1971 australian double feature: wake in fright and walkabout

Wake in Fright: (1971. dir: Ted Kotcheff) As much a classic of Aussie cinema as Picnic at Hanging Rock or Breaker Morant, Wake in Fright chronicles the Christmas holiday of a school-teacher trapped in the bleakest part of the outback in a sort of indentured servitude. En route to Sydney to visit his surfer-girlfriend, he becomes trapped by circumstance, peer pressure, and bad choices in a mining town ("the Yabba!" the locals call it with enthusiasm), and undergoes a mounting nightmare made of drink, sweat, dirt, blood, and vomit. It's infamous for the gruesome and protracted, real-life footage of a kangaroo massacre at its center, fully as disturbing as it sounds, which is further grotesquified by a mano-a-mano between a badly wounded 'roo and a drunk-as-fuck muscleman. The whole thing, the whole movie, the word "disturbing" doesn't begin to cover it. Kotcheff is an American who went on to direct First Blood, among others, and it may be the outsider's look at a foreign culture that heightens the weirdness into a sort of barely controlled hysteria.

It's like one of Polanski's early psychological horror films, the Tenant or Repulsion, in which you feel like you're standing too close to someone, watching while they go insane. This school-teacher (Gary Bond) starts out the day a proper fellow, complete with posh BBC accent and Carnaby Street good looks, who dreams of shipping out to England and cultivates artsy pretensions. Once he's trapped in The Yabba (and it is one of the most nightmarish moments I can remember, when he steps out the back of the lorry to realize that he is, indeed, trapped, as in a sort of Purgatory, just as the driver hands him a rifle), the movie maps a descent into alcohol-frenzy. Watching these men at their berserk, rampaging play is a high-pitched nightmare, one without end, a sort of tornado skipping across the landscape and demolishing everything it touches, some things immediately, others more slowly, like the women trapped amongst them.

*SPOILER ALERT* Here's the clincher, though: it's not a horror film, because of the ending. You watch this guy go all the way down into madness, through suicide and out the other side, and, in the end, he walks back to the same school-house, dressed in the same clothes, and when his landlord asks how his holiday was, he says, through gritted teeth but with some gusto, "The best." And that's when you realize what you've been watching: an Englishman suffering a gruesome transmogrification into an Australian. You've been watching a sort of shamanic initiation, in which he's ritually eviscerated in a frenzy of bacchic idiocy, and when he's strong enough to survive it, he returns to walk the earth as a roo-killing, two-fisted Aussie, disburdened of his previous dreams and pretensions.

Walkabout: (1971. dir: Nicolas Roeg) ...and this, the darling of international arthouses at the end of the swingingest decade, bears odd similarity to its more provocative brother of the same year. It's another outsider's view of the outback, Roeg's vision evoking an incandescent beauty and vibrant thrum of life from within the apparent wasteland. Its instigating incident involves an Englishman driven mad by the same landscape, trying to murder his children before turning his gun on himself, and the children embark on an initiatory "walkabout", saved by an aboriginal boy who takes them under his wing. In this one, however, the transformation is resisted in the end, the children returning to the suffocating harness of "Englishness" (which Roeg points up as grotesque through use of radio broadcasts and cross-cut juxtapositioning of "natural" vs "white" ways of life), only to think back on it wistfully as a transient moment of freedom.

Partly because of Roeg's extreme stylings, it's a film much more trapped in the moment of its making than Wake in Fright, whose nightmare traverses boundaries. This is, at heart, a hippie vision, part of the Rousseau, back-to-nature movement of the time, embodied, perhaps a little leeringly, in retrospect, in Jenny Agutter's 17-year-old nakedness. The film's most striking scenes involve the Aborigines: the boy's final courtship dance, or when a nomadic community comes across the burnt-out car and uses it as a plaything, the white man's decaying body stretched gruesomely in the trees nearby, ignored.

the female gaze: proof and good dick

Proof: (1991. dir: Jocelyn Moorhouse) It's a strange movie, and well worth watching. A blind man (Hugo Weaving) deifies truth, photographing his world so others will verify through their eyes what he has experienced through his other senses. He endures a dysfunctional (like, Eugene O'Neill levels of dysfunction) relationship with his housekeeper (Genevieve Picot), who is in love with him and spurned at every show of vulnerability. "I know she wants me," he explains, "and as long as she can't have me, she won't pity me." In punishment, she silently leaves ashtrays and coat-stands where he will trip over them and uses his beloved dog as a pawn in their power-games. Their lives are bounded in circles of longing, fear, and cruelty, until he meets an amiable and ingenuous dishwasher (Russell Crowe), whose friendship catalyzes growth, disruption, and endgame.

