Third one to go really could dance, but it seems he also thought too much
Alas poor Zac. We knew his problems only too well. All those speeches he made about depression — they were depressing. Zac became the third contestant to leave
last night despite scoring a high 24 with the judges. He could kind of really dance. It was the public that did for him.
Having committed a nifty piece of ethnic cleansing by booting out the two unwelcome Persians,
Gilda and Naz, viewers shone their torches into the eyes of the remaining contestants and Zac — anxious, trembling Zac — was the first to blink.
He was the weakest link. He was too sensitive for the world of
He wore his pain and uncertainty on his sleeve. But there wasn’t enough room on his arms for all that pain and that much abundance of uncertainty, so he transferred the rest to his face. The eyes tended to go out of focus. The line of his mouth fell. They were clues
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that he was committing one of the great sins of New Zealand life: thinking about his problems.
Things had gone wrong in his life, he told viewers. He hadn’t made the Olympics paddling some kind of boat because the guy who paddled it with him got out of the boat. He hadn’t made a good fist of things as
because the series only showed one side of him and he had many sides, so many sides . . .
Zac went deep inside himself, surfing the waves of his psyche, a mystic, a seer, a gentle spirit, a poet, a wanderer — like Kwai Chang Kane from Kung Fu, you could imagine him walking the earth. Barefoot. Wearing rags.
Come to think of it we see people like that every day in most New Zealand cities and sometimes we give them a few coins but it’s best not to.
The show is emerging as a kind of totalitarian regime. The subtext is that it wants to create a master race. It worships banter, nervous laughter, humility, suffocating blandness, all the codes of normal behaviour that make up the immaculate New Zealand conformist. Suzy Cato is looking good. Likewise Shav, Jess, Rog, Sam and Chris the cricket guy.
Robert Rakete looked worried last night. The viewers are surely circling. He’s making it pretty obvious that he has quite fine feelings. Can they be tolerated in the reichstag? Even his choice of song was dubious — by George Michael, that nervous wreck who died of unhappiness.
David Seymour ought to look worried but keeps on riding it out. He shared the lowest score with Rog, who had every right to look a bit indignant about that. The judges had basically lied to his face when they told him how great he was in last night’s performance.
Judge Camilla rolled out one of her favourite quotes, when she told him, “People may not remember what you say or do, but they will remember how you make them feel. And you make everyone feel fantastic!” And then she handed him a lousy 6.
But perhaps her fortune-cookie sentiment revealed the truth about Zac. No one much remembered what he said or how he danced. They remembered the way he made them feel: Depressed.