Tag: Jed Mayer

The cover of the June 1979 issue
of Newsweek featured an image of
Sigourney Weaver from Alien under the
caption: “Hollywood’s Scary Summer.” I was thirteen, and the horror movies
released that summer would form a kind of
grotesque carnival that mirrored my own and the world’s anxieties.
 Earlier in the spring, the disastrous nuclear accident at Three
Mile Island had occurred, and that summer major oil spills
polluted the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the North Atlantic.  This
was also the year when oil prices doubled, Margaret Thatcher was elected, and
the Ayatollah Khomeini rose to power.  As I became aware of the
political and environmental degradation around me, the films I watched
reflected my awareness, as well as my own desires and fears as a thirteen year old, back at me.

I was caught between being a nerdy kid and a nerdy teenager;
the marketing strategies for promoting Ridley Scott’s Alien were similarly split. 
Following on the success of Star
Wars, the film boasted special effects that would rival its
predecessor.  Reading about its
production in magazines like Starlog and
Heavy Metal, I joined other fanboys
in the building anticipation for its summer release.  The fact that Alien mingled SF with horror elements only further whetted my
appetite, but when the film was released with an R rating, I was consigned to
seeing it only through its comic book tie-ins and bubble gum card series.  Surely this was the only R-rated film to have
spawned its own action figure, yet the peculiar split in this marketing
campaign seemed to reflect my own divided self, too old to play with toys, too
young to get into adult films.

As Newsweek’s
chosen symbol of a new wave of Hollywood horror films, Alien embodied other split identities.  Formerly considered a disreputable genre,
associated with cheap special effects and lurid story lines, horror seemed to
be emerging into the mainstream, backed by mega-million dollar budgets and
featuring distinguished actors and directors. 
The process that had begun with 1973’s The Exorcist, and continued with 1976’s The Omen, seemed to reach its tipping point in the summer of 1979
with Alien and The Amityville Horror, culminating in Stanely Kubrick’s The Shining the following winter.   According to Newsweek: “What Alien proves
is that the B movies of yesterday provide the formulas for the A-movie
blockbusters of today.”

But any admirer of Ridley Scott’s film knows that the story
is anything but B movie fare.  While its
last half-hour seems patterned on the kind of murderous chase sequence
perfected the previous year in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), this is only one of the film’s many complex dimensions.  Interestingly, it is likely that this sequence,
along with the infamous “chest-burster” scene, brought the film its R
rating, while in fact its science fiction premise (the element of the film most
ostensibly appealing to younger audiences) more clearly mirrored what was going
on in that adult world I would soon be reluctantly entering.

While Star Wars was
predicated on an escapist premise that used science fiction conventions to
blast us into a galaxy far, far away, in the universe of Alien, space is confined, claustrophobic.  It is a universe very much like our own,
subject to the laws of supply and demand. 
As we watch a complex mass of space-borne metal slide slowly across the
screen, superimposed text tells us this is the commercial towing
spaceship Nostromo, hauling a refinery
and twenty million tons of mineral ore. 
Space, the final frontier, has become, like all frontiers, a resource to
be exploited.  The imposing size of the
ship is in perverse contrast to its seven-member skeleton crew, presumably the
result of corporate downsizing and its technological ally, automation.  It is some time before we encounter any
humans aboard, as the camera explores the ship’s instruments awakening to a
kind of ghostly, simulated life.  When
the crew is finally awakened, they emerge from steel cocoons that resemble both
eggs and coffins, clearly anticipating the deadly alien eggs the crew will
later encounter, but also figuring their grim dependence on the ship’s
technology. 

But of course it is not simply technology itself that
threatens the crew, but the exploitative uses to which it may be put.  The film gradually reveals that the real
villain of the story is not the fierce predator of the title, but the crew’s
employers, mega-corporation Weyland-Yutani, referred to simply as “The Corporation.”  Chief science officer Ash (Ian Holm) is later
revealed to be an android planted by the Corporation to superintend the capture
of the deadly alien for the company’s bio-weapons division.  Like the mineral ore the ship already
carries, the alien is yet one more resource to be commercially exploited, at
whatever cost.

