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Wake in Fright
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Breaking Badland
A
French visitor to Australia, not too long ago, looked across its terrain and
pointedly asked: “What is more difficult to show, cinematically, than this nothingness?” His question, as it
happens, had already been answered, over twenty years previously, in the
opening shot of a film that he had not seen (although it did have a commercial
run back home in France): Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright.
Silence
at first, and later only a lone, electric violin on
the soundtrack. No people as far as the camera eye can see – and it sees a long
way, in deep focus. A 360 degree panning shot, to ensure that no possible sign
of life exists here. Just a dry, flat land under a burning sun – the outback, to use the alternative title of
the 1961 novel by Australian writer Kenneth Cook from which the film is
derived. Out back of what, exactly? Civilisation, history,
progress. Wake in Fright is
situated in an Australia that is less a wilderness than a pure void.
The
plot is simple, episodic, and draws upon moods and imagery already well
established by 1971 in the annals of modern Australian literature (Patrick
White) and art (Sidney Nolan). John (Gary Bond) is a teacher who would prefer
to be working in the big city, but has ended up in the desolate town of Tiboonda. His students, in the opening scene, spanning a
large age range, have the same slack-jawed, rather moronic look that Martin
Scorsese (an avowed fan of Wake in Fright)
shamelessly gives to a gaggle of New Zealanders at the end of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). It’s
holiday time, just beginning. But John’s holiday – he dreams, falling asleep on
a train, of a beach where he caresses the breasts of his girlfriend with a beer
bottle – swiftly turns into an escalating catastrophe.
Stranded
in Bundanyabba – The Yabba, for short – John hangs
out in a pub which, with its claustrophobic, all-male clientele of hard-hats
and officers of various sorts, resembles nothing so much a scene from Cruising (with the added irony that Bond,
who utters cryptic lines about being a “bondage slave” in this scene, was, in
real life, openly gay). But homosexuality is only one of the many things
repressed in the Australia of Wake in
Fright (basic human compassion is another) – and those repressed, emotional
energies inevitably emerge in other, perverted ways under the hot sun and
amidst the ever-buzzing flies. (No wonder both the book and film are so often
compared to William Golding’s Lord of the
Flies.)
From
an illicit gambling den (most social institutions in the film operate in the
shadow-zone between legality and illegality) to a savage kangaroo hunt, John is
thrown deeper in a spiral he cannot escape – a little like the anti-hero of
Bernardo Bertolucci’s contemporaneous Jorge Luis
Borges adaptation, The Spider’s Stratagem (1970). John is unable to comprehend the unspoken rules that govern this
strange world; as Agustín Zarzosa has suggested,”Virtually all of
the male characters John meets at the Yabba offer him a beer. They do not seem
to ask for anything in exchange: what is implicitly expected in return is that
he weaken his resistance to the Yabba and that he
become a Yabba-man”.
Along
the way, the only companion John can find who even half shares his doubts or
cynicism about this vulgar environment is “Doc” Tydon (Donald Pleasance in fine form) – but the Doc is, ultimately, just as immersed
in the process of self-destruction and denial as everybody else, as he makes
blindingly clear when, shouting unintelligibly, he drunkenly smashes a chair
against a wall as others around him engage in hand-to-hand combat.
There is
a beguiling multiculturalism “out back” of Wake
in Fright. It was an Australian-American co-production that seems, in its
sensibility, profoundly British, like several of its main actors – yet was
directed by a Canadian. The complex cultural connections and echoes between and
across these various nations form a strong network that supports the film well.
In Britain in 1963, Joseph Losey (in exile from
America) worked on a plan to adapt Cook’s book; he spoke at the time – just as
he would, later, with reference to another Australian project, Patrick White’s Voss – of the accursed emptiness of the
country, and the horrific bad manners of its grotesque, middle class
inhabitants.
American
reactions to Australia – especially the mythic Australia defined less by its
metropolitan cities than its “wide open spaces” – tend more to awe than
disgust, a sort of “pop sublimity” that can easily
tip into touristic kitsch. Australian filmmakers, for their part, have been
only too happy to portray visiting Americans as uncouth, marauding imperialists
– and they were topped at that game only by Dušan Makavejev in The Coca-Cola Kid (1985).
