8 - Jane Campion’s Palimpsestuous Gothic: Kinship in Top of the Lake: China Girl

Summary

Drawing on her background as an undergraduate student of anthropology, director Jane Campion examines notions of family with an anthropological eye. Her female protagonists come from fractured or dysfunctional families, and their adventures and investigations highlight larger flaws in the social systems in which they participate. In the two seasons of Jane Campion's Top of the Lake (2013, 2017), protagonist Detective Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) investigates crimes against younger women while suffering herself from the trauma of being raped by a group of men in her youth and bearing a child as a result. Beyond exploring rape culture, Campion's anthropological approach bears witness to the fracturing of patriarchal kinship structures based on incest taboos that structure the exchange of women between men (Lévi-Strauss 1969). In the second season in particular (subtitled China Girl), the sex and illegal surrogacy trades in Australia point to the disintegration of these structures.

Kathleen McHugh has observed that Campion's interest in family structures is apparent from the very beginning of her career, noting that the opening credits of her student film Peel: An Exercise in Discipline (1982) contain a Lévi- Strauss kinship schematic – a triangle containing the names of its three actors showing how their characters are linked with one another – followed by the phrase ‘A True Family’ in scare quotes (2007, 27–8). McHugh also examines the opening credit sequence of the first season of Top of the Lake, in which cast and crew names emerge and disappear alongside images of stag antlers, girls, and foetuses. McHugh argues that these images are a paratext, enabling us to read the series as gesturing towards possible versions of ‘family’ unencumbered by patriarchal structures (2015, 23). Similarly, the opening credits of the second season, China Girl, perform a similar manoeuvre, appearing to sweep the so-called nuclear family off to sea. In this chapter, I argue that Campion violates incest taboos as a way of flouting male kinship structures. She does this in two ways: through a use of the Gothic in which Campion's female characters break taboos themselves and work as signifiers of the undoing of the patriarchal management of women, and through a set of aesthetic practices that blur lines between characters and fuse their familial roles.