Male friendship, or mateship, has a strong presence in New Zealand fictions. Central to it is the idea that a man's most important relationships are the bonds he forms with his own sex. These bonds are often based on unity of purpose gained through a common struggle (against a harsh environment, or a common enemy, for example), and are not necessarily verbally expressed. (81)
This ethos is satirized
by the film, while it is also central to a story where not one female
character makes an appearance.
Jackson's next feature, Meet the Feebles (1989), is also a
splatter film. The film follows the adventures of a troop of animal
puppets and is a satire of The Muppet Show. It is full of scatological
humor. Here again, Jackson is evincing a postcolonial attitude in this
savage satire of an important element of the American mass media, which
has colonized many a young mind.
In an article on Meet the Feebles, Ian Pryor quotes Peter Jackson
who has this to say on the film:
The film is a celebration of bodily secretions. That was the whole point of doing it--otherwise you'd just end up with The Muppet Show. The entire movie was made so we could be as disgusting as possible with puppets. There was absolutely no reason to make it unless we could make a terribly
depraved and gross puppet movie, and we tried our very hardestto make that. We were terribly worried when we wrote it that the puppet "gimmick" would run out even after ten minutes, so we really piled on the depravity to make sure we weren't left with too many scenes of straight soap opera. I think it's hilariously
funny for a puppet to break open and be full of tiny organs and
guts. That's the basis of the movie-they look like they're made of foam rubber, they act like they're made of foam rubber, but they secrete out of every orifice imaginable.., which just makes me laugh. I find it funny. (10)
In his next film, Braindead (1992), Jackson uses the horror and
splatter genres as a vehicle for the exploration of the themes of
personal and national liberation. The film starts on Skull Island in
1957. A zoologist is beheaded by the natives of the island because they
consider the rare specimen rat monkey that he is importing to New
Zealand, and which bites him, to be rabid, and his bite drives those
bitten mad. I see the zoologist as a colonial exploiter of the
indigenous population of the island- a role New Zealand itself has
sometimes played. Certainly, a settler colony is also one where the
settlers have expropiated the land and its resources from its native
population. Further, Jackson juxtaposes these moments of ghoulish humour
with footage of Queen Elizabeth II, and God Save the Queen is heard on
the soundtrack. The complex relationship of a settler colony to its
imperial center, and to its own forms of imperialism is suggested by
this juxtaposition.
The monkey is transported to the Wellington Zoo where it bites the
mother of the hero / protagonist, Lionel. All those who are bitten by
the monkey become zombies and their bite is similarly lethal. Here,
Jackson seems to be implying that colonial exploiters become zombies
because they have to lose their human empathy for others in order to
dominate and exploit them. At the end of the film, the mother having
become a giant zombie, swallows Lionel but he carves his way out to find
his true love. As Lawrence McDonald points out, this has obvious
Freudian connotations (15). But it could also be seen as an image of a
bid for freedom from the mother country, as the mother embodies some of
the worst straitlaced characteristics of British colonials.
Other films by Jackson also play with genre expectations. Forgotten
Silver (1995) is a mockumentary which in its depiction of a New Zealand
inventor/filmmaker hero seems to be satirizing the postcolonial
condition itself. This film mixes fact and fancy in order to put into
question artistic and nationalist myths. Many have believed this
fabricated story of a previously unknown great New Zealand filmmaker and
inventor to be true. Thus Forgotten Silver satirizes not only our
gullibility about the "facts" or "truths" presented
by documentaries but also our need for national/artistic heroes. It is
these idealized figures that are often set up to create feelings of
national identity, perhaps even more so when that identity is obviously
a construct as it is in a settler colony.
Forgotten Silver can be seen as being part of the trend in
contemporary cinema that John Cawelti discusses in his article on
generic transformations. For him, when a genre exhausts itself, it can
transform into a mode which uses "traditional generic structures as
a means of demythologization" (507). In Craig Hight's and Jane
Roscoe's article on Forgotten Silver, they point out that in
Cawelti's argument there is a suggestion that as an audience
becomes more familiar with a particular form of representation, that
audience is prepared to accept transformations which can include the
deconstructing of the myths and assumptions on which the original form
is based. It is true that the documentary is not usually seen as a genre
but it can be argued to have certain characteristics peculiar to other
film genres, which also share particular structures and conventions.
