Recovering From Trauma in Paradise: Portrayals of
Feminine Spatial Resistance in Top of the Lake
Rivka Rappoport
January 20, 2015
Professor Insdorf
Senior Thesis
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EXT. Matt Mitcham’s House- Day
A gate opens. Spotted through the trees, a girl rides a bike out of the
compound of a ragged rural house. The camera follows her, zooming out to
capture her small body traversing the lush landscape from wider angle. The
setting is bucolic—dotted with homes and filled in with farmland. A wide
lake rests at its center with mountains looming in the background. The girl
stops. Fully clothed, she wades into the water up to her shoulders, her head
suspended in the thick mist that clings to the deep blue surface. Underwater,
she balls her hands into fists.
A school bus spots her and screeches to a halt. “Tui, what are you doing? The
water will kill you!”
_____________
This is the first scene in Jane Campion’s 2013 miniseries Top of the Lake,
which mounts a multifaceted investigation of gender dynamics in Laketop, New
Zealand by drawing on iconic imagery, generic conventions and biblical mythology.
Top of the Lake became the most-recent entrance to Campion’s oeuvre when it
premiered at The Sundance Film Festival in a daylong screening. Two months later,
in March and April 2013, it was aired in the US as a seven-part miniseries on the
Sundance Channel.
Throughout her career, Campion has illuminated the lives of her female
protagonists, shedding light on the experiences and concerns of women in dark
theaters all over the world. Her first work for television since 1990’s An Angel at My
Table, the series investigates the perpetration of violence against women as it is
mapped upon the New Zealand landscape, and the body of Tui Mitcham. Campion
cuts among Tui, Detective Robin Griffin, and spiritual guru GJ to tell a story about
women fighting to carve out a space for themselves in a hostile landscape.
Penned by Jane Campion and Gerard Lee and co-directed by Campion and
Garth Davis, Top of the Lake investigates the pregnancy and disappearance of 12-
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year-old Tui Mitcham, portrayed by the captivating Jacqueline Joe. The chief
investigator on her case is capable and compassionate Detective Robin Griffin—
Elisabeth Moss in a Golden Globe winning performance. After years in Australia,
Robin returns to her childhood home of Laketop to visit her cancer-stricken mother
and finds herself burdened with baggage she thought she had left behind. She
becomes sucked into Tui’s case, which parallels the rape and unwanted pregnancy
she survived as a teen. The third protagonist, GJ—Holly Hunter, star of Campion’s
The Piano, here dressed as the director’s doppelganger—moves her commune of
women recovering from past trauma of their own to a plot of land dubbed Paradise.
Its owner is Tui’s father and town thug, Matt Mitcham, a charismatic and menacing
Peter Mullan. The Detective Sargeant of the Two Lakes Police Department is suave
Al Parker, played by David Wenham. As the series progresses, the disparate threads
of the story begin to merge, bringing the women together in powerful and
unexpected ways.
A police procedural on its face, Top of the Lake explores how gender and
sexism complicate interactions from the professional to the personal. All three
female protagonists fight to make room for
themselves in Laketop, where powerful men
on either side of the law collude in yachts
stalled on the open water. Campion utilizes the
mise-en-scène to establish certain settings as
masculine and others as feminine, priming the viewer to notice the subtle ways in
which gender roles can complicate even simple exchanges. Each of the three women
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resists being overpowered by the men of Laketop through the occupation or
invasion of space. Using the detailed construction of settings to reflect gender
differences, the series is sensitive to the ways gender roles govern the lived
experiences of both men and women, while enlarging these conflicts to fill the
landscape’s epic scope.
After the police learn of her pregnancy and rape, Tui seeks refuge in the bush
that surrounds rural Laketop—abandoning the society that violated her and seeking
protection from the natural world. As a detective, Robin Griffin is undermined and
devalued due to her gender, but she is also informed by her own survival of rape in
her search for Tui Mitcham. Finally, the disputed space of Paradise, an invocation of
the biblical Garden of Eden, becomes the site of the birth of a new society of women,
created and ultimately abandoned by the enigmatic GJ. Top of the Lake documents
the efforts of Tui, Detective Robin Griffin and GJ to evade capture in the natural
world, invade the masculine space of the police department, and occupy the plains
of Paradise.
The Gendering of Space
INT. Matt Mitcham’s House- Day
A pan begins on a breakfast debris and a man’s naked chest and belt buckle
before landing on the tattooed, bearded face of one of Tui’s brothers, Mark.
Peering through a pair of binoculars, Luke spots several shipping containers
being dragged across the landscape, headed towards Paradise. Outside, the
viewer meets Matt, distributing stew to his dogs, whose cages are adorned
with bleached animal bones. Surrounded by his sons and dogs all vying for
his attention, Matt appears overwhelmed.
