Top of the Lake: Crime and Secrets at the Edge of the World

Going feral at the ends of the earth

Top of the Lake is a seven part television series about misogyny and violence, set at the southern tip of New Zealand. It was directed by Jane Campion, director of the Piano, another movie about misogyny and violence in New Zealand that was very well received when it was released. In her return to New Zealand for this show, Campion has moved her setting from the lush fern forests of the North Island to the desolate peaks and wilderness of the far South Island, and has skipped in time from the colonial era to the modern – though looking at the behavior of the protagonists in this movie, it’s hard to find much of a civilizing influence of modernity.

The basic story of Top of the Lake is an apparently straightforward investigation of child abuse. A 12 year old girl called Tui (pictured) is pregnant and a cop from Sydney called Robin is brought in to investigate the case. The story is set in the fictitious town of Laketop, near Queenstown. Robin grew up in this town but moved to Australia to work, and has returned to Laketop temporarily because her mother has cancer, so she’s ideally placed to investigate the crime. Unfortunately, things don’t proceed simply: Tui is the daughter of a singularly malicious and nasty man, Matt Mitcham, who is a Scottish migrant and the dodgiest thug you’ve ever seen (well, at least until you meet some of his associates in episode 5). He is singularly unhelpful in the case, and Tui is also being very unhelpful – it’s not clear if she even understands what has happened to her, and soon after the show starts she disappears. Furthermore, Robin has her own dark history in Laketop, and pretty much every other person you meet is entangled in something dark and horrible: wherever you turn you see a suspect or their conspirator, and it’s really hard to believe that this town is not deeply enmired in misogyny, sexual violence and repression. Through all of this, Robin is trying to find and help Tui, and the rest of the town are taking a singularly colonial-era and feral approach to Tui’s problems, with almost no one seeming to be aware that it’s dangerous for a 12 year old girl to be pregnant, and dangerous for her rapist to be at large.

Campion’s exploration of the setting really helps to give this impression of a town that hasn’t worked out what modernity is, or updated its attitudes towards women accordingly. Queenstown is a famous tourist town and playground of the rich and famous, but we never see that side of the area: as far as we can tell, Laketop is a rundown and wild place in the middle of nowhere, a little cluster of huts hanging off of freezing, windy mountains and staring out at nothing. The children are wild, playing in canoes and on horses, keeping bones in their homes and wandering wild over the hills and forests, and Tui herself is feral to the point of being fey. The adults are also wild, but in a much nastier and ferocious way. Matt Mitcham, his family and associates cast a long shadow over the town, and he is a violent, sinister presence, completely unreformed and often more like a force of nature than a human. His direct children are ill-mannered, stupid thugs; another of his sons lives in a tent by the lake and spent eight years in a Thai prison; Tui is his daughter by a different woman, and there are children in his house who he doesn’t even really seem to know. The people of the town ride horses and hunt, and Mitcham’s associates use severed deer’s heads on poles as an emblem. The police in the town have a very vague understanding of what crime is or what their purpose is as police. The chief of the police, Al – played with incredible subtlety by David Wenham – alternates between being an urbane and intelligent modern policeman and a quietly dangerous, selfish and very sinister figure. The only apparently “normal” people in this show are a group of women from America and Australia who have formed a commune by the side of the lake, but these women are just as touched as the rest of the place: they live in shipping containers on the edge of the lake, they’re all deeply damaged in some way, and their guru GJ is a remote, harsh and judgmental woman who doesn’t appear to have any kind feelings for her charges at all – and these women also don’t seem to have any conception of the importance of protecting Tui or finding out who raped her. All these people are presented against the backdrop of a wild, silent and unforgiving landscape, cold and windy and desolate but stunningly beautiful, that acts as a perfect counterpoise for the wild, strange character of the people we meet.

Just as in The Piano, Campion uses the landscape to stunning effect as a backdrop to the story. It is beautifully filmed and presented, and in our various excursions to the top of the lake and the mountains beyond it we lose all sense that we are in the modern era. Watching the show makes you feel a kind of sympathetic chill as if you were experiencing the wind and rain and cold of the South Island yourself, but it’s impossible not to be amazed by the harsh beauty of the place. In The Piano, the wilderness offered a lush and sensual backdrop to the corrupted sexuality of the main protagonists; in Top of the Lake the chill, serene lake and cold, distant mountains reflect perfectly the sinister secrets of the town and the impenetrable wildness of the town’s main victim, Tui.

