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2024 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

11. Tracing Trans/National/Textual Limits in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake: China Girl

verfasst von : Blythe Worthy

Erschienen in: Adapting Television and Literature

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Through a host of characters, Jane Campion’s BBC UKTV series Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017) draws on and reflects a diverse adaptation network, focused on transnational communities such as nations and suburbs and those who threaten their cohesion. From historical Australian serial fiction to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1871 novel Devils, revolutionary manifestos and oral histories, Campion appropriates a variety of texts to analyse glocal social embodiment, questioning the white supremacy of Australia’s screen culture, using what Anne Anlin Cheng has termed “Ornamentalism.” As nations converge in the series, Worthy considers the intermedial practices of television culture, including international streaming on OTT platforms, to question the slippery nature of influence and transnationalism, and how Campion interprets them in a modern Australian context. This chapter is forward-looking in its interdisciplinary approach—analysing the limits around the texts deemed appropriate for literary studies as a way of showing television’s capacity to denaturalise certain divisions in society and culture, while also considering the intermedial limitations of texts, and of the media that convey them.

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Rebecca Nicholson, “Top of the Lake: China Girl finale recap – uneven and bizarre to the bitter end,” The Guardian Online, September 1, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/31/top-of-the-lake-china-girl-finale-recap-uneven-and-bizarre-to-the-bitter-end

Anne Anlin Cheng, “Ornamentalism: A Feminist Theory for the Yellow Woman,” Critical Inquiry 44, no. 3 (2018): 415. https://doi.org/10.1086/696921

Kamilla Elliott, Theorizing Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 34.

Linda Hutcheon and Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation, 2nd edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013). https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203095010, 8–9.

W. Higbee and S. H. Lim “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies,” Transnational Cinemas 1, no 1 (2010): 7–21, https://doi.org/10.1386/trac.1.1.7/1

Frantz Fanon, Charles Lam Markmann, Sardar Ziauddin and Homi K. Bhabha, Black Skin, White Masks, 3rd edition (1952; repr. London: Pluto, 2008), 5.

“Behind the scenes: Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake,” https://www.televisual.com/news/behind-the-scenes-jane-campion-s-top-of-the-lake_bid-469/, accessed 4 July, 2023.

Estella Tincknell, Jane Campion and Adaptation: Angels, Demons and Unsettling Voices (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan), 2013, 17.

Though Newell primarily looks at print adaptations, her theorising concerning the sprawl of adaptation networks is useful when considering texts that use multiple intertextual influences to construct an adaptation. For more on Genette’s transtextuality. See Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 83–84. Also see: Kate Newell, Expanding Adaptation Networks from Illustration to Novelization (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017), 1.

M. Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,” in N. Durovicová and K. Newman, World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (London: Routledge/American Film Institute Reader), 13–14, 12.

Tessa Dwyer, “Changing Accents: Place, Voice and Top of the Lake,” Studies in Australasian Cinema 12, no. 1 (2018), 15, https://doi.org/10.1080/17503175.2018.1426403

Steven Peacock, Swedish Crime Fiction: Novel, Film, Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 17.

Peacock, Swedish Crime Fiction, 17.

Peacock, 16.

“The use of Campion’s name as a metonym for larger industry categories has not been limited to advocates of a ‘women’s cinema’. Also, throughout her career, Campion’s name has been used as an indication of the state of either the Australian or New Zealand film industries, a matter on which she has been equally evasive.” See: Deb Verhoeven, Jane Campion (New York: Routledge, 2009), 7.

Citing Campion’s Australian features Sweetie (1989) and Holy Smoke (1999), Cooper argues that Campion’s Aotearoan citizenship is similarly fragmented when analysed in detail. See: Annabelle Cooper, “On Campion as an Antipodean,” Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity, eds. Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox and Irène Bessière (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009).

Tincknell, Jane Campion and Adaptation, 2.

Peacock, Swedish Crime Fiction, 16. Some of the best-known Nordic noir authors include Jo Nesbø from Norway, Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, the Martin Beck series of novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Camilla Läckberg from Sweden, Jussi Adler-Olsen from Denmark and Arnaldur Indriðason from Iceland.

Peacock, Swedish Crime Fiction, 16.

