The future of rail in hawaii

One thing is for sure, rail will have a vast impact on the Hawai`i landscape and future-scape when it happens. Along the path of any rail project new slums and shanties will inevitably colonize; so will shops and businesses, streets and crossroads of all kinds. Traffic may not be substantially eliminated, only redirected; diffused throughout the integrated grid. Rattling through the sky humanoids in packets of iron and steel hurtle through the great routers, switches and portals of electronic delivery. Wider corridors will deepen urban encroachment. Five hundred years from now what rail we install now will be a skeletal feature of the island skyline; but in it's pirated and twisted mode, not as nostalgic an emblem as the asphalt remnants of the old Pali road of the previous generation, that slips conspicuously into the green fern of the Windward mountains. From the stars you will see the beautiful design, so precise, yet organic in its logic, on the face of the aina. And at the root, in the shadow and muck, clusters of homeless and low income communities will cling like opihi to the iron pylons of the system, fighting for space and the scraps of endless detritus.

4. Discourse in the Pacific

Symbols, Myth and TV in Hawai'i

4. Discourse in the Pacific
Just three months after Hawai`i "officially" became the fiftieth state, and seven years after the debut of television in the islands, ABC-TV, the third place network in terms of territorial density, would launch Hawaiian Eye, the first prime time television series to call Hawai`i home. At the same time ABC launched another Warner Bros. series about the forty-ninth state called The Alaskans, starring the young Englishman Roger Moore. While The Alaskans filmed just thirty-six episodes before being canceled, Hawaiian Eye would broadcast 134 episodes. It would also set a generic precedent to be followed in 1968 by the phenomenally successful Hawaii Five-0, and then its successor, Magnum P.I., both of which were CBS productions. Five-0 broadcasted 279 episodes on first run network TV, while Magnum broadcasted 157 episodes. These three series span the Cold War decades, stretching from 1959 through 1988.

Much of the success of the first cycle is credited to the aura and mystique of the islands themselves. And yet, Hawaiian Eye was filmed primarily at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California, with special episodes and stock exteriors shot on location in Hawai`i. Five-0 and Magnum were filmed on location in Hawai`i, and edited in Hollywood; they have been much heralded for their logistical ingenuity and resulting realism. All three series of the first cycle were promoted and acknowledged for the authenticity and realism they brought to bear on dramatic television.

The success of the first cycle—including the studio realism of Hawaiian Eye—is a tribute in part to the array of narrative traditions the three series tap into. A key strategy was to use indigenous discourse to authenticate the mythic environment of subtropical Hawai`i. “Indigenous means peculiar to,” reads the Hawaiian Eye production bible. “Peculiar to means you find it there and no place else.” Hawaiian Eye and The Alaskans would establish ABC in 1959 as the U.S. network with the most far-flung diegetic expanse. ABC had bragging rights to an empire that stretched tele-visually from North of the tundra to the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It would also align ABC and Warner Bros. with the general U.S. project of “settling” Hawai`i, and bringing it into the Union fold.

The universe of the first cycle is a world rich in history and conflict. All three series for instance are steeped in military and anthropological lore. Tracey Steele (Anthony Eisley) of Hawaiian Eye and Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord) of Five-0 are Korean War veterans, and Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck) of Magnum and his buddies are veterans of Vietnam. Other Hawaiian Eye characters include undersea frogman and demolition expert Thomas Lopaka (Robert Conrad, in brownface, i.e., as a part-Hawaiian Native), Cricket Blake (Connie Stevens) whose Naval Commander father was killed during the Pearl Harbor surprise attack, and Kazuo Kim (Poncie Ponce), a member of the famed 442nd Infantry Regiment. Furthermore, references to Native Hawaiian issues are generally informed and ultimately substantiated by an amalgamation of legends and myths of Hawai`i itself. Along with the narrative traditions that support these discursive locations, the cycle is influenced by Hollywood’s industrial, economic and political culture, and that of the federal government, local government and economy, and the specific traditions of the many cultures that call Hawai`i home.

Let me state that a central thread of my argument is that commercial culture in general, and TV narrative in particular as it is situated in the Hawai`i paramilitary context, serves both historicizing and mythologizing functions. Its influence in other words is doubly effective. Episodic drama in the foundational decades of oligopoly TV tended to yield highly pedagogic and idealized content from a recognizable status quo. The ethnic mix of Hawai`i and its contentious political past fueled an extreme level of self-consciousness in the production of the first cycle making it a perfect site to investigate how cultural producers of mass media mobilize myth and history to rewrite the present and the past, establish aesthetic and psychic boundaries, and provide rationales for idealized hierarchies, often making such entities appear naturalized and historically singular and inevitable.

The Hawaiian Eye television series then marks the insertion of a potent line of discourse in and about Hawai`i at a heavily marked moment in island history. This discourse is both a continuation of other generic discourses (travel, evangelical, tourist, political, legislative, economic, anthropological, archeological, ethnographic, cartographic, cartoon, military, for example) and a formal extension of Hollywood genres and style beyond continental boundaries.

