Escaflowne no Thesis

by Sarah Dove

I've often wondered exactly why I love The Vision of Escaflowne so much, and although I can point to many reasons for my love, I've never been able to narrow it down to one ultimate, simple reason. (Besides 'Because it's so damn cool.' That's true, but a bit inarticulate, and I didn't go to university for four years to justify a passion in those terms.) Today (22 January, 2000), while working at my market research job, I had an insight that finally revealed to me precisely why I love Escaflowne.

I love it because I am a New Zealander.

The sense of this statement may be less than immediately obvious to my wider audience, since I assume most of you are not New Zealanders (only about four million people in the world are) and so you probably don't know what it's like. So that you can share my delightful sensation of enlightenment, I want to explain certain key aspects of New Zealand (and by extension Australasian) culture and why The Vision of Escaflowne is so particularly relevant to and resonant with these.

An early form of my final Thesis of Escaflowne came to me a few months ago when I was thinking about being an Aucklander. Only Aucklanders think it is important or good to be an Aucklander. The rest of the country refer to us as 'bloody Aucklanders' or 'JAFAs,' standing for 'Just Another F***ing Aucklander.' Well, we're the biggest city and Xena lives here, so we don't care what they think. The thing is, although to people in the rest of New Zealand, localised cultural identity is based on things like what town or region you're from, (eg. if you're from Taranaki you will be very practical and have an affinity with sheep, if you're from Bulls you will be very odd indeed because living in Bulls seems to do that to people [they have a street named Vampire Place and far more antique stores than any healthy community needs, not to mention a sign outside the police station saying 'Const-a-bull']), in Auckland, one of the most sprawling cities in the world (second only, I believe, to Los Angeles in land area), it is broken down by regions within the city, each with a clear cultural identity, as perceived by people in other regions of the city, at least.

Well, the same goes for what I just said about Taranaki and Bulls. Those are stereotypes based on reading Footrot Flats, a comic strip about New Zealand farm life, and passing through Bulls with my family on car trips to Wellington, totally an outsider's view. (They have a dress shop called Tizzy Designs and a pub called The Rat Hole. Bulls worries me.) But the stereotypes are based on recognisable tendencies among the populations of those regions. (Bulls has a twin city, in England. It's called Cowes.) It came to me, in one of those 'Eureka!' type moments that, if the characters of The Vision of Escaflowne were transposed to Auckland, I knew exactly which bits of Auckland they would come from. I even knew what schools they went to. (The Whittaker's chocolate company used to do a really cool TV ad where they said their milk chocolate was special because the milk in it came from Bulls. I'll shut up about Bulls now.)

I know girls like Millerna. I met her and resented her at university, where the suburbs mix. She comes from Remuera and went to Epsom Girls' Grammar. Allen is from St Helier's or Kohimarama and went to St Kentigern College. (I think my sister went out with him for a year, but he was called Grant, and gave me an Obi-Wan Kenobi Star Wars glass for my twenty-first birthday. I was distraught when they broke up.) Dryden went to King's College, or possibly Senior College in the central city, and probably had an afterschool job in the Hemp Store on Queen Street. Dilandau is what every psycho North Shoreboy with a No Fear decal in the rear window of his little black Mazda is in his dreams. Despite Hitomi being from another planet, I can even place her in Auckland, and this is where the theory began to have especial resonance for me.

The obvious Auckland analogue of the Phantom Moon is Howick, the Eastern suburb where I myself live. It's regarded with mystification and unease by the other suburbs, and generally seen as something of a world unto itself. I once had a long conversation with a nice boy wearing green Dr Martens, in the band rotunda at Albert Park, in which he maintained that Howick actually exists on the other side of a dimension gap like that separating Earth and Gaea (he didn't use that analogy, because I don't think he'd seen Escaflowne, but if he had he would have), on the grounds that he'd never been there, no-one he knew had ever been there and none of them even knew how you got there. There were rumours that you could only get there if you walked under the arch of a rainbow, or if you made the trip on February 29 in a leap year. I tried to tell him about going through Highland Park via the Pakuranga Highway, but he didn't believe me.