CUT TO:
EXT. Paradise- Moments Later
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A serene and bucolic vista replete with frolicking horses—Paradise proves a
fitting name. An aging nudist wanders through the background. Women buzz
excitedly about the shipping containers as GJ, The Piano’s Holly Hunter with
waist-length grey hair reminiscent of Campion’s, enters the frame. Two
women with a camera and a microphone trail her. Anne-Marie narrates: “We
are now six women, with a container each and a mattress. GJ won’t allow
anything more because she says we will play house.”
_____________
If the first scene establishes the central mystery of Top of the Lake, the
following two scenes, described above, launch the motif of gendered space. As men
are repeatedly inscribed within indoor spaces such as the home, the bar or the
police department, women are aligned with
the forest and the natural world. The
possession of space proves a useful guide
for parsing the politics and content of
Campion’s layered storytelling in Top of the
Lake, creating a topology of gender violence. By portraying the masculine home as
suffocating and the women’s commune as liberated, Top of the Lake classes its
misogyny as cultural rather than natural—a hierarchy that emerges from the toxic
social environment of Laketop, rather than the untouched New Zealand bush. A
succession of trespasses and reclamations generate conflict, with Matt repeatedly
invading the feminine space of Paradise and Robin struggling to lead the mostly
male sheriff’s department.
The possession of space becomes one of the primary ways in which the female
protagonists resist the powerful men of Laketop. The topic of female survival in a
male-dominated society is not new for Campion and can be found in her films from
The Piano to In the Cut. Though she frequently disavows a political intent behind her
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films, critics continue to read her work as feminist. In her monograph on the
director, Kathleen McHugh writes, “All of Campion’s films focus on women’s
encounters with power, violence, or abuse” (Jane Campion 51). Her oeuvre is filled
with female-centered narratives that treat gender dynamics and female desire.
Though she eschews the “feminist” label, she has said that she believes “women are
going to tell different stories” (Pulver 1). Acknowledging the importance of seeing
one’s self reflected in fiction, Campion elaborated, “I like to be able to project myself
into the parts and, being a woman, I like to therefore have heroines” (“The World”
138). Christine Lane claims that Campion’s films “centrally engage with feminist
issues,” even if they are not “feminist by intent or design” (Radner 17). Both feminist
and film theory will prove useful in examining the ways in which Top of the Lake
treats the trials and triumphs of Campion’s trio of female protagonists: Tui, Robin
and GJ.
Scholars have written extensively on the role that gender plays in the
portrayal of spatial relationships, as male claims to territory have become part of
the cultural lexicon, suffused into linguistic choices and narrative constructions.
Theresa de Laurentis has studied the notion of the mythical male hero who
dominates Hollywood film, conquering space on and off the screen. She explains:
“the fundamental opposition between boundary and passage… [is] predicated
on the single figure of the hero who crosses the boundary and penetrates the
other space. In doing so the hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as a
human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher
of distinction, the creator of differences. Female is what is not susceptible to
transformation, to life or death; she (it) is an element of plot-space, a topos, a
resistance, matrix and matter” (Thornam 11).
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De Laurentis suggests that male agency trades on the ability to traverse and claim
space, while female agency takes the form of resistance rather than action.
Consistent with De Laurentis’s perspective, the English language is filled with
colloquialisms that gender landscape as female, from “virgin territory” to “mother
country,” producing an iconography in which woman is passive obstacle or
promised reward—a feature of the landscape (Thornam 127). In settler nations like
the United States or New Zealand, these formulations might be considered
additionally persistent, permeating generic structures such as the Western and the
Road movie (Ganser). Quoted in Thornam, Dorothea Olkowski provides a useful
formulation: “with respect to sexual difference, the masculine is experienced as time,
the feminine is experienced as space” (19). According to Thornam, “De Laurentis
suggests that the identifications male-hero-human/ female-obstacle-boundaryspace are built into the structures of narrative itself” (11). The theories of De
Laurentis and Olkowski remain relevant as Hollywood conventions continue to
underpin contemporary film and television, offering a point of reference and
departure for modern auteurs. Top of the Lake illustrates De Laurentis’s theory by
allowing women to co-opt space and wield space as a weapon of resistance. All
three protagonists challenge male mobility; Tui and Robin do so by traversing space,
while GJ moves into it.
