There is perhaps no better realisation of cinema’s capacity for pure spectacle than Godzilla Vs Kong. Not to be mistaken with 1962’s King Kong Vs Godzilla (nor 1963’s re-edited Hollywood re-release), this year’s reimagined exhibition match between cinema’s greatest titans could only take place in today’s context of digital photography and CGI animation.
In 1962’s King Kong Vs Godzilla, the titular behemoths were played by men in rubber suits wrecking playground scaled suburbs in the process. The crudeness of this effect may just be responsible for the now commonplace monster movie trope of hiding the monster from the audience for much of the film’s runtime and building up to a climactic but brief reveal of the beast. But since the digital revolution film underwent in the 90s—ushered in by blockbusters like Jurassic Park—filmmakers have long had the tools and the incentive to get audiences closer to the monsters which lend their names to these movies.
Ever more impressive technological advancements in film have paved the way for a budding cinematic trend. Speechless girls have been used as emotional conduits for reserved leading “men” quite frequently in recent years. Godzilla Vs Kong, War For The Planet Of The Apes, and News Of The World all use this speechless girl trope to remarkably similar effect, but why exactly?
The most obvious answer is that it imbues the film’s intimidating leads with a softer side. Kong, despite getting second billing, is clearly the protagonist of Godzilla Vs Kong, with the film’s opening grounding the story in Kong’s loneliness and desire to return home. The film opens with Kong starting his daily routine with a waterfall shower scored to Bobby Vinton’s “Over the mountain, across the sea”—a song choice that speaks to Kong’s yearning to return home. But it is when we’re introduced to Jia (Kaylee Hottle), a young Deaf girl and the last of the fictional Iwi tribe who worships Kong like a god, that we truly get a sense of Kong’s feelings.
Following Kong’s jungle shower, Jia presents him with a doll she has made in his likeness, and at this point, the film firmly puts us in Jia’s perspective as the camera pans into her ear and the sound completely drops out. Kong’s face fills the frame as he seems to be remembering his home. He quickly acts on this impulse, and hurls a tree at the wall of his biome, smashing the projection and revealing his jungle home to be an illusion.
Outbursts such as these are channeled through Jia’s perspective at various points in the film. We see Kong from her childlike height and limited sound, and through this lens, all his thrashing and stomping become less intimidating. We quickly begin to see Kong’s posturing for what it really is: mere tantrums.
Kong has always been able to express some emotion—it’s how we know “it was beauty killed the beast”—but what sets this latest iteration of the eighth wonder of the world apart from his predecessors is his ability to communicate with Jia through sign language. In the film’s second act, Kong finds himself unwillingly strapped to a cargo ship en route to Hollow Earth. As he thrashes around in his chains, Jia approaches him and holds out her index finger which Kong quickly meets with his own. The resulting shot evokes the famous Michelangelo painting The Creation Of Adam and signifies the relationship between Jia and Kong, as like that between Adam and God respectively. But it would be more appropriate to view Jia in place of God in this scene, with her compassion imbuing the CGI Kong with life.
Despite the heavy lifting Jia does to establish Kong’s character arc, she is not shown the same courtesy. When speechless girls feature in these films, their characters are left cruelly unexplored. Like the manic pixie dream girls that came before them, their only screen role seems to be to effect change in the leading man. It’s far from a coincidence that all three of these characters carry around dolls—a rather uninspired motif highlighting them as passive innocents.
It’s features like this that help link the speechless girl trope with transgressive ideas of primitivism, as is the case in War For The Planet Of The Apes. In that film, Nova (Amiah Miller) is a victim of the Simian Flu: the virus which makes apes smarter while damaging human cognitive functions. The most striking effect of the Simian Flu is that humans lose the ability of speech, which humans regard as ushering in a return to primitive times. Those who contract the Simian Flu are unceremoniously executed and buried in shallow graves.
Nova eventually acts as a foil to this narrow-minded thinking, proving herself to be capable of rich and rewarding communication without uttering a single word. This most recent strain of Planet Of The Apes films has relied heavily on gesture, taking advantage of Weta Digital’s industry-leading effects, and some superb motion-capture performances. The inclusion of Nova who herself is only capable of signing limited words pushes the film even further away from language, with Nova bonding with the apes over simple gestures like the sharing of water or the gifting of a flower.
In News Of The World, yet another film where this trope is deployed, ex-confederate soldier Captain Kidd (Tom Hanks) goes on a cross-country journey to deliver a speechless girl named Johanna (Helena Zengel) to distant relatives. Johanna is twice orphaned with her most recent family being Native Americans. This fact, when added to her supposed inability to speak, leads to many of the characters labeling Johanna as primitive along with the negative connotations which come with that. Yet, when Johanna finally meets another soul who speaks her native tongue (German), she becomes rather talkative and Captain Kidd finds himself excluded by language.
Despite Nova and Johanna both undermining the assumptions placed on them in these films, the fact that they are merely side characters in someone else’s story means the film’s emotional arcs ring hollow. The recent success of The Sound Of Metal has brought many of these issues of Deaf representation to the fore, even if the film itself fails to meet the Deaf community’s expectations. In the film, Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a drummer in a heavy metal band, is on the brink of relapsing when he rapidly loses his hearing. The film parallels his desperate attempts to regain his hearing with his history of drug addiction and drives home the belief that hearing loss is only something to fix if you treat the Deaf community as broken.
Despite being warmly received by the mainstream press as a ‘wake-up call’ to the film industry in how the Deaf community is depicted, the film still presents Ruben’s journey as a binary choice. He can rejoin mainstream society with his hearing partially returned, or embrace the Deaf community wholeheartedly through rejecting cochlear implants—but he cannot do both. Whenever the trope is deployed the argument is the same: only through cooperation and conversation can a happy future be ensured, but none of the films truly follow through with this. The simple fact of the matter is that when speechless girls feature in films, we’d rather use them to translate CGI apes than participate in the conversation.
