The Tribal Mind

The Tribal Mind

By David Dale

Australians are going through a period of anxiety and pessimism, eager to escape their lives but afraid to travel. So they are cocooning themselves in suburbia and retreating into fantasy. And now you know why Desperate Housewives has taken our land by storm.

When this column wondered last week why Channel Seven’s Monday night dramedy was more popular here than anywhere else in the world, we didn’t realise the answer was in the annual Ipsos Mackay report on the "Mind and Mood" of the nation. The report, just released to clients, details what 16 focus groups of ordinary Australians spontaneously raised for discussion in recent months. Research analyst Hugh Mackay identified two themes:

1. World wariness. "People seem more edgy, angry and stressed there is growing concern about the state of Australian society: rougher, tougher, more competitive, less compassionate. Recent reports of alleged Australian drug traffickers have ’spooked’ Australians even more than potential terrorist threats ... Drug stories force Australians to acknowledge ’there are dark forces and bad people out there’ and that organized crime is in our midst. The arrests of Schappelle Corby and the Bali 9 reinforced the current tendency of Australians to turn the focus inward, become self-protective and self-indulgent, and to throw up a wall of prejudice between us and ’the world’. Classic conditions have been created for conspiracy theories to grow."

2. Suburban safety. "A high divorce rate, a low birthrate and the phenomenon of the shrinking household are destabilising the traditional position of the nuclear family, but driving people to forge closer connections with friends and neighbours It is no accident that the word ’village’ is in such vogue in contemporary Australia: the concept of village life is intensely appealing to people who are feeling cut off from their families or at risk of being socially isolated."

The Ipsos researchers found one glimmer in the gloom that currently shrouds the nation: "Although much of the discussion on which this project was based consisted of rather bleak complaints, the conversation often came alive when people talked about their favourite television programs, the hottest new movies, or the blockbuster show they had been to. Correspondents engaged in such lively discussion of media content and media related events as to suggest our new ’guiding story’ may be coming to us via pop culture rather than from the traditional legendary mythologies of politics and religion The blockbuster is alive and well, offering us shared experience on a large scale and supplying safe topics for conversation."

And what sort of thing is this "blockbuster" that unites the nation and saves our sanity? At the movies right now, it’s Monster-In-Law, War of the Worlds, Fantastic 4, and Madagascar. On DVD it’s The Incredibles, Million Dollar Baby, Daddy Day Care and The Pacifier. And on television it’s Australian Idol, House, Lost and Desperate Housewives.

This column’s readers were already hip to such notions. Explaining why Desperate Housewives is such a hit, Heather Thompson wrote: "Like two of the great Australian soaps, Neighbours and Home & Away, it is set in a neighbourhood or street which is pretty much the entire universe of the show. This to me is like life when I was growing up, knowing and socialising with everyone else on our street."

And Jane Whittington observed: "DH reflects any basic insular community, in that its interests are based solely around their immediate environment, rather than the outside world. Wanna talk about Saddam Hussein? No way, but did you hear that Gabby is pregnant and it may not be her husband’s baby??"

In other words, Australia’s village is Wisteria Lane.

http://www.smh.com.au/text/articles...