Here, “gendered space” refers to the ways in which Campion, Davis and Lee
have used mise-en-scène to differentiate settings according to the primary gender of
their inhabitants and the gendered attributes they value most. In her seminal book
on the topic, Daphne Spain explains, “’Gendered spaces’ separate women from
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knowledge used by men to produces and reproduce power and privilege” (3). As
opposed to sex—which is determined by biology—gender, like space, is socially
constructed; its norms vary according to time and place. Geographer Doreen Massey
offers, “It is not just that the spatial is socially constructed; the social is spatially
constructed too” (Spain 4). For the purpose of this paper, a space need not be
inhabited exclusively by men to be one that prizes typically masculine traits and
reinforces male privilege. On the other hand, a space such as GJ’s commune—which
was established to give women access to knowledge—is a gendered space of its own
because it both explicitly and implicitly excludes men, even if its denizens lack the
same societal advantage. To take effect, Alexandra Ganser writes, gendered space
must “rely on the subject’s gendered interpolation through the symbolic
system”(23). Put differently, the gendering of space becomes legible through its
adherence to gender norms. If society produces the symbols that create both gender
and space, it follows that filmmakers can co-opt these symbols to “gender” a specific
setting. In line with auteur theory, this paper assumes that the construction of
setting that results in “gendered spaces” throughout the series were intentionally
cultivated by Campion, Davis and Lee through specific choices of dialogue, casting
and production design.
In Top of the Lake, gendered spaces are vulnerable to invasion and
occupation by members of the opposite sex and, therefore, must be diligently
patrolled. Scholar Ann Hardy claims that many contemporary antipodean films are
“texts that suggest that being a white adult male in contemporary New Zealand is a
positioning characterized by strong tensions, contradictions, and uncertainty about
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the nature and authority of that positioning” (Hardy 70). In Top of the Lake, this is
experienced, to some extent, as a loss of territory. Certainly both Matt Mitcham and
Detective Sergeant Al are struggling to maintain authority over the territory of
Paradise or the police department, respectively, putting the former into conflict with
GJ and the latter, with Detective Robin Griffin. Meanwhile, both men are confronted
with powerlessness in the face of Tui’s complete disappearance into the New
Zealand bush—a spatial claim through evasion.
One way in which Campion contrasts masculine and feminine space is
through the recurrence of dogs and horses in the mise-en-scène. In the pair of
scenes described at the start of this section, dogs and horses each seem to serve as
symbolic icons—caged and hungry on the one hand, and romping freely on the
other. As she rides her bike to the lake, Tui passes grazing horses; she is seen on
horseback immediately before disappearing into the forest. While barks emanate
from behind Matt’s gate like a warning, Matt Mitcham shoots an orphaned dog the
first time he meets Detective Robin Griffin, in a startling act of intimidation.
Numerous sequences feature young girls—Tui’s friends in particular—inexplicitly
perched on horseback in the background of shots, emphasizing this connection. An
empty cage and a barking dog feature in flashbacks to the night of Robin’s rape—
providing a haunting percussive soundtrack to her flashbacks. The recurrence of
dogs and horses in the mise-en-scene is only one of many ways in which Campion
integrates gender commentary into her construction of setting.
In general, men are depicted in indoor spaces like Matt Mitcham’s house,
portrayed as social hubs that frequently conceal a dark secret. For example, New
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Yorker television reviewer Emily Nussbaum describes the male dominated dive bar
scenes as “chaotic” set pieces “in which people bump into one another like weather
systems” (1). There, male patrons call Tui a slut and their “Thai poontang,” and tell
Robin “no one likes a feminist except a Lesbian.” The police department similarly
begins as the locus of patriarchy as male police officers ogle Tui through the glass of
the interrogation room; Robin’s entrance signals a feminine invasion.
These indoor locations harbor secrets: Matt’s house hides a drug operation,
and the bar is frequented by Robin’s rapist and tended by a convicted child
molester. The revelation that the scene of Tui’s rape was subterranean—a
pornography studio buried beneath Detective Sergeant Al’s home to match the drug
dealing operation beneath Matt Mitcham’s place—delivers a message that is
surprisingly on-the-nose: sexism is entrenched in the culture of Laketop. If bustling
indoor spaces conceal male secrets, women seek refuge from the cultural gender
hierarchy in the natural world—in a rural cabin, the fields of Paradise or the dense
forest that surrounds it.
In Laketop, women are most at home at society’s margins as all three female
protagonists are allied with the New Zealand bush. While Tui takes refuge there and
GJ plants a new low-tech society on a lakeside plain, Robin moves from her mother’s
suburban home into her deceased father’s rural cabin, which sits beside the lake.
Her daily runs in the adjacent woods are a grounding force for Robin, providing her
a brief respite from the intensity of her mother’s illness and Tui’s case. Moreover,
distraught by her growing fear that Tui is dead, Robin wades into the lake,
mimicking Tui’s introduction. While Tui spends much of the series secluded in the
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forest and GJ presides over her commune, Robin actively maps the gendered space
of Laketop as she scours the bush for Tui and the town for Tui’s rapist revealing,
through her reception, the hostilities that mar the landscape.
