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.