Although I wasn’t yet old enough to have a driver’s license,
like everyone in 1979 I was highly conscious of rising gas prices and their
effects.  I didn’t understand the
relationship between what President Carter and Walter Cronkite repeatedly
referred to as the Oil Crisis, or the complex geopolitical issues centering
on the Iranian revolution and the Ayatollah’s return to power.  Regardless, I watched those daily images of
gas station lines, so long they looked like shanty towns, with a grim
fascination, as they so closely resembled the conjoined images of excess and
destitution common to those post-apocalyptic films I loved from that era, films
like The Omega Man, Damnation Alley, and Soylent Green, films that seemed half in
love with the world’s death.  What did
the Earth the Nostromo’s crew were trying to get home to actually look
like?  Probably something very much like
the one depicted in these films, and to which the images I watched on the
nightly news seemed to be offering a disturbing preview.

For kids who wanted to act out scenes from Alien (a film they weren’t allowed to
see without a chaperone), Kenner offered their 18-inch action figure of the monster
created by the disturbed imagination of the late H.R. Giger.  Given the fact that this was ostensibly an
R-rated toy, with sublimated sexual imagery typical of its designer, it is
somewhat odd that this is the first action figure I regarded as too childish to
buy.  Taking the alien to school would be
an invitation to bullying, and playing with it alone at home just seemed
sad.  I still had my extensive collection
of Star Wars figures, but these were
beginning to gather dust on the shelf, reluctant as I might have been to part with
them. 

Looking back now, with my wariness of buying any products
that aren’t ecologically correct, I can retroactively congratulate myself on
not purchasing a large plastic figure made largely of petroleum products.  The smaller, 3 ¾” size of the Star Wars figures, as compared to the
foot-long G.I. Joe of eras past, was a deliberate response to the increased
production costs brought on by the Energy Crisis.  So the foot-and-a-half long Alien figure was actually an avatar of
wretched excess lurking in the toy aisle, a fitting embodiment of the film’s
tacit themes of consumption and exploitation. 

The other reason I couldn’t bring myself to buy the Alien action figure is that there was
something kind of sad about it.  Produced
as a single unit, there were no other figures it could play with: no Kane
action figure to eat, no Ripley for it to chase.  It was over four times the size of my other
action figures, so had I bought it the alien would have stood alone on the
shelf, never fitting in, a large wasteful consumer product good for nothing but
packing away, eventually to be sold on eBay, shipped in a FedEx package, hauled
to its destination aboard a vast commercial aircraft, most likely piloted by a
skeleton crew of seven, reduced by corporate downsizing.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

The 90s saw Australian filmmakers enjoying worldwide success
with a series of offbeat comedies that celebrated outsider status and often
mixed challenging subject matter with laughs. 
As inventive as these films were, their success overshadowed the dark
history of Australian cinema, Walkabout and
Picnic at Hanging Rock supplanted by Priscilla and Muriel in the cultural memory. 
But in 2005 that repressed history resurfaced in one of the most
disturbing films to come from down under, Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek.  Dismissed by
many critics as misogynistic torture porn, the film is in fact a compendium of
filmic tropes that simultaneously resurrects and comments on Australia’s peculiar
film history.

One of the most successful and iconic figures of Australian
cinema is Crocodile Dundee, the
raffish survivalist bushman played by Paul Hogan.  In the years following the success of the
Dundee franchise, other Australian directors would achieve commercial—and
sometimes aesthetic—success with such offbeat comedies as Flirting, Strictly Ballroom,
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and
of course Muriel’s Wedding, directed
by Hogan.  Dealing with topics that had
been rarely addressed in comedy, such as racism, gay and transgender
identities, and disability (not to mention ABBA), these films also embraced a
garish and camp aesthetic that was refreshingly at odds with American and
European preoccupation with upward mobility.