Women infiltrate the virgin territory of Laketop and the hallowed ground of
Paradise, subverting De Laurentis’s opposition of masculine spatial domination and
feminine obstruction. Instead, Top of the Lake inscribes the gender conflict into the
mythic New Zealand landscape, as ossified institutions obstruct movement and hold
male secrets. Nancy Miller explains, “the mapping and iconography of privileged
places… may be read as a desire for revision of story, in particular of closure; a
desire… that falls outside the masculinist conventions of plausible narrative”
(Thornam 11). As Miller suggests, the division of setting by gender evinces
dissatisfaction with the status quo, a recognition of inequity upon which one might
mount a revision of conventions. If women are frequently depicted as features of the
landscape, then Tui, Robin, and GJ all transform this into a form of resistance against
the men who attempt to overpower them.
Tui: Evasion
EXT. The forest surrounding Laketop- Day
It has been two months since anyone has seen Tui, but Jamie was just caught
stealing food from the local supermarket. Now, wearing his signature blue
hoodie, he pulls his canoe onto the banks of the river and hides it with
shrubbery. He piles up trash bags packed with food and whistles a birdcall.
Wearing her white jacket, Tui emerges from the forest and descends on the
food, ravenously tearing into a bag of chips and then some bread. She has
survived the Winter.
_____________
After her pregnancy is discovered, Tui disappears into the New Zealand bush
to protect herself and her unborn baby. After this, Tui vanishes from the series for
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several episodes—her case reduced, in her absence, to a trail of clues for Robin to
piece together assembled as a shrine on her living room wall. As the police
department and Matt Mitcham conduct frequent search parties, the towering trees
shelter Tui from the buzz of police helicopters overhead, and the water shields her
from the approach of hunters on dirt-bikes seeking the $10,000 award for her
return. Her successful escape is dually important: it suggests that nature can
provide respite for women battered by society, and maintains that the land never
wholly belonged to man in the first place—even to her father who believes himself
its owner.
Tui’s survival, itself, is an act of defiance, establishing her as a victim who
refuses complete victimization, refusing to be reduced to a symbol. As Kathleen
McHugh argues, “[Campion] refuses to portray her female protagonists as victims no
matter how harrowing the dilemma’s they face” (Jane Campion 48). Matt Mitcham
maintains that Tui can “take care of herself” and he is right: she builds an elaborate
pulley system to alert her to trespassers and carves gun holes into the walls of the
shed. Matt Mitcham lays claims to ownership
over both Tui and the land of Paradise, but
neither that nor his cash reward can buy her
return. Every time Tui evades a search party,
she asserts her agency and reminds Matt that he
cannot control her or the land.
Despite her predicament, she retains a childish innocence, portrayed through
tapes of her singing and dancing that Robin discovers during her investigation. Tui’s
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peaceful stasis is disrupted when Matt’s men finally locate her, bringing violence
and death with them when Jamie, dressed in Tui’s jacket, falls off of a cliff, allowing
Tui to escape. Tui finally gives birth in the bush while Putty, a well-meaning local
fool whose mother was a midwife, has a panic attack nearby. When a helicopter
spots Putty, Matt Mitcham comes to retrieve his daughter. Fueled by postpartum
hormones—hissing as she inches towards him—Tui shoots and kills Matt after he
points a rifle at her newborn, in the ultimate act of rebellion and survival. Defending
her child, she asserts ownership over her body and her right to the land. Top of the
Lake suggests that the forest is truly women’s terrain and that acts of male invasion
end in violence.
If Tui is allied with nature, her body is similarly characterized as a natural
force. Following an encounter with a young musician from GJ’s commune, Tui
appears before GJ and asks her advice. GJ instructs: “The body has tremendous
intelligence. Follow the body, it will know what to do.”
Finally, Tui’s body, itself, becomes a sort of landscape through which the
town’s dark secrets are revealed and by which Robin relives her teenage trauma.
Tui’s body serves not only as evidence of her trauma; it also offers proof of guilt as
her unborn baby contains the genetic key to the identity of her rapist and the
patriarchy that governs Laketop. As the mystery unravels, it involves many of
Laketop’s prominent men—culminating in the reveal of Detective Sargeant Al
Parker as one of her rapists. With the revelation that Tui was one of many victims of
a child pornography ring, she comes to represent not only Robin’s past, but also the
victimization of many young girls in Laketop. Her body with, in GJ’s words, “a secret
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growing in her belly” becomes representative of the crime committed upon it, as
well as those of many other young women, who have endured similar violence. As
Tui evades the search parties sent to retrieve her, she asserts her agency as a
survivor and refuses to be reduced to a victim.
Robin: Invasion
INT. Robin’s Room-Day
With psychedelic string music that seems to reverberate off of the walls of
the small room, Robin is revealed in her bed in close up, bare except for the
camisole and shorts she slept in. Tangled in her bed sheets, she can be heard
in voiceover: “It’s hard being back. This place is so small we can hear each
other breathing.”
