NO STOMACH FOR DISAGREEMENT
Like cartoonist Tom Scott, columnist Steve Braunias is a New Zealand national treasure. Much out-numbered by staid, staunch and serious-minded fellow citizens, they have taken it upon themselves to fearlessly delve into New Zealand’s innards to reverse the country’s irony by-pass.
Last weekend, Steve took on ‘Shame’s Kitchen’ in yet another of his chronicles of ‘the nation that came of age thanks to really horrible meals’ [Sunday Star Times, 21st March, 2010].
He reviews recipes from the 1976 edition of the Women’s Division of Federated Farmers Recipe Book and Household Guide’, the ‘Recipe Book and Home Science Notebook’ published by the Wellington Education Board in 1964, the 1985 ‘Fibre Cookbook’ by Audrey Ellis, and the ‘Selwyn District Girl Guides 300 Favourite Recipes of 1961.’
The recipes include:
- Grilled steak with pickled walnuts
- Lamb chops garnished with balls kneaded from hard-boiled egg and butter
- ‘Spanish Bananas’ (sliced bananas on lettuce leaves, sprinkled with nuts and cayenne pepper mayonnaise)
- Beef curry with apple, banana, orange segments and pineapple
- Home-made sausage rolls baked for an hour in tomato soup, and:
- ‘Chicken Indienne’.
I will give you the full recipe of Chicken Indienne as you may want to try it by inviting friends over to dinner for a ‘New Zealand Night’ (recipe below to serve 4):
“Simmer four chicken pieces in onion, garlic, various spices and two tablespoons of mango chutney for 25 minutes, and then carefully add four cans of peaches. Cook for five more minutes. Transfer to serving dish. Garnish with lemon wedges and parsley sprigs”.
Steve comments that the recipes reveal much about distinctly New Zealand shades of the qualities of ingenuity, naivety, stupidity, and sadism.
The question that this begs is: ‘How do the worst of these characteristics survive?’
Well, two of the pieces in the puzzle are Kiwis’ exaggerated apparent diffidence and pathological fear of conflict. If your mother continues to cook her lasagne with chunks of unwanted pineapple or you can’t bear to suggest to a friend’s wife that you’ll pass on the mayonnaise on your bananas, you pretty much have to swallow and grin.
This fear of saying anything that may offend frequently extends to any kind of serious conversation. There is a widespread view that saying anything that is complicated constitutes a breach of national etiquette – and that anything that is said with a serious tone raises the spectre of hostility.
An immigrant colleague of my wife observed: ‘Kiwis can’t talk about anything that is serious in case they reveal a disagreement - and they then have to try to kill each other’.
Jane and I once saw this in practice when, having invited our neighbour (who had been a relatively prominent national politician) and his wife for dinner, I made the mistake of tabling a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whisky instead of coffee towards the end of the meal. Once the conversation had veered onto such topics as welfare payments and the Middle East, it rapidly descended into chaos and unforgiving acrimony.
And I have given up being amazed at the number of people that I meet who steadfastly refuse to talk about politics, society, economics and even art, though they are proud to recall that they once were members of champion school debating teams.
Of course, this leaves political and policy commentary to a ‘world famous in New Zealand’ band of newspaper hacks and hobby-horse columnists.
All that the politicians and public servants get to hear from the pavements is a muted reaction through comment on comment – though they also feel a chilly silence that tells them that both pundits and practitioners are widely disliked and distrusted.
Would though that we could actually debate the issues of the day among ourselves – sanely and salted with humour - in bars and pubs, workplaces and coffee shops and the snugness of our own homes. Isn’t this what popular democracy is supposed to be about?
And it’s not just about politics and policy – it can be about nurturing the self and developing sustaining and sustainable personal relationships.
THE CINEMA OF UNEASE AND SETTING DOWN OUR HEART OF ANGER
One of New Zealand’s quirky social characteristics is its high level of Clinical Depression and consequent suicide. This has led to a good deal of introspection about Misery in Paradise – which includes pop songs (‘There is no Depression in New Zealand ... There are no Sheep in New Zealand’), and our national canon of films (which NZ actor-director Sam Neill has termed the ‘Cinema of Unease’).