Howick's reputation is, of course, completely unfair. All right, it's a bit remote, even, one might say, a bit dead, but gosh, we've got the oldest Selwyn church in New Zealand, and really nice cafés and restaurants. Dinner at the Windross restaurant in Cockle Bay is an entirely delightful experience, although the colour of the walls makes my vegan cousin Paul feel funny. It just makes me want to order rare steak, or would do so were their seafood menu not so outstanding - and do ask for the special strawberry champagne cocktails. Forgive me; if you live in Howick you must either apologise for it a lot or be brazenly proud of the fact, and I tend to opt for the latter as being less wimpish.

So Hitomi is definitely a nice Eastern Suburbs girl. I think she might even have gone to Howick College, like me, although when I am pressed to be absolutely honest I'll admit that Maclean's College is also a contender. They always had more class than we did. Called their teachers 'sir' and stuff. We had one teacher we called 'Gomez,' but that was pure affection. (Also he looked like John Astin.) At Maclean's there is a rule that boys and girls may not stand closer than a foot apart, and you may not walk on the grass. Whenever Howick College goes there for a sporting fixture or whatever they all have great fun walking on the grass before the envious eyes of the Maclean'sers. I briefly dated a boy from Maclean's and I can vouch for the fact that it turns you funny, so maybe we'll make Hitomi a Howick College girl after all.

At the opposite pole, so to speak, from the middle-class ease of the Eastern suburbs, is the woolly hinterland of the West, domain of… Westies. I seem to see a tendency for the South part of a large city to be its most economically depressed and dangerous; South Auckland, South Central LA, etcetera. Funnily enough, the same holds true for Auckland and the Australian city of Melbourne - people from West Melbourne, I'm told, are culturally extremely similar to people from West Auckland, and are also known as Westies.

What am I getting at? Well, the fact is that Van and Folken are pretty obviously Westies. I even like to think of Fanelia as West of Asturia, although the Vision of Escaflowne Compendium tells us only that it's 'adjacent.' (Actually, I've now seen a map which confirms that it is! All ROYTE!) Being a New Zealander, in general, is a bit like being Fanelian; your country is generally ignored by the world powers and those that do think of it see it as a quaint little place full of people who probably have excessively close relationships with animals. (What I said about Taranaki should be thought about very carefully.) If you want a microcosm of that experience within the bounds of Auckland, try being a Westie.

There are other signs. A big one is Folken's hair. I'm sorry to say this about someone I like so much, but he has the archetypal mullet. This is a haircut favoured by the unsophisticated, short on top and at the sides (often somewhat spiky) but with long, trailing, often stringy bits at the back. It is also facetiously known as a 'sh/long,' as in 'short/long,' but only to people who like having an excuse to say what sounds like 'schlong.' (Curiously, I believe there are some surfers who use 'mullet' as a synonym for the more generally accepted meaning of 'schlong,' but you can't depend on surfers' English to make any sense. If you look in the dictionary for 'mullet' it will tell you it's a kind of fish. A person who seems dazed or dopey may be described as 'like a stunned mullet.' How the word came to be associated with a bad haircut, I have no idea. A connoisseur of mullets was Eddy Temple-Morris, a perky little Welshman with a beard who was host of the sadly defunct MTV Europe show Up For It Live. Nearly every episode featured a segment called 'Mullet Police,' which showcased photos that viewers had sent in of people they knew with mullets. For a brief, heady period when TVNZ was trying to crush local music channel Max TV out of competition, New Zealand received a free MTV Europe feed, and we were able to participate in this mockery. Eddy loved the photos from New Zealand viewers because our mullets are so numerous and so… mulletty. My sister wanted to marry him. That's neither here nor there, although this essay is giving you fascinating insights about my sister's love life. That's quite enough of a digression.)

