Buck translates the conversation to the others, says the pygmies will allow them to return to their ship if they hand over Lola. There are murmurs of dissent. Lola is a great favorite among the men. Buck says that the wisest thing to do at this point is to pretend to leave and then come back, under cover of surprise, and rescue Lola. The First Mate is dead set against the plan, indicating that Commander Buck has a reputation for being a dissembler. Lola intercedes in the argument, saying that she welcomes the challenge of a new job, that her background and training have prepared her for a position of authority among backward peoples.
Lola is turned over to the pygmies and the small band of adventurers, under the leadership of Commander Buck, retrace their path (or seem to) back to their ship. A tracking shot, delineating each of the men in turn, reveals that the First Mate is not with the others.
The Mate, we discover, has followed the pygmies back to their encampment. Hiding himself in the tall grasses on a cliff overlooking the pygmy settlement, he is witness to the following scene.
Lola, who has been stripped to the waist and garlanded about the breasts and neck with chains of red flowers, is recumbent on a hammock like throne. One by one each of the males of the tribe pays obeisance to her. The ceremony is odd — its particulars difficult to follow — and has something to do with shooting sperm in the air (over the queen’s navel) like a fireworks display. It is the tribe’s primitive way of paying homage.
Meanwhile, Commander Buck and his men are lying in a field of yellow flowers, enervated, lost to the world of responsibility. Buck, rousing himself briefly, reminds the men that they have made a promise to Lola to return. “We will,” they say. “Give us time.” Buck tells them of King Dong, the object of their quest, and we cut away from the small band of white men to a huge black hand. The hand reaches over a wall and lifts the queen from her primitive throne.
The pygmies seem unsurprised at the theft of their white queen and go about their business — chanting and darting back and forth in their ritual manner — as if nothing more exceptional than a change in the weather had passed.
“Dong,” the natives chant. “Dong. Dong. Dong.”
Dong has taken Lola to his cave, which is strewn with the broken bodies of other “brides.”
The giant ape holds her in the palm of his hand, studying her, an impassive expression on his wizened face.
“Me Lola,” she says, pointing to herself. “You Dong.”
The giant ape nods in apparent understanding, though it may only be a circumstantial gesture. Abruptly, his face is transformed. He is moved by Lola’s beauty and vulnerability, her sexuality and innocence. It is as if nothing in his life mattered until this moment. The sigh that passes from him is almost human. He strokes Lola’s long blond hair with his giant finger, moving down to touch a breast.
From Dong’s finger we cut to Commander Buck’s pen as he writes in his journal. Once we commandeered the poppy field, we lost all ambition to rescue Lola or indeed even to return to our ship but lay in the field in a stupor of pleasure. Some pygmy girls joined us after a while — a gift apparently from the chief — and although we still intended to rescue Lola, the days passed without a single gesture in that direction. There is something in the atmosphere of this island, some unseen power.
From the point of Buck’s pen, as if emerging from it like a spurt of ink, we cut to the First Mate rushing pell-mell through the maze of the jungle. He follows Dong’s enormous footsteps, stopping from time to time to call out Lola’s name, the sound echoing back. Impelled by the erotic pull of the landscape, he embraces a tree in desperation. All sense of proportion is lost.
We discover Lola asleep on a mat of grass at the foot of Dong’s cave. Dong himself is sitting up, though he seems quiescent, on the verge perhaps of going to sleep himself. We see him glance over lovingly at Lola before closing his eyes.
Lola wakes to find Dong asleep, snoring gently, a complacent hum. What to do? She kisses the sleeping ape on the top of his head, then scratches a note in the ground with a stick, unable to walk out of Dong’s life without some parting communication. “Dear Dong,” she writes, “We are worlds apart.” The message is not quite what she means to say and she erases it and starts again. Her name is called, startling her. It gives her pleasure to have her name in the air, a sense of belonging.
Lola looks around, unable at first to determine where the voice is coming from, discovering finally the First Mate on the edge of a promontory perhaps a hundred yards away. He signals her to join him. “I can’t,” she mouths.
Going down the side of a mountain, Lola trips over a root and falls headlong. Fragments of her immediate past flash before her eyes. When she regains consciousness the Mate is holding her head in his lap. “Ambivalence got the better of me,” she says. “I couldn’t bring myself to leave him.”
Dong lets out an enormous roar of anguish when he discovers Lola has gone. When he comes upon her with the First Mate his grief turns to anger.
“Leave him to me,” says Lola, interposing herself between her two suitors. “Hide behind something until I tell you to come out.”
Dong lifts her in his hand, squeezing her just enough to let her know that he is a monster of displeasure.
“You are making me regret my affection for you,” she shouts at him.
Dong shakes his head, a tear (perhaps a drop of moisture in the air) poises in an eye. He mumbles something almost human, struggles to make himself understood.
While Lola tames the beast, soft-talks and scolds him into docility, the Mate looks on from behind a rock. When Dong seems no longer murderous, she introduces him to the Mate. “This is my brother,” she says to Dong. “This is King Dong, the thirteenth wonder of the world,” she says to the Mate. Dong probes the Mate with a finger, knocking him back and over, laughing apishly.
Lola establishes an uneasy truce between them, a grudging accommodation. “I want you two to be fast friends,” she announces.
Some time passes — we see pages of calendar flutter in the wind — before we return to Dong, Lola, and the First Mate (Tex) living together in domestic compromise in Dong’s lair.
Lola sleeps with Dong in the main quarters while the Mate sleeps by himself in a corner on a pallet of leaves.
“I can’t stand to see you with him,” Tex says to Lola when Dong is away on an errand. “I’ve made up my mind to leave tonight. Whether you go with me or not is up to you.”
She is torn by his request, agrees to leave with him, then reneges. “I can’t leave King Dong.” she says. “No matter how it seems, there is something between us. He befriended me at a bad time in my life.”
“If you stay with him out of pity, you’ll end up hating each other.”
Lola slaps his face, they fight; he pins her to the earth, they kiss. “You’re bea utiful when you’re angry,” he says. We see the lovers bathed by sunlight screened through the high trees. We see them in a long shot in a variety of attitudes like paintings of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
“That’s the best it’s ever been for me,” says Tex.
She pleads with Tex to stay a little longer, promising to make a choice between her two lovers as soon as she knows her own mind.
Tex agrees grudgingly, though confesses not to understand her relationship to Dong. Sex, he would suppose, is out of the question.
“Not so,” says Lola, looking off into the distance.
Tex presses for an explanation. Dong, confides Lola, has a disproportionately small member, which is why he tends to prefer human females to the women of his own species.