The acting in this television series is also exemplary. Robin is played with fine skill by Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men, who does a brilliant job of portraying her human vulnerability and professional strength, as well as her bravery in the face of a town that seems determined to destroy her. Her slow unraveling over the course of the story is brilliantly done. David Wenham gives a master class in his potrayal of the chief policeman, Al, whose motives and allegiances are extremely suspicious, and the other major characters – Johnno and Matt Mitcham and his daughter Tui – are all perfectly cast.

The story is fairly simple and well told, without a real twist but with just enough red herrings and dead ends in its development that you aren’t sure you are right about the key points until the very end, and even then a few things are not fully resolved. It’s essentially a story about corruption and the extent to which a few evil men’s influence can completely corrupt a small community, and although it comes to the resolution one would hope for once one knew the facts, it remains deeply disturbing. It’s even more disturbing if anywhere in New Zealand is actually like the place depicted. My main complaint about the plot is that the commune by the lake plays a big role in the show, but is largely irrelevant to the plot and seems like a kind of boutique side story that Campion put in just to please herself. I think this commune should have been given a different, more satisfying role in the plot or should have been dropped, and I can’t work out exactly why it was important. But aside from that, the story is well told and has that feeling of completeness where nothing stood out as wrong or confusing, and the only unresolved parts were unresolved because the characters couldn’t know the answers, not because there were no answers or because of some plot incoherency. Quite a lot happens for just seven episodes, and it’s an impressively tightly coiled story.

I was surprisingly deeply affected by this show. It’s beautiful, the acting is powerful, the story is disturbing and the characters are amazingly engaging. It also tells a story about a side of New Zealand that maybe doesn’t really get shown much internationally in amongst all the Hobbitons and Rivendells that have emanated from there recently. It’s not always easy going, though it’s not openly brutal, and at times it is breathlessly tense, but in an enjoyable rather than an overly terrifying way. This is a good show to watch for anyone who is interested in crime stories, thrillers and mysteries – especially if you’re interested in seeing those stories unfold in a very unique and almost magical setting.

 

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries: Australian Crime Fiction Exotica?

I’ve started watching Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, an Australian TV show based loosely on the series of Phryne Fisher murder mystery novels by Kerry Greenwood. The basic idea behind these novels and the TV show is simple, effective and fun: Phryne Fisher is a young (28 year old) Australian woman who has returned to Melbourne after serving as a nurse in the Great War (1914-1918), having received an inheritance and a title from a distant aunt in the UK. Suddenly wealthy and flung into the licentious era of the twenties, she starts an investigative agency, and begins meddling in police affairs, as well as having many affairs. She’s “not the marrying kind,” and of course in the twenties this kind of attitude is scandalous but also increasingly accepted. The implication in the TV show (I’m not sure about the books) is that she comes from a poor background and has a sad past (in the books this is her wartime experience as a nurse; in the TV show it’s her younger sister, who was murdered). Since 1918, she tells us, she “hasn’t taken anything seriously,” and this is the atmosphere in which she conducts her investigations. She also collects poor people around her: she has adopted two orphans, and is close friends with a pair of communist activists, one a wharfie and one a cabby.

The TV show definitely has its flaws – sometimes the acting is a bit wooden and it feels like the directors weren’t sure if they were writing a comedy or a drama – but this is the normal experience of watching Australian TV. Typically, the only TV shows that Australian directors can make with any confidence are shit-boring dramas about enormously boring middle-class suburban lives, quirky comedies about rural idylls, or gritty stories of political corruption. Anything else is approached with a kind of self-conscious dread of being caught being pretentious, and this trepidation inevitably spoils the product as the director tries to inject a bit of self-deprecating humour, or gets caught looking over their own shoulder checking that they aren’t taking themselves too seriously. It’s an Australian thing. This self-consciousness is why Australia can make excellent quirky rural comedies (e.g. Seachange) but will never, ever produce a decent science fiction show. Something like Firefly is physically inconceivable to the average Australian movie critic – merely glancing sideways at the script for an Aussie Firefly would cause 99% of Australian movie critics’ heads to explode[1].