Peacock, 16.

Yvonne Griggs, “Reconfiguring the Nordic Noir Brand: Nordic Noir TV Crime Drama as Remake,” The Routledge Companion to Adaptation (Oxon: Routledge, 2018), 278–86.

Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 149.

Hutcheon, 142.

Sean O’Sullivan, “Six Elements of Serial Narrative,” Narrative 27, no. 1: (2019), 54, https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2019.0003

“Through her close friendship with the show’s most significant Māori character, Jamie (Luke Buchanan), Tui comes to understand the mysterious, assaultive events she has experienced in relation to the story of Matāu and Manata, and to conceptualise the heteropatriarchal settler state as the ogre whose body persists in shaking the town. Robin can only perceive this structural issue—that is, the residue of colonialism that underlies the sexual violence she experienced and investigates—by listening carefully to Tui and Jamie. It is this encounter, which exceeds and often defies police procedure, that offers a provisionally utopian potential, one not grounded in a specific place (or idea of a place) but in community-building through conversation.” See So Mayer, “Paradise, Built in Hell: Decolonising Feminist Utopias in Top of the Lake (2013),” Feminist Review 116, no. 1 (2017): 105, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41305-017-0066-7.105

Betty Kaklamanidou, “Introduction,” New Approaches to Contemporary Adaptation, eds. Betty Kaklamanidou et al. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020), 7.

Rebecca Nicholson, “Top of the Lake: China Girl recap, episode five – we’re finally getting somewhere,” The Guardian, August 25, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/24/top-of-the-lake-china-girl-recap-episode-five-were-finally-getting-somewhere

For example, Sue Turnbull describes tone in crime dramas as changing “in the blink of an eye.” See Sue Turnbull, TV Crime Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 3, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748678181

Puss tells Robin Padma killed herself but is an unreliable source.

Jason Mittell, Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 41.

Sonia Saraiya, “Jane Campion Explains Reasons Behind ‘China Girl’ in New Top of the Lake Season,” Variety, (August 30, 2017), https://variety.com/2017/tv/features/jane-campion-top-of-the-lake-china-girl-1202541887/

Blythe Worthy, “Photosensitive Primetime: Race and Recovery in Top of the Lake: China Girl,” Refocus: Jane Campion, eds. Alexia Bowler and Adele Jones (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, May, 2023).

Annabelle Cooper, “On Campion as an Antipodean,” Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity, eds. Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox and Irène Bessière (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009).

In Australian film and television, citizens of East Asian extraction are often represented via migrant stories (such as Clara Law’s Floating Life [1996] or Benjamin Law’s The Family Law [SBS, 2016–2019]), with Southeast Asian people routinely recalled in refugee narratives, and rarely in a favourable light. See Saraiya, “Jane Campion Explains Reasons Behind ‘China Girl’.”

For more on recent transculturalisms in Australian/Asian media see: Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue, “Introduction: Australia in the field of trans-Asian media flows,” Media International Australia 175(1), 2020, 3–5, https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X20907410

From 1888–1901, for example, the editors of The Bulletin published 89 or more articles, 35 poems, 27 short stories and numerous cartoons dealing exclusively with white settler anxieties targeted at Chinese immigrants. See Ouyang Yu, “The Chinese in the Bulletin Eyes, 1888–1901,” Southerly 55, no. 2 (1995): 130–43.

Yu, “The Chinese in the Bulletin Eyes.”

Henry Lawson, “Straight Talk: The New Religion,” by Joe Swallow, Albany Observer, 5 July 1890, 3.

Cheng, “Ornamentalism,” 415.

Phil May’s 1886 cartoon “The Mongolian Octopus,” which depicted a caricature of a Chinese man as an octopus embracing the crimes of cheap labour, gambling, immorality, small-pox, opium smoking, bribery and customs robbery is thought to have initiated the flow of anti-Chinese sentiment in the 1880s. See “The Mongolian Octopus: his grip on Australia 1886,” The Dictionary of Sydney, accessed 5 July, 2023, https://dictionaryofsydney.org/media/1672

F. Bret Harte, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (also known as “The Heathen Chinee”), Overland Monthly, September 1870.