The point is, Welshmen may laugh at New Zealanders for having mullets, but New Zealanders at large laugh at Westies' mullets. They are the Mullet Kings. To have a mullet is to risk being identified as a Westie even if you're from Bulls.

And then there's Van, and his psychic bond with Escaflowne. That sort of emotional closeness with a vehicle is most definitely a sign of Westieism. Transport the two of them to Auckland, put a Holden badge on Escaflowne and probably no-one would think anything was odd about it. (Holden is an Australian car manufacturer. Westies love Holdens. Some Westies love their Holdens more than their mothers. You can't always find a sheep, but a Holden is forever. Often it's forever on your lawn, up on bricks, with long grass growing under it where cats hide and hunt.) People who are already familiar with the hallmarks of Westieism may be growing increasingly indignant at my parcelling two such attractive young men up with the sort of boofheads and bogans you find in the West. True, it is hard to imagine (and it's best not to try) Van wearing a black teeshirt with 'HSV Positive' on it (Holden Service Vehicle - it's another of those cultural things), or Folken getting completely ratted on Lion Red, but I stand by my theory. You don't have to have every hallmark of a Westie to be one in the heart. Any real Westies reading this are probably getting very offended. Please be assured that I am only talking about the stereotype of Westies as a cultural concept, which everyone should realise does not accurately reflect reality in every case. I don't wish to insult any real-life people. (I thought the guy I saw wearing an 'HSV Positive' teeshirt was cool. At my friend Natasha's wedding the bride and her attendants arrived in an HSV with white ribbons on the bonnet.)

Curiously, the only real-life Westie who reminds me of an Escaflowne character is the comedian Ewen 'The Westie' Gilmour, who looks a bit like Dryden. His idea of dressing up for a special occasion is to put his hair in two plaits. Ewen is a past recipient of the Billy T James comedy grant, an award represented by a gift of a yellow towel, to be worn slung around the neck. This is a great honour. Another thing I've been trying to demonstrate to you throughout this essay is that New Zealand is A Very Strange Country. There is no getting away from it, even in Howick. If you can't take Howick, stay the hell out of Bulls, that's my motto. I don't know if there is a Gaean equivalent of Bulls. Some thoughts scare even me. (I don't know if you can tell, but I actually really like Bulls. I just like typing its name. Bulls!)

If you don't know what Westies are like, you are probably finding all this a bit mystifying. The best way to see some Westies without leaving the safety (?) of America (or wherever else you may be) is to watch a wonderful Australian movie called The Castle. (Ask at a good video store, or order it from Amazon.com.) The family at the heart of the story, the Kerrigans, are the most perfect embodiment of all the best things about Westie culture that I've ever seen. They're fabulous. They're my pet Westies. Darryl Kerrigan, played with immense charm by Michael Caton, is the only Westie I could ever consider marrying. These are the Melbourne type of Westie, of course, but the essence is the same.

One of the odder effects of opening your mind to global culture (besides getting to laugh at things like the fact that South Africans call sneakers 'takkies') is that you keep thinking of quite disparate things in bizarre juxtapositions because you keep them all in the same headspace. This is what has happened to me with bits of Escaflowne and The Castle. Sometimes this makes you realise that the apparently disparate things have unsuspected similarities, proving that it's a small world and Walt Disney knew what he was talking about after all. Sometimes it's just an excuse to think it would be incredibly funny for Goau to turn to Balgus by the lake and ask (in a flat Australian accent) 'How's the serenity?' There are so many times when it would give me a giggle to superimpose Castle lines on Escaflowne.

Van: How can you tell where the invisible giants are?

Hitomi: It's the vibe.

I will never again look at Allen Schezar without thinking (again, in a flat Australian accent), 'Now that's a head of hair.' I think that instead of Fortunate Blood transfusions, Folken should have given Nariya and Eriya little statues of elephants - but only if their trunks were pointing up. I have to consciously refrain from referring to Jajuka as 'Son of Coco.'

Allen: Could you move the Corolla? I need to get the Torana out so I can get to the Scherazade.

