While the surf industry and media continue to follow the same old narrative, outsiders are telling the real story and quietly inspiring a revolution. Image: splintersmovie.com
For as in touch with human nature as surfers claim to be, our social track record is pretty sad. And as the global surfing population grows exponentially each year, our footprint only grows greater. These being modern times, you would think that this increased burden we inevitably placed upon the people and places we visit would spark near unanimous concern for our legacy. Unfortunately, you would be thinking wrong.
It hasn’t been until the last decade that some members of the surf community, industry and media took a good long look in the mirror and realized that what was staring back resembled more a Wall Street suit hungry for dollar signs and self-gratification then some Zen Buddhist convert fending off the growing confluence of Western modernity and his idyllic Third World wave gardens. Unfortunately, it has been very few of us that have greeted this conflicting caricature with alarm. The majority of us, in fact, have gone out to buy more suits.
I suppose that’s the wicked nature of an evolving and expanding capitalistic machination, which—you realize—is what has put those super stretchy trunks around your waste, that sleek computer-shaped surfboard under your feet, even that cold beer from the surf resort bar down your gullet. Luckily, the few souls that didn’t like that suit in the mirror have emerged to cultivate a new and better way of thinking.
In the print surf media, the decades have spawned endless gushings over the world’s greatest wave locales with hardly a word or photo directed back to shore, where those scraggly brown people stood watching with a mix of curiosity, envy and concern. There were exceptions, of course—namely Steve Barilotti, who in the early ’00s first noted the severe disconnect between Mentawai charter boat trips and, well, pretty much everything else in the Mentawai Islands save for its perfect waves. “Mentawai boat trips,” Barilotti famously wrote in his 2002 SURFER article titled “The Jungle is Looking Back”: “have become the equivalent of 19th century Gentlemen Adventurers shooting buffalo from rail cars as they speed across the vanishing frontier.”
Surf films haven’t been much better. Always the self-absorbed bunch, surfers created an entirely new film genre held together by an Elmer’s Glue strength stratagem of “clips” and “color.” The clips, of course, were reserved for the construction of the surfers’ character. The color became an agonizingly homogeneous montage of sunrise/sunset time-lapses, mangy dogs and toothless and wrinkled old men and women. One of the godfathers of this now-abused technique, Taylor Steele, woke up and created Sipping Jetstreams and Castles in the Sky. But the result was largely just a fancier version of the same old stuff, where the surfers were the stars and the people and places they came across were depicted only to the extent of audio-less color montages. Steele really did try to give us a glance at the jungle looking back, but in the end he hardly taught us anything new about it or infected within us a desire to learn more.
With the exception of just a handful of surf journalists and filmmakers over the decades, surfing has had a reputation of letting talents outside the industry bubble sort out its social issues. Journalists like Bruce Jenkins and William Finnegan did a fine job in the ’80s and ’90s of training their pens on the cultures behind the waves, rather than the pro surfers riding them. And most recently, we have academics like Jess Ponting, who created San Diego State University’s Center for Surf Research—a department dedicated to educating a new generation of surfers on sustainable surf tourism practices—and filmmaker Adam Pesce, whose documentary Splinters chronicles the conflicts of surfing and modernity with a Papua New Guinea village’s deeply engrained tribal traditions.
Ponting and Pesce, in fact, worked together on Splinters. The two began brainstorming on what would become the award-winning 2011 documentary more than ten years ago. Ponting led Pesce to Lido village, near Sanduan province’s capital, Vanimo, where villagers had been hooked on surfing since being exposed to it by a rogue Australian in the ’80s. As it turned out, surfing was not only a vehicle for, but also cultivator of, Lido’s struggle with modernity. Sure, the waves breaking on the reefs just offshore would have generated some good clips and the natives surfing whittled-down buttress roots of rainforest trees perfect color, but it was the rampant domestic violence ingrained in the culture, and the alcoholism, and the delusions of grandeur that surfing infected in Lido’s youth that demanded the film’s attention.
Constructed to climax at a fast approaching national surf contest to be held in Lido and the competitive frictions that arose as a result, the film reveals something very simple that many of us seem to have forgotten: The natives in the jungle are people too. They can be infected with stoke. They can shine a day’s work when the waves are pumping. They can dream of being successful someday. But more than anything, there is more to them than the ubiquitous surf film color shot.
What I find peculiar, however, is that since its debut in April of last year, outsider Adam Pesce’s passion project has been quietly proving that rather than not caring all these years, perhaps the surf industry, community and media have just been acting like…well…surfers: stuck in the same current that’s been running since the beginning, too lazy to jump stream and do something truly different. The documentary has been a raving success in film festivals worldwide and is receiving praise from first-time surfers to the surf magazine editors and industry jocks that have promoted and proliferated the blind eye approach to surf tourism.
Look, there’s surf porn and then there’s documentary—we all know that. And if it wasn’t for the work of beloved filmmakers like the Brown’s and the Malloy’s, even Taylor Steele, perhaps Adam Pesce wouldn’t have penetrated as far into our hearts as he has. With visionaries like Pesce, I can finally see this genre going far beyond porn. Perhaps these rough economic times and the deep recession in the rivers of cash that once flowed have turned the boat trip blinders off. Responsible surf camps are on the incline in places like Indonesia. Even Tavarua Island Resort, once seen as Fiji’s public enemy number one, is working with Jess Ponting and his team of experts from SDSU to turn the attention back toward Fiji’s coastal communities and local surfers that have been so very impacted and ignored by surf tourism’s great sweep.
The surf industry, community and media are slowly starting to wake up to the fact that it’s not just a jungle in there; that it’s a place full of people with dreams, talents and passions not unlike their own. A place whose story is more than just clips and color. But the realization is slow. Meanwhile, boat charters continue to be booked solid.
