by John Rhall
Yet on the subject of stifling conformity and heaving bosoms it is not only the schoolgirls who are seen as sexually repressed in their need to conform to the expectations of cultural continuity. Mrs Appleyard is also described as one who has shut down her “sensual nature”, indicated by the severity of her dress and demeanour, along with her desire to control any outward expression of enthusiasm from either her “girls” or the staff (Shiach 47). The creeping fear of uncontrolled sensuality that may lead to the dreaded act of intercourse is well exampled when the one schoolgirl rescued from the ‘Rock’ is quickly examined by the doctor to ensure that she is “sexually quite intact”, and therefore, still pure enough to take her place in a stultifying society (Bruzzi 46).
Dermody and Jacka note not only the fear of unsupervised hormonal feelings but the class structure that underlines it and write that “the upper class live under a sexual regime that perversely and erotically denies sexuality, linking the denial to class duty” (2: 107-108). The servants on the other hand can rut like dogs because of their less “mediated” less “sensitive” response to the urgings of the natural while the “self-repression” of the “upper classes” leads to their inevitable downfall at the hands of nature – in this case the ‘Rock’ (2: 108). Robin Wood’s example of sexual repression among women, as exampled by the girls attending Appleyard College is worth noting:
The particularly severe repression of female sexuality/creativity; the attribution to the female of passivity, her preparation for her subordinate and dependent role in our culture. Clearly, a crucial aspect of the repression of bisexuality is the denial to women of drives culturally associated with masculinity: activeness, aggression, self-assertion, organizational power, creativity itself (198).
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The horror of being in close proximity to licentious appetites and the need to control them is somewhat matched by the fear of the native landscape overwhelming the colonial outpost, as exemplified by Appleyard College with its exotic foreign trees acting as an imported buffer to the primitive landscape. That the characters in the movie are aware of the alien landscape outside their walls is made clear to the viewer on many occasions. One such is when Whitehead the chief gardener shows Tom the handyman a curious plant “Did you know there are plants that…that can move?” and Whitehead touches a leaf which suddenly closes (McFarlane 74). The handyman is chilled by the demonstration but confused by his feelings and Whitehead twitches a smile and moves away, having made his point about nature (74). By cutting to a shot of the craggy and forbidding looking escarpment that is “Hanging Rock” the film registers the “threat” contained in an unknown “nature” lurking just outside the door (74). In contrast to Wake in Fright, where the local inhabitants are shown to embrace their miserable landscape, thus defining its horror by their presence and their ferocious actions, the inhabitants of this outpost in Picnic at Hanging Rock are well aware of their trespass. Even the low-class Tom with probably more understanding of the rougher side of life than his colonial masters shrinks in fear from that which is seen as the unknown.
Although, it should be pointed out, that in this film it is the upper classes that most cling to the vestiges of empire and imaginings of greatness, as opposed to the underlings who have a greater acceptance of the unknown precisely because they do not understand it; which “is merely another of the questions without answers that are to be darkly accepted, like the one of eternal service and subordination” (Dermody and Jacka 2: 108). While the matriarch Mrs Appleyard pines for a faraway land that is forever England in the confines of her office, where the blinds are drawn to defend her from the site of a heathen foreign soil, the wealthy aristocrat hosts a tea party on his manicured lawns, to the accompanying sounds of Beethoven filtering from the windows of his mansion shielding both he and his guests from the ever present cicadas and even managing to drown out the other-worldliness of the pan flute (Shiach 52-53). There is no tangible hint of reconciliation by any of the upper-class characters in this film, neither for the land on which they tread nor for the original inhabitants of Australia who seem to scare them as equally as any tale of horror. The lone Aboriginal in the film, the blacktracker brought in to help with the search for the missing girls, is denied dialogue and thus a voice in this his land. The fact that he fails to find any trace of them seems to amplify the white person’s world of repression of invasion. However, there are other indicators that lead to a recognition of Picnic at Hanging Rock as an exercise in colonial guilt repression. This is seen in the film with its repeated references to the horrors that may be forthcoming from the bush that helps to create a “national uncanny” (Rattigan 249) and Rattigan makes this point: “The bush has held, since the earliest times of European settlement, a dread fascination. It has become the overriding natural element credited with creating Australians as a race apart from others” (249). This “race apart” is an important sub-text of the film, allowing the differences between an ancient civilisation (The British) and an even older ancient artefact (Hanging Rock) to clash so jarringly(Shiach 51). The prissiness of the colonial picnic with its regimental order is always overshadowed by the imaging of Hanging Rock as a towering phallic-like projection casting its shadow over the virginal schoolgirl offerings. That they are dressed to impress the God of the “other” in “white dresses” while ants carry off their “pieces of cake” (thus erasing their temporary impression) creates a world where “nature” is seen in opposition to “culture” and nature is the nominated winner (McFarlane and Mayer 56). Rattigan says of the tragedy of the missing girls and the complicity of the supposed demonic landscape ...“The malevolence of the bush is not so much in itself but as a result of the incompatibility between the bush and human beings” (250).