They argue that Jackson and co-director Costa Botes have created a mock
documentary that demythologizes the documentary form itself (14). For
them, one of the most interesting aspects of the film is its
relationship to myths and to New Zealand myths in particular: "A
perhaps central part of the effectiveness of the program with New
Zealand audiences is the subtlety and variety of ways in which its film
makers exploited cultural stereotypes and accepted notions concerning
the nature of New Zealand history and society" (16).
Of course, Jackson's latest project is the trilogy based on
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (2002-2004). As Andrew Horton points
out, the ways in which minority cultures appropiate Hollywood cinema and
make use of the dominant discourse can prove instructive for both
narrative film studies and cultural studies (173). Jackson appropriates
various genres from Hollywood cinema in Lord of the Rings. Primarily, he
uses the horror genre, the combat film genre, and the fantasy genre, as
well as Tolkien's literary legacy, to create a story whose ideology
reflects that of New Zealand's foreign policy and its anti-nuclear
stance. Roy Smith states that New Zealand's 1984 decision to
distance itself from a defense policy based on reliance on the United
States' nuclear capabilities, under the ANZUS Treaty signed in 1951
had far-reaching consequences. The reverberations of this decision were
felt throughout the Pacific region and also echoed in Europe, affecting
US alliance politics and strategy (11). The fellowship's decision
to destroy the ring of power is similar to New Zealand's decision
to create a nuclear free environment in the South Pacific. It is true
that the film is financed with Hollywood money. One can only conjecture
as to the interests that lay behind the financing. However, as Smith
points out, this ideal was embraced by a significant element of the
international community (26).
The film that I would like to now analyze in some detail is
Jackson's Heavenly Creatures (1995), which won a Silver Lion for
the best script at the Venice Film Festival and an Oscar nomination. The
script was co-written by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh and capitalizes on
Jackson's ability to create powerful imagery through special
effects. The narrative is developed from an actual event and is about
two girls who inhabit a fictional world of their own creation. A mixture
of docu-drama, fantasy film, Gothic horror film, and family melodrama,
Heavenly Creatures is based on a true story of matricide committed by
two young schoolgirls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, in the city of
Christchurch in 1954.
Heavenly Creatures begins with a sequence from a 1950s National
Film Unit travelogue of Christchurch, New Zealand. Here the citizens are
more English than the English. The optimistic tones of the
travelogue's voice-over, and its sunny images of a model town, are
interrupted by shots of two teenage girls, bloodied and screaming,
running down a garden path. The violently moving camera affects the
viewer in such a way as to create an empathetic reaction to the
girls' out-of-control emotions. This cinematic device reoccurs
throughout, as the filmmaker wants to induce a sympathetic reaction to
these girls who have murdered one of their mothers. To further this aim,
the actual diaries and fictional writings of the girls are used to let
the viewers know what was going on in their minds at the time. The
nationalist propaganda of the travelogue is thus countered by the
girls' subjective point-of-view of Christchurch society in the
1950s, when an atmosphere of propriety and conformity reigned. The
surrealist filmmaker, Luis Bunuel, used a similar type of satiric
juxtaposition in his mockumentary Land Without Bread (1932) where the
voiceover is heard extolling the beauty of the Spanish countryside,
while the images show us starving children whose faces are covered with
flies.
For all its empathy with the girls, the film does not see their act
of matricide as anything other than horrific. In using matricide as a
central element of the plot structure, it is similar to Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) and the film clearly has elements of the
psychological horror genre. The girls are both monsters and innocent
victims. The disaster is brought about by the two girls' desire to
shape their own destinies (Ribeiro 33). To be a young female with
ambition, intelligence, and imagination in this society seems to be a
recipe for disaster. The repressive atmosphere of 1950s New Zealand has
been well documented in Janet Frame's autobiographical writings, as
well as in Jane Campion's film, An Angel at my Table (1990), which
is derived from them. In many ways Heavenly Creatures can be seen as
espousing a feminist point-of-view due to the fact, no doubt, that it
was co-written with Fran Walsh.
