‘I thought I was like you, but I’m not’: Identity, masculinity and make-believe in Taika Waititi’s Boy (2010)

Abstract

Abstract This article sets out to argue that the growing maturity of a national cinema permits a challenge to established tropes and representations that can result in innovative and original visions. Taika Waititi’s Boy (2010) is a film that deliberately confronts the conventions that have developed around the representation of Māori culture and Māori characters on-screen. By avoiding either depictions of urban violence and deprivation or mythic fantasies, the film is able to collapse notions of difference and instead focus on a transnational experience of popular culture and growing up. Furthermore, it seems to evade the weighty responsibility that often appears to restrict Indigenous cinema by embracing contradictions and fluidity. Such an approach has encouraged considerable debate amongst critics and scholars and it is the aim of this article to engage with both negative and positive responses to the film in order to contribute to the ongoing discussions. Specifically, this article will explore the film’s nostalgia for 1980s popular culture, the use of daydreams and makebelieve sequences, location, and Waititi’s approach to identity and masculinity in order to highlight its inventive and unconventional themes and style. Ultimately, the controversy and competing discourses that have emerged around the film suggest that, far from negating a sense of national, cultural identity, it has generated important reflections on the cinematic representation of Māori people and Māori culture.