I’ll draw in some comments here from a deep but gloomy (and appropriately intellectually challenging) review by Duncan Petrie (Illusions, 37, 2005) of the New Zealand film ‘In My Father’s Den’ by Brad Mcgann.
“In My Father’s Den remains a resolutely New Zealand film in terms of its story and cultural perspective. Yet it has resonated with audiences around the world, placing it among a small group of films including Vigil, The Piano, Once Were Warriors, Heavenly Creatures and Whale Rider that have defined New Zealand’s cinematic creativity in the international arena.
Adapted from Maurice Gee’s 1972 novel, McGann’s film begins with the return of Paul Prior to his South Island hometown after a 17 year absence, ostensibly to attend the funeral of his father. It quickly becomes apparent that Paul, who has made his career as a successful war photographer, is a withdrawn and emotionally damaged individual.
Certain deep unresolved tensions also exist within the Prior family, as suggested by Paul’s brittle relationship with his brother Andrew. But slowly he begins to reconnect with the community and to his past, a process given particular resonance by the rediscovery of his father’s secret ‘den’, a place filled with books and music which had awakened his own desire for adventure and excitement as a child.
Paul also begins to form a bond with a schoolgirl, Celia Steimer, the daughter of a former girlfriend, Jackie, and he begins to suspect that she may be his daughter. Celia is a promising writer who longs to break away and Paul’s interest in her is further fuelled by a strong sense of recognition of his own younger self. Half way through the film Celia mysteriously disappears and Paul immediately falls under suspicion as the police begin their investigations.
The mood turns progressively darker as the narrative moves towards its devastatingly bleak denouement in which Celia’s body is found and the shameful secrets of the Prior family are revealed. It transpires that Paul witnessed both his father having sex with Jackie in the den and his mother’s subsequent suicide, a traumatic memory he had repressed. Celia is therefore revealed not as Paul’s daughter, but as his half sister.
The web of secrets and lies is also implicated in the girl’s accidental death at the hands of Andrew’s wife Penny who, on finding photographs of a semi-naked Celia, concludes that he is having an affair. The images had actually been taken surreptitiously by their 13 year-old son Jonathan, a character with certain affinities to Paul who is already displaying signs of emotional damage as a consequence of the failure of the adults around him to communicate, trust and share intimacy with one another.
Paul is a profoundly damaged individual. His psychic scarring is revealed through his detached and cold demeanour with others, particularly his brother, the diffidence he shows when addressing the school about his experiences photographing war, and more graphically in his recourse to auto-erotic asphyxiation during sex with a young woman and drug taking when he crushes and smokes his father’s morphine pills.
His predicament is brilliantly crystallised in the scene at the beginning of the film where he is unable to enter the church where his father’s funeral service is taking place.
His lonely face is framed in close up on a slight angle, the door of the church forming the shape of a cross that bars him physically and psychologically. Paul’s alienation is profoundly reinforced by the sermon – “Part of our grief may be regret for things done or left undone. Words said or words never said.”
It is Celia who helps him to confront and come to terms with his past, through directly challenging him – “is that why you push people away?” – and by providing an opportunity for intimacy and meaningful human connection.
Coda: A Return to the Cinema of Unease.
The attraction to “the shadow lands of human experience” directly invokes a tradition in New Zealand cinema identified by Sam Neill and Judy Rymer in their controversial 1995 documentary Cinema of Unease.
Their film foregrounds a history marked by social conformity, Puritanism, fear, insanity and violence, and how this in turn has produced a national cinema that has produced a dark and troubled reflection.
The thesis is heavily reliant on a familiar discourse of New Zealand cultural nationalism associated with John Mulgan’s seminal novel Man Alone and the brooding landscape paintings of Colin McCahon, which are replicated in Cinema of Unease by Alun Bollinger’s moody and filtered images of the remote South Island plains and mountain ranges.
This also chimes with Martin Blythe’s insightful analysis of the response by Pakeha filmmakers to the opportunities of biculturalism and the challenges of Maori cultural and political revival.
