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Drowning, not waving: surf movies and the ends of the earth
Jeff Lewis, Applied Communication RMIT
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Cultural theory offers a number of readings of surfing and surf movies. Most derive from a celebrational popular culture. Australian cultural history and sociological texts often identify the beach as a site of national meaning-making and identity formation. John Fiske elaborates this reading through an application of Bakthinian, Barthesian and de Certeauian conceptions of popular transgression. For Fiske and other postmodern celebrationists the wave is a site of bodily bliss, beyond language and the limiting effects of discursively constituted politics. Andrew Milner's conception of the Australian beach in terms of an apocalyptic hedonism resonates with a more Romantic and pessimistic postmodernism characteristic in the writings of Jean Baudrillard. Surfing and surfing texts cannot be so easily conceptualized. In fact, the prevailing motifs of both 'narrative' an 'documentary' surf movies and videos articulate a complex cultural imagining. The 'language wars' constituted through surfing and surf imaging are formed through political cultures that have thus far been inadequately theorised.