If it's the nineties, it barely is. Everything except the digital camera looks like the eighties, including an ill-judged musical montage of photographs and perky music designed to communicate to us the first night our two heroes bond. Mostly, it's an interesting portrait of how spurned love can lead to petty cruelties and power trips, and how impossible it is to learn trust, except to relax into it as a necessary part of existing amongst other humans. Moorhouse communicates beautifully the sensual experience that is the blind man's world, the acting is very good, and Russell Crowe is impossibly young and charismatic.

photo courtesy of Fanzone50 (http://fanzone50.com/Hugo/Proof2.html)

Good Dick: (2008. dir: Marianna Palka) This movie reminds me of two things: first, the Ballad of Tam Lin, in which a woman whose lover has fallen under a fair-folk enchantment must cling fast to him as he turns into all manner of creature and thing, and, in succeeding, the enchantment is broken and he is again hers. The second is a dream I had in my twenties, in which the guy I was seeing at the time tried to walk across a room and touch me, and I had to execute a complex series of dance-steps to freeze him. It worked, but each time I did it he'd be frozen for a shorter period, and the dance-steps took just as long, so it was inevitable that soon enough he was going to succeed in his approach. I woke up in a cold sweat before he did.

Palka has written and directed a bold character study in which an unassuming and well-intentioned video-store clerk stalks, lies to, and manipulates a woman who rents porn at his store until he insinuates himself into her life, then loves her in subservience, withstanding her violent torrents of abuse, until she takes charge of fixing her damaged life and in doing so finds the power to love him back. You've got to admire the guts of it: Palka doesn't so much defy the (sometimes, let's be honest, increasingly fascistic) boundaries of Political Correctness, she ignores them completely in her search for emotional truth, crossing over and back without seeming to notice.

It looks and feels exactly like what you think "quirky indie film" should look and feel like: short scenes, indeterminate time passages, indie-rock transitions, pauses and medium-shot to emphasize emotional distance, eccentric conversation between a group of male friends. It's hard to believe this is her first film, and that she directed herself in the lead. She avoids that fall into loss of perspective and vanity to which 99% of novice self-directors succumb. And, somehow, despite the dark subject matter, Palka and her co-star Jason Ritter manage to infuse the piece with a sweetness which prevails in the end.

exodus gods and kings: a superfluity of crocodiles, and not enough snakes

(2014. dir: Ridley Scott) You know what I miss about Biblical epics? Technicolor. That immersive, saturated, ultra-bright color of the Ten Commandments that made the blues and reds of Pharoah's palace so sumptuous you could feel the silk against your own skin. When the Nile ran red with the blood of the Hebrew God's plague, it was red like fire-trucks, like finger-paints. When the Plague of the Firstborn crept down from the sky in a green haze, it was greener than seaweed, greener than Kermit the Frog, and the thing itself, with its eerie, distant screams, its smears of lamb's-blood, it was the most eldritch night-scene ever.

In Ridley Scott's version, we begin with a mediocre script, filmed largely in earth-tones, and we get bumped along from one mediocre set-piece to the next without ever growing to care about any of the humans involved. There's a long Hollywood tradition, sure, of jumbling American and English accents together (Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Dame Judith Anderson opposite Edward G. Robinson and Vincent Price? Seriously? But, in retrospect, how do you not love it?), sticking in one "exotic" actor (Yul Brynner amongst the Wonder Bread), and calling it Egypt. Scott sticks with that (Christian Bale, Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver, John Turturro, Tara Fitzgerald), and hopes that Joel Edgerton manages to look exotic enough to obscure his Aussie origins. (He doesn't. A blue-eyed pharaoh?)

The night scenes are teal and orange. The most interesting one involves the burning bush, which is all very blue, very LED, and Moses himself is buried in mud with only his face emerging, a fascinating idea, but then Scott brings God out in the figure of a little boy, and again we're lost. In the old days, they knew when to respect the source material. Yeah, MGM gave God a cheesy, pretentious voice, but they stuck with His original lines, which a lot of folks know by heart because they read the Book. And when you're writing lines for God, you better by gum have a vast talent, my friend. This God-Child just sounds like a Hollywood hack scribbled some things down on a napkin.

My own biggest disappointment in this failure involves the dearth of snake-life. Where are the serpents? That's one of my favorite things in the Bible, when Moses turns a staff into a serpent then Pharoah's thaumaturges replicate the "trick". I always thought it said something particular that was never again so particularly addressed, something about the ascension of man's cleverness obscuring the world's numinous nature. Scott just leaves it out. And, in this version, the Nile turns red because crocodiles run mad and kill everything? Well, alright, but isn't the point kind of that God turns it red because He can turn it red? In other words, shouldn't we be addressing questions of Faith?

Walter Chaw has written such a brilliant review of Hail, Caesar! over at Film Freak Central that it may be the last word on its subject, and it's relevant here in that he points to it being a movie about Faith. How is it that the Coen Brothers manage to explore the issue of Faith more compellingly in a tribute to the golden age of Hollywood than anyone else can with an actual Biblical epic? It may have something to do with our current problems with zealotry and terrorism, or there may be another factor at play. Michael Gebert addresses the idea in his Encyclopedia of Movie Awards while speaking of Hammer Films: "There's a nice Ph.D. thesis to be written on the subject of why horror films hint more effectively at the mystery of faith than Hollywood's lumbering Bible soaps... Why Peter Cushing's faith is so much more convincing than Charlton Heston's."