Kotcheff as director appears
to have somehow absorbed a mixture of all these viewpoints: cinematographic
fondness for a spectacular landscape mixes with horror and opprobrium at what
happens inside it – but also with a certain degree of identification, since
Canada, too, knows what it is like to vainly toil in the shadow of Big Brother USA.
Wind
back to that opening shot. Kotcheff’s eye for
landscape grasped the immediate peculiarities of Australia, but also connected
it to the terrain of the American Western – less the land of John Ford, in this
case, than of Monte Hellman’s films of the 1960s, The Shooting (1966) and Ride in the Whirlwind (1967). A haunted, menacing place suggesting a vacuous, existential abyss. The
people who find themselves stuck there go crazy, regress to an animalistic
state.
The
few signs of civilised society that dot the panorama – a church, a school which
is a single room, a pub – are fragile hold-outs against general entropy. This
is not very far, in terms of atmosphere and meaning, from the New Mexico
consecrated more recently in the television series Breaking Bad (2008-2013), with its mixture of arid, rocky deserts
and doomed little pockets of suburbia.
Breaking Bad, too,
frequently ignites our collective memories of the Western genre – albeit warped
through the many historic revisions and subversions of that classic form since
1960. Likewise, the bleak “Australian Western” that is Wake in Fright seems to partake in that early ‘70s, trans-national
moment in cinema that also produced the beautiful but disquieting landscape
studies in Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973) – a film which inspired more than one commentator to subsequently label
Australia itself an inscrutable badland, crossed by
violence, frustrated energies, and natural beauty twisted into its grotesque
opposite.
In
the breaking badland dramatised by Kotcheff and screenwriter Evan Jones (who wrote three films
for Losey, and later several scripts in Australia), there
is no backstory, no prior history for the characters worth more than a few
image-flashes. The story starts where it starts, just as we see it on screen,
and dives straight down to Hell. This, too, corresponds to a particular vision
or mythology of Australia – especially belonging to those who view it from
beyond its borders.
In
an intriguing 1994 article, Cahiers du cinéma critic Serge Grünberg – the David Cronenberg specialist who did that
ruminating on the Great Australian Nothingness which I cited above – proposed a
compact distillation of the nation and its character. The “Australian
neurosis”, according to Grünberg, is a combination of
“a fascination with violence that never takes place; vast empty spaces, and the
ultimate moral of every story: that all roads lead nowhere.”
For Kotcheff, again sharing in a prevalent ‘70s mood,
such neurosis also suggests a new, jagged, very modern aesthetic – a mode of
experimentation possible even within the constraints of commercial, narrative
film. Characters need only be vividly outlined (their deep psychologies are of
no concern); cause-and-effect story connections can proceed elliptically; the
physical terrain can be constituted in a succession of fragmented ruins and
ultra-dark spaces. It was an aesthetic Kotcheff would
use again, and ingeniously so, for instance in his terrifying exposé of
religious cults and their brainwashing techniques, Split Image (1982).
Within
the specific context of Australian folklore, however, this notion of the void –
both wide open and terrifying in its possibilities – is often associated with
the experience of post-war immigration: this is the land where traumatic
histories (from Europe and elsewhere) could be swiftly repressed, and family
life, business ventures and community networks built anew. Australia as the collective
blank slate, zero point, or terra nullius … except that this last term inadvertently exposes the terrible truth that it
tries to hide: namely, that the land which the whites settled was not empty at
all, but fully inhabited and known by indigenous peoples, who had to be ousted
from their natural sovereignty by any means, whether seemingly benign or outrightly genocidal.
Wake in Fright, in 1971,
could only gesture towards that other, colonial history, in the glance that
John casts across the train seats to an Aboriginal man humming to himself in
the solitude as the ever-boozed whites spark up another, slurred sing-along …
The
credits of Wake in Fright mark a
fascinating crossroads between the past and future of Australian film/media
culture. Chips Rafferty’s presence recalls an earlier, glorious period of national
production in the 1930s and ‘40s. Behind the Australian component of its
production and financing was middle-of-the-road TV celebrity Bobby Limb, star
of musical variety shows in the ‘60s – whose no-less recognisable wife, Dawn
Lake, appears in the cast. John Meillon, who bookends
the film, was another stalwart actor beloved of Australian cinema and TV.