Gaddes: Well I'll have to get the keys to the Cortina if I'm going to move that Corolla.

Allen: Yeah, watch the boat mate.

Millerna: Get your hand off it, Dryden.

'The Ispano Clan reckon they'll repair Escaflowne.'

'How much?'

'[however much it was].'

'Tell 'em they're dreaming!'

(wipes eyes) Man, this stuff is so not funny if you don't know and love The Castle, but if you do it's… well, maybe it only works for me. I wonder how many people there actually are who have seen both Escaflowne and The Castle? I know for sure there are three. One of them is me and the others are my friend Kevin and his ex Elizabeth, whom we indoctrinated before she decided she only liked him as a friend, the fool. I'd like there to be more, just to see what happens.

Oh well, if you thought that was silly, be glad I didn't acquaint you with my idea for a cross between the British celebrity quiz show Shooting Stars and Sailor Stars. (Haaaaaaaaaaaa-ruka, kakaka!)

After that long international Westie tangent, you may be wondering why I started out to say that Escaflowne has special relevance for me as a New Zealander, especially since I've said I'm not a Westie. Well, there's more to it. As I've said, being from New Zealand is very like being from Fanelia. But I can also identify heavily with the people of Zaibach.

For one thing, we both come from countries with the letter Z in their names. There aren't that many of them. Can you think of any besides Zanzibar and Zaire? (I'm not even sure Zanzibar is a country.) There is a whole novel, The Strange Letter Z, centred on the idea that New Zealanders living overseas are unusually attuned to the capital letter Z, since the sight of it on a printed page is often their first hint of news from home. (Or so the review of it I read said. I've never actually found the book.) I'm sure being from Zaibach is the same. And there's another thing - we have no national adjective, nothing handy like 'American' or 'British,' 'Fanelian' or 'Asturian.' You can be a New Zealander, or, one supposes, a Zaibacher, but there is no more precise term for you. It feels a bit like there's something missing, linguistically at least. I am sure this is the source of our deep, shared angst.

And then there are our leaders. Sir Robert Muldoon was so New Zealand's Dornkirk. He was our Prime Minister in the 1970s and early 1980s, when I was a little girl, and he was spooky. His policies of economic protectionism and 'Think Big' works projects (which the dragons'-graveyard Energist quarry is if ever I saw one - and if we'd had the technology for destiny machines, we'd've had them too) helped make New Zealand the odd little shambles it is today - although, to be fair, Sir Rob's successors did a lot of that, what with Rogernomics and privatisation. I do not approve of Muldoon; I was brought up not to, but I find his image fascinating. (If you're trying to figure out where you know his name from, well, the transvestite quarterback played by John Lithgow in The World According to Garp was named Robert [or Roberta] Muldoon, and another fictional Robert Muldoon was the Australian velociraptor keeper in Jurassic Park. New Zealanders get a great laugh out of this.)

Muldoon was one of those potent bogeyman figures that burn themselves into an impressionable young nation's psyche. He recognised this about himself and enjoyed it. After his fall from power, when he got stinking drunk one night (I'm sorry, stinking tired and emotional) and, on live national television, called a snap election in a fit of bravado, only to lose by a landslide, he enjoyed himself performing as the Narrator in a national touring production of The Rocky Horror Show (Rocky Horror was written by a New Zealander. I'm not kidding about New Zealand), and hosting the Friday night horror film slot on TV2 in full Transylvanian costume as Count Robula. To put this in perspective, can you imagine any former President of the United States, or even a state Governor (Jesse Ventura doesn't count) doing the same? If he could have sat in a giant fate wheelchair thingy directing the destiny of the country for two hundred years, he would've, that's all I'm saying.