3. The Lesson of Corporeal Politics

Top: The Apotheosis of Captain Cook from a drawing by Webber
Next: Maniere de punir de mort un coupable aux iles Sandwich, Lithograph by Langlame
Next: Hawaiian Eye cast--Robert Conrad, Connie Stevens, Loren Eisley, Ponce Ponce
Bottom: Gilbert Kauhi, aka Zulu, as Kono in Hawaii Five-0

Symbols, Myth & TV in Hawaii

3. The Lesson of Corporeal Politics
Where verbal communications prove inadequate, the language of the body conveys context and subtext in extraordinary ways. The idolatry of apotheosis is problematized for instance by the politics of corporeal violence. Hawaiians were in a state of war when Cook sailed into their waters. The British ships were clearly viewed as vessels of significant military capacity. Cook was clearly a capable if not gifted navigator and leader of men. Oceanic cultures had great respect for those who could navigate the vast waters of the region. My purpose here is not to write a new truth about the Cook saga, but to cast a reasonable doubt over institutionalized interpretations, while suggesting a more proactive role for Hawai`i politicos and intelligentsia. In this way, institutional and commercial culture indebted to the Cook myth for structure and narrative sensibilities, are necessarily called into question for the socio-political assumptions they support, the hierarchies they naturalize, and the mysteries they inevitably resolve.

There is of course a certain historical and ethical accountability that goes into the framing of narrative and images. Ethnographic, archeological and anthropological discourses are tapped to contextualize and substantiate the televisual world, especially when natives, tikis or grass shacks are at hand. For better or worse, the frame is always strictly controlled: this is both an artistic and institutional imperative. The narrative iconicity of White supremacy in Hawai`i is partly rationalized by “official” theories of first contact relations. The pseudo-histories that results depict a tourist-friendly, accessible Hawai`i, where natives drive cabs, serve as doormen, bartenders, helpers and fire-dancers, or occasionally play knuckle-headed muscle. Such activities are generally staged on the narrative periphery of White-on-White conflict and romance, color in this case connoting both an ideal national subject on the one hand, and an ideal subservient position for the local on the other. Hawai`i in this way serves as the exotic threshold of Americanized space.

2. The Buttocks of Captain Cook

Above Photo: Robert Conrad and Stella Stevens in Hawaiian Eye. Lopaka’s girlfriend refers to him as “Captain Cook”. ©1960 Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.

Symbols, Myth and TV in Hawai'i

2. The Buttocks of Captain Cook
The legend of Captain James Cook for instance, a hotly contested narrative, is used by all three of the series to define, justify or identify its heroes in Hawai`i space. The Cook analogy is an important factor in understanding the paramilitary cycle in Hawai`i, for the detective/hero, like the 20th century anthropologist and archeologist, inevitably takes up the explorer/navigator role within the series, looking for clues, discovering exotic locales, erotic entanglements, solving crime, negotiating relationships, leading natives, translating for tourists, essentially becoming the new high priests of the tropics, albeit with a gun in hand, and access to high technology, military infrastructure, and unlimited funding.

(Photo: The Death of Captain Cook, Engraved by Francesco Bartolozzi and William Byrne, 1784. Based on the oil painting by John Webber)

Such a trope inevitably collides with other subtropic mainstays, such as the mystic power of the tiki, the benevolence of the primitive native, the authority of the foreign professor, the acquiescence of tribal elders and the inevitable seduction of the explorer by irrepressible women. The myth of Cook is central to understanding the narrative logic of the paramilitary cycle, and a key example of the necessity for writing a history that acknowledges series influences not usually taken into consideration for a television study of this sort.

Cook of course will forever be associated with Hawai`i not so much on the basis of his “discovery” of the archipelago in 1778, but more viscerally because of his death and dismemberment at the hands of irate Hawaiians less than one year later at Kealakekua Bay. The heartfelt, often rancorous debates in academic circles and popular histories over the meaning of Cook’s death suggests that popular and historic narrative continue to function as lightening rods for struggles over cultural and geopolitical power and legitimacy. Often such debates in Oceania, and there are several of them—Sahlins and Obeyeskere, Mead and Freedman, Trask and Linnekin—are framed as intensely partisan campaigns that attempt to leverage the force of academic reputation, command of secondary resources, and fraternity standing as lynchpins for theoretical rationales.

Academic writing and theories of such sort are not culturally or historically inconsequential. Rather, they have tremendous social and cultural impact, and often unintended repercussions, as Haunani Trask has argued in regards to the Navy’s use of anthropological treatises to substantiate their war-game bombing of the island of Kaho’olawe. Thus the importance of historical accuracy in the interpretation of symbolic (i.e., iconographical) communications is paramount, especially since the history of the past is often used to justify and historicize the present. The narrativization of Captain Cook under the rubric of his assumed godhood, for instance, or perception of his godhood by Hawaiians, is problematic if in fact the historical moment is other than the generic interpretation. In fact, undervalued evidence suggests that alternative interpretations of this complex moment are warranted.

