As China Girl concludes, the case solved almost as an
afterthought, the question burned in my mind is not the ending, which some took
as a cliffhanger, in which Robin watches home videos of Mary and looks up at a
knock on the door in yet another image that has me 100 percent certain Jane
Campion and/or Gerard Lee are giant fans of Veronica Mars. I take the show at face
value that it’s probably Pyke, who is coming over after all, to catch up on
lost time as a budding family unit, but it could be Mary, or Adrian or Liam or
a freshly released Miranda. It’s not really that interesting who’s at the door,
and in any case, Campion and Lee designed the scene so that it doesn’t matter. It’s
a scene about Robin discovering the wonder of parenthood, witnessing her
child’s first demonstrations of personality, loving Mary from afar. But the
question that haunts me is about loving Mary up close. Does Mary give Julia
that hug?
I was screaming when they cut away. It’s a brilliant climax,
Julia not taking the bait, staying put, enduring, negotiating, demanding Mary
meet her on some level, making it clear how much more giving her love for Mary
is than Puss’, and Mary on her way out the door and out the country with the
abuser who hit her and pimped her out. Mary refuses to stay even after being
taken hostage and somehow avoiding a local manhunt that you’d think would
involve cops at her house. She also refuses to listen to Julia. Julia’s new
partner Isadore has been let’s say dangerously removed from things, by which I
mean lived experience and consequences, once calling Puss’ life story a fairy tale
and immediately sucking up to him after his freak-out and now calling Mary’s
story a hero’s journey. Maybe that has something to do with Julia’s insistence on giving her daughter so much rope. But now Julia’s fed up with Isadore’s
point of view and she’s face to face, talking to her daughter who insists on diving back into
the fryer of her own volition, and at last she’s down to one last compromise:
How about a hug? No more philosophizing, no more abstraction, no more ideals, just a reestablishment of the physical connection between Julia and Mary. The cut to profile is shot through the bar, which blocks
Mary’s side of the scene from view. It’s just Julia standing there, arms wide
open, waiting. And then a cut.
Based on the cut, it’s an open question, and based on the
circumstances, I’d guess Mary did not hug her mother. They make up for it
later, but that resolution occurs off-screen, with Mary sedate. But whether Mary felt her mother’s tight embrace or she just felt the guilt of
punishing her mother once more, the showdown is a powerful influence on what
she does next, which is go to the airport, meet Puss and the girls, and finally
see him with enough perspective to remove herself from the situation.
In “Chapter 5,” Pyke wonders how Mary could still be
with Puss after the nose bite, let alone the pimping. That’s because the
episode opens with Mary leaving Robin’s apartment with Puss, who’s come to pick
her up and give Robin a creepy kiss in her sleep, which is redundant in at
least two ways. Here Mary cites the final straw as Puss letting the elevator
doors shut, which left her as a hostage for Brett the crazed gunman and
revealed how little Puss cares about her in a glaringly obvious image. But if that were
it she wouldn’t have shown up at the airport at all. He’s trying every trick in
his pathetic book, calling himself the true victim, preying on her class guilt
and self-esteem by calling her a spoiled bitch, and slapping her right there in
the airport. None of it seems to work. She doesn’t budge an inch.
I’m not sure Robin’s quite right, though, either. When she
confronts Puss, and by that I mean she beats his ass and holds a gun to his
head, she tells him Mary doesn’t love him. Mary hates him. That inadvertently
gives Puss ammo to use against Mary later. At the start of their fight, he
tries to cow her into submission: “So what, you hate me now?” He’s trying to
make her the bad guy so she’ll feel sorry enough to seal the deal and fly away.
Mary doesn’t take the bait. She may hate him, but that’s something like the way
she loved him, counterfeit emotion. More specifically, she sees things more
clearly. She sees his fraud and selfishness, she sees the free, fierce,
unconditional love of her mothers, and she sees a way out of an abusive
relationship. Julia sees Mary off to that showdown with love and Robin sees
Puss off with fear, the two mothers working in tandem to help Mary finally free
herself.
I almost wish Top Of The Lake wasn’t so committed to being a
murder mystery, because for one thing it barely cares what happened to
Cinnamon, and for another the drama of the investigation is well beneath that
of its other relationships. Brett goes on a rampage to avenge Cinnamon,
including hiding in the sand and shooting a cop. There’s a recurring accusation
that Robin is not open to love that makes a jagged fit with what we see of her,
but it’s treated like some kind of epiphany and a catalyst for Robin’s growth.
The shadow surrogacy business at Silk 41 brings out some real pain and—of
course, as always—leads right back to the top of Robin’s department, as Miranda’s
pregnancy was surrogate and Adrian was to be the father. Top Of The Lake never met a coincidence it didn’t like. And I guess we take
Puss’ word for it that Cinnamon hanged herself and the proprietors of Silk 41 were
just disposing of the body?
