Week Six: The Power of Perspectives

One of the things that struck me most about this week's film, Bustin' Down the Door, was the film's skillful manipulation of the audience's favors. When you listen to the same people speak most often in film, you begin to trust their point of view and sympathize with them, as they become the protagonist. This is how the Avengers franchise is partially able to make audiences sympathize with Loki, despite his tendency toward villainy; this is also how the television show Hannibal (and even, to some extent, the film Silence of the Lambs) is able to make even a cannibal worth rooting for. While the men interviewed in Bustin' Down the Door are far from supervillains or cannibals, I found myself a little surprised at the film's sudden twist in its representation of them from surf heroes and pioneers to arrogant haoles. This same effect was clear in the interviews that portrayed Eddy Rothman as a vaguely violent monolith in the North Shore community, until it became clearer (at least in the documentary) that his actions, while perhaps not fully justified (this is obviously up for discussion), did have quite the motivation. That also speaks to the power of the white male as storyteller/historian: we are bred to trust his point of view, and distrust those who may try to interrupt it.

With this technique - getting the audience to trust the interviewees, and then question them - the film skillfully illustrated how complex it is to take sides in territorial disputes, especially those that are based on ancient grudges between races. In truth, the Australians and South Africans were, for the large part, being incredibly disrespectful to the culture they adopted for themselves, but did the response by Da Hui need to be a violent one? Is a solution like Eddie Aikau's a reasonable solution for surfing disputes between members of the culture and perceived outsiders?

To bring in my minor knowledge of film theory: another thing that stood out from this film was just how objectified women are in surf culture; shots of disembodied female parts served almost as decorations. How many slow motion shots were there of two tanned, bikini-clad asses walking side by side down the beach? I think we might have seen a woman's head in the frame in less than 10% of the shots featuring women. This is a primary assessment used in feminist lenses when critiquing films: is she dehumanized by being visually cut up into pieces to be admired, or is she portrayed as a complete human? While I know that the goal or obligation of the film was certainly not to address gender equality on the waves, the film's stylistic choices underscored the Beach Boys surfing ideal of girls and waves as objects to be enjoyed, and ensured the film's entry into a pantheon of demeaning representations of women in the world of surfing.