It seems to be a week full of real-life stories with fascinating role reversals. There is one that has blown up here in Australia that even overseas readers might have an interest in since it features a lead character who became globally famous at the recent Paris Olympics. I’m referring to the Australian breakdancer—Raygun.
In a post a few days ago, we used the archetypes defined by Eric Berne to analyse the role reversal that had occurred in the story of Lilly Phillips. While generic archetypes such as the Child, Parent, and Adult are valid at a more abstract level of analysis, there also exist culturally-specific archetypes that play an important role in more localised stories. That is what we are going to talk about in this post since Raygun’s story has taken a culturally-specific turn here in Australia in the last few weeks.
The global popularity of Raygun arose because her breakdancing performance at the Olympics amounted to a kind of slapstick visual humour. That kind of humour has a universal resonance across cultures and age groups, which is the reason why Mr. Bean has a worldwide following.
Thus, the popularity of Raygun for international audiences was a kind of Australian-themed visual humour that required no extra storyline to make it work.
Things were different here in Australia, of course. Raygun had become a celebrity and people wanted to know what her story was. A narrative built up around Raygun that took on a very culturally-specific form. To understand that story, we need three archetypes that are integral to Australian culture: Tall Poppy Syndrome, the Aussie Battler and the Larrikin.
For a variety of reasons, early Australian culture developed an adverse attitude towards the pretences of the imported British aristocracy. It’s not hard to see why. About 1/3 of the convicts transported to Australia in the early days were Irish or Scottish, who had more than a few bones to pick with their English overlords. Meanwhile, the English convicts were not exactly on good terms with their elites, who were, after all, banishing them to the other side of the world.
It’s not hard to imagine how a resentment towards the “upper class” evolved in early Australian society. It solidified into what is called Tall Poppy Syndrome, which is the desire to remind those who reach the upper echelons of society that they aren’t all that special.
Related to the Tall Poppy Syndrome is the Australian identification with the average man. The early settlers here had an awfully hard time trying to make European agricultural practices work in poor Australian soils with all the vagaries of a climate that had nothing to do with northern Europe. The average person who strove hard against the odds came to be embodied in the Aussie Battler archetype. Both the Battler and the Tall Poppy would later be easily transplanted into the class struggle that arose between capitalist and worker in the industrial factories of the big cities.
Nowadays, with overt class animosity removed from public discourse, it is the sports field where the Aussie Battler archetype often manifests. Australians will enthusiastically support a player who is clearly never going to be the best but who works hard and tries with all their might.
Of course, that’s an almost exact description of Raygun’s performance at the Olympics. She was not good at breakdancing, but she gave 110%. Because she was performing an American cultural tradition that no Australian has any understanding of, Australians viewed her performance as the embodiment of the Aussie Battler archetype, and that’s exactly how commentators here began to frame the larger story around her.
But there was also a comedic aspect to Raygun’s performance and it was this that invoked another archetype that we introduced earlier: the Larrikin. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of her performance, some people asserted that the whole thing was a joke and that Raygun was trolling the entire Olympic tradition. That’s the kind of thing a Larrikin would do.
The Larrikin is related to both the Tall Poppy Syndrome and the Battler in that its historical origins were tied up in bringing the elites down to size. Since the Olympics is all about being elite, it is a natural target for the Larrikin. That’s why some people thought that Raygun’s performance was deliberately designed to take the piss out of the Olympics. They created a story where she was cast in the role of the Larrikin archetype.
These were the two main threads of the story that grew up around Raygun here in Australia. She was part-Battler and part-Larrikin. Now, it has to be said that Raygun went out of her way not to encourage this story. After her Olympics performance, she deliberately stayed out of the spotlight. Perhaps she did that because she could see that the archetypes were not a good fit for who she is as a person.
Raygun’s real name is Rachael Gunn. She has a PhD in Cultural Studies and is a full-time academic at Macquarie University. Based on her social position alone, irrespective of her personal qualities, she is exactly the kind of person that the Larrikin would want to take the piss out of and that the Aussie Battler would resent.
Nevertheless, while the primary material of the story of Raygun was her whacky dance moves at the Olympics, the stories told about her worked and the archetypes of Battler and Larrikin were valid. That’s almost certainly how things would have remained, but recent events have thrown a spanner in the works.
Ironically, what forced the overturning of the official narrative was that somebody else wanted to tell a version of Raygun’s story. An enterprising comedian here in Australia decided to try and capitalise on the Raygun craze by creating, of all things, a musical about her. The inaugural performance was due to take place a couple of weeks ago at a comedy club in Sydney, with all proceeds apparently going to charity.
