martin

Kinkón

Kinkón feels like a fun exercise inviting a reading of how deeply entrenched bourgeois narrative patterns are in our minds. Zulueta compresses the entire King Kong into seven minutes, plays with speed and movement, and introduces cathode ray flicker, yet the whole narrative and its classical Hollywood structure remain instantly familiar, even if for people who have never actually seen the 1933 film. That is how powerful the Hollywood template is as a bourgeois form, it has become a kind of narrative common sense that we reproduce almost automatically in the way we recognize and process images. What troubles me watching it is how the short demonstrates just how totalizing that narrative hegemony is. Many people who believe they think and work outside capitalism, or outside Hollywood, or who see certain movies as anti-capitalist, still cling to the same classical structure and continuity editing, so their “opposition” never really leaves the bourgeois cinematic form that capitalism produced. They have absorbed and internalized the ideology so completely that reproducing Hollywood form feels neutral, even rebellious, when in practice it keeps them aligned with capitalist ways of organizing perception, desire and spectacle. Seen from that angle, Kinkón feels like a reminder that you cannot work against capitalism if you remain fully invested in its most basic narrative and visual machinery. Though kind of dated, the short shows something that is an even bigger problem now than it was fifty years ago, because it exposes how limited our capacity for rebellion has become when we only engage with surfaces and never question the Hollywood form that structures how we see and tell stories in the first place.