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Clearly context is everything, because between the production line of alternative facts and the free-jazz arcs of television soaps, a shared (unhinged) writing ethos prevails.
Frederic Jameson, theorist and fatalist, who believed we’d reached a point of cultural production that was purely pastiche, that was wholly incapable of generating the new (whatever that is), also once called conspiracy the “poor man’s cognitive mapping.” If that’s true, it points to folk histories and sort-of oral traditions, the passing round of mythic solutions to the maddening opacity of big government and corporate subterfuge. What most conspiracy theories and their unhinged peddlers have in common is a love of fiction—the upholding of a serialised narrative, tilled and pruned in real time by earnest acolytes, like sprawling Rosetta tablets of collaborative invention. Clearly context is everything, because between the production line of alternative facts and the free-jazz arcs of television soaps, a shared (unhinged) writing ethos prevails. Take Shortland Street, for example.
Most people will know Shortland Street by osmosis, but there are some, I’m sure, who have doggedly followed the show since it first aired in 1992. Either way, most are familiar with the show as a uniquely Kiwi property amidst a slew of mid-budget soap operas. Like Ouroboros (the cosmic snake eating its own tail), the soap opera is a dizzying model of endlessness, and Shortland Street is no exception. What makes it distinct is certainly not the hospital setting, or even the reachy diversity of its casting (Lord knows it tries but the zeitgeist moves faster than a casting agent on Ritalin), but its regional limitations, its New Zealand- ness, and its ongoing search for an identity separate from better-funded imports.
Much like QAnon, Shortland Street is a collective creative writing project that takes a roster of existing characters and forces them into increasingly novel encounters. It’s a methodology anyone who has ever played The Sims will recognise: a spacious diorama that, unbound by the constraints of seasons, aspires to a synecdoche of life itself, which it mostly achieves in its anachronistic adherence to schedular viewing, coexisting with its audience every weeknight at 7pm like a never-ending film. Historically, Shortland Street has been a stopgap for an absent New Zealand image on big and small screens, a fetish of Kiwiana amidst a glut of American media—and so (you’d think) perfectly poised to critically engage life as it’s lived here, rather than service the didactic hegemons otherwise clogging our channels.
Shortland Street, in its varied run, is, has been, and will predictably continue to be, a bit of both. Resistant in its early queerness and in its mostly diverse casting, conformist in its heteronormative upholding of coupledom. Resistant in its fictionalised mirroring of an appointed Māori Health Authority, conformist in its positioning of public health as Empire’s benevolence. Whatever its intention, it can’t help but be a utopian project (one ultimately doomed to fail) in as much as it retrofits reality towards something more palatable. Which is exactly what you might expect from our national character of false modesty and Little Guy exceptionalism—a show well-meaning, but ultimately misguided.
Samuel Te Kani is a writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He writes critically on art and cinema and is the author of a collection of short fiction titled Please, Call Me Jesus (2021) from Dead Bird Books. He is currently working on a Netflix-funded short film.
Header image: Temuera Morrison as Dr Hone Ropata and Michael Galvin as Dr Chris Warner in Shortland Street. Courtesy of South Pacific Pictures
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