______________________
INT. Police Department- Later
Robin enters the police station, weaving around the men chatting in the
hallway. She is ushered into a viewing room. Through a one-way mirror, she
notes the scene in the interrogation room: three men stand over Tui, who is
seated at the table with her head down, staring straight at Robin.
“Get them out of there!” Detective Sergeant Al Parker emerges from the
hallway as five male officers cluster around the conflict: “Who authorized this
session?”
______________________
After a character introduction that emphasizes her vulnerability and
femininity, Robin immediately becomes more authoritative and self-assured as she
transitions into her role as detective. While Tui’s absence becomes her means of
survival, Robin’s resistance rests with her refusal to accept boundaries, as Tui’s case
requires her to investigate the male spaces of Laketop; she trespasses in the role of
detective, the mostly male Two Lakes Police Department, and the dive bar. The
conspiracy that assembles against her—an escalating series of gender affronts and
reminders of her sexual assault—reveals the extent to which misogyny is
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entrenched in Laketop. However, despite the efforts of Al and Matt Mitcham to drive
her back to Australia, Robin remains. If
Tui resists through evasion and
avoidance of male society, Robin’s
resistance comes through a
determination to work within it to help
her.
Not only is Robin trespassing in male space physically, but also generically in
the role of a female detective. In her book Detecting Women, Phillipa Gates defines
the detective genre as films that: “[have] the common topic of the investigation of
the crime and the common structure of the detective as driving the narrative
forward to a resolution of the investigation” (Gates 6). Within the genre, then,
Detective Robin Griffin is “a semiotician reading the signs to determine the pattern”
and Tui is the iconic victim, traditionally a young woman (Gates 32). Top of the Lake
is clearly in the lineage of films that “explore the gender-related issues that arise
from having a woman as the focus of the film, operating in a predominately male
world” (Gates 35). In her exploration of the emergence and significance of the
female investigator, Yvonne Tasker writes, “Women, it seems, are involved in
transgression even and to the extent that they are represented as lawmakers and
enforcers”(93). Detective Robin Griffin exists within a long tradition of women
testing the boundaries of prescribed femininity through investigation and
infiltration of masculine space—or, in Gates’ words, “the discontinuity that arises
when a female protagonist is placed in the central position of a male genre” (32).
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The police station is the site of much of Robin’s struggle against the town’s
institutionalized patriarchy. It is introduced as a male space when Detective
Sergeant Al Parker responds to the revelation that the Child Services Officer helping
with the case is a woman: “Oh, fuck. Well, this is going to be painful.” Robin’s first
instinct upon entering the police station is to have the male officers glue paper over
the one-mirror in the interrogation room, creating an internal feminine space in
which she can talk to Tui. The department is full of male officers except for a single
woman, who seems to be a secretary. Throughout the series, Robin must continually
assert her authority: male officers snicker as she delivers a report on Tui’s
disappearance. One cop asks why she cannot just go into the bush and squat to have
the baby, as they do “in primitive societies,” and then balks at Robin’s request to
speak with him in the hallway: “I just think you’re exaggerating. More than likely
she’s already dead.” Later, when Robin calls off Al’s cruel and illegal interrogation of
Jamie, Tui’s friend, in which he was smacking him in the head, Al tells her, “Don’t you
ever, ever disrespect your superiors again, ever.” Moreover, Al manipulates Robin’s
investigation—granting certain requests and stalling others—to keep her from
discovering that he is the rapist she is pursuing.
Sometimes Robin’s presence, alone, as a woman doing a man’s job in a maledominated space, constitutes resistance to the status quo,. At the bar, a male patron
asks Robin, “So, tell me, are you a feminist? …Because no one likes a feminist except
a lesbian.” He is struggling to integrate her into their familiar conceptions of
femininity, attempting to patrol the space by reducing her to a sexual identity.
Similarly, one of her rapists, a lowlife named Sarge, asks her how he knows her: “Did
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we fuck or something?” She holds his eye contact as she breaks a beer bottle against
the counter and shoves it into his chest—an act of violent penetration that recalls
his original violation of Robin. As she infiltrates male Laketop, Robin must develop
different methods of pushing back against those who seek to stifle her investigation
or dispel her agency.
Confronted with Robin, Al attempts to
recuperate her through what Linda Majewski calls
“heterosexual strategies”: “the excessive
fetishization and domesticization of the female
detective; the imposition of a romantic subplot;
the heterosexual partnership” (Gates 33). In their third scene together, Al asks
Robin if his shaved legs are a turn-on, initiating his sexualization of her. He asks,
“Who’s getting you all to himself?” and tells her she should try an older man—
“experience counts.” More perniciously, Al roofies Robin’s wine during a
professional dinner to which she arrives only to find that it is inexplicably candlelit.