Looking
forward, the film showcases the first role for Australian icon Jack Thompson,
who has since worked with everyone from John
Woo and Clint Eastwood to Baz Luhrmann and Nagisa Oshima. And its editor,
Anthony Buckley, would go on to be a renowned producer and all-round
mover-shaker in the burgeoning Australian cinema industry – as well as,
eventually, the key individual responsible for tracking down and rescuing the
film’s negative (used in its restoration), which was located in a shipping
container in Pittsburgh and marked “For Destruction”.
It
is a difficult part of the legacy of national cinema for Australians that the
much-vaunted “revival” or “renaissance” of filmmaking in the 1970s may have
eventually been carried by such homegrown product as
Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), which has wielded an influence on many subsequent filmmakers including
Sofia Coppola and Lucile Hadzihalilovic – but that
renaissance was effectively kicked off, four years earlier, with two remarkable
films directed by non-Australians, namely Wake
in Fright and Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, both released in the same year of 1971.
These
films came at the end of a scattered, sometimes shameful history of features
made by visitors – even heavyweights like Fred Zinnemann (The Sundowners, 1960) and Michael
Powell (They’re a Weird Mob, 1966) – and
usually financed from beyond the nation’s shores. Australian viewers and
commentators of the time – particularly if they shared a proudly
nationalist temperament – had to deal with the decidedly mixed bag left in
their laps by such movies: yes, they showed Australian places, told Australian
stories, and included some of our best actors (such as Rafferty or Mellion).
But
Australians were not yet in full command of these films; they seem compromised,
forced, too distant in their outlook. Australia was
being rendered, weirdly to local eyes, as something colourful and exotic; and
imperial powers like UK and USA were “outsourcing” in our general direction.
Was this the sort of attention we wanted – was it how we wished our “national
projection” (in Jean-Michel Frodon’s phrase) to be
handled?
Wake in Fright and Walkabout drove a wedge into the melancholic
Australian thinking on these issues from the 1950s and ‘60s. Yes, they too made
Australia into a strange, barren, exotic place. But they each, in their own
way, seemed to penetrate to an essential, poetic truth. Australian cinephiles – separating themselves from the strict agenda
of cultural nationalism – had to admit that the “outsider’s vision”, at least
in these cases, was keen, well wrought and passionate.
This
is the viewpoint recalled and, again today, persuasively justified by Tina
Kaufman (longtime editor of Australia’s left-leaning,
independent cinema magazine Filmnews) in her superb 2010 book on Wake in Fright: even if the film was not entirely “ours”, it strongly
resonated with the heady combination of national pride and counter-cultural
questioning that marked the progressive artistic and political milieux of Australia throughout the ‘60s. It truly
registered a new tone for Australian cinema.
Grünberg in Cahiers evoked, with a lordly air, the
“violence that never takes place” in Australia, and its “bush culture neither
truly civilised nor truly savage – where, it must be said, absolutely nothing
happens.” Again, a viewing of Wake in
Fright might well have altered his opinion. Yes, there is certainly the
emptiness, the roads to nowhere, the cosmic despair in Kotcheff’s indelible vision. But there is also a dark, explosive energy, no matter how
misdirected; things do, indeed, happen. Kotcheff found himself fascinated by the
contradictions of Australian life, and he explored, to the bitter end, his own
ambivalence toward it. This fascination and ambivalence found their form in a
vivid, eternally haunting film.
A final note. The general dystopia
projected by Wake in Fright seems to
capture, well before its time, the mood of the current situation in 21st century Australia, where government decisions regarding refugees, the treatment
of the indigenous population, and the arts (to name only a few flashpoints)
march ever backward, into a gloomy and dangerous murk.
As
I myself was born Australian, I incline to this viewpoint. Then again, I meet
people all over the world who relate to Wake
in Fright directly, immediately, even without much prior knowledge of its
cultural and historical backdrop. Zarzosa discusses
the role of “sunglasses, money and beer” in the film as universal elements, not
local ones. My friends in Spain tell me that the film is, in fact, “very
Spanish”, and that it can be closely related to an early Carlos Saura movie, The Hunt (1966).
The
Decline of Western Civilisation, it would seem, is a hot topic almost
everywhere.
© Adrian Martin February 2014/August 2016 |