According to Deborah Shepard, the very fact that Heavenly Creatures
is so different in nature from Jackson's splatter films and that it
proceeds from a more feminine viewpoint suggests Walsh's influence.
The idea of making a film about the Parker-Hulme murder came from a
memory Walsh had of reading a sensational account of the story,
Obsession by two international tabloid journalists when she was twelve.
As a teenager Fran Walsh had been drawn to reading about the darker side
of life and could identify with Pauline and Juliet to some extent (155).
Many feminist filmmakers have adopted the genre of the woman's
film, which is itself a form of woman-centered family melodrama. Thomas
Elsaesser states that the current that leads to the family melodrama of
the 1940s and 1950s is derived from the romantic drama, which had its
heyday after the French Revolution but is unthinkable without the
eighteenth-century sentimental novel and its emphasis on private
feelings. The element of interiorization and personalization of what are
primarily ideological conflicts, together with the metaphorical
interpretation of class conflicts as sexual exploitation and rape, is
important in all subsequent forms of melodrama, including that of cinema
(514-515). Thus, the form of the family melodrama can have political
implications, even in Hollywood, since the central characters are often
victims subject to social oppression as in Douglas Sirk's All That
Heaven Allows (1955). Also, (as in Elsaesser's account), the
melodramatic form can be linked to stories pertaining to national
identity (Gledhill 25). In many ways, one can see in Heavenly Creatures
New Zealand's ambivalent rebellion against Britain, as well as its
angst at being deserted by the mother country with the advent of the
European Common Market.
The two girls' relationship in itself is emblematic of
colonial relations as Pauline is a working-class New Zealander and
Juliet's parents are British upper middleclass. Pauline, whose
thoughts the audience shares via a voice-over reading of her actual
diaries, idealizes the sophistication and culture of Juliet and her
family and longs to become one of them. It is their proposed departure
from New Zealand that brings about the crisis point of the film since it
is her despair at not being able to leave with them that causes her to
murder her mother. This crisis can be seen to have parallels with the
trauma of separation that was experienced by many New Zealanders when
Britain cut its close economic ties to its former colony to join the
European Common Market.
In psychoanalytic terms, the murder of Pauline's mother can be
accounted for in that the process of socialization for the female child
involves accepting her "bleeding wound," her lack, and she
remains angry with her mother whom she holds responsible (Kaplan 121).
In a way, the same process could be seen to occur when a settler colony
has to face the fact that, because it is not part of an empire anymore,
it lacks power in the world at large. Of course, this depends on the
actual position of that excolony on the world stage. The United States,
for instance, having had a successful revolution and become a world
power itself tends to produce narratives where the male hero triumphs
over the father figure in symbolic Oedipal conflicts.
The melodramatic imagination underpins many forms of thought
including the Freudian and Marxist account of reality. It is also the
basis of many literary and filmic genres such as the woman's film
and the Gothic horror (Gledhill 20-37). Heavenly Creatures uses both of
these Hollywood genres to address issues that are central to New
Zealand's reality. Teresa A. Goddy explains that gothic tales of
horror use elements of dystopian fantasies that are intimately connected
to the culture that produces them and can articulate the horrors of
history, and register the contradictions from which of the culture they
emerge. For instance, the American Gothic is a literature of darkness
and the grotesque in a country built on the notion of Utopian hope and
harmony (4-5).
New Zealand, which is sometimes called by its inhabitants
"godzone," has also at times seen itself as a paradise of
sorts. Roy Shuker writes of a small but significant body of New Zealand
literary utopianism that reflects that country's historical
development, at critical junctures, as a utopian social experiment
(14-15). But New Zealand, like the United States, also has its dark
side, which is often expressed in the Gothic mode. Of course, like
America, New Zealand is also based on the repression of its indigenous
population and the return of the repressed is what the horror genre can
effectively portray.