Al broaches the topic of Robin’s assault; confused and angry, she attempts to leave,
but collapses on his carpet. The next morning she wakes up in Al’s bed and, unable
to remember the events of the previous night, reaches down to be sure that she is
still wearing her underwear. Al deftly dodges all of her questions, claiming she
simply got too drunk. Still, episodes later he inexplicably brings it up again only to
reassure her he did not rape her immediately before proposing marriage.
Regardless of his sincerity, Al’s sexual advances and references to Robin’s rape are
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attempts to recuperate her into the role of sexual object or wife, while engendering
self-doubt to derail her investigation.
Arguably, drugging Robin is the mistake that leads to her suspicion and
eleventh-hour discovery of Al’s guilt. Even though he tells her that Matt’s DNA was a
match for Tui’s baby, Robin becomes concerned when Tui does not answer her
phone while at Al’s house. She rushes over and Al emerges extremely intoxicated,
claiming the children have left to see a film. When Tui’s phone suddenly rings inside,
Al blocks her from entering and Robin shoots him in the chest. She discovers the
basement studio in which he and several other Laketop men have been drugging
and raping children. In doing so, she succeeds in preventing the sexual assaults of
future women, drawing attention to the possibility of surviving trauma, and moving
from victim to hero in the narrative of one’s life.
Christine Lane adds that the female detective films offer “one of the few
genres that focus on women’s subjectivities, especially women’s experience as
sexual objects” with “investigative heroines trying to overcome their own
powerlessness through their conviction to stop some kind of male villain from
preying on women” (Gates 294). Laketop is a landscape rife with psychological peril
as Robin is forced to confront the gang rape she survived after her high school
dance. Through her relationship with Johnno, who was her date, and her
interactions with Al and Matt, she retreads the events of that night. As she asks what
happened to Tui, she finds the answer to a far more intimate question: who am I?
Both survivor and investigator, Robin demonstrates the ways in which women can
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recover and reclaim the traumatic territory of their assault. The race to help Tui
becomes the struggle to cast herself in a new role—that of heroine.
Robin’s investigation yields information about her past as well as Tui’s
present—linking the two protagonists in a loop of recurring sexual violence. Though
committed by completely different groups of men, their assaults are linked in the
mise-en-scène when Robin discovers a photo that was taken at the scene of Tui’s
rape. Despite the fact that she cannot determine where it was taken, Robin sees a
taxidermy deer head mounted on the wall in the background—iconography that is
repeated in Al’s office and at the scene of her own rape. While her proximity to the
investigation may make Robin seem compromised—vulnerable to projections of her
own history—she uses her connection with Tui to inform and fuel her investigation.
The boundaries of past and present blur as Robin challenges the separation
of masculine and feminine space, suggesting the permeability that may have plagued
these binaries all along. Robin’s excavation of the secrets of Laketop brings her into
conflict with the powerful men that control the town, into their police departments
and their homes. Robin is a liminal figure—capable of trespassing in masculine
territory and crossing borders through the defiance of gender conventions that
begins, but does not end, with her profession. She not only passes through male
spaces, but moves from the typically female role of rape victim to the male role of
hero.
GJ: Occupation
EXT. Paradise- Day
Robin rides in a helicopter above Laketop, surveying the landscape from above in
search of Tui.
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As the clearing with shipping containers piled up like children’s blocks comes into
view, the pilot says, “See this clearing; they call it Eden.”
The elderly nudist wanders across the landscape and he remarks, “Oh, look, there’s
Eve as well.”
______________________
INT. GJ’s Shipping Container- Day
Robin is on a cushion on the floor, bruised and hungover from a lakeside drinkingspree after learning that Matt Mitcham is her father.
GJ tells her, “We are living out here at the end of the road, at the end of the earth, in a
place called Paradise. How’s it going? Perfect? No. You are madder than ever.”
______________________
Delivering abstract platitudes and frequently caustic advice, GJ carves out a
safe space for the women of Laketop on the plains of “Eden” in the valley of
Paradise. The contested space over which both Matt Mitcham and GJ claim rightful
ownership, Paradise draws ironic comparisons to the biblical Garden of Eden. In the
guise of GJ, Campion, Davis and Lee riff on religious myth while exploring the
concept of a matriarchal society. GJ is a spiritual guru in a postlapsarian mountain
town wracked with suffering, whose presence on the landscape offers the possibility
of a new start for her followers and the women of Laketop who take refuge there.
While she and Robin both cross the borders of prescribed femininity, GJ’s
colonization of Paradise makes her a threat to Matt Mitcham and the masculine,
violence-enforced authority he embodies. For Matt, the stakes of the ownership of
this territory are high: the resting place of his mother and the proving ground for his
pride. Studying literary portrayals of British imperialism, Anne McClintock
concluded that these gendered narratives of exploration and occupation with
“ritualistically feminized borders and boundaries,” reflects a “profound, if not
pathological, sense of male anxiety and boundary loss” (Thornam 127). By taking
control of Paradise, GJ realizes this loss.