Henry Lawson, “Ah Soon,” The Lone Hand 11, no. 64, August 1912, 324–328

Yu, “The Chinese in the Bulletin Eyes.”

Cheng, “Ornamentalism,” 416.

Cheng, 416.

Cheng, 418.

Cheng, 419.

Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Television and Serial Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2017), 90. Wells-Lassagne also gives the example of Sanford and Son ([NBC, 1972–1977], which adapted the BBC1 sitcom Steptoe and Son [1962–1974]), among others.

Jennifer M. Jeffers, Britain Colonized: Hollywood’s Appropriation of British Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 233.

The character Hugh utters this line in Act 2, Scene 2. Bryan Friel, Translations, In Plays: I (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 419.

Claire McCarthy, “Adaptations down Under: Reading National Identity through the Lens of Adaptation Studies,” The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, eds. Dennis Ray Cutchins et al., (New York: Routledge, 2017), 218.

The entrapment of People of Colour into corporeal slavery has been explored via narratives of biocolonialism in the Antipodes before, in texts such as Māori author Patricia Grace’s 1998 novel Baby No Eyes.

Yu Ouyang, “Lawson, Gunn and the ‘White Chinaman’: a Look at How Chinese Are Made White in Henry Lawson and Mrs. Aeneas Gunn’s Writings,” LiNQ 30, no. 2 (2003): 10–23.

Hilary Neroni, “Feminist Filmmaking on Television: Lacan, Phallic Enjoyment, and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake,” Intertexts 21, no. 1–2 (2017): 115–35, https://doi.org/10.1353/itx.2017.0005

Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia. University Press, 1993), 2.

“‘Top of the Lake: China Girl’ Q&A | Jane Campion, Gerard Lee, Ariel Kleiman, and Alice Englert,” YouTube Video, 42:08, posted by Film at Lincoln Center, September 25, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4YXYT8DBqc&ab_channel=FilmatLincolnCenter

Saraiya, “Jane Campion Explains Reasons Behind ‘China Girl’.”

Hannah Ellis-Peterson, “Jane Campion: my Top of the Lake research involved sneaking into brothels,” The Guardian, July 19, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jul/18/jane-campion-my-top-of-the-lake-research-involved-sneaking-into-brothels

Secularism is negotiated through the construction of real, imagined and anticipated losses, including losses of patriarchal, white Christian hegemony. See Sophie Sunderland, “Grieving secularism: Jane Campion’s secular daughters in spiritual spaces,” Studies in Australasian Cinema 6, no. 1 (2012): 73–85, https://doi.org/10.1386/sac.6.1.73_1

Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2015), 26.

“‘Top of the Lake: China Girl’ Q&A | Jane Campion, Gerard Lee, Ariel Kleiman, and Alice Englert.”

In “Feminist Filmmaking on Television” Neroni provides a more thorough investigation of the other collective of characters of the series, a group of men who monitor a website that tracks the Silk 41 women and other sex workers in Sydney called Hooker Rater.

“‘Top of the Lake: China Girl’ Q&A | Jane Campion, Gerard Lee, Ariel Kleiman, and Alice Englert.”

Newell, “Adaptation Networks,” 24.

Newell, 25.

The Devils is also known as The Possessed and Demons. Campion admitted as such during audience questions at the Melbourne International Film Festival screening of Top of the Lake: China Girl. MIFF Talks Presents Top of the Lake: China Girl, Sun 6th August, 2017, 12:30 pm–2:00 pm, Comedy Theatre, 240 Exhibition Street, Melbourne. Event details available at https://miff.com.au/festival-archive/films/id/27230 last accessed 3/8/2021

The Devils was based on newspaper articles detailing the assassination of a revolutionary known to Dostoevsky. Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia, “The Possessed.” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 7, 2015, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Possessed-novel-by-Dostoyevsky

D. D. Minaev, “Prazdnichnye podarki ‘Iskry,’” Iskra, April 15, 1873, qtd. in “Primechaniia” to Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, by F. M. Dostoevskii, V. G. Bazanov et al. (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo “Nauka,” Leningradskoe otd-nie, 1972–1990), 12:260.

F. M. Dostoevsky, Notebooks for A Raw Youth, Edward Wasiolek, trans. Victor Terras (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 187, 236–7.

