Phrack, a kickstarter video and romanticized farewells

As I said in my previous entry, I am taking a course in Ethnology this semester. I felt a need to broaden my perspective of the notion of culture that I hope to make a PhD in archaeology about one day. The course has proved to be very good even though the sort of shallow time frame of the subject has me confused from time to time. If you are used to thinking in a time frame that is often thousands of years, it is definitely a challenge to limit it to the last 200. I still love it though and the literature has given me inspiration for a lot of different blogposts. Unfortunately, it has also given me less time to write them.
Anyway, on 15 September Every Cloud Production, the production company behind Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries started a Kickstarter campaign to finance the upcoming Phryne film Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears. I have to say that I am more excited and positive towards it than I was back in November last year when I wrote a post about my thoughts and feelings about a continuation of the franchise. My worries are still intact, but I have faith in them to make it good, so I did pledge. Not least because seeing Nathan Page talk to Essie Davis in the video they made for the campaign made me realise just how much I miss seeing them together.

The video was awsome. I love how Nathan is both himself, Jack and the fans of the show in it. (And before you say anything: I actually love how he looks! I think he looks like a Viking!) It starts with him looking at the end of Death Do Us Part and then he berates Jack for letting her fly away from him. When Fiona Eager and Deb Cox tells him about their plans for the films including all the foreign lovers, he seems to get a bit offended until Fiona reassures him that Jack will go after her and that Phryne cannot do anything without him.

After explaining about the Kickstarter campaign, Nathan calls the director Tony Tilse who tells him he should really talk to the most important person of them all, so of course Nathan calls Essie too and I love to see them talking to one another. I have seriously missed seeing them together and it put a smile on my face when they said that they missed each other. Yes, I am so in love with both of them. Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries is my biggest nerdiness at the time and I am proud of how nerdy I am!

Now you probably wonder what all of this has to do with my Ethnology class. Nothing at all, even though talking about the so famous Folkhemmet concept which the course has made me realise has been more influential to the Swedes than I think we often understand and want to admit, has had me thinking about Phryne and I have felt a need to compare what the course literature says about Sweden in "the Phryne era". However, my thoughts about Folkhemmet and how it all has me thinking about Phryne deserves its own blogpost soon, but not this one.

Instead I want to focus on something I read in one of my course books Kulturanalytiska verktyg by Billy Ehn and Orvar Löfgren (2012). In chapter 4, they describe an ethnological survey at a train station and brought up how they are often used in films for dramatizing farewells. This has created a romanticized version of those farewells and my mind immediately went to the end scene of Death Do Us Part.

I love how Nathan berates Jack for just letting Phryne fly away and it is very much a typical farewell scene (at an airfield instead of a train station though). However, I feel like there is a twist to the scene that a lot of other, similar ones lack.

"Come after me Jack Robinson!" 

~ Pryne Fisher

I cannot recall that I have talked about how Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries often takes a somewhat cliché subject and twist it a little before, but the last scene of Death Do Us Part belongs in that category. Phryne is about to leave which, from what we know about Phryne, is typical behaviour for her (I have talked about it here.). When Jack turns up to say goodbye however, Phryne immediately jumps out of the plane to run up to him.

To me her asking him to come after her is a testament to just how much her mismatched Melbourne family in general and Jack in particular has come to mean to her. He wants Jack in her life and their kiss seals the deal that he will obey her. The scene and the episode, end with Phryne flying away with her father. However, the scene is not as dramatical and Jack does not shed any tears. Instead he stands calmly on the ground looking at her as she disappears in the plane, a small smile lightening up his face. To me it is proof that he sees it as a beginning and not an end.

The values in the term "Stone Age"

A dolmen from the Stone Age on Tjörn, Sweden

I have written two entries about the popular image of the Stone Age before on this blog, but based on a discussion in the chat of the ethnology class I am taking this semester earlier today I felt a need to write another one.

The popular image of the time period known as the Stone Age was created through colonial interactions with non-Western cultures in the Americas, Africa and Oceania. Like I wrote in the first Savage Stone Age post, this means that the popular image of this time period more than any others tends to bring out Western ethnocentric and evolutionistic contemporary biases both of the past and the present based in an imperialistic worldview. Indigenous groups were seen as the last remains of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies, making the distant present become the distant past. This means that there are more to the term "Stone Age" than just being descriptive of a time period. It comes with a set of values and is often used both degradingly and evolutionistic.

Stone Age fishing-hook,
Skåne, Sweden

The popular picture of today has not really changed so much either. We still think about a less complex society populated by uncivilised beasts that could not speak, lived in caves and hit each other over the head a lot. And of course their lives was different from ours as I talked about in my second Savage Stone Age post. Their society was complex just like ours today are. However, because there are so very little material left from the time period and most of what we do have are artefacts made out of stone. We know next to nothing about their family constellations, their sexuality or their other relations and it is not so easy to use contemporary societies for comparisons and analogies. There is really no reason to think that the same livelihood means that anything else is the same.

Funnelbeaker pot

Comparisons and analogies between a society in the distant past and in the present degrade the latter society because they deny them a past just as adventurous and complex as our own. They also degrade the contemporary societies by implying that they are static and cannot change themselves but need a "more evolved" culture (like the Western one!) to help them. It acts hierarchically, putting the Western society higher than non-industrialised ones. And last but not least, it also puts the industrialised Western society as the norm for what a real society looks like and strive for.

Battle axe

This does not mean that you cannot use the present for analogies and comparisons however. In fact you can certainly find similarities between societies of today and societies in the past. We are, after all the same spieces and basic needs like food, sleep, love etc. is still ever present in our lives. However, we need to be aware of how we are doing it, because we are stuck with a racist evolutionistic and imperialistic past that can seriously hurt non-Western societies even though it is not intended.




All photos are from Wikimedia Commons.