So, who or what is he, really? Pariah is a creation of actor Owen Black , who some will remember as the the villain Ethan Pierce on Shortland Street. Black grew up in the South Island, did a long stint in Auckland, and came back south again to make a western called Netherwood. That’s where he met his wife, Aleisha, and they now live on her parents’ farm, with a couple of young kids. 

Black and film-maker Araus have known each other since both were students in Auckland more than 20 years ago. In this business, you sometimes have to make your own work. Pariah emerged from improvisation sessions and brainstorming; Araus mentions earlier rural characters, Rootman and Pigman.

Pariah is not just a character, though. There’s more going on. He’s an alter ego, a physical embodiment of struggles with mental illness, that rural inarticulacy, that dark male silence.

As Pariah, Black walks differently and talks differently. He slouches, he stomps. He grimaces; he has an angry resting face. He makes less eye contact. Pariah is an outlet for depression, but sometimes it can be hard to know who is speaking and when Araus trails him, he needs to be alert as Black might switch mid-sentence into this other thing, the feral Pariah.

The pain

Araus and Black can get a five-minute episode of their web series, also called Pariah, from a couple of days of filming. There was one in which Pariah dragged rocks from the bottom of the valley up to the house, as a kind of Sisyphus metaphor.

There is only one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide, Albert Camus famously wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus. He asked how we can live with the absurdity of existence.

“I’ve been hiding away, I guess, somewhat,” Pariah says. “I felt like I had got to this point in my life where I hadn’t offered anything to the world.”

Pariah is confronted in middle age with the fear that he has never done anything of value. So if he learns to write songs, and releases those songs to the world, and follows that with live shows and a tour, then perhaps he has offered something to people. It’s that simple. The first series of Pariah culminates in the making of a music video. The song, Here Comes the Pain, is powered by a mighty, cathartic riff.

Call it heavy metal healing. The pummelling guitars, the great sense of release.

“It’s very heavy. I’m a real metal fan. I love a lot of music but the lyrics that come out are very personal. Those lyrics came from a place of darkness. I have a lot of angst. There’s nothing like heavy rock music to express that.”

And it’s his pain? “It’s my pain. It was a time when I was going through a particularly dark moment that I was really struggling with, and I knew there was more coming, and that phrase came to me. Here comes the pain. You’re going to have to deal with it, like preparing myself mentally. It’s not going to get any better. It was like a meditation to prepare myself for something I was going to have to go through.”

Could the song even become an anthem for depressed men, as though Pariah is hard rock’s answer to Kiwi mental health spokesmen John Kirwan and Mike King?

“I think it’s catchy enough to be an anthem and it’s coming from a real place. It’s anger but it’s about love. It’s coming from a place of empowering. My experience shouldn’t be wasted. I’ve gone through this thing and it’s hard and life is really, really hard and it’s not something we talk about a lot. You see things in the paper, but they’re always someone else’s problems. On social media, everyone’s living a good life, but it’s really hard and I think everyone knows that, but it’s not something we go around saying. ‘Life’s frickin’ hard, guys!’ The more we can stick together, we can help each other. I think that’s what I found in the music. It’s a positive energy, it’s a powerful energy, to be able to change your life and change what you’re doing.

All this is probably confusing until we get to see it. It might even be confusing for some of those involved.

As Pariah talks about moustaches with Dunne, an image of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust flashes up on a computer screen. It’s a reminder that rock music has always depended on alter egos, the invention of new selves to go out and do the hard work of shocking the public. Black was stirred up by seeing Marilyn Manson do his Antichrist Superstar act in Auckland in 1997. There was someone fully, deeply in character.

But it becomes dangerous, that kind of game-playing. “I really did have doubts about my sanity,” Bowie said four years after he had killed off Ziggy for good. 

Pariah has a journey to go on before Black can do that. The first nine-part web series, which culminated in the Here Comes the Pain music video, is being followed by another. The dream is to play live in Japan, as a tribute to Black’s Japanese stepmother. Or maybe that was Pariah’s Japanese stepmother. Or both.

Black has built a studio and a gym above a barn packed with farm equipment. Maybe we can read too much into poster choices, but here is one for the reality-blurring Inception, and he just got one of the inspirational Marilyn Manson. There is a box of hard rock CDs and his dad’s vintage stereo, the 70s type with monolithic speakers. A big chunk of macrocarpa makes a mic stand.

He has written lyrics for about 40 songs, and music has been added to about half a dozen. When I ask about songwriting, he replies in the Pariah voice.

“I’m not a musician, so I don’t have those talents of melody and chord structure and all that. I’ll get a rhythm in my mind and get a flow on that. I’ve always done wordplay in my mind. Switching words in a sentence like it’s some OCD kind of thing. I love words. Always been a good speller and stuff. Always had a fascination with words.”

Did he write poetry as a kid? 

“I tried a couple of times but it seemed so stupid. Everyone writes poetry, but how do you know if it’s good? It’s probably not. Better not show anybody.”

Low self-esteem is a recurring theme.

“Oh yeah. That’s definitely been an issue for me, in my character and my environment growing up. I never realised how badly I thought of myself, how many issues in my life came out of that, until a friend of mine showed me a book on cognitive behavioural therapy. I read that and things just started resonating. Man, that’s me, I’m doing all these things. Someone will say something and your first thought is a really negative association with yourself in connection with it. 

“You do come through the other side but you’ve got to keep on top of it. I’m in a much better place now than I was before, and music’s been a huge part of that. Just writing these lyrics and getting this stuff out. That actually means something. As Pariah, I could do it, I could access it. Before the mo, before this whole character stuff…” 

There is before the mo and after the mo. We need to go back to the moustache. He grew it a couple of years ago. 

“My dad died not long before that. He was a really powerful influence on my life. I would never have grown a mo because Dad would have thought it was stupid or maybe not, but I was always judging myself through Dad’s eyes. It’s funny saying all this came out of a mo because it’s much deeper than that. Once he died, and we were very close, I loved him dearly, he wasn’t this domineering, bullying character, but he was a strong character with strong opinions. 

“But once he died, I tried the mo and it was a cool look. It became part of my character, part of this new me that emerged. It was actually me. I’d never known me when Dad was alive. Suddenly I was writing music and stuff. It was this whole turnaround from what I was doing before. It’s taken me by surprise, the way it’s gone. I’ve just got into it.”

Fight back. Fight back!

Now, do you want to see how loud this big stereo goes?