But however much these films challenged certain conventions
of the comedy genre, they arguably contributed more to the worldwide success of
their stars (Nicole Kidman, Guy Pearce, Hugo Weaving, Toni Collette, and
director Baz Luhrman) than they did to Australian cinema.  The same might be said of the path taken by Dundee’s
demonic doppelganger Mad Max, who launched Mel Gibson into stardom.  While the original 1979 film was an inventive
transformation of the New Wave’s darker stylings into irresistible grindhouse
fare, as the franchise gained commercial success and higher budgets, it devolved
into the disastrously overblown theatricals of Thunder-Dome. 

On its release, Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek was regarded by most serious critics as slasher shlock,
yet it can also be read as a disturbing treatise on Australian film and the
peculiar cultural and geographical history that underpins it.  Certainly this film is not recommended for
the queasy, but it could also be considered less a celebration of violence than an indictment of it.  By exploring the
relationship between character and setting, it offers a powerful
meditation on the causes of violence, one that has resonance well beyond its
Australian setting.

The film begins in Muriel
territory, with three twenty-somethings partying poolside before piling into a
car the next morning.  Liz and Christy
are both British tourists, and their Sydney pal Ben is accompanying them on a road
trip on their way to the airport in Queensland. 
They travel the forbidding spaces of the Great Northern Highway, which
rolls through the arid western deserts with only rare interruptions by a roadhouse
or rest-stop.  When they do finally hit a
gas station, they are harassed by a group of slack-jawed yokels, who threaten
the women with a “gang-bang.”  Ben tries
to man up on the occasion, but it is a role he is clearly uncomfortable with:
he is feminized, and the women are verbally objectified and victimized.  The film will continue to explore the ways in
which gender is as much a product of cultural context as biology.

Soon after this disturbing encounter, they arrive at their
first destination: Wolf Creek, site of a massive asteroid crater.  As they walk around the eerie terrain, the
atmosphere becomes reminiscent of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1972), in which the students and teachers
of a girl’s boarding school go for a holiday outing at a strange and ominous
rock formation, where several of the girls mysteriously disappear.  The dream-like rhythms and surreal landscape
of Wolf Creek evoke a similar sense
of the uncanny, and likewise hint at the spiritual traditions of Australia’s
aboriginal population, so closely linked to the continent’s unique
ecosystem.  This dreamy atmosphere culminates
in the travelers’ watches stopping simultaneously, suggesting a spiritual or
astral influence on the dire events that follow.

Such scenes are significantly enhanced by the film’s
astonishingly inventive sound design. 
François Tétaz composed a score woven out of a collection of field
recordings made from the sound of power lines eerily humming and vibrating in the
desert winds.  When these rise to muted
crescendos, they vaguely resemble the conventional horror movie “stingers” that
punctuate scare scenes, but with a subtle organicism rooted in the ambient
soundscape. 

When they try to leave, their car refuses to start, and as
they wait through the night for the unlikely arrival of another visitor they
are “rescued” by a rugged frontiersman, Mick, who bears more than a passing
resemblance to Crocodile Dundee, but one badly gone to seed and stripped of all
his rugged charms.  The resemblance is
made explicit later on, after an hours-long tow back to Mick’s compound.  As they sit around a campfire before their
good Samaritan goes to work on their car, the gap between rural and urban,
Australian and English, goes from awkward to excruciating, until Ben tries to
break the tension by quoting Dundee’s famous line, “You call that a knife? Now
that’s a knife!” which Mick doesn’t quite get, and assumes he’s being
mocked. 

And, in a sense, he is. 
Earlier in this uncomfortable encounter Ben tells him he’s from Sydney,
to which Mick replies, “Poofter capital of Australia!”  This further hit on Ben’s threatened
masculinity can be seen as motivating his later insult, intended to mark Mick
as a redneck, a bumpkin, a rural relic, lost in the past of a modernizing
nation of which Sydney is the urban symbol. 
But the nation’s repressed history takes its revenge, as Mick drugs them
with what he claims to be “rainwater from the top end.”  Thinking they are partaking of the landscape’s
natural purity, they are in fact being prepared for slaughter.  This irony is anticipated in the campfire
conversation when Ben enthuses about Mick’s life in the open air, his freedom
in nature, to which Mick bluntly replies: “What the fuck are you talking about?”  Idealization of nature is a product of the
urban middle class, not of those who scrabble a living off the landscape.

