Learning from Underbelly

Posted on | November 7, 2008 | 4 Comments

Erskineville Road, Sydney, November 7

Erskineville Road, Sydney, November 7


In a couple of weeks the Television and the National conference is on at ACMI in Melbourne. I’m giving two papers. The first is the Work on TV paper I’ve mentioned here previously, and which I’ll post about separately as I add some more touches. I now have to mention Tina Fey’s Palin persona as well as the significance of Mad Men, now that I’ve seen it (thanks David). The second is a synopsis of the Underbelly book I’m writing with William. Filming for season two is now underway, and we’re excited to hear the next version will be keeping with the drug theme. This is one of the key arguments we make about the show in our paper, as the abstract suggests:

Ordinary Australians? Aspiration, commodity fetishism and masculinity in Underbelly

While Channel 9′s Underbelly has several obvious points of interest for TV scholars – its legal travails, its status as “post-broadcast” television and its connection with the “True Crime” genre among others – this paper finds it to be most profitably read as a counter-narrative to the dominant renderings of Australia’s social and cultural history through the 1990s and early 2000s. First, in its connection of the criminal violence of its protagonists with suburban material aspiration, and its presentation of its narrative events as alternatively continuous with and dangerous to Australian suburban life. Second, in its revelation of the brutal economies of drug production and distribution which underwrote ecstasy consumption in the golden age of Australian club culture. Third, in its capacity to offer a retrospective genealogy for the spectacular, drug-inflected, criminalised hypermasculinity which is now – in the bodies and behaviours of professional sports stars in particular – a visible part of the Australian mainstream.

By putting the vocabulary of aspiration in the mouths of criminals, and by situating them in the suburbs, Underbelly suggests that ruthless, murderous competition may not be incompatible with the Australian Dream. Exposing a generation’s denial of the criminal economy behind ecstasy’s fetishised status, it problematises celebratory accounts of club culture, and suggests dark externalities for the “night-time economy” of our inner cities. As well as connecting country, suburb and city in repressed criminality – by virtue of its casting choices at the very least – the series blurs the lines between ordinariness, celebrity and infamy. It is in these unresolved tensions that Underbelly constitutes a televisual history of Australia’s present that countervails the official pieties of the “ordinary” that characterised the Howard years.

We’re keen to hear from anyone with comments or responses to these ideas at this stage, because the conference will be a fairly closed audience. I also think we’ve been scheduled on with two papers about Deadwood, so I’m not sure if our listeners will have much in common. I guess this is ironic given that we think Underbelly has a lot to teach media and cultural studies scholars about their preferred objects of inquiry in Australia in recent years. But it will take a book for us to say that.

I’m now off to search for some t-shirts to wear at the conference.

Category: Gender, Reading, Research, Travel, Viewing

Comments

4 Responses to “Learning from Underbelly”

  1. Michelle
    November 7th, 2008 @ 2:24 pm

    I haven’t watched Underbelly. But I am interested to hear you mention the (Great) Australian Dream, which historically has related to home ownership. You’re interested in “suburban material aspiration”; what do you mean by that? Is the new Australian Dream different to the old Australian Dream, and is home ownership still central to it? Just wondering.

  2. Nate
    November 10th, 2008 @ 9:32 am

    there is also a weird generational distinction. although the whole ‘underbelly’ have fairly standard aspirations of material bliss (which is usually depicted in the language of the suburban dream), there is definitely a sense in which the established carlton crew operate through a stable code based on the loyalty, respect and so on. that is, their aspirations are tempered by well established protocols. williams and his unruly gang represent the new generation of crime; as the introduction of too much noise in the system of organised crime.

    although underbelly reveals the dark side of club and rave scenes, the nostalgia with which the old guard is represented complicates the notion of criminals as beyond a moral code.

    what is most interesting in this regard is that although both groups – carlton crew and williams’ crew – are highly ethnocised the leaders of each camp (gatto and williams) are polarised. williams seems whiter, more aussie bogan than most other characters and he has no extended family. williams’ attainment of the australian dream, then, compliments your analysis because he is ‘more australian’ than the others.

    of course one could also argue that williams has little investment in the dream at all and he attains such things purely because he has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it. or, perhaps to satisfy the demands of his charming lover: “suck my fuckin’ toe jam”. the fact that he rarely, if ever, expresses his desire for the australian dream lends some support to this reading.

    just some basic thoughts,
    nate

  3. melgregg
    November 10th, 2008 @ 4:55 pm

    this reminds me, did anyone watch the show who isn’t from melbourne?

    i’m not really able to answer michelle’s questions outside of the claims we would make for the text, which as nate shows, has several competing representations of suburban aspiration.

    i will just add that the women seem much more obviously enamoured with money and possessions than men, for reasons i will explore in the book (to my mind this is possibly because they hold such an ambiguous position in relation to what is such a homoerotically-charged set of relationships that drive the action. that’s right – i’m proposing a queer reading; not only that, a feminist queer reading! more on that later)

    nate, your comments are really interesting in light of a conversation i had with my cousin the other week. he used to work as a bouncer in the 1990s in sydney and then went on to run a security firm. for him, in sydney, the crims with the stable code were the white anglos; the ‘new generation of crime’ directly attributable to the growing ambitions of migrant kids from the western suburbs for whom ‘the old rules’ didn’t inspire loyalty and who made up their own rules haphazardly and dangerously, a la Williams.

    for these reasons it will be fascinating to watch the new season, which reportedly will be offering the pre-history of the moment when these so-called rules were established (how different precincts were territorialised, we might say.) this, alongside the clear ethnic tensions in my cousin’s comments that continue in various suburban milieux gives obvious room for the show’s expansion right up to the present.

    finally, this makes industry sense of why season 1 worked so well – the potential audience were probably already used to an as you say ‘ethnocised’ representation of underworld crime through the mafia genre as well as the popular press. i’m not sure what would have happened if the show had been pitched around chopper’s contemporaries from the outset, for instance.

    the lack of family in williams’ case is certainly symbolic of many things… that’s a great point to note, thanks.

  4. Jason W
    November 11th, 2008 @ 5:04 pm

    Some things I think was thinking about as we wrote the abstract…

    Sunshine vs. Carlton, which Nate picks up on in an interesting way above.

    The “givenness” of the economy of drug production and distribution in the narrative, alongside the deadly contest about relative positions of individuals in that economy. There’s no suggestion that even the police will be able to restrict the flow of drugs and cash, only that they may be able to restore an imbalance which has led violence to exceed acceptable limits.

    The “ordinariness” of the settings for key events. This happens in every episode, but one which can stand in for the rest for the moment is Carl’s eventual arrest as “barbecue-stopper”.

    Club scenes showing money being made in the city; suburban scenes showing it being spent in or on the home.

    The comparisons to be made between the domestic lives of crims like Carl, and the troubled, overworked police officers.

    Anyway thanks all for comments so far.

Leave a Reply