Resilience, Angel, 6 Feet Under and Alias

This article first appeared in the Age on February 28, 2004

Resilience is one of those qualities most of us hope for, and, according to Anne Deveson, most of us have. Author of a book called Resilience she is interviewed this weekend on Compass (Sunday, ABC, 9.45pm). Half an hour is enough for us to find out some of the things Deveson has had to endure (a failed marriage, the suicide of a son and, cruelly, the finding of a soul mate only to have him die of cancer within 8 months). Half an hour is not enough, however to really articulate what qualities allow a person to live through such events and continue to have a positive life.

The trait of resilience is one also evident in, but never articulated by, many long running drama series -the kind of shows where characters have to endure so many twists and turns it is impossible to imagine they could survive in the real world without going mad. Two series ended last year by erasing the memories of their main characters. At the end of the last season of Angel (Wednesday, 10.30pm, Channel 7), Angel's tortured son Connor was reborn into a happy suburban household, with no memories of the hell fires from whence he came. Everyone who knew Connor has him wiped from their memory- with the exception of his father, who lives in a private hell of accurate recall. I think this show just gets better and better but it would seem others do not agree. Warners have just announced this season is to be the last.

Last season Six Feet Under begun with Nate's death. Quickly though, it spun him into a parallel universe of marriage, babies, and the horror of having his wife go missing, presumed dead. Nate's memory of any other life is wiped, though flickers of it come to him as deja vu and dreams. Alias (Channel 7, 9.30pm, Mondays) had one of the best cliff-hangers of any series last year when Sydney woke up after a violent fight to find herself in Hong Kong, with a long healed scar across her stomach. Her fiance; Vaughn turns up married to someone else. It seems she's been presumed dead for two years and Sydney, of course, can't remember a thing. Alias is one of the best series on TV at the moment, so leap in quick so you've a hope of following the twists and turns to come.

Wiping memory is a great narrative devise. It allows characters to race off into new plot lines and suggests much about the fracturing of identity people feel in the twenty-first century. It also leads to trauma for its characters, and, as Anne Deveson suggests, trauma in real life as well. This is the quality that shines from Deveson and give us a clue to her resilience; she remembers everything, with a great clarity of detail. That way, even the saddest of events can become a source of strength and inspiration.

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