That campfire exchange, and the class and gender politics
that frame it, is crucial for understanding the violence that follows.  While the women are tortured, they also fight
against, and momentarily escape, their captor. 
It should be noted that much of the film’s violence occurs off-screen,
though Mick’s gleeful sadism and Kristy’s abject fear create an unbearable
sense of dread.  During their escape the
film recalls another great film from the Australian New Wave, Wake in Fright, which makes the
expansive landscapes of the Outback into a paradoxically claustrophobic space
of dread.  Threat lurks everywhere in the
wide-open desert spaces.  Holes appear in
their getaway vehicle, inexplicably, until we realize they are made by a rifle
fired from hundreds of yards away.  As in
the Mad Max films, the freedom of the
open road is turned into a space of entrapment and violence. 

This is the end of the frontier.  The exploitation of the landscape and
near-genocide of the native peoples of Australia is supplanted by a more
mysterious, surreptitious form of violence. 
The film opens with the vague and sinister words: “30,000 people are
reported missing in Australia every year. 90% are found within a month.  Some are never seen again.”  Though this is conventional thriller
verbiage, it is also an altogether different vision of the country than that offered
by Baz Luhrmann’s camp epic Australia or
Paul Hogan’s lovable bushman.   Like the
great films of the 1970s, Wolf Creek
de-romanticizes the landscape, and reminds us that the past is never past, and
that violence can erupt from the most seemingly remote places.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

Australian cinema came into its own during the 1970s.  The same might be said of Hollywood during the
same period, as directors like Terrence Malick, John Boorman, and Peter
Bogdanovich eschewed constructed sets and artificial lighting to tell stories in which
settings were as important as characters. 
The obvious difference lies in the nature of Australian nature, itself: the vast
desert spaces of the Outback, the dense vegetation of the bush, and the shark-infested
beaches, foster forms of life that seem alien to outsiders, and many of
Australian film’s best stories revolve around forbidding encounters with a
nature that seems unnatural.  As the
country’s great film decade came to a close, a low-budget horror film would appear as a kind of compendium of the era’s visual tropes.  It is also a dark meditation on the era
itself, one that still has surprising resonance.

At the time, Long Weekend was
promoted with an irresistible tag-line: “Their crime was against nature:
nature found them guilty.”  Directed by
Colin Eggleston, the film was released on March 29, 1979, the day after the
infamous nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island. 
Just a few months later, on June 3, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico
began spilling 30,000 gallons of crude oil a day, a toxic event that was later
to be echoed in the unforgettable summer of 2010.  Long
Weekend’s theme could hardly have been more timely.  A dysfunctional couple (Peter and Marcia) decide
to get away from it all on a camping weekend: along the way they hit a kangaroo
with their car, start a fire with a carelessly thrown cigarette, dowse their
campsite with insecticides, and kill sundry birds and aquatic animals while
barely restraining themselves from killing each other.  It’s hard to imagine a more unlikable pair of
characters, and when nature begins to strike back, we are firmly on the side of
the nonhuman. 

Thematically, the film has much in common with another
environmental horror film from the same year, John Frankenheimer’s Prophecy.  Waste chemicals dumped from a local paper
mill pollute backwoods waters in Maine, causing birth defects and mutations in
the local Native American population, and bringing into being a monstrous
mutant bear.  Lost Weekend takes a less
heavy-handed approach to the same environmental theme: indeed, it would be hard not
to.  What’s surprising here is the way it
manages to merge social and psychological issues with environmental ones. 

Nature’s threat seems to come as much from the human
characters as from the bush that surrounds them.  The sound design blurs distinctions between
noises in the characters’ minds and howls and whines from the environmnt.  Since they often refuse to speak to one
another, it’s not clear who hears what, as high pitch buzzing gives way to
humanoid cries in the film’s disturbing soundscape.  Driving into the bush, they enter a space that
is as much mental as physical: driving by night, their headlamps light an eerie
tunnel through the forest that seems to go on and on; they pass what they
believe to be an identical tree several times, despite staying on the same
track; at their camp a speargun mysteriously fires on its own, nearly killing
Marcia; later a bird drops a woman’s shoe into Peter’s lap. 