Goddy states that the Gothic, despite its formulaic nature and its
easily listed elements--such as the haunted house, the evil villain,
ghosts, gloomy landscapes, madness, terror, suspense and horror--has
rather unclear parameters and is cobbled together of many different
forms (5). Certainly elements of the fantasy genre are obviously
incorporated into Heavenly Creatures. The girls develop a fantasy world
to which they can escape, and its cinematic embodiment through morphing
makes this subjective world particularly important to the impact of the
film. In some ways, this is the same story of adolescent escape from the
real world as Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939). But these
girls never want to go back home, for the New Zealand reality depicted
in the film is a repressive society, which regards their emerging
lesbian identity as a form of madness.
Wade Jennings describes the fantasy genre as involving a quest,
literal or metaphorical, a journey that leads to necessary
self-discovery, a rejection of conventional values, and a climax in
which the protagonist makes a choice between two worlds. Some
protagonists choose to return home but some do not. Thus, the genre
entails a questioning of what constitutes home. The most significant
theme of the fantasy film is freedom; since fantasy denies natural laws
it opens the door to freedom (249-251). This has obvious implications
for narratives that are concerned with issues of national and
postcolonial identity. Like adolescents, settler colonies must establish
their own individual identity as separate from that of the parent.
However, in Heavenly Creatures, Jackson twists the fantasy genre around
because the bid for freedom has such dire consequences. Perhaps, this is
because the settler colony can have such ambivalent feelings towards the
mother country. The fantasy genre has been used by writers like William
Morris to put forward ideals of utopian communities (Mathews 42). But
Heavenly Creatures shows us both the utopian fantasy (in the girls'
vision of a "Fourth World") and the dystopias and nightmares
associated with the Gothic genre in the act of matricide.
It is apt indeed that this contradictory aspect of national
identity should be embodied by two women, for women have often
represented heaven and hell, the angel and the demon. According to Nina
Auerbach, in the nineteenth century, the loss of faith led to the
displacement of spiritual feelings onto the woman, hence the recurring
image of the "angel in the house" (74). But, Auerbach states
that the female invasion of religious iconography is also one agent of
the radically new sort of terror, which, in the nineteenth century,
conflated divinity with demonism. And this conflation is related to the
new British Gothic literature of the time which, at the end of the
eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, reasserted the claims to
attention of the sacred and the sublime in its most primitive
manifestations as an ethics founded on terror. In Victorian England, any
incursion of the supernatural into the natural became ambiguously awful
because unclassifiable. As the primary agent of supernatural activity,
woman hid within her virtue a divine-demonic terror (75). Heavenly
Creatures indeed! Perhaps, the film is warning us not only of the
problematic power of displaced spirituality onto women but also onto the
terrain of national identity, where it can certainly create both heaven
and hell. The creation of images by Romantic painters, in the nineteenth
century, expresses a phenomenon basic to modern times: the shift of
allegiance from religion to nationalism (Janson 465). In New Zealand
this shift seems to be related to the idea of New Zealand as a pastoral
paradise. According to Ian Conrich and David Woods, the most dominant
and persistent New Zealand myth is of an Edenic garden, a natural
utopia. Initially this concept was fabricated as nineteenth century
propaganda to attract European settlers. New Zealand painters maintained
the myth, importing and absorbing European landscape conventions (8-10).
But, as Jonathan Rayner points out, the variety of
landscapes--temperate, tropical and geothermic- contained within the
islands of which the country is composed can suggest an Edenic
diversity, or an imprisoning, infernal purgatory (39).
Ann Hardy, in her article on the transcendental style in Heavenly
Creatures, states that, although New Zealand is a secular society and
few Pakeha filmmakers except Vincent Ward deal with the spiritual
dimension of the land, for the Maori and the Maori filmmakers, such as
Merata Mita and Barry Barclay, that dimension is important. She quotes
Gaylene Preston (a Pakeha woman filmmaker) who sees much of the creative
work coming out of New Zealand as evincing an unresolved tension between
land, art, and spirituality. For Preston, there is something that comes
out of the land that is spooky and which has cost all of New
Zealand's great artists much pain. Further, according to Hardy, the
entry of the girls into a "Fourth World" and their
accompanying visions, as described in their diaries, is offered a
sympathetic elaboration by Alison Laurie and Julie Glamuzina in Parker
and Hulme: A Lesbian View. Port Levy, where the "Fourth World"
vision takes place, had been the site of an important Maori settlement
and the Maori tohunga or priest, consulted by the authors, was of the
opinion that their visionary experience was genuine. Neither was he
surprised that the aftermath of the event ended in violence. It was his
belief that the guardians of that other world sometimes demanded blood
sacrifice (5).