Blythe identifies a variety of strategies he terms the politics of silence, of blame, of repression and of irony, which collectively convey a deep sense of settler unease generated by the problems of culture, identity, belonging and legitimacy.
In My Father’s Den chimes with this ‘structure of feeling’ both visually and thematically. While the Paul Prior of Gee’s novel is a cerebral version of the archetypal ‘man alone’, McGann relocates him into a lonely landscape that immediately resonates with Neill and Rymer’s images.
The opening shot of Celia lying on the rail track - recalling the climax of Smash Palace, another archetypal ‘man alone’ film - pans up to reveal the mountain range that functions as a kind of natural wall, keeping the community in its place, a small rural town cut off from the world.
In Gee’s novel the fictional small town of Wadesville becomes an anonymous suburb of Auckland as the city sprawls in a direct swipe at modernity, the loss of the orchards and creeks mirroring Paul’s own loss of innocence. But the Otago landscape of the film affords a different kind of reflection of the interior landscape of the characters, emphasising a perennial loneliness.
To underscore this McGann even has Paul’s father recite James K. Baxter’s High Country Weather, a poem celebrating the virtues of isolation:
Alone we are born
And die alone
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
over snow-mountain shine.
Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.
But this invocation of the familiar New Zealand trope of the egocentric loner is not an affirmation, as Paul’s neurotic predicament painfully demonstrates. Moreover, the emotional detachment that characterises most of the adults in McGann’s film is clearly an undesirable state of affairs, retarding human potential and destroying young lives”.
Interesting then to report some on some recent research on the links between meaningful conversation and mental health – see below.
TALK DEEPLY, BE HAPPY?
[By Roni Caryn Rabin, New York Times, March 17, 2010]
‘Would you be happier if you spent more time discussing the state of the world and the meaning of life — and less time talking about the weather?
It may sound counterintuitive, but people who spend more of their day having deep discussions and less time engaging in small talk seem to be happier, said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona who published a study on the subject.
“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” Dr. Mehl said.
But, he proposed, substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.
“By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”
Dr. Mehl’s study was small and doesn’t prove a cause-and-effect relationship between the kind of conversations one has and one’s happiness. But that’s the planned next step, when he will ask people to increase the number of substantive conversations they have each day and cut back on small talk, and vice versa.
The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, involved 79 college students — 32 men and 47 women — who agreed to wear an electronically activated recorder with a microphone on their lapel that recorded 30-second snippets of conversation every 12.5 minutes for four days, creating what Dr. Mehl called “an acoustic diary of their day.”
Researchers then went through the tapes and classified the conversation snippets as either small talk about the weather or having watched a TV show, and more substantive talk about current affairs, philosophy, the difference between Baptists and Catholics or the role of education.
A conversation about a TV show wasn’t always considered small talk; it could be categorized as substantive if the speakers analyzed the characters and their motivations, for example.
Many conversations were more practical and did not fit in either category, including questions about homework or who was taking out the trash, for example, Dr. Mehl said. Over all, about a third of all conversation was ranked as substantive, and about a fifth consisted of small talk.
But the happiest person in the study, based on self-reports about satisfaction with life and other happiness measures as well as reports from people who knew the subject, had twice as many substantive conversations, and only one-third of the amount of small talk as the unhappiest, Dr. Mehl said.
Almost every other conversation the happiest person had — 45.9 percent of the day’s conversations — were substantive, while only 21.8 percent of the unhappiest person’s conversations were substantive.
Small talk made up only 10 percent of the happiest person’s conversations, while it made up almost three times as much –- or 28.3 percent –- of the unhappiest person’s conversations.
Next, Dr. Mehl wants to see if people can actually make themselves happier by having more substantive conversations.
“It’s not that easy, like taking a pill once a day,” Dr. Mehl said.
“But this has always intrigued me. Can we make people happier by asking them, for the next five days, to have one extra substantive conversation every day?”
COMMENT
So the taciturn Kiwi pays a price for his / her disengagement from serious issues – and, as is well-known, it is the serious issues that ultimately provide the best opportunities for humour.
Great though that people like Tom Scott and Steve Braunias are slowly coaxing us away from withdrawal - towards participation and potential fun.
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