Yes, there are plenty of scenes where animals attack, but as in Hitchcock’s The Birds, what is most
compelling about Long Weekend is the
lack of any explanation of the cause behind nature’s transformation.  Earlier in the film, Marcia overhears a story
on the radio about cockatoos attacking people’s homes, baffling wildlife
experts.  Near the end of the film a bird
flies into a livestock truck, blinding the driver.  In between these incidents, nature’s threat
seems to be directed entirely on the unhappy campers, and while the tag-line
seems to draw a direct connection between the characters’ disrespect for nature and its
revenge, the particular forms taken by that revenge make this less clear.

As we learn more about the couple’s past, the incidents that
befall them in the wild seem eerily to mimic the incidents that led to their
mutual loathing.  Watching Peter swimming
in the ocean, Marcia suddenly sees a large, dark shape in the water, and
screams out a warning.  Peter eventually
makes it to shore, unharmed but shaken.  Though
they suspect it is a shark, neither can identify exactly what they saw.  As they return to their camp, Marcia makes a
mysterious segue: “What would you have done if I’d have died? Would you sell
the house?  Would you have
remarried?”  Later, she asks Peter: “What
do you think that noise was last night? Sounded like a baby crying.”  Peter doesn’t reply: either he didn’t hear or
he doesn’t care about his wife’s concerns. 
Eventually we discover that Marcia has had an abortion, terminating a
pregnancy by another man.  As the sordid
story is pieced together, it seems that Peter actually pushed the two of them
together, so as to leave the man’s wife free for himself.

The story becomes a fitting epitaph for the 1970s, when
fantasies of free love and a return to nature turned violent and deadly.  In what other era could wife-swapping,
abortion, and environmental devastation be so mysteriously, but inevitably,
connected?  Human nature
takes its revenge in the film as much as does that Nature-with-a-capital-n we like to think
exists out there, pristinely apart from us. 
As the couple have it out, Peter arrogantly claims, “You’re so clear to
me, it’s all so clear to me now,” and Marcia replies, “Don’t get philosophical
with me: you poke your head out of your $2,000 camper and you think that’s reality.”  Attempting to escape the confines of
monogamy, they hav experimented with extramarital sex, and it’s torn their
marriage apart.  Hoping to heal the marriage,
they flee to a nature that is anything but nurturing.  There are few films that so cannily invoke
the uncanny in exposing the dark side of our so-called natural desires.   

Frightened again by the dark shape in the water, Peter fires
his gun relentlessly into the surf, as a bloody tide washes in.  Eventually the shape washes up on the beach,
and turns out to be a dugong, a manatee-like creature that was once populous on
Australia’s shores before being hunted nearly to extinction, “for its oil,” as
Peter says with regret.  Both comment on
how ugly the seemingly shapeless creature is, even as Peter notices that it’s a
female, and speculates that the sound they’ve been hearing is its pup: “they
sound just like a human baby when they cry.” 
In a fitting irony, they are most disgusted by nature even as they realize
how human it is.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

1. Bring an outsider’s
perspective

Like Wake in Fright,
the only other Australian entry at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, Walkabout was directed by an Englishman,
Nicolas Roeg.  He tells the story of
Australia without sentimentality, without rancor.  The landscape is not idealized or demonized;
neither are those who dwell in it.

2. Use images to tell a
story

Based on a 1959 novel of the same name, about two American
children whose passenger plane crash lands in the Australian Outback, Roeg’s film
rigorously pares back and revises the story; the novel is 144 pages, the
screenplay 14.  The film begins with a
mineral surveyor driving his children to a deserted desert landscape, where he
tries to shoot them before covering himself and his car with gasoline and
lighting a match.  We don’t know
why.  His daughter stares blankly.  The fire burns fiercely.  The children walk into the desert, their
school uniforms black against the rust-colored landscape.

