Top of the Lake

Adapting Raymond Chandler right after World War II, Hollywood discovered a sure-fire narrataive formula in pictures like "The Big Sleep." A detective story, generally the search for a lost person or thing, provides a loose framework on which to sling vivid character portraits of eccentric and sexually deviant criminals, con-men, entertainers, millionaires, etc. These narratives employ naive, but resourceful, outsiders who gradually penetrate networks of depravity festering in remote or isolated communities. The outsider's journey of discovery simulates the viewer's participation in the story, decoding events to perceive a sinister pattern. By nature episodic, these kinds of narrtives can assume great length and, often involve, torturous plots -- Faulkner, who helped to write "The Big Sleep," claimed that neither he nor director Howard Hawks understood the story. The fascination that these stories exerts has almost nothing to do with the narrative's ostensible plot -- rather, the tale fascinates because of its unusual and menacing characters, and, frequently, its exotic, carefully observed setting. "Chinatown" ends in a place that no one can decipher; "True Detective," a noteworthy recent example of this genre, explores rural poverty in Eastern Louisiana and, of course, the tribal habits of career cops; "Top of the Lake," Jane Campion's engrossing mini-series, plunges into the multi-cultural and male chauvinist milieu of New Zealand's improbably mountainous outback. In setting, Campion's show resembles a paradigm of the genre, David Lynch's "Twin Lakes" -- both programs assemble their casts of isolates, visionaries, and monstrous villains in a remote village surrounded by sinister and majestic landscapes that threaten to engulf the characters in their malign indifference. Campion's show is more naturalistic -- at least, on the evidence of the two episodes that I review here -- and her motives are clearer than Lynch's perverse, self-generating narrative that, ultimately, had nowhere to go. Campion's subject, similar to previous films including the highly regareded "The Piano," is feminism tested by immersion in a society that is male-dominated to the point of madness. Her strength is that she doesn't really take sides -- her brutish men are, often, sexually appealing and exert a strong erotic attraction on her female characters. Her feminists are, often, loony, moon-struck dreamers and her vision of an all-female society, a feminist colony in which the women live in storage containers, genuflect to an eerie white-haired crone (brilliantly played by Holly Hunt), and sit around discussing marital traumas and masturbation all day, represents a solution to male-female conflict and masculine power that is as sinister and vicious, it seems, as the drunken all-male cameraderie of the taverns where the boys gather to plot their rapes and murders. This show is mostly atmosphere and acting -- the locations are astounding: a narrow Loch Ness-style lake, said to contain a throbbing demon's heart according to Maori legend, ensconced in mountains that look like something an eight-year-old might draw, sheer pointed peaks, glaciers, and canyons clogged with rain-forest jungle. And the acting seems to me to be pitch-perfect, although much of what is said involves New Zealand accents and argot so dense as to be inaudible to my Minnesota ears. The plot involves a pregnant 12-year old who refuses to identify the father of her child and, then, goes missing. The little girl is the daughter of a alpha-male bad guy, although as the program advances the father's motives becomes increasingly complex and his personality develops in surprising ways. The bad guy lives on a compound surrounded by gates, smokes pot openly when the detective interviews him, and seems to have impregnated half the women in the community. He menaces everyone and is a savage bully. But he also seems to love his daughter and appears to have raised her to be some sort of woman warrior, an avenger of her gender. At first, the little girl seems frail and desperate but, later, when we see her armed with a shotgun and riding a horse through the mountains, one has the sense that there is much more to this character than mere victim and pretense for the show's quest. The detective entering this unknown terrain, in fact, has come from this community, but been absent for many years -- apparently, the young woman detective seeking the identity of the man who raped the little girl lives in Sydney, the metropolis to which everyone refers, and she is estranged from her mother, probably because the older woman, a kind of aging hippie, lives with a Maori boyfrien who periodically beats her. (The relationship begs the question of the heroine's father -- a man who has drowned in the lake and whose shoes the detective caresses, murmuring "Daddy.") The young woman seems, at first, to represent feminism, the role of women in the modern world, but, in fact, she is also complex and her relationship to the men around her is ambiguous. The program suggests that the matriarch of the feminist compound (the storage container colony) is in mortal combat with the alpha-male patriarch of the male-dominated society behind the locked gates across the lake. But, in fact, the two characters, with their oracular pronouncements and their flowing white hair, seem very much alike, prophets of their respective domains doomed to collide precisely they are so similar to one another. The series is dense with interesting characters and strange confrontations. Campion understands that the two sexes, ultimately, reside in different worlds but that they are inextricably entangled -- the separatist female commune operates on bizarre principles (one matron goes into town to have sexual encounters that she has been told by the matriarch must last less than seven minutes)and one has the sense that the alpha-male's proudest possession is his warrior-daughter, fleeing the authorities, armed, dangerous and pregnant in the High Sierra. A little scene embodies the complexity of Campion's vision. A wealthy man is ferried to the compound by helicopter and drops off his teenage daugher who hates him. The wealthy man has divorced his longsuffering wife for a much younger woman and the spurned woman has fled to the compound -- she is the one with the seven-minute sexual adventures. The rich man seems brutish, ugly, and insensitive. But before he leaves in his helicopter, he comes upon his daughter seated by a stream playing her guitar. Suddenly, he begins to sing with extraordinary passion, scat-singing in which he imitates a guitar while flailing away with his own air-guitar The girl refuses to look at him but, nonetheless, imitates the sounds that he is making and plays a kind of tiny duet with him -- clearly, there is some connection between the father and daughter, probably extending far back into her childhood that all the misery of the present with its betraysls and calamities has not wholly effaced.