ABSTRACT
This essay discusses the TV series Top of the lake (Campion 2013) within the frameworks of theories of trauma and psychoanalytic object relations. The essay’s focus falls on the prominence given to the New Zealand landscape in the series and in reviews, and on Top of the Lake’s apparently paradoxical combining of a narrative concern with extreme violence and performances that evoke childlike playfulness. Having examined the possibility of categorizing the series as a trauma text, the essay concludes by proposing that its formal and narrative elements combine to produce a spectatorial experience that evokes potential space while triggering reparative impulses.