3. Cross-cutting
multiplies perspectives

Images of rocks, strata, broken landscapes.  A girl’s school where Australians are going
through their English elocution lessons. 
Bricks, brown and earthy.  The
Outback, sand glowing fiercely red under a cloudless sky.  Brutalist architecture, dystopian concrete
forms like an urban cage.  A butcher
grinding kangaroo meat to be packaged as pet food.  A woman preparing dinner while listening to a
radio show on proper table etiquette. 
Chitinous lizards crawling over the desert floor, unwieldy in their
armor but perfectly adapted to their environment.

4. Tell immigrant stories

Europeans don’t seem to belong to this landscape, or at
least they seem to be trying their level best to maintain the culture of their
place of origin, practicing elocution, rehearsing manners.  Ninety per cent of Australians live on the
coasts, while the Outback represents over seventy per cent of the continent’s
landmass.  A teenage girl and her younger
brother are abandoned to this landscape; their school uniforms can’t protect
them from the heat, and they burn until their skin bleeds.  They come upon an oasis; a fruit tree feeds
them; the water revives and washes them. 
By the next morning the water has burned away in the heat.  Roeg somehow manages to compress two hundred
years of immigrant history into twenty minutes.

5. Tell native stories

A lone aboriginal boy comes upon them; he shows them how to
draw water from the soil.  They join him
for his “walkabout,” the aboriginal ritual in which a sixteen year-old boy is
sent out into the Outback to see if he can survive.  He and the schoolboy communicate through sign
language, and he increasingly draws the whites to his world.  They gradually strip off their school
uniforms, the last trappings of the world they are leaving behind but also
moving inexorably towards in their errant pilgrimage.  The aboriginal boy wears their clothing, but
with a difference, the boy’s pants on his head. 
They later make a sun parasol by stringing a blouse on sticks.  The boy decorates the children’s white skin
with elaborate painted designs.

6. Everything is sexual

The film was initially rated R for a nude bathing scene that
was then pared down for a PG rating.  The
restored scene is mesmerizing in its mixture of Edenic innocence and subdued
eroticism.  Nothing overt happens between
the teenage girl and boy, but in many scenes they are shown looking hungrily at
one another.  Their coy courtship breaks
racial taboos even while it serves as a metaphor for relations between immigrants
and natives.  The boy’s desire for the
girl later becomes so intense that it drives him to distraction; he does an
elaborate mating dance but she claims not to understand what he wants.

7. Everything is
political

The sexual element of the story is a bold move on Roeg’s
part, considering the radical separation enforced between immigrants and
natives, the latter of whom had long been consigned to government-sponsored
reservations.  The courtship narrative
dramatizes the country’s slow evolution towards greater inclusiveness, but the
film’s troubling conclusion offers little hope of full reciprocity.  In its post-colonial setting, every element
of the film’s narrative takes on political overtones: the father’s seemingly
innocuous profession of mineral surveyor can also be seen as essential to the
continent’s commercial exploitation; every exchange between the young
characters may be read as a cultural one, rich in possibility, fraught with
foreboding.

8. Everything is natural

Soon after the abandoned children begin their own version of
the aboriginal walkabout, the landscape begins to transform them.  The sun burns their skin, leaving them a
darker shade of white.  They suck water
from the dry earth.  When they encounter
the vestiges of Western civilization they are as bemused as their aboriginal
escort.  A wombat waddles up to them while
they are sleeping and sniffs curiously. 
They eat raw meat, freshly killed. 
All thoughts of elocution and table manners are burnt away.

9. Nothing is natural

This is not to say that they fully assimilate to the
landscape.  The film’s genius lies in its
unwillingness to romanticize their journey. 
They eventually grow up and become conventional urbanites.  Neither is the aboriginal way of life
represented as pure and unsullied: a kangaroo spear-hunt is cross-cut with
images from a meat-processing plant; white hunters are later shown doing the
same thing with rifles.  Killing is
killing, in city or outback, a point underscored by a close-up of the kangaroo
the boy kills, its five-fingered paw raised in the air like an accusing human
hand.

