Daniels trump the world's Donalds
This opinion piece was first published by the Sydney Morning Herald, 9 November 2016
Their first names start with D, they're both ginger-haired, and they both have interests in real estate empires, but otherwise Rosehaven's Daniel McCallum and Republican Donald Trump couldn't be more different.
A large part of the pleasure of watching Luke McGregor (Daniel) in the new ABC drama is, surely, that our hero plays the anti-Donald. When you spend your days trying to duck from near hourly clips of Trump boasting about grabbing pussy, or his tearful victims' testimonies, tuning in to watch Daniel – a man so terrified of hurting himself or anyone else you imagine his first word was "sorry" – functions as a form of "cultural crack". The show screens out the world's awful blighted reality, replacing it with a nicer, lighter high.
Trump is all unrestrained and aggressive id – Freud would have had a field day with his split attraction/aggression towards women, his obsession with breasts, and his disgust for women's bodily fluids (who would have thought menstrual blood and toilet trips would become a presidential campaign talking point). Anxious, striving Daniel, meanwhile, suffers from an excess of superego. And unlike Donald his respect for women is clear: his best friend is Emma (Celia Pacquola), a benignly bossy woman who pushes him to stand up to bullies and chase the girl he still loves.
While shows such as Seinfeld, Friends, The Secret Life of Us, and more recently Please Like Me and Girls, have long portrayed friendships between men and women as a standard feature of modern life, it's still rare to find a show where a platonic friendship between a man and a woman is the central – and completely unremarkable – premise. There's no backstory of a past relationship, and no sense of a love affair in the air. And it avoids the sweet but now terribly tired and easy trope of the straight woman/gay man best friends.
It's been more than a decade since Ethan Watters' book Urban Tribes dissected the way friendship groups are the new family for a generation that is delaying marriage, prolonging studying and sharing group houses well into their 30s. The post-1970s generations didn't invent friendships between men and women, but they are a defining feature of young adult life now. Stories that portray how such friendships work, and are central to many people’s lives, are long overdue.
I'm not suggesting there aren't any Donalds in the post-1970s generations, or that there aren't 70-year-old Daniels in the world. But when you're raised with the belief that the differences between men and women, if they exist, are wildly exaggerated and overly prescribed, withholding empathy from the other sex simply becomes that much harder.
Not that differences don't remain and aren't sometimes useful. Daniel doesn't force Emma to talk about her marriage breakdown, and you suspect that had Emma turned to an over-empathetic female friend she might have fallen into a self-pitying hole. As Graham Little, writing in his book, Friendship, says about our need for friends who aren't mirrors of us, "Friends dread the tedium of being merely echoed in a conversation, their attitudes not enhanced or contradicted but Xeroxed"
It's time we recognised and celebrated our opposite-sex friends. Those people we've known for decades, who offered us friendship when we started work in a politically-charged workplace. Who helped us move out of an old home or decorate a new one. Friends who have been there for births, funerals and every bad joke or career screw-up.
Now that significant friendships between men and women often outlast romantic relationships, a show that acknowledges this friendship is a welcome breath of sexual tension-free air. The audience for the early episodes of Rosehaven, a fictional, though truthful story about a platonic friendship between a man and a woman, was similar in size to the final episodes of the Bachelorette, a real but totally fantastical story about finding true love on national TV. Viewers, it seems, agree.