Many stories in Western literature reiterate the need for a human
sacrifice to be made in order to ensure the continuance of the world. An
obvious example of this narrative structure is the death by crucifixion
of Jesus Christ. The girls certainly sacrifice the mother in a bid to
ensure that the imaginative world they have created does not come to an
end. If the mother represents the mundane, working class world of 1950s
New Zealand, it is a world that they violently reject. Hardy describes
their energy as "daemonic," containing both good and evil (6),
that is, they are both angels and devils. Like nineteenth century women
in England, they embody the unease of a displaced spirituality that has
also been associated with the land. In the film's discourse on
postcolonialism, what their vision signifies is that vision of a new
world that is the beginnings of nationalism in a postcolonial society.
But usually for that new world to come about something or someone must
be sacrificed. I think the rejection of the meek and servile colonial
position is signified by the killing of the mother, who for Pauline
embodies subservience and lack in her role as a working class Kiwi wife.
However, the film makes the viewer aware of the contradictions involved
in this rejection. After all matricide is an abhorrent act, and to cut
the ties to one's cultural identity is not an easy task for a
postcolonial subject.
Hardy points out that Heavenly Creatures can be analyzed in terms
of Paul Schrader's description of the Transcendental form in film
narrative. She cites the three stages of this form as 1) The Depiction
of the Everyday, 2) The Growth of a Sense of Disparity, and the arrival
at 3) Stasis or the decisive moment. The sense of the banal in everyday
life induces tension and boredom. This leads to an understanding of the
disparity, or lack of it, evident between the character's sense of
self and the world that becomes unbearable, and there's an
outpouring of human feeling which can have no adequate receptacle in the
everyday life. That emotional relief occurs during the final stage of
disparity, when the character makes an irrevocable choice, and it serves
to freeze the emotional into expression, the disparity into stasis (8).
It is this trajectory which the narrative of the film undertakes as it
follows the girls from their rejection of the everyday reality of New
Zealand, to the creation of another disparate world which cannot exist
with the everyday, to the final terrible act of murder. Perhaps the
terror lies in the paradox that for something new to be born something
old must die, or that death and birth are inextricably linked.
Jocelyn Robson and Beverley Zalcock, in their book on Australian
and New Zealand women filmmakers, discuss the importance of being
ex-colonies to both of these countries' sense of cultural identity.
If New Zealand settlers did not arrive as convicts and therefore did not
reject English culture as readily as the Australians, they still had to
cope with the isolation and the enormous physical demands of the new
environment. The need for survival did encourage collectivity as well as
the rejection of old priorities determined according to social status.
This experience shaped various images and myths of national identity
which in New Zealand took the shape of "The Good Keen Man,"
where the emphasis fell on unsophistication, on a celebration of
vulgarity, and on "doing it yourself." The striking features
of these identities are, of course, their maleness and whiteness. For
women there was little of interest in this thing called national
identity (4-5).
However, by the 1970s, as Robson and Zalcock point out, fuelled by
the civil rights movement and feminism, there were some major changes in
consciousness. Maori nationalism was gaining momentum and the role of
the United States in the Vietnam War, Britain's entry into the EEC
and the developing economic prowess of several Asian states were all
giving impetus to questions of national identity and helping to create a
new assertiveness. Old myths continued to find expression in a number of
"boys' films" but some distinctive films by women
directors were also being created. Many of these films focused on three
major preoccupations: the family, the landscape, and ethnicity. It is as
if filmmakers were exploring what had previously been omitted, the
experiences of women and the dark side of the collectivity myth. Jane
Campion and Alison Maclean are two among these New Zealand filmmakers.
