dark beige

Warfare against a Billy Madison?, 29 May 2008

Author: annevejb from UK

Summer Heights High 2007 is an Australian high school series of eight 27ish minute episodes. It is intended for a matured audience. Episode 1, coarse language was a problem for me. The IMDB user comments at May 2008 tell me that some will experience no problem at all with this, me yes. Look at bits of other episodes and I found that most were still a problem for other reasons, the presentation not my personal taste.

* Start to interpret it as a war against a scapegoat class, the likely link with Billy Madison 1995, then the problems increased. A war against a scapegoat is, here, what I understand as war against a gargoyle for a parody of the gargoyle qualities that earlier stages of that war have painted on or embedded in the scapegoat. I have to react against this. Billy 1995 had early learning and belief disorders, or something akin to that, and the fantasy solution adopted was to send him through a crash education course. Openly and willingly. There was pressure to get that sunk and Billy managed to face that well. The real scapegoat classes are in trouble. The war is real.

Should Summer Heights remind me of the coast watch in Emerald City 1988? But a watch by those who believe in dispossessing the dispossessed? Around 1998, BBC radio 2 was occasionally playing a popular song about someone being mangled by a ton of bricks, first from one direction, then from another. Summer Heights as reflecting possible stages in that.

The DVD collection includes three and a half hours of deleted scenes, etc. The bit I saw felt empty, valueless apart from what half of seven might imply, a statement. This is date stamped 2007 at the episode seven end credits, yet I found my double disk complete collection at a UK charity shop in Spring 2008. Me, a dispossessed, obtaining a low cost copy as easily as that. If I knew more of the rules about such wars should that make me worried? For that reason this links with my comment re Eurotrip 2004.

The three Lilley characters are what made me head straight to a guess that this was a war against some Billy types. The storyline disagrees with me, but symptoms tell me that these three have all been raised by way of a Hard Knock Life. There are other strands too, it is not just me who might get defensive from this, especially as this is for the matured.

* Footnote. A quote from a message board re Annie 1981: Everyone is entitled to my own opinion. I do not know much Aussie series, but The Adventures Of Skippy 1992 is what I rate so far. I hope to purchase all these Skippy 1992, sometime, if practical. My current priority is the early works of the English Anna Popplewell, though. The good girl Susan Pevensie of Narnia and the Anna of The Little Vampire, which I already have. I experience her portrayal of Anna Sackville-Bagg to be a pinnacle of romantic fiction. I look forward to her and Rupert Grint in Thunderpants 2002, despite the June 2008 IMDb user rating of 2.8 out of 10. My reaction to Summer Heights High comes from my experience of English artists, when dealing with me it is as if they look to Wally of Wally World as their hero. I see Lilley's work here as about what happens when Wally and his saboteur have been around, but only the results shown. In what I have seen of Skippy 1992, as an aging male to female I need mostly to look to Lou. I see Lou facing the modern world with sense and nonsense and her use of her camera to foil Wally is the sort of sense that my past says can escalate the trouble in reality by inadvertently supporting a hidden Wally. Blaming a fall guy. For me, Summer Heights High looks to real issues in a traditional arts way that is often not non-polluting. I interpret The New Worst Witch 2005 etc series as dealing with similar territory to Summer Heights High, but with careful acclimatisation I can accept much of it as successfully non-polluting as it feels like fantasy. I am also reminded of the gargoyle in Weirdsister College 2001, aka The Worst Witch season 4.

* Footnote 2 The four Popplewell I could afford were Dirty Tricks 2000 and Me Without You 2001 and Thunderpants 2002 and Girl With A Pearl Earring 2003. All reflected aspects of this Lilley more than reflecting Anna Vampire, but in more approachable ways. There is not much Anna in Thunderpants and Rupert looks and acts very different to in Harry Potter, but I still rate it highly. To me it is a parable about some of the reality underlying such as Summer Heights High. A different world to The Little Vampire, possibly a male view of romance.

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