The Empire State Building is one of those recognizable landmarks that doesn’t so much stand for something as it stands for being really really tall. For a while, it was the tallest buildings in the world, and it’s still the place to go if you’re a tourist and want to see all of Manhattan in one go. So where would a gigantic gorilla tourist go if he was chilling in New York? Empire State Building, of course.
King Kong decided he needed to make a foray to the top of the Empire State Building in 1933. He even brought his girlfriend along with him. Being an ape, one would have thought that he’d have more fun swinging on the girders of the Brooklyn Bridge. But the Empire State Building remains forever ingrained in our cinematic consciousness as the site of that beloved monkey’s demise.
Still, in King Kong it isn’t really the big monkey that launches an attack on the Empire State Building – it’s the United States airforce. Poor Kong thrashes around as the planes divebomb him, probably doing more damage to the building itself than to the big ape. Then he falls and the film director Carl Denham gets to utter his seminal line: “It was beauty that killed the beast.” I think the planes had something to do with it.