Given that this was just a local performance in a small venue, by itself this wouldn’t have changed the mainstream narrative. There would have been a performance or two, and then it would have all been over. The rest of Australia would have been completely oblivious. But here’s where the power of archetypes shows itself yet again.
Because Raygun had been cast into the role of Larrikin, many people had assumed that she had organised the comedy show herself. This makes perfect sense. Writing a musical about yourself is a very Larrikin thing to do.
In the real world, Rachael Gunn did not want people to think that she was associated with the show. Rather than simply dissociate herself from it with a public statement, she called in some lawyers to force the venue to cancel it.
Here is where the story takes an ironic twist. Raygun became famous by badly performing American-style dancing. Now Rachael Gunn went for the classic American move of calling in the lawyers. That might work in New York City, but it absolutely doesn’t fly in Australia.
The combination of the Aussie Battler, the Larrikin, and the Tall Poppy’s Syndrome gives Australian culture a large part of its distinctive quality. Americans love winners, and Americans expect and encourage their winners to partake in public displays of power and aggression. In Australia, our public figures are simply not allowed to take themselves too seriously. Australian public figures must be able to take a joke made at their expense. It’s part of the job description.
Raygun had inadvertently become a public figure due to her Olympics performance. Since, she had also been cast in the roles of Aussie Battler and Larrikin, any Australian would have expected that she should have no problem with a comedy show about her. Calling lawyers to shut the show down is the complete opposite of the behaviour expected of her. In one fell swoop, she had punctured the archetypes that had been assigned to her.
That would have been bad enough. But in just the last few days a new twist in the story has hit the news. It turns out that Raygun’s lawyers have demanded that the venue pay for her legal fees in the matter to the tune of $10,000. The venue is a small local comedy club. It’s not a huge corporation; it’s an owner-run business in a very tough industry. Incredibly, the owner of this comedy club fits exactly the two archetypes that had previously been assigned to Raygun: Battler and Larrikin.
Rachael Gunn has managed to flip the entire story that had built up around Raygun. She has become the Tall Poppy who is going out of her way to destroy the Battler and Larrikin. Accordingly, there has been a flurry of comment over the past few days denouncing her. She’s gone from being a quintessential Aussie hero to a quintessential villain.
To call in the lawyers on a struggling comedy club owner is about the worst possible thing she could have done. That’s literally the storyline in one of Australia’s best-known movies, which also had some international success, The Castle. The good guys in that movie are Battlers and Larrikins. The bad guys are the lawyers and business interests.
All of which goes to show, stories and archetypes are not just fiction. They are very real.
The fact that she took herself seriously from the start marks her out as someone who is well divorced from the cultural heartbeat of her country. Then once you read a few of her dissertations it all becomes clear that she is a complete (and very privileged) loony.
Skip – she’s got more than one dissertation? Dare I ask what the topic was?
Scratch that. Found a list of her stuff. So, apparently you can now be a full time academic and just write about your hobby. I feel the sudden urge to write a paper deconstructing the hyper-narcissistic foundations of modern academe 😛
Well, I just realised a rather crucial point in the story of Raygun.
Australia was founded on British imperialism. The Tall Poppy archetype is the representative of that imperialism while the Battler and the Larrikin are the average person who are forced into serving it.
Australia now finds itself under American imperialism. If Rachael Gunn is the Tall Poppy, that would make her the representative of American imperialism.
But that’s exactly correct. Gunn’s hobby is breakdancing, a 100% American thing to do. Why was breakdancing even included in the Olympics? Because of American imperial power. But this is the exact way US imperialism works more broadly. It’s all about the soft power of academia and control of the media which spreads “American culture” to things like the Olympics. The purpose of these is to create a smokescreen that hides the imperial machine. Gunn as an academic breakdancer is almost the perfect representative this US imperial power and that’s why she is a Tall Poppy from the Australian point of view.
The Raygun myth that she was the opposite of a Tall Poppy (Battler/Larrikin) was a fabrication created by powers-that-be who control the media. American soft power rests in the creation of such myths, whose sole purpose is to hide the exercise of imperialism.
Yep she’s actually a great representation of everything that is wrong with modern academia and social science, and has projected that onto sport, in such a silly way that it is archetypically delicious. It was the world of utter abstraction meeting the cold reality of needing actual talent and skill to compete in real competition.
I knew there must be an old Fast Forward sketch on this subject. The fencing (taking offence) bit at the end of this could have been written about Rachael Gunn herself – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzKNQH3Unwo&ab_channel=FastForwardAU
Hi Simon,
I’d not been following this story closely, but thoroughly enjoyed your analysis and interpretation.