For example, despite the erudition of Marshall Sahlins’ dense analysis of the mytho-poetics and structural apotheosis of Cook from the Hawaiian perspective, the long overlooked buttocks of the Captain tell another tale (no pun intended). Though historiographers and anthropologists have tended to overlook or explain away the nocturnal presentation of six to eight pounds of leaf-wrapped “hind parts”, the horrified crew and officers of the Resolution and Discovery fully comprehended the nonverbal, symbolic insult, as is evidenced by their equally symbolic reply. Days later, after the presentation of the Captain’s buttocks, and other acts of derision, like the slapping of buttocks and parading in British regalia, the Englishmen would murder several defenseless villagers of Kealakekua, after the masses and warriors of Ka`awaloa had departed. They then decapitated their victims and impaled the heads on spears, waving them with taunts to the people in the hills.

Excerpt from Symbols, Myth & TV in Hawaii, first published in the critical journal Spectator, "Oceania in the Age of Global Media", University of Southern California

1. The First Cycle

PHOTO: The Danger of Hawaiian Insurgence. Troy Donahue, Grant Williams & Hawaiians in "Maybe Menehunes" Hawaiian Eye. ©1963 Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.

Symbols, Myth and TV in Hawai'i

The First Cycle
In discussing the sale of telefilms to foreign countries during the export hey-day of the 1950s and 60s, media historian Erik Barnouw observed that “like missionary expeditions of another era,” American television “seemed to serve as an advance herald of empire. Implicit in its arrival was a web of relationships involving cultural, economic, and military aspects, and forming the basis for a new kind of empire.” The psychological and material parameters of this empire find aesthetic expression in a late-twentieth century cycle of television shows featuring Hawai`i as homebase and exotic backdrop to Euro-American men, their Lieutenants, sidekicks, and love interests. Hawaiian Eye, Hawaii Five-0 (1 and 2), and Magnum P.I. form a discursive arc that intersects the hallowed spaces and mediated flows of myth and history, local and global politics, federal and indigenous ideology, as well as the economics, culture and technologies of a networked society.

The Oxford Dictionary defines “paramilitary” as: “ancillary to and similarly organized to military forces.” While the logistics and hierarchies of audiovisual production at times resembles the military operation, my use of the term paramilitary relates to the diegetic rehearsal of armed enforcement and control, as seen in military, combat, western, sci-fi, police, detective and an increasing number of reality genres. The first cycle of paramilitary series in Hawai`i helped shape popular perceptions of what Hawai`i is and the nature of its social, demographic and political constituencies in the latter half of the 20th century. The cycle adds up to nearly a quarter century worth of first-run programming on network TV. Hawaiian Eye was the first of the cycle and ran for a respectable four years—1959-1963; Five-0—1968-1980—ran for a detective series record of twelve seasons straight; and Magnum P.I.—1980-1988—the follow up success, ran eight straight years, coinciding exactly with the Reagan years in office.

The inclusion of Hawaiian and other ethnic types in the Hawai`i first cycle context marks an important steppingstone in the politics of media representation in America, and the world in general. But the appearance of such characters on the broadcast tube never guaranteed a representative voice would be heard, or even allowed to speak. When the Hawaiian perspective is foregrounded, or when locals take active roles in episodes, the underlying politics of the shows often become concomitantly exposed.

This dialectic reveals itself in episodic television in the form of pseudo-histories that attempt to (re)define the relationship between plantation authority, for example, and Hawaiian landlessness and subservience. In particular, such episodes (focusing on Hawaiians) try to justify the usurpation of Hawaiian authority by enlightened colonial humanists. Inevitably the paramilitary hero serves as the vehicle of law, recuperation and compassion for both Hawaiian and colonial factions. Certain tropes and iconographies recur in such discursive enunciations. One challenge is to unpack such iconographies and the tropes they suggest; and to write into discourse that which contract auteurs tend to elide, or to contextualize that which has been institutionalized, historically assumed, naturalized, or, as in the case of the tiki, to reveal how symbolic articulation positions the viewer to consume sound and image in directed ways. 


Symbolic utterances, inflections and clusters are often underpinned and informed by elaborate rhetorical traditions across many presentational platforms, from oral to cartoon, to print, cinema, TV, radio, Internet. Some (postmodernists for example) suggest that this discursive materiality is the desert of historical reality:  a gazillion glittering surfaces signifying nothing.  In reality, such stories, myths and iconic amplifiers have tremendous social and cultural effect, and deserve critical attention as much for what they say as what they don't.

Excerpt from Symbols, Myth & TV in Hawaii, first published in the critical journal Spectator, "Oceania in the Age of Global Media", University of Southern California