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Hyland.M, 2023, Wake in Fright (1971), Reformulation 56, p.28-29
Directed by Ted Kotcheff
Screenplay by Evan Jones
Based on the novel by Kenneth Cook
Madman films – available on youtube
Midway through rewatching "Wake in Fright," I had the image of Munch's "The Scream" protagonist coming to life and screeching "I've just come from the Yabba" - finally making perfect sense of his anguished disposition.
The movie stars Gary Bond (a ringer for an unfortunate Peter O'Toole, who just finished walking out of one desert straight back into another) as the schoolteacher John Grant, attempting to make it home from the harsh Australian outback to Sydney, for Christmas. To do so, he must leave his school in the desolate Tiboonda town and reach Bundanyabba to get a connecting train to Sydney. It's a film of many reflections, of things seen and unseen by self and other. This film will likely alienate as many as it enthrals and do both to most who view it. It's compulsive and revulsive, a waking nightmare that you slide into unknowingly and then, like Grant, you can't escape.
Like one of Chaucer's tales updated and even more brutalised, it's visceral, raucous and relentless. The Yabba welcomes Grant and he begins his descent - he meets his first enabler by welcome, police officer Jock Crawford, who pours beers into the reluctant teacher (forcefully feeding – reluctantly compliant). Bond conveys his contempt and haughtiness, wordlessly dismissing all of those around him - the people, the land above all and is contemptuous of everything (contemptuously degrading – contemptibly worthless). The film is both contemporary and artifact, boorishly 1971, where women are mostly passive and peripheral, mostly odd surreal sculptures barely speaking, stuck in a commune of savage men. Humour is present in moments of odd juxtapositions; Christmas carols sung in the sweltering heat, men standing to attention at slot machines for a mere moment to salute the fallen soldiers of WW2. This scene judders, celebrating reverentially those who served to honour Australia "lest we forget" whilst cutting back to the Yabba a soiled community (parenting permissively - feral/unkempt). Viewed today, the movie shocks more - it's so raw, a creeping bullying menace pervades and entraps the viewer, there is no one to empathise with, no hero, no anti-hero, pure distilled 100% nihilistic proofed. Like a perverse laundry experiment, everyone gets grubbier, filthier as everything goes round, everyone's soul stained further.
Jock tells Grant, “Each man knows what's coming to him, he just goes and gets it." This advice, vaguely banal and apathetic follows Grant as he gambles what little he has on a "simple minded game" of chance, the two-up coin flip. He loses, and so begins to lose his mind, restraint and dignity. Here he meets the great Donald Pleasance's curdled "Doc" Tydon, a character soaked in alcohol and reeking of a Graham Greene novel. Tydon knows himself and says as much, "Dr of medicine and tramp by temperament, I know more about myself than most people''. Is he the axis of the movie, this grotesque creation and yet, knowing and still accepting of himself, a survivor but at what a cost. Tydon seems both survivalist and victim, indeed happy to torment and be tormented. Relationally it rings true, on a perpetual knife edge, as these characters swing between sadism to each other and to themselves. This middle section feels like a Heart of Darkness, night closes in and the unhinged madness escalates. Pleasance is hypnotic, oily yet ambiguous, an intersection of fair and foul. There is an honesty in the movie that allows the characters to truly be distorted by their experiences. Janette is the one dominant female speaking role in the movie. How has she survived? By becoming at times predator, taking what she can when she can and smothering her vulnerability.
There is of course a murderous kangaroo slaughter interlude midway through, gratuitous but purposeful, extreme and horrifying and yet absurdly appropriate. It's shot chaotically, hysterical like a marsupial version of a massacre that belongs to McCarthy's Blood Meridian (if ever filmed) - just substitute tiny upper limbs flailing and bouncier hind quarters. The spiralling narrative lurches drunkenly between violence and sexual servicing, the outback lawless, yet bizarrely forgiving – this is, except if you're Aboriginal, you are then silenced, rarely in frame and ignored (violently smothering – silenced/ erased). The dialogue feels true, gritty and trustworthy, occasionally striving for objectivity of self, mostly from Tydon, who sees but cannot change himself, or rather has found acceptance in this environment where his flaws are innocuously overlooked. Alcohol pervades nearly every scene, beer swilled, cans crushed, whiskey swigged, all contributing to the blurred lost, unfocused self-loathing. Learning is limited, what has Grant become at the end, his last attempt to escape the Yabba comically backfiring. We know he ditched his books and kept his gun, pragmatic, subtly changed and hardened. Wake at Fright ends quietly, poetically, almost as if it never happened. Filled with ambiguity, implied events that may have happened (does he even have a girlfriend, is the photo real?). There are questions of sexuality hinted at but never confirmed. It feels satisfying in its refusal to fully commit; fractured individuals in a fractured landscape.
This movie can be watched on Youtube, an appropriately grainy copy, like a discarded unloved lost video. But if you dare to watch it you will be rewarded. The Yabba will welcome you, pour you a beer, make small talk, clap you on the back, offer you another beer, coerce you...what will you do? For me, its power is in this questioning of the audience, are you intrigued? Are you disgusted? It's a movie that never lets you forget you are a participant, an accomplice (powerfully coercive – intrigued complicit (entrapped)). Grant is somewhat of a cipher, we become projected into his linen suited self, his journey now our journey into our own Heart of Darkness.