In 2014, the Guardian reviewed the box set of Chris Lilley’s Summer Heights High, a “mockumentary” set in a public secondary school. It was a “masterclass in character comedy,” the reviewer said, a “towering achievement” that brought “three fabulously memorable school characters to hilarious life”. They were the vain and delusional drama teacher Mr G, the narcissistic private school girl Ja’mie, and hard to handle Jonah.
Now, just six years later, Summer Heights High is cancelled, so egregious that Netflix has removed it and three other shows made by Lilley, not long ago lauded as edgy and possibly brilliant. Also disappeared were We Can Be Heroes, Jonah from Tonga and Angry Boys.
Lilley has been criticised for racial stereotyping and “brown face” characters such as Jonah and African American rapper S.mouse. I’m not sure why We Can Be Heroes has disappeared – should I feel guilty for loving it at the time? – but possibly because he plays a Chinese student. The removal of the shows from Netflix is reportedly permanent.
The ABC, which not long ago basked in the success of Lilley’s series (it broadcast Summer Heights High in 2007), in response announced a review into its content to “ensure it meets current community standards and reflects our editorial policies on harm and offence”. The obvious questions are: who will decide what are current community standards and on what criteria is something deemed harmful and offensive? Fraught issues indeed.
So, why is this such a talking point? What does it matter, too, if Gone with the Wind – glorious but racist at its core – is dropped for a time by HBO Max, to return with a “discussion of its historical context and a denouncement” of its depiction of slavery?
Or if the “Don’t Mention the War” episode of the classic 1970s British comedy Fawlty Towers was dropped by a BBC-owned streaming service, to be reinstated with a warning of “potentially offensive content and language”. It was pulled down because of “racial slurs”, a scene in which hotel guest Major Gowen, a pompous fool, uses racist language about the West Indies cricket team.
As for those statues tumbling in the US and the UK – and no doubt here soon too – good riddance. Public statues are a limited snapshot about who the wealthy and powerful thought should be immortalised at a particular time in history, and times have changed.
All of this is in the context of the rage that ensued after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May. The much bigger issues of this crucial moment – playing out differently in different countries – are about police brutality, systemic and persistent racism and somehow facing, full on, the truth about the past.
Comedian and former Triple J breakfast host Matt Okine put it well on ABC Melbourne radio on Friday morning. Talking about Lilley, he said, “just distracts from the main topics of why there are 30,000 people marching in the middle of a pandemic … what’s a million times more offensive to every person of colour I know is the is the denial of Australia’s history by our current PM saying slavery was never a thing here when it absolutely was.”
He makes a good point, but there is room to talk about culture, too. How we tell our history, what version of the past we highlight, is not only reflected in history books and official statistics, and certainly not through public monuments to (mostly) white men. It includes our movies, our books and our television shows.
Myths are embedded. Networks and streaming services and Vogue and sporting codes and every other institution suddenly reviewing how they have performed and vowing to do better are belated and opportunistic given how long people of colour have politely complained, but they might matter if they are held to it.
If we can’t and shouldn’t erase every “problematic” piece of culture, Gone with the Wind might be a good place to start the discussion. Millions of people love this movie. I first saw it as child at a drive-in with my family and was mesmerised. I didn’t even know what the Civil War was. I don’t think I looked past Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara’s tortured and glamorous love story (now I realise Rhett all-but raped Scarlett, which is a a problem, too).
Gone with the Wind is terribly, patently racist. Most of us don’t judge the past by today’s standards – otherwise farewell to Shakespeare and, in my view, deeply sexist films like Love Actually (although others will disagree). As 12 Years a Slave scriptwriter John Ridley put it, we know films reflect the concerns and attitudes of their time and even well-meaning ones can fall short in representing marginalised people.
Films are interesting because they are a snapshot of a particular time, but Gone with the Wind is different, argues Ridley, because it is “a film that glorifies the antebellum south. It is a film that, when it is not ignoring the horrors of slavery, pauses only to perpetuate some of the most painful stereotypes of people of colour”. It continues to give legitimacy to the idea that the secessionist movement was somehow noble, and not “a bloody insurrection to maintain the ‘right’ to own, sell and buy human beings”.
Ridley is not a censor but he advocated what HBO Max ultimately did – pull the movie down until an addendum can be added that explains the film’s context.
Ridley’s framing is a good place to start. Using his argument, the removal of the Fawlty Towers episode was panicked and foolish, a sop to social media outrage. There will be some people offended by just about anything, but we have to be a little more sophisticated.
In that episode, nobody much cares about Basil’s ludicrous attempts not to insult the Germans, because he’s the fool. And similarly, the Major’s racist remarks are primarily a comment on his English upper crust bigotry. Culture is complicated and people will have different views, but we can’t censor to placate the most sensitive of us. As John Cleese told the Age: “We were not supporting his (the major’s) views, we were making fun of them. If they can’t see that – if people are too stupid to see that – what can one say?”
The pulling down of statues is not about erasing history but about a different perspective on that history, a bigger truth than the “white hero” in stone. Historians have pointed out that there’s nothing new about it; the Romans tore down statues, as did the Germans after the second world war.
But there is an argument that, in some cases, we would do better to leave a statue of an important figure up, with an additional plaque to explain the times, the context, even the individual’s complexity. Perhaps, as Stan Grant suggested a few years ago, the Hyde Park statue of James Cook could contain a further inscription to the insulting one that he “discovered” Australia. Indigenous Australians have been urging that conversation for decades and it’s way past time we had it.
Perhaps statues of Winston Churchill could acknowledge the multiple sides of him – yes, he did help defeat the Nazis, and yes, he was a racist, especially towards Indians.
But others, as William Dalrymple wrote in the Guardian, deserve no ceremony. There is no place, he wrote, for a statue of Robert Clive outside the British foreign office for the man who established British rule in India and was known even during his lifetime as Lord Vulture, a corrupt looter and overseer of murder.
A museum might be a better place, perhaps one that explains the British empire in all its facets. In Australia, we need more of that, too – more history and public acknowledgement of the complexity of our own past, the good and the horrific.
As for Lilley, Okine made the most important point. Comedians are meant to push boundaries. What some people find offensive, others don’t. And yes, some Tongans have said they loved the portrayal of Jonah from Tonga, but many found it patronising and racist.
The real issue is that there are little or any other representations of Islander people. Indigenous Australians, Chinese, Indian, African stories rarely get told in human and complex ways, and that’s what needs to change. Netflix will show its mettle when it commissions more of them. “It’s not that Chris Lilley did it, but that Chris Lilley was the only one doing it,” Okine said.
It’s too early to be cautious or too handwringing. It’s impossible to know exactly what this moment will mean. But the issues of culture, of how we tell our stories, what’s “acceptable” now and what is not, is fraught, and somehow, we need to find a way to discuss it. Together.
