Maori culture is represented differently in Boy (2010) because the writer and director Taika Waititi is employing a Maori filmic lens onto Maori culture. Waititi injects his own understanding and experience of New Zealand into the film in order to create a dynamic Maori subjectivity. As a result, Waititi is able to present the Maori as their own culture and community, detached from a Western perspective. Waititi represents the Maori with their own distinct lifestyle and sense of self, which works to flip the Western identity onto itself. In other words, since Maori culture is the foundation of this film, Western culture takes on the role of being “the odd one out.” No longer are the people of New Zealand foreign and exotic. Instead, the roles are reversed: Michael Jackson, E.T., and Hulk — the Western references in the film — are now the foreign and exotic beings.
Maori culture is represented differently in this film by virtue of how Waititi humanizes all the characters. The audience experiences a variety of people: a widowed, troubled father; a young boy acting as the caretaker for five other children; a mentally ill man, a domestically abused young girl; an emotionally scarred son who takes the blame for his mother’s death; and much more. By placing Maori culture and New Zealand as the backdrop, the audience is able to sympathize or even empathize with the Maori not as the Maori themselves, but as human beings equal to them. Waititi portrays relatable pains, identifiable emotions, and familiar situations to convey to the audience an understanding of Maori culture as its own community with its own dilemmas to deal with on a day-to-day basis.
This film enlightened me about how common it is to value icons and emblems of a culture more so than the actual culture itself. For example, it is an impulse to identify the Maori as the people with the tattoos that do the haka; however, it takes an anthropological lens to perceive them as humans with their own identity and worldview. Everyone must stop fixating an orientalist gaze onto cultures like the Maori because that in itself is a form of oppression and misrecognition. Maori culture deserves its own right to craft its own identity, and Waititi takes on this matter by attempting at a reflexive, filmic lens. In short, my understanding of Maori culture has widened in scope.
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