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