Black Snow, Alpha male, my cousin Richard

To say my hopes were not raised before starting the Australian crime drama Black Snow wouldn’t be accurate: truth is, I had no hopes at all. Mrs Pond had identified it based on reasonable reviews and the presence of “housewives’ favourite” (Mrs P’s anyway) Travis Fimmel. It was streaming. Why not? I’ll have forgotten it in a week anyway: remembering the last but one box set you watched can be a real test.

Turns out it was one of those rare instances of a show teaching me – without any clunkiness – about something I knew nothing.

But first of all, Travis Fimmel. The elephant in the room. He was once, allegedly, the most in demand male model in the world. That was at the point where models were given jobs on the basis that they looked good, the brand wanted to be aspirational, and customers would buy stuff in the – deluded, but slightly enjoyable – belief that a bit of the magic sauce would rub off on them if they spent their money on the right brand. The right white jeans = tight abs, obvs.

In those joyous years until around 2015, the basic commercial assumption was that everyone wanted to be 20-something, buff, sleek hair, and a smouldering stare away from shagging any stranger that took their fancy. Twenty years later and the assumption has matured. Now, buying the right brand means you can be part of an ethnically and physically diverse group who spend all their time socialising outdoors while wearing sensible clothes. Or sitting in your joggers in front of the TV watching a “Just eat” advert and responding by doing a mass “Just Eat” order of burger and pizza with the ethnically and physically diverse group around your block of flats.

All advertising is lies, of course, but it really is desperate when the lie you are told is that you want to be boring. Boring and slovenly? Yes, I knew I was never going to be irresistible, like Fimmel at his pant bulging prime, but who really aspires to wearing a checked shirt and having unremarkable lunches in generic beer gardens without the beer? Or getting a McDonalds brought to you by someone on minimum wage, even limper and colder than it would be if served promptly (the word “fresh” really can never apply in this context).

I used to strive after animal magnetism, but now my focus is on being unthreatening, self-satisfied, and on ensuring any social group I’m in meets the diversity requirements of a FTSE 250 board. Imagine being an advertising executive with that brief? Oh, and make this portrayal of ubiquitous corporate blandness distinctive, please? No wonder they go wild once a year when the Christmas perfume ads come out and they can book anorexic models in absurd clothes and square jawed men in tight kecks emerging dripping from the pool. Better than scouring the Boden catalogue for the opposite of inspiration.

Well, such drivel was not on the desk of the Calvin Klein creative department when they hired our man. The Fimmel legend says that billboards of him advertising white Calvins caused traffic jams, as ladies stopped to gawp^[1], in the way the Wonderbra “Hello Boys” ad had allegedly appealed to men in the 1990s. Because really, none of this ever happened at all. In the way of the modern world, being famous – in this case, by being the opportunity for a marketing department to create an urban legend that almost certainly never happened - leads to opportunities in other fame industries. So he first came across the Pond radar as Ragnar Lothbrook in the altogether wonderful Vikings. It’s on Prime. If you haven’t watched it, you should.

I’d love to say that Fimmel is a terrible actor, but he’s great. I struggle to think of an actor that I find more interesting to watch. His acting style, both here and in Vikings, is distinctive: a whole series of small twitches and ticks, that you sense any formal acting training would have ironed out. It’s a little like watching the soul of Ivan Lendl stuck inside the body of Brad Pitt.

And Fimmel could be like an antipodean Brad Pitt, and that would be a fine thing, but it clearly isn’t what he wants. Even when Brad is not at peak Pitt – think the bearded nerd in The Big Short, he is still, irrefutably Brad Pitt. The essence of Brad is to be at ease with the world. He’s the guy that walks into the room and does what he wants. It’s why in films he is always eating. No actor has ever spent so much time snacking as Brad Pitt. Because to be Pitt is to do what you want. You have appetites and you satisfy them. Hell yeah! Whereas to be Travis Fimmel is the opposite. It is to be thrust into a role of authority that you don’t want. To be the chief who everyone else wants to be feasting, so they can join in.

Fimmel’s bizarrely mannered style invariably is perfectly suited to Black Snow and Vikings, where he is the flawed alpha male protagonist. He looks great, he can fight and outthink everyone, and yet, deep down, that is not his purpose in life. The twitches and ticks come across as the flitting between the role of police investigator or Viking chief, and the urge to just walk away and live a quiet life. He doesn’t fit the role he is being asked to play. I may be great, I may be handsome, but I don’t care about that, it is not what that I am. He is, in short, exactly how I imagine I would be if I were great and handsome and thrust into a role of responsibility.

So, Fimmel was the hook but the show itself was a perfectly serviceable crime drama. What made it interesting was the location and community. It was set in a coastal town in Queensland, home to a giant sugar plantation and a community of South Sea Islanders that had, historically, worked on the plantation.

The Queensland coast was stunning, although it was noticeable that the beaches were deserted and nobody swam in the turquoise tropical oceans. After a conflab with Mrs Pond we reached no conclusion whether saltwater crocs, box jellyfish or sharks were to blame. But clearly, a quick dip was out of the question. No chance of running into someone shooting a Davidoff ad on the next beach across.

The South Sea Islander angle was new to me. My knowledge of Australian history was largely limited to cricket and the treatment of the aboriginal people, and a lot of that can be told through a single line: I had (poor Richard is now dead) an aboriginal cousin. He was the only aboriginal in Jersey, about as far from his homeland as it was ever possible to be, and, I discovered decades later, was widely known in the Island as “Abo”. Richard came to Jersey in the late 1960s, adopted by my uncle during a holiday in Australia. Government policy at the time was contemptuous of aboriginal culture, and the thinking was that the children were better off being brought up away from their families and communities.