21
GJ’s androgynous appearance reflects her defiance of gender norms, as she
becomes the active arbiter of the landscape rather than a feature of it. When he first
sees her, Matt struggles to categorize her, asking, “Is… is… is she a she?” Later, one of
his sons asks, “Is it a man or a woman or something else?” By referring to GJ as an
“it,” Matt’s sons evince their inability to integrate GJ into familiar constructs of
femininity. Male claims to territory are superseded by women in Top of the Lake as
they construct an alternate society of their own on a plateau called Paradise.
GJ purchases Paradise as a rest stop of sorts, a beautiful tract of land upon
which women can rebuild and reimagine themselves independent from both the
men and the misery that dominated their past. By the end of the series, many more
women have moved out to Paradise seeking GJ’s advice, support or solace. Before
her death, Robin’s mother, Jude, visits. When Jamie dies saving Tui’s life, his funeral
is held there. When he is stabbed in the leg, Johnno is treated there, as is Robin
when she gets drunk and wades into the lake before crashing her car. Robin and Tui
both visit GJ for advice and, at the end of the series, Robin, Johnno, Tui and her baby
all move into one of the containers. Planted at its margins, GJ’s commune offers
something that the rest of Laketop does not: a caring community of women.
Top of the Lake features numerous
allusions to religious iconography, most of
which are centered on Paradise, the “Eden”
plateau in which GJ settles, and the myriad
connotations of this moniker. Set in Protestant
New Zealand, the references to biblical mythology are frequently in tension with GJ’s
22
Eastern-influenced spirituality. In the essay “Jane Campion and the Moral Occult,”
Ann Hardy investigates the use of the spiritual and religious imagery in Jane
Campion’s oeuvre. Like most contemporary filmmakers, Hardy writes, “Campion has
the religious cultural knowledge of someone educated in a society imbued with
Christian traditions and values, yet her personal sympathies and appear to be not so
much with organized, Christian religiosity as with eastern-influenced spiritual
technologies such as the practice of meditation” (Radner 251). Through her attire
and her calm countenance, GJ is coded as a spiritual guru—“in another mental
space,” according to the women in her commune. Still, her spirituality is undercut by
her caustic wit. “Why are these people closing their eyes?“ she asks a group of
meditating women. “Wake up!” she yells. GJ’s enlightenment has led her towards
disillusionment more than any religious awakening.
GJ’s occupation of Paradise is loaded with additional ideological weight
because it shares a name with the biblical birthplace of humanity and raises
questions about the connotations of Original Sin in a matriarchal society. The
biblical myth of the Fall of Eden holds that, tempted by the serpent, Eve grasped the
fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and offered it to Adam.
They both ate the fruit and learned the shame of their nudity. For their
insubordination, Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden to live in a world
plagued by injustice, like the town of Laketop (Genesis 2-3).
GJ’s occupation of Paradise is as much a religious revision as a political one—
a matriarchal reimagining of the social and the spiritual. GJ presides over Eden
giving women knowledge, reversing the original biblical myth. She prophesizes but
23
makes no claims to the origin of the advice she disperses in common-sense truisms
and foreboding warnings. Similarly, GJ’s commune is a place in which knowledge
makes neither nudity nor sexuality shameful, as the women openly discuss
masturbation and the pursuit of pleasure. Nestled in the shadow of Laketop’s
depravity, GJ and her women attempt to establish a utopic settlement of women
empowered by knowledge and free from sexual shame.
Just as Campion does on film, GJ fills the empty space of the plateau with
female survivors of trauma struggling to become the heroines of their own stories.
Beyond their physical similarities—both women have a crone-like appearance, with
long, straight grey hair and dress shirts buttoned up to the neck—GJ and Campion
are associated throughout the series. In the introductory sequence, the visual
emphasis on hands and water as Tui wades into the lake recalls the opening and
closing sequence of Campion and Hunter’s
first collaboration, the Academy Award
winning The Piano. Similarly, GJ is
introduced in the next scene trailed by a
camcorder as one of the women attempt to
interview her, associating her character with
Holly Hunter as GJ (left) and Jane Campion
(right).
the camera. Most importantly, Campion and GJ both create space, either cinematic
or physical, upon which women can realize their desires.
As a filmmaker frequently praised for her political consciousness, Campion
has been subjected to debates about the sincerity of her films, and attempts to
dissect the intent behind her cinematic decisions in order to decide whether she is
24
truly worthy of the acclaim. Similarly. GJ remains an ambiguous figure—she can be
accused of taking advantage of the damaged women of Paradise to finance her trip.
