Diplomatic Immunity?: Night Court – By Melissa Beattie

As I am certain many of you also do, I find myself revisiting television series that I enjoyed watching in my misspent youth.  In many cases, I have gained new appreciation for aspects of those series that I was too young to understand at the time.

And sometimes…there are other cases.

Like this one.

As I may have mentioned before, I have a forthcoming book on fictitious countries.[i]  While I cover several regions in that book, I was unable to include everywhere I had wanted.  As such, I will be focusing this blog on the fictitious South Pacific island Kapua as shown in the original Night Court (NBC 1984-1992, hereafter NC). For those unfamiliar with the series, NC follows the trials and travails of Judge Harry Stone (Harry Anderson) and his courtroom.  The series is known for quirky characters and generally socially progressive politics, which is one of the reasons why this episode is not one of its best.  In its attempt at blending humour and progressiveness, it unfortunately engages in some deeply problematic representation.

The episode (4.10) begins with a young Pacific Islander being brought before Judge Stone as she had been arrested after swimming naked in Central Park.  She, it turns out, is Princess Tatiana (Jeanne Mori) of ‘Kapua’, a developing South Pacific island country upon which the US is negotiating the lease of land for an airbase.  This potential political aspect is not really used, however; it functions as a ticking clock when Tatiana’s brother, the Crown Prince Maurice (Tim Dang), arrives to retrieve her.  Yet even that plot line is disrupted in favour of the prince’s attraction to Defence Attorney Christine Sullivan (Markie Post) since she is both not subservient and wears a full business suit as opposed to the bikini and sarong that the princess wears.  This aspect of Kapuan culture, the oppression of women, is clearly what the episode is attempting to critique.  It is unclear to which cultural group Kapua belongs (Polynesia, Micronesia or Melanesia) but women’s rights in various areas of the South Pacific can vary widely (Slatter 2012).

Palmieri et al (2023) argue that women’s suffrage movements in the South Pacific have often been incorrectly focused upon white women rather than on the Pacific Islander women who advocated for their rights.  But this ties in with the wider issues surrounding the very concept of ‘paradise,’ which reinforces colonialist ideas and representations.  These are often gendered, racialised representations which prioritise Western perspectives.  Tucker (2019), speaking of myths of paradise notes that such a myth…

invites tourists to be self-indulgent and sensuous in ‘tropical paradise’-type settings… This myth promotes both the natural environment and the people in these destinations not only as exotic, but as there only to serve in the indulging of tourist fantasy. […] The myth of the unrestrained presented in tourism marketing of certain postcolonial destinations often intersects with sexual imagery used, for example, (95) in regions such as the Caribbean and the Pacific, which tends often to replay Western representations of an exotic, sexually available, and subservient female ‘Other’ that stems from seventeenth-century colonialism…(94-95).

This is exactly how NC treats its Kapuans.  When Tatiana is standing before the judge, she asks if there are laws in the US/New York City ‘against pleasure’, which she regards swimming nude as being.  Later, in the judge’s chambers, when he invites her to make herself comfortable (i.e., to sit down) she responds by removing her top.  This implies that Pacific Islander women are sexually available or focused upon giving/receiving pleasure, just as Tucker describes in the quote above.  She asks for asylum to avoid an arranged marriage, with the implication being that she is unable to reject the marriage (i.e., is forced to be subservient); in so doing, thanks to a translation difficulty, Tatiana believes that the judge has fallen in love with her and wishes to marry.  Thus, even when the series is trying to support women’s rights, which it is clearly trying to do, the plot line undercuts that by showing both Tatiana and Christine as objects of contention.  Christine has agency and rejects the prince, despite urgings from the State Department representative Cawdrey (Frank Bonner), but this again prioritises whiteness/Westernness as being ‘civilised’ by contrast to Pacific Islanders.

Even the ultimate resolution of the plot falls into this problematic representation.  When the judge and Tatiana have returned to his chambers to explain that he does not wish to marry her but does wish to help her but does not know how he can.  As Judge Stone is also a magician, he tries to cheer Tatiana up by pulling a coin out of her ear as a magic trick.  She immediately drops to her knees in front of him, believing that he controls nature and should be worshipped.  The ‘primitive’ stereotype here is obvious but the fact that she tells Judge Stone that even the king would have to obey one who controls nature reinforces the disconnect between what the episode is clearly trying to do and the way in which it goes about doing it.  The following scene features Tatiana going out into the courtroom where her brother the prince is and performing the coin magic trick.  The implication is that Harry taught her how; she now controls her situation as well as her government.  While the only thing we hear her say for certain is that she wishes to change things for Kapuan women (i.e., giving them equal rights), it is still a white Western man who grants this power– and engages in regime change– and manipulates local religious or cultural beliefs to do so.

The fallacious idea that white/Western interference always benefits people(s) with or without direct colonisation is a pernicious one (Absher et al 2023).  Though we never hear about the Kapuans again and the characters and production team are clearly well-intentioned, this episode is a prime example of how embedded problematic discourses of ‘paradise’ can be, something to which even progressive texts are clearly not immune.

Dr Melissa Beattie is a recovering Classicist who was awarded a PhD in Theatre, Film and TV Studies from Aberystwyth University where she studied Torchwood and national identity through fan/audience research as well as textual analysis. She has published and presented several papers relating to transnational television, audience research and/or national identity. She is currently an independent scholar.  She is under contract with Lexington/Bloomsbury for an academic book on fictitious countries and Palgrave for a book on Canadian crime dramas. She has previously worked at universities in the US, Korea, Pakistan, Armenia, Ethiopia, Cambodia and Morocco.  She can be contacted at tritogeneia@aol.com.

References

Absher S Grier R and Grier K (2023) The consequences of CIA-sponsored regime change in Latin America. European Journal of Political Economy 80: n.pages.

Palmieri S Howard E and Baker K (2023) Reframing suffrage narratives: Pacific women, political voice, and collective empowerment, The Journal of Pacific History 58(4): 392–411.

Slatter, C. (2012) Gender and custom in the South Pacific. Yearbook of New Zealand Jurisprudence 13/14: 89–111.

Tucker H (2019) Colonialism and its Tourism Legacies. In Handbook of Globalisation and Tourism, edited by D J Timothy. Cheltenham: Elgar. 90-99.

[i]     Fictitious Countries in Media should be out later this year from Bloomsbury.