Chapter 4
Fear of the Dark (Man)
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) is notable for the way in which the landscape is framed, “it broke the genteel period reconstruction that had characterized the New Australian Cinema to that time (Rattigan 86). Rea Francis, instrumental in marketing Australian films to the world, says it showed Australians (who ignored the film at home after a drubbing from local critics) as “incapable of looking at themselves” by rejecting the messages and images contained in a film that “didn’t show Australian colonialists as pretty and beautiful” and she further argued that it “was the first hard look at our colonial reality” (228). Francis makes a valid point as contrary to a misguided expectation of the hard-working, honest and welcoming homesteader, extolled in Australian bush films of the past On Our Selection (1932) The Overlanders (1946) or even The Man from Snowy River (1982), the landholders who cheat Jimmie Blacksmith of his wages are shown as “terse, close-mouthed” who “can’t resist finding fault with Jimmie’s work and shorting him on his pay” (Kael 206-206). The police are shown as brutal and racist when “Constable Farrell” drunk out of his mind “tortures and kills” a black in custody (206). The myth of the “noble savage” or in this case the indigenous native, being as one with the land, is also opposed in this film (Turner 70). The move from belonging to the land to being expelled from it is a subtle one, as Jimmie Blacksmith becomes, more “white man civilised” the visual landscape turns from one of benign indifference, but spectacular beauty, to one of spoilage and defilement that left the audience “feeling they had been misled” (Dermody and Jacka 2: 118). Apparently most viewers thought they were in for another pictorial display of Australiana (2: 118). Graeme Turner notes the changes wrought on Jimmie Blacksmith’s landscape by way of explaining the shock of unwilling recognition from those who watched the film:
While the Australian bush may appear to submerge him, the representation of the blacks’ camps and the degeneration of tribal life make it clear to us why harmony within this existence is unacceptable. For such as Jimmie there is no ‘natural’ context; what the whites see as his natural place he rejects (70).
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It can be argued that Jimmie’s violent axe attacks had cut into
more than his victim’s necks but perhaps into the psyche of the Australian public. Jimmie is cast in the role of a prisoner of a system that refuses and refutes assimilation and denies the possibility of change. The kind of racial harmony that is proposed virtually by the film turns out to be an illusion as does the pursuit of a place for Jimmie within the white social structures to help frame his existence. Australian critics were not alone in seeing the story of Jimmie Blacksmith as a reiteration of Australia’s convict heritage and colonial imposts. Pauline Kael, the respected American film reviewer, claims The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith concerns “the cultural chasm that divides the natives and the European-spawned whites, and its horribly funny, because the whites are inadequate to their own cruelties” (Kael 204). A further exchange between a schoolteacher hostage McCready held by Jimmie and his half-brother Mort amplifies Pauline Kael’s repost. McCready discusses Jimmie’s grievances and comments on the amount of “blacks” killed by “whites” in relation to how many “whites” were killed by rogue Aboriginals. When Jimmie complains about the “taking away of his way of life” McCready remarks that what was given back included “alcohol, influenza, measles, syphilis, schools” which McCready sadly asserts were a “host of improvements.” McCready is not only aware of the changes the white man has wrought upon the Aboriginal in the most negative of senses but he is now grappling to understand how to resile the place of Jimmie amid the preconceived concepts of one with nature. Graeme Turner notes:
The use of Aboriginals is a metonym for the indigenous version of nature is conventionalised ...their representation in our narratives derives just as much from an uncertain response to the landscape as to the Aboriginal race itself (26, 28).
