[Back in December 2024, I dedicated a weeklong series to histories from our 50th state. This week, in honor of the 75th anniversary of James Jones’s debut novel From Here to Eternity, I’ll offer a complementary series on Hawaiian stories!]
[NOTE: The first four posts in this series expand on texts I discussed briefly in this weekend post concluding that 2024 series.]
On how the popular surfing film reflects a painful Hawaiian history, and why that’s not the whole story.
Almost exactly a year ago, as part of a series on Alaskan contexts, I included in this post on the darker realities of American expansion a paragraph about the white missionary and educator Charles Reed Bishop and his experiences in Hawaii. Check out that prior post if you would, and then come on back for how Bishop relates to Blue Crush (2002).
Welcome back! As I discussed in that paragraph, Bishop was unquestionably a white settler in Hawaii and so problematic in all the ways they were and always are; but he was also pretty respectful of the local communities and cultures, and over the course of his time on the island he also became a victim of even more aggressive white settlement and imperialism. I’m not suggesting that the main character of Blue Crush, Kate Bosworth’s Anne Marie, is identical to Bishop—from what I remember she and her younger sister Penny (she of the problematic cornrows) are supposed to have been born in Hawaii—but she is a white woman (and a very stereotypical one at that, with her blonde hair and blue eyes) who is both positioned at the center of the film’s frame and used in it to represent the local community in its contrasts with (for example) the NFL players visiting the islands for the Pro Bowl who are depicted as definitive outsiders. Fictional stories don’t have to do full justice to historical and cultural contexts (nor can they ever, really), but it’s still less than ideal that one of the most popular 21st century cultural works about Hawaii uses its very white protagonist in this way.
At the same time, I would say there are two truly foundational realities when it comes to the history of Hawaii: every culture in this very diverse place migrated there; and the islands’ most inspiring and important stories are of cross-cultural community and activism. (Not coincidentally, both also ways in which Hawaii also serves as a microcosm of the United States.) Anne Marie’s story isn’t really an activist one (although she and her friends are working-class and push the wealthy NFL players to think about such communities more fully, a plot thread of which Pablo Manlapit would be proud), but it is an inspiring tale of a young woman overcoming past traumas to achieve her very Hawaiian dream of becoming a professional surfer—and she’s able to do so largely because of her cross-cultural relationship with her best friend and surfing coach, Michelle Rodriguez’s Eden. If folks watching this entertaining sports film and coming-of-age story get inspired to learn more about these defining Hawaiian and American contexts, then I’d say they’ve caught a very big one indeed.
Next Hawaiian story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Hawaiian texts or contexts you’d highlight?
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