New Zealand even has its own national sorcerer, or, to give him his preferred title, wizard. The Wizard of New Zealand (formerly only the Wizard of Christchurch) was appointed by the last Prime Minister but two, Jim Bolger, affectionately known to the electorate as 'Mr Potato Head' and currently serving as New Zealand's ambassador in Washington, DC. Many people find this a surprising posting given that Mr Bolger was always considered a bit of a diplomatic Achilles' heel. He had a tendency to unconsciously imitate the accent of whoever he happened to be speaking to, giving the strong impression that he was making fun of their English. This was most bizarre whenever he came into contact with Bill Clinton. Mr Bolger never sat his School Certificate exams. These are a more basic qualification than the SATs, taken by most people at the age of fifteen. I do not wish to give the wrong impression of New Zealand democracy; it has many wonderful victories to its credit. We were the first country to give women the vote, in 1893, and in 1999 became the first country to elect a known transsexual, Georgina Beyer, to Parliament. Georgina Beyer rocks. In the same election we acquired a delightful white Rastafarian backbencher, Nandor Tanczos, who attends Parliament in a hemp suit and worries about people drinking alcohol.

Although the Wizard has never, to my knowledge, involved himself in stealth technology design or fate manipulation, he cast some good rainmaking spells during a serious drought a few years ago, and does have a cat of which he is very fond. Her name is Flopsie and she is not very bright. I learned this from an attractive book called Household Gods, consisting of interviews with and pictures of notable New Zealanders and their cats, including Burton Silver, author of the remarkable work of artistic theory, Why Cats Paint. Meruru would be welcome here. (Another former Prime Minister, Sir David Lange, has a cat named Sir Jonathan who he claims can travel through telephone lines by faxing himself. Okay, actually he's joking. But I thought I'd see if I could freak you out. Sir David was actually one of our most highly educated, sensible and humane Prime Ministers, and a very witty man to boot. I think there was a picture of him in the National Geographic once.)

(Also, I have no excuse to fit this in, but in the nineteenth century we had a Premier (before the office of Prime Minister was available, since we were only a Dominion of Great Britain) named Richard Seddon who, because of his autocratic personal style, was known as King Dick. This is brilliantly funny to me, in the same way as Will Smith's calling an album Big Willie Style.)

And then there are the poor Dragonslayers. At the roots of New Zealand's sense of national identity is the legend of the ANZACs, or Australia & New Zealand Army Corps. In World War I these soldiers were directed by British officers to land at Gallipolli in Turkey. It was a bloodbath. It was the wrong bloody beach. Turkish defenders with machine-guns in the hills mowed down the Australians and New Zealanders almost as fast as they could get onto the shore. Some of the invaders did manage to get a little way in, and a small party of New Zealanders briefly took and held a hill called Chunuk Bair before they were all killed too. The point is, we got our asses kicked on a Dragonslayer scale (I'm thinking here of how Van massacred them). It was an epic and glorious defeat, and we are fiercely proud of it. Or we used to be. Most of the ANZAC veterans have died of natural causes by now, and the painful sacredness of ANZAC Day, our remembrance day, is beginning to weaken. If Zaibachers really are like New Zealanders, they will make heroes of those unfortunate boys, perhaps buying red paper roses the way we buy red paper poppies…

Interestingly enough, in Turkey there is a body of water called Lake Van. A famous breed of cat, which likes to swim in water, originated in that region.

What conclusion can be reached from all this? There is the conclusion that I started with, that Escaflowne has particular relevance and resonance for the New Zealand cultural psyche. There is my friend Kevin's probable conclusion, that cats masterminded the whole thing and will one day take over the world, just as soon as they're all good enough at swimming and can trick us into genetically engineering them to have hands. And there's what I think is the truth, that the world is a strange and wonderful shifting web of ideas, full of fluid intersections of dreams, always and never the same. I love having The Castle and The Vision of Escaflowne in my head at the same time. I love living in the sort of country that produces the sort of people I've told you about. (Even people who went to Epsom Girls' Grammar. One of my dearest childhood friends, Amy, did, and it didn't spoil her at all.) Life is weird. Life is good. Escaflowne is so damn cool. And Folken Fanel really needs a haircut.