"They're not generalizing about the character of giant apes," he pointed out. "They're reacting to the immediate action on the screen with direct assertions about what they see."

Does he think Westerners generalise about the character of giant apes?

I suspect if you asked Westerners what they thought King Kong told them about the character of giant apes they might look at you a little strangely.

It's possible he means that there's no abstraction going on - which is more like conceptual indirection than recursion. And there's also no attempt to build a model based on universals generalised from those abstractions.

Both of those seem to be a very Western speciality. I'm not sure other cultures are quite as keen on them as we are, so if he's thinking they should be universals - he's just being very Western about it.

Personally I like the recursion of a monkey watching a monkey watching a virtual monkey.