Raising Anxiety to Construct the Nation: Heartland – A Case Study

Abstract

Television is recognised as one of the best mediums to effectively access a great number of people within a nation and unite them by communicating stories which help them understand and feel they belong to a country. Shared meanings of nationhood are constructed in narrative form (Barker, 1999) and it is television's use of images that adds character and places it in a superior position to radio and print in eliciting a direct response from the audience (Corner, 1995). This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the narrative structure of an episode of the New Zealand television series Heartland, titled “East Coast – Towards the Light” to investigate the way it constructs a national identity for New Zealanders. It is argued that the programme uses a narrative structure similar to that described by French structuralist Tzevetan Todorov (1971) of equilibrium-disequilibrium-equilibrium whereby anxieties are raised within the audience psyche and then resolved in order to convey a positive message for New Zealanders - that in spite of differences whether ethnic, cultural or socio-economic - they can all be part of a united nation.