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December 4, 2011
I saw a DVD of a remastered and restored of Ted Kotcheff's masterful Wake in Fright over the weekend. It's a convincing representation of the sordid, brutal reality of outback male society amidst the dust and heat in regional Australia had been rejected by Australian audiences in the 1970s.
They were shocked and affronted by the macho, masculine culture of Broken Hill, the hard core drinking, the violence of the kangaroo killing, and the homo-eroticism”. This dystopian representation of white settler Australia was dismissed as unrealistic.
The film had been more or less lost. It is now seen as a classic of Australian cinema--- a seminal film in the renaissance of an Australian film industry and something of a stylistic precursor to the so-called Australian gothic cinema – eg., The Cars that Ate Paris (Peter Weir, 1974), Mad Max (George Miller, 1979). It's Australia as a gothic nightmare, the very opposite of a utilitarian society based on Enlightenment reason and science.
Andy yet Australia had been seen as a dumping ground for Europe's detritus----Bentham's "excemental mass"; a site of purgatory, exile and madness. Australia as a prison colony signifies the ultimate confinement for its failed citizens, outcasts removed to a far-off territory with little chance of return. It was a world for escaped convicts, lawless sailors and whalers, and tough immigrants whose existence depended on their survival skills in a hostile land.
In the 19th century, Australia as the antipodes, had an ambiguous status as penal colony and a land of promise which required the reasoning and rational governance by an elite, cultured, and educated, expert class to control the underclass--- the disordered and feral inhabitants, the criminal, the irrational and the depraved.
The film expresses the geographical unconscious of Western culture. The photographic colours in Wake in Fright was gaudy, saturated, intense hues, and surreal, as these expressed a place of chaos, excess and madness.
This was a strange, hostile landscape and a society that was a living hell with madness and alcohol as the mechanisms of escape--used to anaesthetise the pain of existence. It is the other side to the sunlit world of Enlightenment rationalism and settler hope. Alcohol is the escape from a grindingly harsh existence.
In the film the veneer of the enlightened world of culture and refinement was stripped to the raw underpinning of settler neuroses and anxieties on the rim of western civilization; an aberrant and abnormal white world that is debased, animalistic, bestial and savage in which there is a loss of control and a dissolution of the rational self.
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Australian Gothic cinema is an aesthetic of unease, distortion, and inversion.It's ethos is the sense of impending doom ---decline into savagery, primitive debauchery and barbarianism.