Good Fry Pork Pie, The Abrogator and The Piano Finger
These three texts exist in New Zealand film and the filmic intersections
with literary equivalents show that postmodernism, postcolonialism and
neocolonialism are structures which are perpetuated in film as well
as literature. The first film indicates that New Zealanders are able to
laugh at themselves—as long as the film involves a Mini—but the
other two show that Pakeha unease and dis-ease still intersect with
Pakeha New Zealand Lit. Questions of anxiety, uncertainty, evasion,
ambiguity, ambivalence, deceptions, disclosures and the slipperiness evident
in the Pakeha sense of self indicate that the post-settler identity of
the New Zealand Pakeha is still in a whole heap of trouble. This is
evidenced in the sidelining of Maori characters to the margins of discourse
and, in particular, the metaphoric cutting off of the finger in the
award-winning film, Piano. Thus, the paper will
also discuss
dismemberment as a Pakeha response to having no culture, genital mutilation,
pornographic culture, the conflicting discourses of homo-erotic and
hetero-erotic narratives in the film concerned—and the crucial
question of what happened to the finger? It was not, as far as the author of
this paper is aware, thrown out of a plane.
