... While all of this is going on, and I just got to the end of the fight with the Tyrannosaurus Rexes, and so I just got that the ape had bonded with the woman, like the infant had bonded with the mother, and that's a step forward, right?
This is what gets the infant out of the savagery of this brutal island and towards something like civilization, right?
The taming of the id, if you want to put it in Freudian terms.
And so... What happens then is that Jack Black, his character, is completely, absolutely and totally blind to the danger that's going on and shows still an enormous amount of lack of empathy towards everyone around him, right?
So people get killed and he keeps saying, you know, well, we're going to not let him die, not let his death be in vain.
We're going to finish the movie for this guy who just got trampled by the Brontosaurus or whatever.
We're going to finish the movie for him and we're going to take all the profits from the movie and donate it to his wife and children and so on, right?
And he says the same thing twice, and I'm sure he says it again before the end of the movie.
But this is an example.
He still feels no danger, no empathy.
Whatever terrible things happens that he has caused still end up serving his ends, right?
So he dragged everyone on this island.
He lied to get everyone on the island.
People get killed. And he's like, great, now that they're dead, we have to keep going with my project, right?
So this, again, this is the narcissistic entitlement, right?
Whatever happens, good or bad, my project, I'm going to manipulate you, and I understand emotions and feelings enough to the point where I am going to manipulate you, but basically, no matter what happens, my agenda is going to get served, right?
So this is, I don't know particularly yet, because I haven't seen the end of the film...
Whether the King Kong slash infant represents Jack Black's personality structure or not.
And we'll find out as we go on to the rest of the film.
But I hope that you enjoy this.
I think that this is the level...
I mean, you could go for hours on any of this sort of stuff.
But I think it's important when you look at artistic experiences in movies or books or whatever, have a look at them like their dreams and what they're saying about it and why have certain stories resonated like this, like the third time or fourth time that King Kong's been remade.
Why is it that this resonates with people and why is that image of, I guess it was originally Fay Wray in the hands of the poor of the...
Why does that image resonate so much?
Well, because from the infant's personality, the infant is the sight of the ape relative to the mother, right?
The infant perceives themselves as being much larger and more primitive than the mother, and so I think it's just an image that works psychologically because it's got a real kind of accuracy to it.
And so I'd really invite you to, within your own life and within your own dreams and with your own experience of artistic expressions, to look for this kind of stuff.
I think it's very interesting, well worth examining, because you can get a lot of self-knowledge and personal growth out of it.
And I also would appreciate you coming by freedomainradio.com, click on the donate button, throw a couple of bucks my way, and you will get fine, overblown and deeply detailed reviews of just about anything that you can think of.
If I've seen it or read it, I'd be more than happy to do it.
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