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.
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