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By locating the Aboriginal as belonging to and inseparable from the landscape the Western invader invests in them both an equal share of fear and repressed anxiety (28). That anxiety manifests itself in what Gaile McGregor argues is the feminising of the Aboriginal in the same way as the whites saw the land as “she” in order to “distance” them both from an assumption of guilt of oppression or the need for any redress of “rights” that may need to be accorded (139). Dermody and Jacka don’t see Jimmie Blacksmith as feminised but do equate his plight with that of all women in general claiming that women are “sexual subordinates in almost every culture” and see instead an oppression doubled by claiming that for the “black” male “white women can be read as more powerful signs of black oppression than the white males who oppress both” (2: 118). Jimmie needs to be oppressed and repressed in this film lest he and the landscape, to which he is mythologically attached, emerge as a threat to colonial dominance, prompting the dreams of white security to melt into nightmares. McGregor claims that it was the perceived “passivity” of the Australian native and the languid manner of acceptance that encouraged such a “Eurocentric” view to take root in white society; seeing Jimmie snap out of that torpor and come swinging with an axe shattered the thin shell of repression that had for so long protected the white colonisers from self-scrutiny (138). With Jimmie’s eruption into violence the hazy spell of falsehood and deceit began to crumble, forcing questions for which there were few answers.
The demonised landscape can be seen to become one of Jimmie’s own making, and according to McFarlane:
Jimmie never seems quite at one with this unyielding landscape of sullen blue-grey bush and the sudden arbitrariness of great rock heaps that fill the screen with a sense of undefined terror (76).
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In opposition to the indigene represented in Walkabout (1971) Jimmie is not only at odds with the landscape because he is a half-caste but more to the point because his efforts to become more white have left him vulnerable in the “land of his ancestors” that now only offers “concealment” without “comfort” (76). A scene from the film shows how far Jimmie has been displaced and how deep is his repression: Jimmie and his half-brother Mort (Freddie Reynolds) edge around a rocky outcrop, as if menaced by the physical scene, and this impression persists as they run along a blue-lit, early morning ridge lined with dead trees. No noble savage silhouettes here, just desperate fleeing boys, ‘displaced persons’ in every sense of the word. Mort is full black, unlike Jimmie, and ‘still had his nearly intact black soul’, and the difference between the two is distinguished when they come upon what was once sacred ground now desecrated by white intruders. In this place, where vast trees suggest cathedral architecture, Mort flays his body ‘to divert the foreign spirits’, while Jimmie, as much associated with the white desecrations as with the original sites, is again adrift in the scene, wearily insisting, ‘Yer’ll never fix it. It’d take bloody days and yer still wouldn’t fix it’, as Mort tries to restore the place (McFarlane 77).
For Jimmie, his rite-of-passage into the “dominant white culture” is never to be realised and a retreat to his roots is blocked by the landscape he disrespected (Rattigan 88). The Australian bush has turned its back on Jimmie as he has done to it and appears to “submerge” him, leaving Jimmie without a “natural role” among either the whites or his fellow blacks (Turner 70). Unlike Picnic at Hanging Rock the landscape in this film does not offer so much as an overt threat as much as it provides a covert threat, and a similar warning against violation. In this film we can see that Jimmie is at war, war with himself for failing to become like the whites he eventually despises and kills, and war with his land that will no longer accept him. Jimmie’s conflict can also be seen as one between two “debased” and “threatened” cultures – the one individual and the other tribalistic (Kael 208); the only outcome is death. In the Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith the underlying racism exhibited toward the original owners of the land and the myth of “attractive colonialism” is brought to the surface in a manner that leaves little room for argument.