Merata Mita explores the Maori experience. And often the land is
represented not as a tourist's paradise but in its more sinister
aspects (6-7).
Heavenly Creatures falls into the category of New Zealand
women's films that look at the underside of the national myth even
though its director is male. Both, because it focuses on two female
protagonists, and because the script is co-written with Fran Walsh this
film qualifies as a feminist film. It also follows the narrative mode
used by most other New Zealand women's films. As Robson and Zalcock
explain, New Zealand women filmmakers have produced a body of work that
is mostly described as psychodrama with a feminist tilt. The New Zealand
feminist psychodrama is closely allied with the psychological thriller
and has a heightened preoccupation with gender, especially gender
confusions and conflicts (7-8).
However, most of the Australian and New Zealand feminist films have
a female protagonist who triumphs over odds as in Gillian
Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979) and Jane Campion's The
Piano (1993). The protagonists of Heavenly Creatures come to a dire end
as they are imprisoned and separated forever. Heavenly Creatures is
closer to Campion's Sweetie (1989), the tale of two sisters who
have been harmed by their dysfunctional family life. Sweetie's
younger sister is particularly anarchic and destructive in her
relationship with people and it is she who is mad and dies at the end.
Robson and Zalcock see her as representing "a force that is
presented in the film as potentially liberational but also deeply
destructive" (76). The girls in Heavenly Creatures also represent
such a force, where the bid for freedom teeters into chaos in opposing
itself to a social order that borders on tyranny. The breaking away from
the parents, or the parent country, can be dangerous, but is also
necessary for the establishment of an independent identity. Perhaps,
this is even more so for women who are even further outside the norm
because of their "deviance," sexual or otherwise.
Elizabeth Guzik allies Heavenly Creatures with the New Queer Cinema
of the 90s in its self-conscious play with the conventions of the
"killer-dyke" narrative. For her, the film demonstrates how
women on the margins, in terms of both sexuality and nationality, can
shape mass media images, whether those of heterosexual romance or
Hollywood films, to their own desires. The use of fandom in the film
also reveals New Zealand's struggle to come to terms with its
national identity (48-49). The two girls use various male hero figures
that they call "the saints," including Mario Lanza and Orson
Welles, as a means to access their lesbian sexuality. By taking on the
roles of these male figures, and through the use of fairytale romance
narratives in their fantasy kingdom of Borovnia, they enact heterosexual
roles that allow them to imagine a lesbian romance. As Guzik points out,
this mirrors in some ways the position of New Zealand as a postcolonial
nation in 1994 when the film was made. She sees New Zealanders as
splitting their interests among "four mistresses" because of
their complex history. Not only are they attached to their own land, but
they also have affiliations with Australia, Britain, and the United
States. Thus New Zealanders tend to work out their national identity
through the myths and icons of other cultures (55). Nick Perry suggests
that post-modern pastiche has acquired particular local energies in New
Zealand and Australia. In cultures instituted by colonization, bricolage
is a way of life and therefore there is a developed awareness of
culture, including the idea of a national culture as artifice (14). I
think that Jackson himself, in this film as well as in earlier ones, has
used the genres of Hollywood cinema to describe the postcolonial
condition of New Zealand.
This poses the question of what links queer concerns to those of
postcolonial artists and thinkers. This question is central to an
understanding of Heavenly Creatures since the film seems to make this
link itself. Guzik writes that the national citizen is a male, abstract
subject, thus female subjects can only be citizens by masquerading as
men. Once a woman makes herself even more sexualized, by declaring
herself to be someone who practices a sexuality that is read as
aberrant, she will further embody herself. Even if lesbians remove
themselves from the economy of sexual exchange, the perceived deviancy
of lesbian sexual acts would still increase their abject or liminal
status, and disrupt the possibility of abstraction so necessary for the
definition of citizen. Instead of having access to Anderson's
imagined communities, lesbians are reduced to "imaginable
communities."