10. Mix genres

Just as the line between nature and culture is blurred, so
are the conventions of genre.  Nature
documentary undercuts social satire. 
Epic looms over coming-of-age story.  
Experimental, new wave style mediates adventure narrative.  Shifting point of view undoes the falsely objective
gaze of visual anthropology.

11. Know your ruins

The Outback is not a pristine, unsullied place. The walkers
come upon abandoned mines, burnt-out cars, empty sheds, and eventually,
amazingly, an entire white community residing in the middle of the desert in
geometric, modern cottages.  Seemingly,
the only difference between civilization and the wild is time.

12. There will be blood

The story begins with an apparently motiveless attempted
murder and self-immolation.  The
unexpected violence of this scene overshadows the rest of the film, like the
colonial past haunts the present.  Every
act of killing, whether for food, sport, or otherwise, feels like a brooding
recapitulation of that inaugural baptism by fire.  The possibility of violence hovers over every
encounter between the children and the landscape’s denizens.

13. History repeats itself

The children reassimilate into urban life, yet the story ends
with flashbacks to them bathing nude together. 
Was their walkabout an idyllic escape from social burdens, or a violent
rite of passage enabling them to return as better citizens?  The final image is of their school uniforms
hanging on sticks, empty vestiges of their former selves, yet waiting to be
donned again.

Jed Mayer is an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz.

Click here for the first installment of Jed Mayer’s “Down-Underground,” a series on the Australian New Wave.

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—Many people associate
Australian films with offbeat comedies like Muriel’s
Wedding or Priscilla Queen of the
Desert. Excellent as such films are, the history of Aussie film-making is a
much darker one, shaped by the country’s harsh landscapes and brutal
history.  Nowhere are these conditions
more evident than in a film that most of us might never have had a chance to
see. Although Wake in Fright was
greeted with accolades when it premiered at Cannes in 1971, the film’s
uncompromising portrayal of colonial life in the Outback incensed Australian
viewers, and poor distribution elsewhere drastically curtailed its potential
audience.   It was only dogged
determination and chance luck that managed to uncover the lone surviving print
of the film in a warehouse in Pennsylvania, days before it would have been
destroyed.  With this crucial piece of
the puzzle of Australian film history now restored, those of us living in the
northern hemisphere have the opportunity of entering Australian cinema through
its darkest doorway. 

Like America, Australia is a former colony that struggled to
find a cultural voice distinct from its British origins.   In 1973 Patrick White was the first
Australian to receive the Nobel Prize in literature and it is during that same
decade that a distinctive national film culture began to emerge.  A bold group of directors—including Nicholas
Roeg, Peter Weir, and Gillian Armstrong—began telling wholly original and often
epic stories that placed Australia’s distinctive landscape at their
center.  Working with absurdly small budgets and means, these directors
offered their own, unique response to the revolutions happening in European New
Wave and the New Hollywood of the 1970s.  Like these other post-War film
revolutions, the new Australian cinema played with familiar genre conventions,
injecting them with an often ruthless sense of realism that reflected the
country’s particular social and ethnic tensions.  The result is a body of film that is both familiar
and strange, engaging, even “accessible” but infused with a sensibility refreshingly
apart from American and European film.

Wake in
Fright is one of the earliest and most formative examples of this
new sensibility, and while it is wholly Australian, it bears comparison with other
films from the same era.  Like Sam
Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, which also
premiered in 1971, it depicts a mild-mannered intellectual’s descent into
brutality when he is relocated into an unfamiliar and disquieting rural
world.  Like John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) it graphically acts
out the alienation of city from country. 
Like The Wicker Man (1973), it
depicts an outsider’s initiation into a bizarre alien culture.  Yet Wake
in Fright is arguably more complex and more disturbing than these contemporaneous
classics, at times recalling the work of Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Camus.  If these comparisons seem grandiose, see the
film for yourself and get back to me.

It opens dramatically, with a panoramic shot of the bleakest
imaginable landscape, the camera circling around to reveal a town consisting
only of two small buildings facing a railway. 
This is Tiboonda, where John Grant (Gary Bond) is serving out a kind of
indentured servitude at a teaching post assigned by the peculiar terms of his
student loans.  It is the last day of
school, and the students stare vacantly into hot space while flies buzz and
clock ticks.  At last released from the
confines of the classroom the children flee, and Grant boards a train for the
mining town of Bundanyabba where he plans on catching a plane to Sydney to
spend the vacation with his girlfriend. 