“Fifty dollars a week,” she says, “no freeloading!” She, as Campion, can be accused of
manipulating people to turn a profit, leaving once she has grown bored of this
location and these stories. GJ heads off to Iceland at the end of series, while
Campion’s projects and financing become increasingly international. Savior or savvy
capitalist, GJ occupies the same ambiguous space as Campion, herself.
Ultimately, if Campion creates female protagonists who possess agency to
move through diegetic space and puts images of female desire on screen, GJ grants
these characters a home on the plains of Eden. With an appearance evocative of
Campion’s, GJ is a character that suggests and, perhaps, parodies the reverential
approach of auteur theorists to Campion’s work. Campion, who is notoriously vague
and non-committal about the meanings of her films in interviews, has created for
herself a doppelganger that spews surprisingly meaningful nonsense. Nonetheless,
GJ’s words guide the women who cluster around her, granting them an abstract
comfort. She gives them the space to be full, fragile and frustrated, just as Campion
has done for her heroines.
Conclusion
EXT. PARADISE-DAY
In the film’s final sequence GJ zips up her suitcase, leaves her shipping
container and begins to walk across the prairie, away form Paradise. Tui sees
her and runs towards her, trying to stop her. GJ refuses and trudges on: a
woman traversing the New Zealand landscape, a spiritual guru leaving
paradise, and, perhaps, a filmmaker embarking on her next project.
_____________
25
Jane Campion, Gerard Lee and Garth Davis inscribe their commentary on
gender relations into the very landscape of Laketop, New Zealand. Through evasion,
invasion and occupation—the methods chosen by the three protagonists—the
filmmakers demonstrate an escalation of spatial resistance culminating in the
establishment of alternate matriarchal society in Eden. With GJ as her proxy,
Campion claims ownership over space both filmic and physical, making room for
transgressive female characters like Robin and Tui.
Though their focus is on the cartographic efforts of the female protagonists,
Campion, Lee and Davis also address the ways in which patriarchal society
continues to shudder under the weight of
prescribed gender roles with violence
directed inward almost as frequently as it is
outward. Over the course of the series, male
characters commit suicide, whip themselves
and bang their heads against the wall. Men such as Jamie and Johnno offer their own
forms of resistance, allying themselves with Tui and Robin. This is reflected in the
decisions both men make to retreat from society and sleep outdoors, either in the
forest with Tui or in a tent beside Robin’s cabin. While the New Zealand bush
protects the female characters of Laketop, it exhausts their male counterparts who
traipse futilely around the landscape attempting to maintain authority or control.
The demarcation of gendered space takes its toll on both the men and women of
Laketop, enforcing boundaries where there ought to be fluid passage.
26
Top of the Lake’s mapping of gendered space is both simplified and
heightened—divorced from the lived experiences of many women through its
extremely clear designation of masculine and feminine. Reality remains far messier.
Critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote that Top of the Lake is “as much a fable or cautionary
tale as it is a detective story” (1). Its conflict is heightened; its spaces are more
clearly delineated according to gender than most in the real world, and its
characters are at once individual and representative. In doing so, however, Campion,
Davis, and Lee create a paranoid nightmare of gender relations in which the
Detective Sergeant is also a rapist and a child pornographer, expressing, perhaps,
what misogyny feels like, if not what it is like. It is the feverish dreamscape into
which both GJ and Jamie command people to wake up.
By enlarging gender tensions to fill the landscape of Laketop, Campion, Lee
and Davis make them visible to a global audience of men and women. Dwarfed by
the lush forests of New Zealand, one easily begins to view the characters and their
actions as allegorical—projections into this mythic territory. The sweeping shots
and the massive scenery give it the cinematic scope of an epic, allowing Campion to
investigate, in her own words, “how our thoughts function, their mythic content
which has nothing to do with logic” (Jane Campion 5). This interplay between the
situational and the universal, supported by the numerous biblical references, yields
an allegorical atmosphere. Seitz continues, “This miniseries is jam-packed with
situations that play like archetypal showdowns between representatives of male
and female psychology” (1). The gendered spaces become the backdrop for these
power plays, shrunken from epic proportions to take place in the backwater town of
27
Laketop. Yet, embedded amongst these archetypes are three women, who
nonetheless emerge as full and flawed characters modeling their own forms of
resistance.
Through its allusions to religious mythology and the detective film genre—
two narratives that structure social thought and gender relations—Top of the Lake
becomes refractory and reflective. In Campion’s hands, genders and genres
combine, conflate and collapse under the weight of mutation, as though stretched
too thin, revealing the psychological and physical violence inflicted in their name.
These stories are divorced from their context—the Garden of Eden has become the
site of a murder, the victim has become the hero—but their displacement remains
telling. The series ends just as Robin learns the truth of Tui’s rape, leaving the
audience to wonder: What happens after the Fall?
28
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