Understanding surfing through a postcolonial and
de-colonial lens.
With the 2022 WSL season now behind us, it is an
opportune time to revisit an emergent theme on this august
site: that of understanding surfing through a postcolonial
and de-colonial lens.
DR and Chas have created space for our collective to educate
ourselves on this needed vocabulary and analytical frame.
Given the edification I received therein, I want to apply a
critical theory lens, informed by decolonial and postcolonial
thinking, to the 1987 surf camp classic, North Shore. This movie
captured a gestalt within modern surfing and deserves to be
excavated, to see how colonial tropes (and heteropatriarchal ones,
but that’s another article that someone else can give us) are
deeply embedded at the very core of surf culture.
We begin with the setting: an overachieving, eager to please
young white man, from a broken home.
This is a statement on emerging family dynamics in white middle
class America from the 1980s, as divorce was still stigmatized, and
the Spicoli surfer stereotype in full effect. Rick Kane breaks the
stoner stereotype with his work ethic and “wear your heart on your
shoulder” approach to being an upstanding member of the community,
where these character traits grant sympathies for his coming from a
broken home.
This background allows Rick Kane to stand in for US
entrepreneurial spirit and the naturalness of exporting this benign
(on the surface) spirit to the rest of the world, via his impending
trip to Hawaii to surf the North Shore.
Kane arrives on the North Shore, naive to local customs,
immediately accosted by the savage temptress and seductress in a
house of ill repute. Kane’s coded bourgeoisie puritanism makes the
correct play and holds out against such seduction, thus arming our
colonial protagonist with the moral uprightness needed to justify
the exploits to follow.
Kane catches a ride with fellow colonizers, Occy and Alex
Rodgers, who goad Kane into stealing sugar cane en route to the
North Shore. This stands in for a classist metaphor that belies a
central dynamic of colonial expansion: that of the educated,
materially abundant and resource rich post-agricultural white
empire, belittling and then taking the resource base of the
agricultural-based dominated non-white other.
Kane continues his colonial trajectory where his whiteness
appeals to the exotic Hawaiian princess, Kiani. Kiani acts out her
own Oedipal desires on the groomed white body of Kane, fantasizing
of rubbing his back with aloe, as she has done to her own family
and fellow subaltern community members. The horse upon which Kiani
rides is also a metaphor of her desire to advance her own mobility
and social standing, benefitting from white capital (the owner of
the horse) to escape the limitations of her own backward,
uncivilized upbringing.
Kane, now bereft of his property and with no money, meets
Turtle, the classic white-who-has-gone native.
Notice, though, that a turtle is a mammal with the strongest
heart. Here Turtle’s nomenclature is a subversive statement that
white privilege is long lived, solid, patient, stable, and able to
conquer in any environment.
This is echoed when Kane meets Chandler, the latter who has
achieved the colonizer’s dream: a native wife, a house on the
beach, and credibility with the locals, all who defer to him in the
lineup and want to buy the products of his labor. Chandler
evidences total appropriation of native Hawaiian knowledge, using
folk expertise and colonized traditional ecological knowledge to
groom Kane in following in his footsteps to continue the
colonization of the North Shore breaks via a variety of superior
technologies crafted by Chandler through his industrious work ethic
and his copious colonized knowledge of the various surf breaks
therein.
Note there is even tension with the alpha-male, Burkhart, the
uber-capitalist playing out escapist fantasies on the same
colonized landscapes. Chandler opines his products are only made
“the right way,” yet Chandler and Kane work together to create a
logo that further will allow for the appropriation and subjugation
of colonized surf knowledge and crafts, while the veneer of
“authentic” stoke allays any capitalist-colonialist guilt, making
Burkhart the fall guy.
This move presages the onset of greenwashing within the surf
industry as a whole.
Note, too, the etymology of the word “chandler”: Middle English
(denoting a candle maker or candle seller): from Old French
chandelier, from chandelle. Here Chandler is lighting the way for
the appropriate way to colonize the North Shore–it is not via brawn
and muscles, a la Burkhart, as that is not a long-term solution to
colonization. Rather, it is through charisma and ingratiating
oneself into the local populace that colonization is most
effective.
This dynamic is on full display as Kane battles Da Hui and the
titular leader of this group, Vince Moaloka.
The character arc of Vince is Edward Said’s archetypal
“Orientalist gaze” in a nutshell: the dark, exotic other, full of
violence and danger, steadily pacified by the grit, superior work
ethic, and rational, secularized, democratic knowledge of the West,
as embodied here archetypally by Kane.
We see this, too, in the reverse arc of Rocky, the uneducated
local thief and thug, who stole Kane’s property. Kane, local beauty
in hand, encounters Vince and Rocky amongst the sacred fields of
Hawai’i. Here Kiani had already begun the process of freely giving
native secrets to the white colonizer, with her body and heart to
soon follow; Kane notices his belt buckle on Rocky and challenges
Rocky to get it back.
Rocky recognizes the superior military might of the West and
tries to create solidarity amongst his brethren, only to be denied
by the father figure and leader, Vince. The colonial project is now
almost complete, and the pole is part of the metropole.
Only one last transaction is needed: the full taking of the
resources from the latter, to fully benefit the former. This occurs
symbolically in two ways: the first is Kane taking back his belt
buckle. Note here the silver clasp is a metaphor for minerals,
which were subsumed by colonial powers on the back of enslaved
labor–such is the unavoidable fate of Hawai’i.
The other resource, of course, are the waves–and here again,
Kane becomes the conqueror.
But unlike the transparent aggressive colonialism of Burkhart,
it is by appropriating Hawaiian soul, as taught by his colonial
mentor, Chandler, that allows Kane to emerge as the white victor,
overseeing a now conquered empire.
Lest we be remiss and think fiction does not influence lived
reality, let us remember that Makua Rothman is the child of
Chandler. Here the hybrid figure of Makua, as an innocent real-life
child born of a white father who helped form Da Hui, cannot be lost
on viewers of surf culture.
There is a direct line from that scene to Nathan Florence and
Koa Rothman sitting at a table at Turtle Bay, discussing their new
podcast in 2022, further cementing the colonization of the North
Shore by white descended peoples. \
To add insult to colonized injury, Koa is drinking a Coors
Light–Coors is of course the business run at one point by Peter
Coors, a well known supporter of far-right, conservative politics,
which of course target critical theory and decolonial approaches to
understanding structural and racialized inequalities.
So where does this leave us?
I must confess, it brings me no joy to undertake this analysis
of such a pivotal movie in surf culture; a movie that many have
enjoyed from its release in 1987 through today, myself
included.
Sadly, I think it leaves us with one major question that the
industry must answer, to atone for its laggardness on this
front:
When the fuck are we finally getting the god damn sequel?!?!