Greta Matzner-Gore, Dostoevsky and the Ethics of Narrative Form: Suspense, Closure, Minor Characters (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020).

Muriel Andrin, “Her-Land: Jane Campion’s Cinema, or Another Poetic of the Inner Sense,” eds. Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox and Irène Bessière, Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 28–29.

These often-surreal sequences that puncture but do not affect the overall plot of the series can also function, as I have written elsewhere, as safe spaces in which vulnerable characters like Padma can hide (given she is, as a living person, otherwise excluded from the plot). See: Worthy, “Photosensitive Primetime.”

Rochelle Simmons, “The Suburb in Jane Campion Films,” eds. Hilary Radner, Alistair Fox and Irène Bessière, Jane Campion: Cinema, Nation, Identity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 176–177.

Ellis-Peterson, “Jane Campion: my Top of the Lake research involved sneaking into brothels.”

Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996) via Newell, Expanding Adaptation Networks, 35.

Newell, 36.

Mikhail Bakhtin and Caryl Emerson, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 252.

Richard Pope and Judy Turner, “Toward Understanding Stavrogin,” Slavic Review 49, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 545.

Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 250.

Newell, Expanding Adaptation Networks, 36.

Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 630.

Newell, Expanding Adaptation Networks, 36.

Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 252.

Newell, Expanding Adaptive Networks, 36.

Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 252.

Rebecca Nicholson, “Top of the Lake: China Girl recap, episode four – the fiasco continues,” The Guardian, 18 August, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/17/top-of-the-lake-china-girl-recap-episode-four-the-fiasco-continues

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 5.

Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 5.

Caruth, 7.

Nicholson, “Top of the Lake: China Girl finale recap.”

Gwilym Mumford, “Top of the Lake: this singular drama is still gloriously weird,” The Guardian, May 24, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/may/23/top-of-the-lake-this-singular-drama-is-still-gloriously-weird

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4.

100

Saraiya, “Jane Campion Explains Reasons Behind ‘China Girl’.”

101

James Donaghy called the supporting cast “a parade of one-dimensional grotesques.” See James Donaghy, “Top of the Lake: China Girl – is this mess of a series beyond repair?” The Guardian, 11 August, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/aug/11/top-of-the-lake-china-girl-is-this-mess-of-series-beyond-repair

102

Olivia Khoo, “Telling Stories: The Sacrificial Asian in Australian Cinema,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 27, no. 1–2 (2006): 45, https://doi.org/10.1080/07256860600607587

103

Khoo, “Telling Stories.”

104

Henry Yuhuai He, Dictionary of the Political Thought of the People’s Republic of China, (London: Routledge, 2015), 69, 89.

105

Mao repeated this at the Moscow Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties. “It is my opinion that the international situation has now reached a new turning point. There are two winds in the world today, the East wind and the West wind. There is a Chinese saying, ‘Either the East wind prevails over the West wind, or the West wind prevails over the East wind.’ I believe it is characteristic of the situation today that the East wind is prevailing over the West wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism have become overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism.” See He, Dictionary of the Political Thought of the People’s Republic of China, 69.

106

Marjorie Perloff, “‘Violence and Precision’: The Manifesto as Art Form,” Chicago Review 34, no. 2 (1984): 66, https://doi.org/10.2307/25305249

107

Kate Muir, “Jane Campion: Capitalism Is Such a Macho Force. I Felt Run Over,” The Guardian, 21 May, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/may/20/jane-campion-unconventional-film-maker-macho-force

108

This term has now largely been discarded due to the complexity of contemporary television, which requires attention similar to that of a cinema. See Mittell, Complex TV.

109

Frank, Dostoevsky, 630.

110

Simmons, “The Suburb in Jane Campion Films,” 175.

111

TV Week, “Everything You Need to Know About Top of the Lake,” August 3, 2017, https://www.nowtolove.com.au/celebrity/tv/top-of-the-lake-china-girl-cast-set-location-39710

112

Tincknell, Angels and Demons, 8.

Titel: Tracing Trans/National/Textual Limits in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake: China Girl
verfasst von: Blythe Worthy
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: Adapting Television and Literature
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-50831-8

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-50832-5

Copyright-Jahr: 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50832-5_11