So, having attempted to break out of the standard mold of Aussie drama, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries is already painfully self-conscious. But if you can deal with that (and I’m sure it will relax as future episodes are unveiled) you get an actually pretty excellent TV show. Phryne is a fun character: she’s got guts, she’s going against convention, she’s clever, she’s compassionate and she’s lusty. Her two working class friends, the wharfie and the cabby, are intensely Australian men, laconic and kindly and macho all in one, simultaneously shy and big-hearted. Her maid, Dot, is an amusing combination of sassy girl-next-door and Catholic repression. The setting is unashamedly Australian – the Ballarat express[2], the Melbourne University boat club, flying a Tiger Moth out to the countryside to meet “Vic” – who leans in the doorway and talks out the side of his mouth in just the way you expect of an Aussie shearer – the dodgy Turkish baths and the backyard abortionist behind the pie shop, they’re all classic Australian settings. The characters also convey that strange Australian combination of conservatism and vital, progressive energy that makes our politics and culture simultaneously so small-minded and so visionary. For non-Australian viewers this show manages to present Australia in a suitably exotic light even though it’s set in Australia’s second largest city. It’s a nice introduction to some of Australia’s wilder history, as well as to the very special physical environment of South East Australia, which in its own way is easily as exotic as the Top End. At any moment you expect Phryne to just waltz out of the city and go solve the mystery of hanging rock.

Another thing that this show does very nicely is its depiction of gender issues. The twenties were an era of newfound sexual liberation against a backdrop of essentially very conservative sexual values, and this show does a good job of depicting the sexism of the time without making it menacing or overbearing: it depicts this sexism as contested and malleable, as also is the homophobia and racism, so that we don’t have to endure a stultifying atmosphere of overpowering misogyny such as mars shows like A Game of Thrones. Phryne is clearly liberated not just because she is a woman in the twenties, but because she is rich; the women around her are not so lucky, and we see this, but we also see how they make their own place in the world despite adversity, and how the men of the time adapt and respond to these challenges to traditional gender roles. Even though as a crime show it has license to be grounded in “gritty realism,” we get a much better example of how to depict institutional sexism without creating an atmosphere of woman-hating, which I think directors with much bigger budgets might benefit from watching.

I guess for people living outside Australia this TV show is going to be hard to see – it’s been produced by our public broadcaster but it’s not available over the internet if you live outside of the country. I’m sure there are ways, though … and if you’re interested in seeing a nice depiction of how Australians view our own history, through the vehicle of a fairly well-designed (but occasionally overly self-conscious) murder-mystery show, then I recommend this. Obviously, as well, the twenties are a fun era full of progressive girls wearing splendid clothes and men who spout over-the-top English. However, if you can’t abide shows with slightly stilted acting that don’t quite know what they want to be, or you can’t handle anything that isn’t standard American crime fare, then you should probably steer clear. I like it though, and will be watching more where I get the chance.

—

fn1: oh, I wish someone would write one!

fn2: which seems to take all night, even though Ballarat is – what – 3 hours from Melbourne?

 

Current Reading: Psychic Detective Yakumo

Can he see you...?

As part of my new year plan to improve my Japanese, I am on a manga collecting binge, starting with Psychic Detective Yakumo (Shinrei Tantei Yakumo,心霊探偵八雲) by Manabu Kaminaga. This is a series of case files about a cynical and slightly misanthropic college student called Yakumo, seen mostly through the perspective of the slightly eccentric college girl Ozawa Haruka. Yakumo was born with a single red eye that enables him to see spirits and ghosts, and the trouble that this eye has brought him has turned him into something of a recluse and a bit of a bastard. His mother even tried to kill him and then abandoned him when he was a kid, so he’s understandably a little cynical about people. Haruka, on the other hand, wants to help others because when she was about 8 years old she accidentally got her older sister killed, and ever since she’s wanted to be the child who everyone loves, but behaves eccentrically in her quest for this fulfilment. What she doesn’t know – but finds out through Yakumo’s red eye – is that her sister’s ghost is following her around as a kind of guardian angel – and maybe this is why Haruka is the impetus for the adventures that we read in the manga.