It’s a long way to walk to make the point that the developed
world subsists on the bodies and labor of the developing world, but make that
point it does, in Puss’ comically didactic goodbye film taped to the TV for the
police and surrogate parents. For too long, he says, the West has exploited the
East. You will note that this is a German ex-academic landlord drafting a bunch
of immigrant tenants who barely speak the language to star in a video about
their own exploitation, and it’s unclear to what extent they understand either the video or their emigration from Australia. But he’s not wrong exactly. The Thai
immigrants in China Girl are exploited by the crypto MRAs, the wealthy
couples in need of cheap surrogates, even the authorities at Robin’s police
department. And now the shoe’s on the other foot. The law sides with the girls.
Their fetuses may have none of their DNA, but they’re the children of their
birth mothers. And those mothers are taking their children to another country,
never to be heard from again. Meanwhile the parents who provided the DNA are
breaking down, calling lawyers, appealing to Adrian in his role as police
honcho, prevailing once again on the exploitative power systems that led to all this. The power systems that resulted in a Thai
woman’s death being labeled by the investigators, “China Girl.”
Class and race are welcome buttresses for Top Of The Lake’s
jeremiad against patriarchy, but bound up in that flight is a last defense of
maternal rights. In the design of the show, not only is it just and appropriate
that Robin have a role to play in her biological daughter’s life, despite
giving her up for adoption before leaving the hospital, but a mother would have
such a claim even if her child had none of her DNA. But are the DNA-providers
not biological parents as well? They’re treated as desperate, pathetic, and
offensively bourgeois, but doesn’t it follow that Miranda has some claim to
maternity over the child eventually born of her DNA? Not legally, no, but on a
more fundamental level, the tremendous intelligence of the body, as GJ puts it
in the original miniseries? Poor Miranda gets off even worse than Robin. But maybe that’s why Robin promises to find Miranda’s child. Maybe this isn’t over.
So Top Of The Lake: China Girl concludes somewhat as
expected, a drama of women’s bodies and a feat more of provocation than
conclusion. The mystery of Silk 41 doesn’t get resolved exactly, but as the fog
of mystery dissipates, what lingers is that the real danger to the girls of Silk 41 was never within but without.
Stray observations:
- “Chapters 5 & 6” were written by Jane Campion and Gerard
Lee. Campion directed the first, Ariel Kleiman the second. - Pyke: “I’ll get him fucked up. I’ve got contacts.”
- In the scene where Brett identifies the body of Cinnamon, Robin
tries to be considerate but Stally is compassionless: “I guess she died fucking…Did
she shave her muff?” He also laughs off Brett’s request for a moment alone. But
Robin backs him up on that. “It’s inappropriate. You’re a customer, not a
family member.” - The real Stally drama comes to a head when he once again
interrupts their work and punches a wall because he can’t have Robin. Happily
his partner intervenes, making him go outside and get the car and warning Robin
to keep her distance because Stally gets fixated. And here Stally was acting so
high and mighty to Brett. Unhappily his partner goes on to enlighten Robin on
the diverse spectrum of “yes-nos,” which is a shared belief among the guys apparently
that a woman might say no but means, “Keep trying.” - Brett tells his phantom Cinnamon he’ll restore her honor, which is such half-considered buzzword phrasing I almost think the producers didn’t mean for it to sound like anything more than it is. But it does; it sounds like defending her honor, protecting her virtue, father-daughter dances and Pyke standing up for Mary at Puss’ school. None of which has anything to do with the implied and fitting feminist target of real men perpetuating violence supposedly to defend a woman’s honor. Cinnamon’s already dead, so Brett isn’t doing this for her honor. And Pyke isn’t concerned for Mary’s dignity or virginity but her life and well-being.
- Miranda’s having a girl and naming her Rosa, but not
herself. She’s a customer of the same surrogate black market as the other
characters, quite a coincidence. “To my one good egg, my A-grade blastocyst.” - Not sure what to make of the idea that everyone convinces themselves
these sex workers are students. Is it class blindness? - Pyke’s reaction to Mary’s pregnancy test is to worry this
might mean she could be indulging risky behaviors maybe. “So she’s not using protection?
That’s a risk.” As if the danger is still ahead. No, Pyke. We’re well past risk
at this point. Do some parenting for once in your life. - We finally get the story on how a girl like Mary wound up
with a guy like Puss. Apparently she and Michaela used to hang out at Café Stasi
after school, and Puss works there. In fact, we’ve seen this place before. When
we first meet Mary, she’s with Puss, and a woman slaps him. We see her again
too. It’s Lydia, the disabled girl Puss proposed to on a dare. - If nothing else, Robin at least makes Puss fear for his life
once before he leaves the country. “You pimped by daughter! You almost got her
shot!”