You could say that young ‘gun pulled a supposedly power move, which flopped spectacularly. Talk about being unable to read the room, but then when I think back about how some folks acted from that professional background during the recent referendum, not good. Always unwise in this culture to project yourself as better than your fellow man. And! Dare I say it, but perhaps the archetypal energies are seeking a vessel? What’s your take on that? Are they an inevitability set in motion by the currents of society? Or something else completely?
Have you ever watched the English series ‘Clarkson’s Farm’? Well worth your time for all sorts of reasons. The presenter, who’s large farm it is filmed on, takes a lot of verbal shit from heaps of people – and handles it all with good grace and aplomb. An impressive display of fortitude, which ‘gun possibly failed to employ. Such was expected of the aristocracy of the past, and that was one of the costs of wealth and privilege. In wanting more these days, I guess they’ve neglected their roots of where their wealth and privilege derive from.
Cheers
Chris
Chris – in Europe there used to be one day of the year, it might have even been Christmas day but I’d have to check that, when the local lord opened the doors to his house and everybody was allowed to show up and eat and drink to their heart’s content. I’m pretty sure it was the one day of the year where you were able to make jokes at the lord’s expense too. I think most societies have something similar. It’s a kind of release valve for resentment that would otherwise build up.
This is another thing we can blame the protestants and puritans for because they weren’t gonna have any of that, which is probably why elites in protestant cultures seem to be universally sanctimonious hypocrites. Maybe that’s why we needed democracy: so we can at least throw the bastards out every few years and it releases the pressure.
Problem now is that we have a set of bastards who can’t be thrown out: the permanent state.
Hey mate, been a while.
Interesting take on raygun.
I saw the raygun thing as the best possible representation of contemporary Australia. Just brilliantly spot on. With the possible exception of Monty Python I cannot think of anyone capable of a bullseye like that.
The Australian archetypes are of course familiar to me but my take here differs. Not surprising I guess given my different cultural background. Would be interesting to have an investigation in the Aussie archetypes and the different interpretations.
Cheers
Roland
Hey Roland, good to hear from you. Absolutely, the Raygun story is perfectly cast, perfectly written and now has a great twist at (what might be) the end. The universe/God is a great story teller.
I’d be interested to hear your interpretation of the Australian archetypes.
Hey mate,
this would be a longish post. Plus i have not really thought it trough in detail, but in a nutshell, this is it:
1) I guess these archetypes are historical artifacts. Maybe they were more appropriate at the time of federation. A bit like Byron Bay has the reputation of being a great place. This was possibly true 40 years ago. I have no way of knowing, but these days it is an overpriced shithole of a tourist trap.
Are the archetypes part of the self perception of the actual national character? I find they differ greatly in most nations. Especially so in Australia.
2) Tall poppy syndrome: I see this as a “know your station in life” directive. It is deployed not against the upper class, but against members of the same class who have attributes that are only allowed to members of a higher class. It certainly is a hangover from the english class system and from the days as prison colony. It is not a distrust of authority (which is basically non existent in australia as the last 5 years have demonstrated) but an affirmation of it.
3) The larrikin. This seems to me mainly an excuse for a shallow, pollyannaish, hedonistic lifestyle. In it’s best form a larrikin would be an iconoclast. I see nothing of that here. Same as tall poppy it is system affirming since it takes attention and pressure away from it.
4) The battler. Not sure what to make of this. For the baby boomers life certainly was an easy ride, for previous and subsequent generations not so much, so this archetype is in most times and societies quite appropriate.
Like I said, i’d need to think about it a bit more systematically, but I am not in the habit of blogging or writing books.
Roland – all good points. The archetypes have both positive and negative attributes. A good example is the Warrior. He might protect the nation or he might learn to use his strength to extort it. I like to use Jung’s notion of the shadow to represent the negative traits of an archetype.
So, I’d agree with your analysis of the shadow side of the Australian archetypes. In Australia we have a nominally anti-authoritarian and anti-intellectual attitude which is all really for show. When the chips are down, as during corona, we want our experts to tell us what to do and we want them to make everybody who disagrees fall into line.
As for Tall Poppy’s, the one area of life in Australia where it is okay to openly excel is sports. That’s another way in which the Raygun phenomenon was an inversion of reality, because she seemed to be taking the piss out of sports. She got away with it because it was breakdancing, which is not a real sport. If she’d somehow gotten herself into the swimming team and was seen to be making a joke of that, there would have been mass outrage.
Of course, Australia ended up finishing fourth in the medal tally at the Olympics, punching way above our weight as we always do. Clearly, if we put the same amount of time, money and energy into intellectual and artistic pursuits, we could achieve similar results. But the Raygun story also reveals that fact because she is a professional “intellectual” whose entire career consists in writing absolute garbage. She can only get away with that because Australians don’t care about intellectual matters. We accept nonsense from universities that we would never put up with on the sports field.