In the first episode we also discover that Yakumo is a bit of a fraud, cheating at card games through a mirror pinned to the door of his club room in the University, and then offering to exorcise a ghost from a completely normal memorial picture of the English professor’s dead daughter – in exchange for higher marks and attendance records. “I sell peace of mind,” he tells Haruka, “And it’s an awesome business!” However, he is basically good at heart, and although very off-hand and cool with Haruka maybe he has a bit of a thing for her. By the end of the first instalment we have seen hints of a love triangle, and then tacked on to the end of the book there is an amusing “interview” conducted by the intrepid report “M” who ambushed Yakumo as he was waking up, in which we see the depths of his misanthropy and lack of interest in ordinary life.

The story itself is simple but effective. From here on I shall give a few spoilers, but since there’s no english translation of this manga as far as I know, i doubt you will be reading it, gentle reader (if you can read Japanese, maybe skip this paragraph). Haruka approaches Yakumo for help, having never met him before, because her friend Miki is in a coma in hospital after a strange incident, and a friend suggested Yakumo could help. Miki visited an abandoned house with her boyfriend Kazuhiko, and was attacked by a ghost from behind the door of “the forbidden room,” a room whose door had a sign on it saying “do not open.” Subsequently Kazuhiko “commits suicide” on the train line. Yakumo visits the girl and identifies that she has been possessed by the ghost of a girl called Yuri. Haruka and Yakumo do some investigating on the computer system of the university (which Haruka has access to through a part-time job) and discover that a girl called Yuri went missing a little earlier. The girl was from Haruka’s class, and by tracing rumours of attachments they identify Yuri’s ex-boyfriend, who Haruka goes to talk to. He tries to kill Haruka, revealing as he does so that he had a brief fling with Yuri and got her pregnant, even though “after we had sex just a few times she started acting like my girlfriend.” But Haruka’s sister’s ghost gets Yakumo, who comes and saves her, revealing as he did so that he had guessed that the boyfriend killed Kazuhiko as well. The reason? When Kazuhiko and Miki were fooling around outside the abandoned building, Kazuhiko took a photo of Miki and in the background was the faint image of Yuri’s boyfriend carrying her body away from the scene of the crime. In good Japanese style, having been discovered, the boyfriend turns himself in. The story closes with Haruka and Yakumo getting involved with the case of a serial killer.

The story is pretty simple, but it works as a basic detective story, and a lot of it is about boy/girl interactions between the lead characters. In fact, the manga is probably better called “bumbling helper Haruka” because it seems to focus more on her (and the story of her sister’s tragic death) than on Yakumo, who remains an enigma. The narrative force is largely with Haruka, who though a little ditzy and physically weak is a clever and forceful character, possessed additionally of an emotional depth and moral depth that Yakumo definitely lacks. In all it’s a good story and an amusing tale of a burgeoning friendship (or love affair?) between two people whose characters are guaranteed to create trouble for each other, and it is clearly set up so that we will slowly learn more about Yakumo, while we watch Haruka become a skilled ghostbuster and reconcile herself with her sister.

The artwork is fine, typical manga black-and-white drawings, though everyone seems to have the same features, which makes it hard for me to work out who is talking. But the clear plan in this series of manga is to focus on the story and interactions, not the pictures, so it works as basic background information to support the basic story. I can recommend this to anyone who is able to read Japanese (and I might add, the kanji are entirely supported by furigana, so it’s smooth and easy to read compared to, say, Emma or Shuna’s Journey). If you’re looking for an easy introduction to intermediate Japanese with a fun story and good characters, this is the manga for you!

