This review contains spoilers for Sam Brooks’s play “A Rich Man,” which I strongly recommend seeing next time it runs.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about a New Zealand movie I didn’t like and how our conflict-avoidant culture precludes us from writing useful art criticism. This week, I’m writing about New Zealand settler-state art I do like. My favorite books, plays, paintings, and films right now show the cruelty that lies beneath our “paradise in the South Pacific,” and challenge the profitably twee image of New Zealand that the Flight of the Conchords, Taika Waititi, and Jacinda Ardern sold. Despite our successful tourism campaigns, this isn’t a friendly place, and my favorite work reminds people of that instead of luring them back into a somnambulant slumber.
To understand the New Zealand settler-state, you have to understand its colonial history and economic relations. For international readers, “New Zealand” was founded in the 19th-century by Europeans who lied in their translation of its founding treaty to introduce capitalist private property to the land. The English then committed massacres at Parihaka, Rangiowhia, and other places to threaten Māori people with obliteration, used financial colonization to steal Māori land after they established a monopoly on force, and created standing armies in the form of police and a military to keep indigenous and working people in their place. On a superstructural level, New Zealand is similar to Australia, the United States, Israel, Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa, and other colonized lands. Our ruling class is similar to those settler-states’, too, anointing people with bottomless appetites who’ll forgive any sin for profit.
Our nation’s organization around the pursuit of profit means we turn a blind eye to rich people’s crimes until we can’t ignore them anymore. It’s why one of our far-right governing parties’ former presidents got away with decades of child sex abuse, why our second most-powerful cop amassed a hard drive’s worth of child porn on his work laptop, and why Neil Gaiman, and I suspect other rich men, feel so comfortable committing sex crimes here. Our colonial-capitalist social organization dissuades us from saying anything that could threaten resource extraction. The best New Zealand art, in my view, reveals our ugliness instead of contributing to the soporific fantasy that we’re all bumbling do-gooders.
My favorite New Zealand art lately has revolved around the war for land, how the violence of the industrial meat trade psychologically affects us, and how we give rich people permission to do anything they want so long as they keep turning profits. I recently saw a spectacular play by Sam Brooks called “A Rich Man” that addressed all three of these things.
“A Rich Man” opens on four young men who sit in a living room while they wait for an old man who coughs morbidly offstage to die. The young men’s relationship to the old one is unclear until midway through the play, when they reveal to the old man’s estranged daughter that they’re his rent boys. The old man picked them off the street and made them fuck each other while he watched for a year in exchange for food and housing. It’s an all-too-common New Zealand story, almost certainly based on the real-life example of meat industry heir James Wallace. The young men start to fight about what they’ll do for housing when the old one dies, as they’ll likely be homeless when the sun rises and he’s gone.
The most interesting thing about “A Rich Man,” to me, was how Brooks showed colonial economic relations making predators out of prey. Late in the play, the old man makes one of the young men, the saddest and most childish, think he’s going to inherit the house when he dies. The smartest of the four young men immediately starts scheming to manipulate the prospective inheritor into letting them stay. He encourages one of the other men, who the inheritor is in love with, to pretend to love him back and continue doing sex work for their collective housing. Primitive accumulation, or the original act of settler violence that separated people from their land, permits us only to be owners or renters. The most ambitious young man decides he’d rather be the wolf than the sheep.
I liked “A Rich Man" because it reflects a truth I’ve observed after seven years here: that we’re only nice until our land rights are threatened and the knives come out. I also liked how the play, based on $170 million meat heir James Wallace’s real story, reflects how settler industries shape us. In the 1970s, scholar Patrick Evans argued that our “industrialized violence towards animals is merely the sanctioned version of other widespread malignancies.” I can’t think of a better example of that than a meat-butchering factory heir keeping a harem in plain sight because he has enough money to be immune to the law.
A lot of my other favorite Antipodean work touches on the meat industry, too. David Ballantyne’s unnerving 1968 novel Sydney Bridge Upside Down is set in a small town built around an abattoir, Garth Maxwell’s 1993 gothic horror film Jack Be Nimble is about a boy who becomes a serial killer after being made to slaughter animals as a child, Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog, filmed in New Zealand, is about meat hides, tanning, and murder, and Owen Connors’s paintings show men doing dark things near lambs they’ll slaughter at the bottom of the world. I also like work that shows us how strange it is to impose British clothing and housing on Antipodean environments, namely Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, adapted into a spectacular film in 1975 by Peter Weir, and David Blyth’s surreal, Clockwork Orange-like 1978 film Angel Mine. These works are ugly, discomforting, and sometimes difficult to read or see because they’re true: something I value in a time when settler-states punish criticism with death.
In their politically astute science fiction story “The Final Order,” author Seth Dickinson writes that “empires,” or in our case, settler-states, “exist to give certain men the power to do anything they want” because a critical vanguard of their citizens “secretly believe that’s what should be done with power.” In his 1952 essay “Fretful Sleepers,” Bill Pearson writes that “In public [New Zealanders] condemn the profiteer,” and “in private we connive… and envy his opportunities.” My favorite Antipodean art right now confronts viewers with our endless colonial appetite instead of selling them the lie that we’re good people. As the West abandons its pretense of a liberal international order for 19th-century gunboat diplomacy and puts conquest back on the menu, our rulers will try to lead us, sleepwalking, to world war. Anything that shakes us out of our fugue state is good.
Recommended Reading
I liked Rayne Fisher-Quann’s essay about “the matrix of ancient human suffering that persistently defies her attempts to categorise it,” and how, as a woman writer, she “spends all this time trying not to think about her body but it still hunts her like a dog.”
I liked P.E. Moskowitz's essay about how they got a Labubu, immediately wanted to cut its head off, and then realized they were responding to what it represents: a culture of willful self-distraction as the world burns. I love an essay that starts off with a wild feeling (“I wanted to saw the head off my Labubu”) and follows it, like a thread through the labyrinth, to an interesting exit.
I liked Kate Wagner’s review of Melly Stills’s Santa Fe production of Richard Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” opera, and how Stills brought out a new dimension by having the opera’s heroine, Sieglinde, “disobey [Richard] Wagner’s stage directions at almost every opportunity – because it is these instructions, even more than the text itself, that keep Sieglinde passive and docile.” You have to pay $5 to VAN Magazine to subscribe for a month to read it, but the magazine’s good and it’s worth it. If you can’t afford the subscription and still want to read it, DM me and I’ll send you the text.
Tāmaki (Auckland) Events
Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is playing on Saturday, September 6 at 7:30 at the Auckland Town Hall. Mahler’s my favorite composer, which I wrote more about here. I’m looking forward to seeing this one.
Peter Burman is putting on a play called “Scorned” from September 9-13 at Basement Theatre. Peter’s one-half of a writing duo with Murdoch Keane that put on the plays “She’s Crowning” and “Minnie and Judy,” which were two of my three favorite plays that I’ve seen in New Zealand (the third being Sam Brooks’s “A Rich Man.”)
The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Clara Law’s A Floating Life on September 17 at 8:25pm. My friends have told me it’s very, very good despite having the worst and most un-representative poster I’ve seen since Jennifer’s Body.
You should check out Johnny Crawford's book Downstream From Nowhere, I'm not that far in but it's fun and mean about this country