Chapter 5
Fear of Foreigners
In The Cars That Ate Paris the audience is encouraged to view the idealism of life in a small country town through fresh eyes. The country town of Paris is a town of murderers and zombies, thieves and cannibals, a town in which there is no light of reason but only a dark and festering insanity, a total contradistinction to years of filmic views of the sleepy village – one that may not overly welcome strangers but hardly one that deliberately sets out to snare and kill them (Shiach 32). Brian McFarlane notes the landscape imagery in this film: “It is not that there is anything inherently sinister in the image of the green hills and snug little town: rather, the dramatic effect lies in the contrast of the landscape with the violence and terror of the human behaviour, barely masked by the apparent ordinariness” (79). Dermody and Jacka call this film “the first car crash movie” and proclaim it as part of a specific Australian genre that translates the “subversive fantasy” of a film like Mad Max (1979) into “Australian Gothic” (2: 94). However, while Dermody and Jacka may claim that the director Peter Weir has crafted a film in which the symbolism of the car directly relates to the Australian ethos of dependence on transport for life affirmation “the rule of the car is almost complete” (2: 95), there are others who argue that the figurative use of cars in this film evoke the image of a “male world” and the inherent violence repressed in the male animal (Murray 121). It could be argued the cars in this film are an important part of the circus of events that allow deeper tensions containing repressed violence and guilt to be brought to the surface as the film unfolds. Don Shiach remarks: “The grotesque cars that the young use against their elders are the progeny of a society that has itself lived off car wrecks. The violence that respectable society has condoned and encouraged rebounds on that society and finally destroys it” (33). Neil Rattigan suggests the town of Paris may be seen as “a metaphor for Australia itself – especially in its insularity, its insistence on community consensus, and its dependence upon the (feared) outside for its economic well-being” (81). Graeme Turner sees The Cars That Ate Paris as a similar film to Picnic At Hanging Rock where the characters are “dominated by forces�
� beyond their “control” in that they are mere players in a larger concept of cultural events (100-101). However, consensus would appear to be that this film can be read as a metaphor for the “seething violence” and the “innate corruption” that are repressed by a veneer of “genteel Australianness” in our society as a whole (Shiach 33). It could be said that Australian society was under strain at the time of production of this film and that reflection is contained in the narrative.
According to Richard White, in 1974 the Australian attitude to outside authority was under strain, with one of the main frictions said to have been caused by the war in Vietnam, an unpopular war to the Australian public; one that had promoted social unrest, “student movements and counter-culture” along with a fresh “focus” on Australian values (168). The Vietnam War was not only viewed by many Australians as a mistake but also the fault of the American pressure that contributed to Australia’s involvement. Graeme Turner in Making it National points out: “For many of my generation, Vietnam is responsible for a residue of leftist ant-Americanism” (98). The fact that Australia’s involvement ended in 1971 had barely assuaged the anger and division wrought in the society (Shiach 33). At the time of this film’s release rampant consumerism was also under attack and the Australian dream was being mocked as a pale copy of the American dream; one of false values that needed to be stroked by a display of ostentatious wealth with America standing “for both the best and the worst capitalism can offer” (Turner: 98). This display of wealth is invited in the opening sequences of The Cars That Ate Paris with a view a young well-to-do couple driving through a pastoral landscape in an open-top sports car. The audience is subdued as the film starts with its parody of a pleasant day out, motoring past the signs and symbols of an American/Australian consumer society (Coca Cola, Alpine cigarettes) interspersed with images of the pleasant rural life (sheep, crops, a pretty town nestled in a distant valley). This helps to convey, if not a false message – that the audience is watching an advertisement for the good life before the feature starts – then a false sense of safe viewing. When the opening credits roll the spectator will feel they have been tricked by the advertisement-like beginning, and when the couple’s car crashes shortly after they will feel their false sense of safe viewing evaporate. The fate of the glamorous young couple is deliberately left unresolved; are they dead or just injured? Leaving the viewers to ponder the question and inducing in them a state of anxiety due in part to character identification. According to Noël Carroll, character identification is formed more by recognising similarities between the spectator and the protagonist rather than complete identification that requires “emotional duplication” (90). It could also be argued that it was cunning for the director to insert attractive people in the beginning of the film as the rest of the cast almost defy any type of sympathetic identification.