This, in itself, can lead to an inclination to appropiate images,
texts, or elements of other cultures without full consideration of the
colonizing influences at work (Guzlik 56-57). Thus, it seems to me that
both the lesbian and the postcolonial subject are prone to an openness
to the myths and icons of others. For instance, Michelle Elleray, in her
article on Heavenly Creatures, sees the girls' mode of performing
lesbian sex through a heterosexual paradigm as paralleled by the process
of the settler whose reality is mediated through another culture's
symbolism and categories (237). This openness to the texts of others can
be seen as a liability (as it is by Elleray) but it can also be seen as
a positive attribute in that it makes for an openness to multiple
meanings and an avoidance of essentialism. At least this is the point of
view of postmodern/poststructuralist thinkers like Jean-Francois Lyotard
(66-67).
I will argue that Heavenly Creatures is a postmodern film because
of its openness to multiple meanings, and its uses of different
Hollywood genres. Barbara Creed describes postmodern queer cinema as
using appropriation and pastiche, irony and the reworking of history.
These films break with the older humanist tradition of gay identity
politics and the "positive image" films that accompanied them,
and are influenced by poststructuralist theories of subjectivity. She
claims that, like Lyotard, queer theoreticians call for the abandonment
of a universal truth that would apply to all (160-163). Thus, an
openness to multiple truths can be seen as a defining feature of
postmodern queer cinema.
As Heavenly Creatures is dealing with lesbianism and its political
implications, it can be seen as related to queer cinema. Laurie and
Glamuzina point out that the local and international media coverage
seized upon the girls' "special relationship," with a
resulting association of lesbianism with "evil," insanity, and
criminality (73). Chris Watson, in his article on the film, links its
themes with Foucault's ideas on the control of sexuality as a way
by which the middle classes exercise power (14-27).
Linda Hutcheon argues that the type of postmodern film that
questions the status quo works to subvert society's system of
values from within. Their deliberately unresolved paradoxes serve to
underline the complex contradictions within our socially determined
patterns of thinking (5). The central paradox within Heavenly Creatures
is that the girls are both victims and victimizers. The tyranny of the
social order of 1950s New Zealand denies them freedom of expression but
their bid for freedom leads them to commit murder. The problematics of
individual free will are underlined in the film by their hero worship of
Orson Welles, a young rebellious artist figure, whom they meet in his
role of villain in Carol Reed The Third Man (1949). Their identification
with various masculine heroes allows them to express their sexuality but
also leads them further and further into violence. And that violence
leads them to the ultimate horrific act of matricide.
A similar postmodern queer film is Derek Jarman's Edward II
(1991) Susan Broadhurst sees this type of film as concerned with
"liminal politics". She regards Edward II as directly
political in that it demands the repeal of all anti-gay laws. However,
the film denies closure by integrating past and present events,
disrupting cinematic space and fragmenting the narrative structure. As
well, the inclusion of Jarman's subjective fears and desires calls
for subjective identification and participation by the spectator. Yet,
character identification is problematized for both Edward II and his
lover, Gaveston, commit violent murders (120).
As I have argued previously, the forwarding of contradictions and
paradoxes is central to the kind of postmodern film that questions the
status quo (Alemany-Galway 5-6). It is a central aspect of Heavenly
Creatures in its forwarding of the problematics of postcolonialism. As
Linda Hutcheon states, there are clear links between postcolonialism and
postmodernism, although there are also many differences. Some texts do
engage with the overlap of their formal and thematic concerns. Thematic
concerns regarding history and marginality, and discursive strategies
like allegory and irony are all shared by both the postmodern and the
postcolonial (130-131).
I do not think that all of Jackson's films can be considered
postmodern, but I will argue that Heavenly Creatures is both
postcolonial and postmodern in its use of multiple discourses and
narrative genres to forward contradictory truths. To construct a
national identity in postcolonial times can be both a necessity and a
problem, as it is for New Zealand. In the postmodern age, with its
suspicion of "grand narratives," the contradictions inherent
in nation building are apparent and inform films like Heavenly
Creatures. The film adopts a questioning attitude and alludes to the
contradictory nature of nationalism and national identity, which can be
allied to both heaven and hell, utopia and dystopia. For one thing, just
as Pauline and Juliet are both victims and victimizers, a settler colony
is built on an act of destruction of the indigenous society, while
itself being a victim from the imperial center.
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