3 ms·
> I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it
by bradrn 5y ago
> I wondered if [Get Back] was the result of a man who, locked down in his Antipodean editing suite, had waded too deep into his material and lost control of it
Note that Peter Jackson is a New Zealander, and presumably was in the country while editing, so the editing suite was ‘Antipodean’ in the sense of the dictionary.
- wolverine876 5y agoYes. That's what I mean to address (apparently imperfectly) with the sentence beginning, "But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography ...".
- iainmerrick 5y agoThis is definitely written from a British perspective -- “Antipodean” and “recce” at least are much more conventional in British English than you might guess. In this case I took “Antipodean” to have the additional meaning of extreme remoteness from Britain (both the setting of the documentary and implicitly the centre of the universe from the British perspective).
- egypturnash 5y agoYeah, the author seems to be British - there’s no obvious Brit spellings in this piece, but if you look at https://ianleslie.substack.com/ https://ianleslie.substack.com/ you’ll see a story excerpt with “favourite”, plus pieces about the BBC and Boris Johnson. Writing in British as opposed to American covers quite a few subtly different shadings of word meanings, as well as a willingness to use words a fourth-grader wouldn’t have encountered.
- wolverine876 5y agoNew Zealand isn't far at all from the British center of the universe, other than in miles. Jackson's movies did pretty well in the UK; they weren't shown in the art house theatres with the subtitled movies.
- klelatti 5y agoBear in mind Britain sent convicts to Australia because it was so remote. 'Antipodean' still carries with it a sense of remoteness in the UK even if the countries may be culturally close.
- wolverine876 5y ago> Britain sent convicts to Australia because it was so remote That was a long time ago. We could bear in mind that for most of human history, people in Britain had no idea that Australia or most of the world existed.
- klelatti 5y ago> 'Antipodean' still carries with it a sense of remoteness in the UK even if the countries may be culturally close. A number of us have done our best to explain what the author is conveying with the choice of language he is using but if you don’t believe us then there’s not a lot more we can do.
- glenngillen 5y agoAs an Australian who lived a number of years in the UK, I was initially surprised had how frequently I’d encounter people using the term antipodes to refer to Australia and New Zealand. A term I understood but had never actually seen or heard used previously. Yet it had fairly common and casual usage in the UK. > "But so what? Clearly it is meant to say much more than geography ...". Maybe. Maybe it was meant to emphasise the distance and isolation from much of the rest of the world. Or maybe it was just a turn of phrase that is common and understood in a context and experience outside your own.