I don’t know if Richard had parents who were alive and capable of looking after him. There must have been someone, surely? It’s too late to know. The authorities didn’t care. They decided he was better off out of there, and so it was that he was brought, as a toddler, to Jersey in the 1970s, a tiny speck of rock run by Methodists: uptight, damp, judgmental. But tiny. The very opposite of the outback.

Nobody had thought it through. It didn’t end well. Alcohol, violence, prison, an endless cycle, then eventually returning to Australia as an adult, finding his family, and dying young. I last saw him when I was in my teens, and my memory is of someone utterly ill suited to anything Jersey could offer him. He was immensely strong and quick to laugh, but, at the time, everyone thought (and I was young enough to assume they knew what they were talking about), “there was something missing”. Alcohol was the trigger, and once applied, the pain and anger came out.

But what really was missing for Richard? Perhaps that is the wrong question to ask. Whenever someone doesn’t fit in, the assumption is that the fault lies with the person, but the smaller and more tightly regulated a society is, the less people will fit in. The comfort of the majority is always at the expense of those on the fringes. And if you look different, and perhaps are wired differently, you don’t stand a chance.

Anyway, when the South Sea Island community appeared in Black Snow I struggled to place them because here were people who existed in a blind spot in my mental landscape. They weren’t aboriginal, but nor were they the type of country Aussie that only comes into consciousness when a tourist gets murdered in the outback. It is of course near impossible to talk about race without sounding racist to someone. Wikipedia filled in the gaps.

The daughter of the lead female character spent some time defacing the public statue of the founders of the town. And not without reason. These South Sea Islanders were a people that had been ripped from their own islands – whether through trickery or kidnapping appears unresolved – and been enslaved with no prospects. This was all alluded to but the series had a lightness of touch. Most affecting were the glimpses given of the communal life that the community maintained. There were gatherings, multi-generational and multi-family, where people got together, lit barbeques and spent time in a large, unstructured group untainted by capitalism.

That glimpse was what stayed with me. DH Lawrence makes the point time and time again in his essays that the English are a small people, and how he feels constricted as soon as he returns here. Our lives are not full of passion, or music, or late nights under starlit skies, or even feasting and drinking in great halls while the snow piles up outside. What we exported to the world was what did for my cousin Richard: that protestant ethic, a narrow focus on being conventional, working hard, following the straight path, questioning nothing. Making money, if that path was open to you. Being exploited and accepting your fate, if it was not.

In place of big outdoor groups communal activity was limited to going to Church on Sunday when this was all presented as God’s will, as the lines from the famous hymn “All things bright and beautiful” make clear:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

I’ll return to this in my essay on “Offensive Songs”, though here it is enough to note the mental gymnastics involved in paraphrasing Christianity to support the status quo. And yet, that was the modus operandi of the empire. We came, we saw, we conquered, we taught everyone songs about how this was all God’s will so suck it up.

What we didn’t do was make any effort to understand how native people had adapted to their own environments. Bred as we were to live in windy, damp islands, bolstered on plain, boiled food, the British exported their dour miserabilism across the world. But the islands of the Pacific posed a total challenge to the land of hope and glory. From the Mutiny on the Bounty to the life and works of Paul Gaughin, these islands have lodged themselves in the western psyche as the antidote to western values.

Lands of plenty, of warmth, where the physical, sensual world had got the upper hand. To generations of missionaries, these were islands of nakedness and sin. There was no work ethic, because there did not need to be: the damp, warm climate was an Eden for yams and taro and coconut and food was plentiful without huge human effort. It was not like England: the English were God’s chosen people: therefore, these Islands were the devil’s work.

And yet the strangeness of it all is that the father in Black Snow was a pastor in the community, and there is no doubt that the South Sea Islands are among the most devout and, for want of a better word, “traditional” followers of Christianity today. Prior to the arrival of missionaries in the 1830s, islands like Samoa had a religion that was based are the unity of the natural world and being part of that natural environment. It seemed, like the remnants of aboriginal culture, to emphasise the ultimate connectedness of everything. Children singled out to be wayfarers, skilled navigators, would be brought up in shallow tidal pools, learning the ebb and flow of tides and the power of currents before they could speak.

Local communities were strong, and patriarchal, but the emphasis was on responsible stewardship of the natural environment. The people were the guardians of something with immense spiritual value. That essential sacredness, and living in harmony with nature, appears to be at the heart of their values. Not money, or some distant God.

When everything is connected, if you pull on the right thread, everything can fall apart very quickly. That was what did for Richard. He suddenly wasn’t connected to anything. He probably didn’t even know what it was he should have been connected to: the outback, his family, his ancestors, the universe.

And it often comes down to money, to knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing. That mean spirited Methodism, the Protestant work ethic, call it what you will, that deep belief that everything can be reduced to money and the conscience salved through charity, has a lot to answer for. The aboriginals are drunk on cheap grog, the South Sea Islanders obese from Spam, the Americans and British buying rubbish they don’t need from people they don’t know on their mobile phones, everyone cut adrift from what it is that gave life meaning.

And that was what I came away from Black Snow thinking. Here was a community torn away from their home, following a new religion, but with some sense at least of where they came from and what they had lost. Whereas we in the west are adrift, rudderless, with no idea of where we came from or what we have lost. We’re just distracted. By stories of people getting distracted by people selling pants.

March 2024

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^[1] Gawp is a strange word. It seems to date back to middle English, when the language was full of harsher consonants and glottal stops.