 

Current reading: Altered Carbon

The next in my line of eBook downloads, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan is perhaps best described as a cyberpunk Space Opera. It is set in a near future, perhaps 500 years from now, in which humans have developed a technology of human mind replication. This technology is not cheap, but it enables people to back up their mind and memories (their stack) and install it in a new human being (their sleeve) when their current human dies. This provides a kind of immortality, and changes many aspects of ordinary human life, including:

• punishment: prison is time spent “on stack” while the sleeve in which you committed the crime is rented out to others to use
• insurance: every person’s goal is to get a resleeving policy, so that when they die they can be reborn based on their last backup, in a new sleeve
• torture: if you really really want to torture someone, you upload their stack into a virtual system, and torture them there for as long as you want – they can’t die

The very rich can afford regular backups, perhaps as often as every 48 hours and done remotely, but for the vast majority of even the middling rich, the mind and memories are backed up only internally, in essentially a memory chip inside their head. This enables them to die for real if their head is destroyed or the stack is removed and lost.

The story centres around a criminal called Takeshi Kovacs who has retired from a specialist psychotic marine unit called the Envoys. He is dragged out of a long prison sentence (on stack) by a very rich and long-lived man (a methuselah, or “meth”), who was murdered two days earlier and wants his death investigated by an independent operator. Unfortunately all is not as it seems (of course) and after a slight mishap on the first day, Kovacs ends up to his neck in real and virtual shit. There are a lot of tricks based on the fundamental conceit of the altered carbon (at one point we briefly meet an assassin who uses a copy of himself for backup, because he can’t trust anyone else); but there is also a sensitive and intelligent investigation of the consequences of this backup process for human society. What does death and childhood mean when you can live forever? Does money become more significant or less when it has the power to buy you eternal life? How does one prosecute a war when the dead can come back to life? And how does one deal with criminals who have no fear of death?

Kovacs answers most of these questions using an advanced array of extremely dangerous weaponry, and the author produces some very poignant moments based around the experiences of ordinary mortals cast into these situations. He also writes very well, giving simultaneously an excellent story, believable characters and an interesting and unpretentious exploration of some of the philosophical consequences of the phenomenon at the centre of the novel. This is an excellent novel, well worth reading, and I will definitely be pursuing the series as he writes more!

 

Current Reading: The Dresden Files

In two months I’ve managed to fly through the series of books called The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher. I’m up to book 9 already, and it’s been a ball. This series of books is about a Wizard called Harry Dresden, in modern day Chicago, who advertises himself in the yellow pages and takes on cases involving mysterious beings, Faerie, Vampires, and all manner of other nasties. The first book starts fairly light, with Dresden taking on a mysterious case with links to the criminal underworld and a vampire. But over the series of books it becomes clear that something much bigger is on the move, and Harry Dresden is at the centre of it.

The books are done in a generally pulp detective/ film noir style, a kind of Maltese Falcon meets Harry Potter sort of writing which is easy to read, very plot-heavy, and self-consciously deals in stereotypes and plot twists you are meant to guess. The plots are clever but never so complex as to be misleading, and Harry Dresden is a likeable and funny chap who is just imperfect enough that you are willing to believe it when his emotions lead him astray, or he makes silly mistakes. Like every good private Eye, he has his own dark past which is continually coming back to bite him, and he isn’t always on the side of the righteous – and all the “good” powers in the book are pigheaded and silly, just like they should be. Every story is a tale of an ordinary man with ordinary flaws, overcoming extraordinary challenges to ultimately triumph because he is, ultimately, a good man.

These books also remind me of the Flashman Papers, in that the anti-hero is immediately likeable, and they mingle the pulp writing of the genre with some really nice writing. In the first book, for example, the scene where Dresden traps a faerie by a lake using pizza, in order to get information, is both very pulpy, very funny and eerily otherworldly. It is well written and classically pokes fun at every genre it is part of, while self-consciously revelling in the details of those genres. Even in the later books, when the challenges facing Harry Dresden are much greater, the books remain light-hearted and well aware of the rules of their genre, without being bound by them. This makes them both entertaining, engrossing and very impressive. And, at the same time, just as with the Flashman Papers, the reader (well, me at least) is confronted with that most artfully constructed of characters – someone whose beliefs and motivations you don’t necessarily agree with or support, but whose humanity and believability cause you both to support him through thick and thin, and to challenge your own views and assumptions. This is, I think, a rare and well-written character.

So, having consumed 9 of the buggers in 2 months, I strongly commend them to you, dear reader.