But Bundanyabba, or “the Yabba” as the locals call it, has
other plans for John Grant.  At first the
town seems deserted, but it would appear all the residents are at the pub,
where Grant is treated to the brutish hospitality of a local policeman, Jock
(played by veteran Aussie actor Chips Rafferty), who buys round after round of
beer in what will become a recognizable ritual of initiation.  Mateyness, blokeishness, or what we might
call dudishness, is portrayed almost as a form of sadism, coerced inebriation being
the first of many inductions into the male culture of the Outback, one soon to
be followed by gambling, in an explicable, seemingly free-for-all game the
locals call “two-up” that seems to be loosely based on the simple principle of
heads or tails.  These scenes are
mesmerizing, frequently shot directly from above, as we watch with an almost
anthropological eye as the locals enact this peculiar, almost dance-like
ritual.

Flush with beginner’s luck, Grant pushes it until he loses
all his money, rendering him dependent on the Yabba’s tender mercies.  While he had sought to win enough money to
free himself from his teaching bondage, he finds himself trapped in
another.  With another round of forced
pints of beer the next morning, Grant finds himself beholden to local landowner
Tim Hynes, who brings Grant back to his place, where he meets a bizarre cast of
locals, including Hynes’ enigmatic daughter, two local bullies, and the alcoholic
Doc Tyden.  Played by the always
inscrutable Donald Pleasance, Tyden is Grant’s perverse Virgil leading him
through the Yabba’s surreal Inferno. 

From one bizarre episode to the next, the film draws us in,
along with the protagonist, until we are overtaken by a sense of unreality in
which nothing is true and everything is permitted.  As Grant moves from hangover to binge, his disdain
for the yokels dwindles away, and he engages in acts he never would have
dreamed of before coming to the Yabba. 

This perverse odyssey culminates with a night-time kangaroo
hunt that remains shocking over forty years later (12 people walked out of the
theater when the film was screened as part of a classic series at Cannes in
2009).  The harrowing scene, which portrays
the drunken hunters laughing gleefully as they indiscriminately kill and wound
dozens of passive creatures, was created by editing shots of the actors with
film from an actual kangaroo hunt where the film crew was allowed to tag
along.  The footage was later
instrumental in Australia’s banning of the brutal hunting practices, where
hunters hypnotize kangaroos with bright lights and kill them in droves, for
meat that would be sent to America to be used as pet food, while the skins were
made into plush toys for the growing tourist market. It is this kind of
intersection with Australian history that makes the story of Grant’s descent so
powerful.  It might even be argued that
the kangaroo hunt sublimates and reenacts the history of slaughter that resulted
in the near-genocide of the Aboriginal population. 

These historical resonances make it all the more remarkable
that the film was directed by a Canadian, Ted Kotcheff, who would go on to
greater commercial (if not critical) success with First Blood and Weekend at
Bernie’s.  For this reason it is
considered by some Australian film purists as less than genuine, but it is hard
to imagine any film that engages more fully with space and place than Wake in Fright.  Iconic Aussie musician, screenwriter and director
Nick Cave has called it “the best and most terrifying film about Australia in
existence.”  When the film was recently
screened at the Sydney Film Festival, followed by a Q and A session, one
audience member asked the director if he felt the world depicted in the film
still existed, to which three men shouted, “Does it still exist? It exists in
my backyard!” 

And for all the film’s brutality, the conclusion seems to
imply that the events we have witnessed are just another lost weekend in the
Outback.  John Grant gets off the train
and wanders past the drunken station master, who asks knowingly, “Did you have
a good holiday?” and when Grant answers, “The best,” he almost seems like he
means it.  Though rooted in the
sun-bleached soil of the Australian cultural landscape, Kotcheff’s masterpiece
reveals a penchant for barbarity that is disturbingly familiar.