Top of the Lake

Great mystery follows the model of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes’ stories. An event occurs that seems beyond the range of ordinary experience, an atrocity that can’t be assimilated to sociology or natural explanation -- the only possible explanation appears to be supernatural. And, then, the detective intervenes and the wonderful mythological calamity, the supernatural eruption into our world, is explained in terms of ordinary, if complex, depravity. As a result the genre is inherently disappointing -- the wonderful, impenetrable darkness that looms over the opening parts of the narrative, a fabulous night abounding in intimations of weird gods and monsters, is dispelled. We are left with mere evidence of human frailty and, often, the narrative turns inward -- the detective ends up seeming as monstrous and frail and wicked as the criminals that he encounters, and, ultimately brings to justice. On the moors, the footprint of a monstrous dog is seen, a murder occurs in a locked room, in “True Detective,” the corpse of a woman is decked with the horns of a stag, and in Jane Campion and Garth Davis’ “Top of the Lake,” an eleven-year-old girl is pregnant and declares that the father of her baby is “no one.” In the end of “Top of the Lake,” the mystery is solved; we learn the paternity of the child and come to understand why the teenage-mother thinks that there is no father for her infant. The most vicious of the bad guys, who turns out to be not as bad as we thought, is killed. Order is restored to the world and what is lost is found The outcome is intrinsically disappointing, all loose ends tied-up logically enough, but without accounting for the pall of the eerie, the downright weird, and the archetypal that hovers magically over most of the six-hours of the series. Set on the shores of a majestic fjord -- it’s really a great, inland loch -- amidst the pinnacles and glaciers of the South Island of New Zealand, “Top of the Lake” makes use of a bizarre and magnificent landscape as the stage for its Gothic fairytale. At one end of the lake, a commune of women live in storage containers, a colony of female refugees under the spell of a crone, enigmatically played by Holly Hunter. The women’s commune is called “Paradise” and it seems a quixotic attempt to imagine what a world and society would be like without men and their casual brutality and violence -- ultimately, Campion is honest enough to show that Paradise is pretty nightmarish, that the society of women is no less atrocious and retrograde than the society of men. At the opposite side of the lake, an alpha male and bully Matt lives in a compound that embodies a wholly masculine world -- the place is full of dogs, women who seem to occupy a status lower than the dogs, and half feral sons and brothers. This place, paranoid, and surrounded by surveillance cameras and armed to the teeth is the male equivalent of Paradise -- the other thought experiment that the series proposes: what would a wholly masculine world be like? In between these two extremes, which both seem oppressive and inhuman, totalitarian regimes based upon gender, there is a village where people go about their ordinary daily lives -- although since this is New Zealand everything seems a bit offbalance; the people are all tattooed elaborately and they seem to drink a great deal and fight with one another. (It’s a bit a like the world in Lee Tamahori’s “Once were Warriors”, another picture set in New Zealand and featuring Maori culture.) The bulk of the series concerns the search for the pregnant 11 year old -- the little girl has absconded to the wilderness -- rainforests and glacial canyons -- above the lake, and, like everyone else in New Zealand, she is armed and dangerous, a kind of indomitable woman warrior. A young woman from Sydney, Australia is visiting her dying mother who lives in the town and since she is a female detective and experienced in child sexual abuse cases she becomes involved in the search for the pregnant child -- a search that has a natural and suspenseful deadline based upon the baby’s due date. The young woman fled the village years before after being gang-raped and she spends much of the series either drunk or sulking. She falls in love with the son of the alpha male Matt whose daughter has gone missing and there are a variety of interesting romantic entanglements, barroom brawls, and menacing encounters. Obviously, there is some kind of larger skullduggery afoot and, after the fashion of a typical crime film, our heroine quickly finds herself in deep, and dark, waters. The action plays out against gender differences that are starkly and, I think, honestly dramatized. In New Zealand, the men and women often seem to be members of different species, scarcely able to communicate except by violence and rape. The show is lyrically filmed and takes great advantage of the natural beauty of the environs and the clash between male and female visions of nature and reality is effectively portrayed. In one scene, Tui, the pregnant child, gives birth behind a kind of wet stump, a bird impassively watching her; a child falls off a mountain and cascades thousands of feet to his death and, then, when his body is brought back across the lake in a boat, the dead boy’s mother runs hip-deep in the lake to pull the boy from the boat and cradle his corpse, even though the dead body is almost as large as she is. When Tui shoots down her assailants, she hisses, a feral sound, like a cat or a goose. The seven episodes have their dull passages and, periodically, the narrative gets confusing and doesn’t make much sense -- there are too many red herrings and some extraneous characters. For five episodes, no one can find Tui and she seems to be perfectly concealed in the outback. For the last two episodes, everyone seems to know where she is and, yet, no one really comes to her aid except a half-crazy old man whose mother was a midwife and who is wholly ineffectual in assisting her. The radical sex-segregated communes that organize the action and provide the schematic structure for the story are revealed to embody their opposites: Holly Hunter’s guru is a sibyl who speaks in a gruff no-nonsense voice and seems more decisive and misogynistic than most of the men in the show: she characterizes her followers as “crazy bitches” and leaves them, ostensibly to found another commune in Iceland. Matt, the leader of the male commune, is obsessed with his mother and flagellates himself on her grave and, in some ways, seems more feminine than many of the rather hard-bitten, practical and desperate female characters. Although the show’s ending brings us to a conclusion that dispels many of the program’s beautiful mysteries, an ending that is a bit too prosaic for me and too logical, this is a crime show that plays fair -- it follows its premises to their logical conclusions, and, unlike “Twin Peaks”, for instance, actually resolves most of the issues that are posed by the narrative. It’s an excellent crime film and worth the investment of six hours. (The 2013 series written by Jane Campion with Gerard Lee is available on Netflix.)