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Writing Wellington: Twenty Years of Victoria University Writing Fellows

Good Fry Pork Pie, The Abrogator and The Piano Finger

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.