218. Wake in Fright

Song - Tom Traubert's Blues (Waltzing Matilda) (Tom Waits)

Movie: Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971)

With great concern the guests whisper to their host that his new friend would rather talk to a woman than drink beer with them. They are quickly reassured - this strange man is a schoolteacher. They let him be. 

At this moment Wake in Fright comes close to breaking its spell, risking to become a movie that bluntly asserts its thematic concerns, handholding the audience into reaching comfortable conclusions about how horrible it would be to be as uncivilised as those strange people in Bundanyabba, and how they differ from them. But while this scene is indeed a turning point, the film only becomes stranger, better and more discomffitting from there.  

The schoolteacher in question is John Grant (Gary Bond), who has a degree in History and Literature, and dreams of a journalism career in England. Currently he is, in his own words, a slave of the Australian education department, forced to teach wherever the government chooses to send him. At the moment, that's Tiboonda, in the Australian outback, surrounded by endless open space. For the Christmas holidays he gets to go back to Sydney and his girlfriend, with a stopover in Bundanyabba, one of the most isolated cities in Australia. 'The Yabba' is fictional, but the film is shot in the real, equally isolated, city of Broken Hill, and filled with extras who often seem like actual residents, fitting right in with the lived-in dive bars, the shoddy restaurants and the generally crummy atmosphere of the town. 

Once John gets stranded in the town, you expect Wake in Fright to follow the usual path of a horror/thriller about an educated city kid getting in trouble with unruly rednecks. For a little while it seems like it will, and that it will be a superior example of such a film thanks to how vividly Kotcheff conveys the atmosphere and mood of the town, and Gary Bond's fantastic performance. The town is filled with people, mostly men, who are constantly drunk,. loud, gross, dirty, prone to violence and verbally agressive. For fun, they kill kangaroos (I was amazed at how realistic and unflinchingly graphic the big kangaroo hunting scene was, had no idea how they could have possibly filmed it withour hurting real kangaroos. I was even more amazed to find during the closing credits a title card stating that this was footage of an actual illegal, condemned by the filmmakers, kangaroo hunt), spend ridiculous amounts of money betting on the most simple-minded coin flipping game, or beat each other up. They only show a modicum a decorum when the lights go out in the bar for the nightly commemoration of the fallen soldiers; every night through the speakers a voice recites a poem for those who "shall not grow old." All in all, it just seems a matter of time until an incident occurs that will make life miserable for John, maybe after a romantic encounter with one of the women in town, overjoyed to finally have a male companion they could have a meaningful conversation with. 

Such a romantic encounter does occur, and doesn't go according to plan, but it doesn't lead to any particular incident. The townfolk is not interested in hurting John at all. They are in fact quite tolerant and hospitable towards him, accepting that he is not one of them and doing their best, in their own way, to help him out (John participated in the gambling game and lost all his money to buy a ticket out of town) and make him feel welcome in their town. Unfortunately they only know how to integrate someone in their society by including them in their incessant drinking, their violent games, and their gruesome kangaroo hunts. There is a lot of violence, ugliness, drunken behaviour and indecency on display in the film, but only once (the bar destruction following the kangaroo hunt is not liked by the bar owner) does that target someone who is not a willing participant in it. People lose often lots of money in the coin flip game, but the rules of the game are always respected. Nobody lashes out, and there is little hostility or distrust when strangers like John win big. Residents who have fallen on hard times can get by for a bit without money, because everyone is quie willing to share beer and meat. 

The film doesn't pretend that this is a town that's easy on women, but at no point do we see anyone treat a woman in way that she doesn't like, and the most sexualised image of a woman that we see in the film occurs in John's mind, at the beginning of the film when he anticipates a bumpless journey to Sydney and imagines his girl pleasuring him in her bikini body on the beach. The film also doesn't pretend that 'The Yabba' is a preferablse society over the Sydney civilsation, but it does believe the boundaries between the two are more porous than we'd like to believe. John faces societal pressure, but the film always makes clear that he can choose opt out of taking part in the men's violent activities. It's ultimately his own lack of willpower that stops him from doing so, and that makes him act in ways that are alien to his valiues and his view of himself.

I'd never heard of Gary Bond before. He's only appeared in three films, but his performance here is incredibly rich in details the script only hints at, It's easy to imagine John as a hugely succesful and popular student, one who could drink his fellow peers under the table and ace an exam the next day. Now he is clearly a matured man who takes his job seriously, but also makes an effort to look cool and attractive, even on a train in the middle of nowhere. And he clearly enjoys, despite his best efforts not to, the drinking and posturing challenges the Yabba throw at him, relishing in the opportunity to show them that he is more than just intellectually superior to them. Bond's performance helps the film get it at its most provocative suggestion: The Yabba's engagement with violence, guns and beer is more 'civilised', virtous and sophisticated than John's. They see these as mostly innocent activites that are part of their daily life and help sustain their communities. For John, they are an opportunity to prove his worth. It's completely unsurprising that Scorsese was an early fan of this film and supported its restoration after it was deemed lost.