Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Every Tom, Dick and Jonah
Originally published in The Age Green Guide, 1 November 2007.
Anyone who has ever spent any time in a high school would be familiar with the almost pathological obsession teenage boys have with drawing dicks on things. It might be an exercise book that's dicked, its owner paying the price for allowing his attention to drift for a split second. It might be a lightning quick dicking of the top corner of a classroom whiteboard in the fleeting moments before the teacher arrives for class.
Or the artful dicker might spend some time carefully drawing a dick on the end of his ruler with chalk before tapping it lightly on the blazer of the unfortunate dickee, leaving the faintest suggestion of a misty dick just below the collar. As surely as the sun comes up in the morning, teenage boys draw dicks.
But, as any secondary school teacher will tell you, "tation" has begun to follow the dick, a scribble directly inspired by the "dicktation" tag of Jonah Takalua, the troublesome Tongan boy in Chris Lilley's recently concluded Summer Heights High. This, along with reports of students saying to their teachers "puck you, miss, with a P", is testimony to the show's incredible resonance, particularly with high school kids.
There was more to this show, though, than Lilley's spot-on replication of universal teenage truths like boys dicking everything and girls choreographing and rehearsing dance routines. Familiarity alone is not enough to sustain interest in a TV show, let alone transform it from entertainment to something that will most likely come to be an Australian cultural icon.
Like in We Can Be Heroes, Lilley's characters were richly drawn and instantly recognisable. Ja'mie was selfish and self-absorbed, a spoilt rich girl obsessed with being hot and so determined to get what she wants that she threatened her mother with getting herself pregnant. She's only 16, though — she's entitled to be immature.
Mr G had no excuse. He was a bullying, selfish, ambitious monster utterly unable to subjugate his own ego for the benefit of his students. Sadly, he's in every staff room in the country, and Ja'mie is in every yard.
But Summer Heights High was undoubtedly the Jonah Takalua show. On the surface, Jonah was a classic troublemaker. Lilley's extraordinary skill as a writer and an actor, however, gave the character of Jonah such richness and nuance that in him we understood the challenges and the difficulties facing not only young troublemakers, but their families, their teachers and their friends.
Still, as brilliant as Lilley's performances were, Summer Heights High was more than the Chris Lilley show. Its supporting cast was a much-needed foil for the protagonists, keeping each scene, no matter how absurd, from drifting into absurdity.
Principal Murray (Elida Brereton) was wonderfully authoritative and calm in the face of Mr G's hysterical rantings. And the incredibly difficult conversations she had with Jonah and his father alongside Doug Peterson (David Lennie), student welfare, were models of professionalism and empathy. In Ms Murray and Mr Peterson, we saw every dedicated senior teacher in Australia.
If they did the heavy administrative lifting, Mrs Palmer (Maude Davey) was the teacher that we all want our kids to have. Loving, patient, gentle, she was never intimidated by the challenge of teaching illiterate teenagers how to read. She trusted and cared for her students, and in return, Jonah showed his affection by rubbing his shoes on the carpet to give her static electricity shocks as she passed, and in his stilted reading of his end of term story: "All teachers are gay. Except Mrs Palmer."
It was these characters who elevated Summer Heights High to something more than a string of sketches. The ones who didn't have a single gag, or their own stories, or a life outside the scenes they shared with Lilley's characters were the ones who turned comic farce into drama. They were instantly recognisable and wonderfully real, and go a long way to explaining the show's extraordinary resonance.
But not all the way. A familiar setting, recognisable and richly drawn characters — these things are important, and they will usually get our attention. But many films and television shows have failed despite spending thousands of hours and millions of dollars ensuring that every detail of setting and characterisation is absolutely authentic. There needs to be something else. At the heart of Summer Heights High, and of all great drama, was story.
The creation of situations where characters we care about are pushed to the very brink of what they can handle. Sometimes they rise above it and triumph. But often, as in Summer Heights High, they don't. Jonah came the closest, and his story I suspect forged the strongest emotional connection with young and old viewers alike. Because it was an absolute heartbreaker.
Lilley built the pressure on Jonah until it was almost unbearable — banned from breakdancing, taking Ritalin, liable to be expelled and sent back to Tonga, and, although it's never made explicit, every misstep he makes at school was punished with abuse at home. We saw fleeting, devastating glimpses that Jonah wanted desperately to just once not be the kid who gets into trouble. But his circumstances, cruelly outside his control, conspired against him at every turn.
It was a crushing irony that when he finally took a courageous step towards a more hopeful future, when he turned up, in borrowed collared shirt, to Mrs Palmer's remedial reading story day and read his story aloud, it was too late. He'd been expelled. That moment, when we saw Jonah swallowing his pride and doing the right thing, when Mrs Palmer wept at the realisation that she had managed to make a small difference in one boy's life, that moment is precisely why Summer Heights High meant so much to us.
That's why kids are scribbling "dicktation" on walls and saying "puck you, miss, with a P" to their teachers. Because at the core of Chris Lilley's superhuman effort in creating a world and characters that are recognisable and real was a story that moved us. Summer Heights High went beyond comedy. It was human drama that went right to our hearts. Is it any wonder we loved it?