by John Rhall
The demonised landscape of the Australian countryside in Mad Max is created by the obvious horrific events; the intimidation, the rapes, the killings, along with the suggestion of moral decay among its population, including the guardians of the law. It is also suggested in the filming of the countryside, at least as Delia Falconer sees it: “Even the archetypal iconography of the Australian outback, of tinder-dry grass and barbed wire, is contaminated by a sense of threat” (257). The pointed reminders that this area is either a dangerous wilderness, or becoming one, is reinforced by the road signs spelling out a predicted doom for society; names such as “anarchy road” and warnings to “keep out” and “prohibited entry”, ignored by the gangs and police alike. The reminders of the binary difference between this rural landscape and the imagined safety of the cities are viewed by the shots of the coastal beaches and the supposed safety of Max’s house overlooking the sea. It is interesting that the gangs who wish to kill Max never come near his home, or attack his wife until she leaves the beach and enters the wooded landscape; the place of fear. For both the gangs and the public of this area the beach is a place of leisure and safety that must not be transgressed any more than the hospital, the food outlet, and the saloon, and it is an overt reminder to the viewers who mainly live in our coastal cities that anywhere away from them spells danger.
Chapter 7
Mad Max and Transformation
The departure from Mad Max in Mad Max 2 is the profound distinction between good and evil, almost as visible as the bad guys wearing black hats and the good guys wearing the white hats in the early American Westerns. It is important to note that Max himself remains dressed in black. Some critics see this as an indicator that Max is not all good-guy yet It could be argued that this, along with his characterisation, allows Max to be read as symbolic Aboriginal. Gaile McGregor says this about his portrayal:
Max is not wilful. All Max’s deeds, all his decisions, all his inter-actions, are thrust upon him by chance. Max, therefore, is both the epitome and the antithesis of the Kiplingesque ‘hero’. Insofar as he is formally dynamic the new protagonist avoids the stigma of effeminacy. Because he is at the same time functionally passive, however, he does have to pay the usual price for self-assertion against (m)otherness. From here it is only a short step to the open legitimization of what, with great difficulty, had formerly to be disguised or denied (284).
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It may be possible that a reading of Max as Aboriginal allows another sense of the unfolding events in the second film. Mad Max 2 begins by locating Max in the middle of nowhere, considering that Max resides by the seaside in the first Mad Max why is he now in this desolate landscape? Is it because he kept driving “north” at the end of the first film, following the white line on the road in an effort to escape the tragedy of his murdered son? The answer may lie in the fact that this is another Max; Max the Aboriginal, or at the very least the symbolic Aboriginal, and being so he does not see the landscape in the same way as white people. For this new Max the desolate landscape is simply terrain, a part of a whole that is the land to which he belongs. Max appears to the viewer to be going to nowhere specific and yet that is the fundamental mistake made by those who have little understanding of the term “walkabout”. Neil Rattigan describes “walkabout” as the “puzzling habit of aboriginals to simply leave wherever they might be and, usually by themselves, walk off into the bush, returning often many months later” adding that it may be a “form of spiritual pilgrimage” (336). It can also be argued that many films particularly those of the early American Westerns like Shane (1953) and The Searchers (1956) through to the revisionist Westerns like Unforgiven (1992) also cast the main protagonist as “going native” or assuming the mantle of the loner or remaining outside of normal societal conventions. However, this is not an American Western and Max is not the type of gunfighter depicted in these films, his relaxed familiarity with the landscape is similar in concept but rather than being alert for danger Max exudes an awareness that goes beyond that exhibited by his Western movie counterparts making McFarlane’s description of this film a “myth-making vision of a stranger in an alarming wasteland” (30), worthy of further discussion. This new Max no longer seems to be nursing the hatred that earned him the title of “Mad” Max in the first film, when he lost those he loved to the murderous biker-gangs. When he evades the first attack his actions are calm and deliberate, he breaks his car and allows one thug to shoot another by mistake. Max also shows little emotion when he searches the ruined truck for fuel, ignoring the dead driver while calmly collecting gasoline mingled with blood, yet staying alert and aware of further possible retaliation. When another trap is laid for Max involving a deadly snake, that has already claimed the life of one of the marauders, Max easily evades it and captures the man who laid the trap. These actions help to paint Max as not quite the stranger in this alarming wasteland.
Once again the camera work, music score and editing combine to produce a contrast between inert terrain and threatening landscape. This can also be seen in The Cars That Ate Paris and the first Mad Max where, as McFarlane notes, a pastoral landscape is used to create a visual counterpoint against which the horror of violent action takes place accompanied by a “pounding score” (79). An example of this in Mad Max is when the small oasis of a farmstead, with its pleasant wooded area, is made to feel isolated and dangerous because the musical score underlines the threat of imminent attack upon Max’s wife. Later, when Max takes to the road to enact revenge for the tragedy of his family, the engine of his supercharged car screams its defiance against the “peaceful landscape” like a mechanical beast let loose from its chains (79). Mad Max 2 opens with a similar roar of defiance but this time the landscape is seen as anything but pastoral with its air of desolation and uncompromising threat that helps to construct “a hopeless, violent future” (79). This vision of a violent future is a scenario that infuses Wolf Creek (2005) and will be discussed last in this review.
In opposition to The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith this symbolically Aboriginal Max can be seen to be quite different. He does not try to enter into an engagement with the remnants of the white society he finds in this film, and, if anything, he seems to hold them in disdain. Max ignores their primal display of discontent with their surroundings and shows no interest in the plans of the male members of the group who want to get away to the north for “breeeeeeding” (Falconer 262). Max shows little concern for anything other than fuel for his car, and it is quite possible to see the self-contained Max abandoning his car if necessary, completing his journey on foot – such is his “quiet man” sense of strength and self. So we have a situation in which Max is a man who needs little and desires even less, surrounded by those who are driven by wants, and the intention to achieve those wants by whatever means are necessary, including rape and murder. It is possible to see the history of colonial invasion of Australia, along with the discontent in the first colony, played out in miniature in this film. What to the band of oil-drillers is desolation is to Max simply landscape upon which he treads, with, arguably, more of a sense of belonging than those around him. The overt villains of this piece, attacking the outpost like a band of crazed Indians in an over-the-top Hollywood Western, appear to be more self-contained than the great-white-hopes for the future sheltering behind the flimsy make-shift walls of their refinery (Johinke 121). The villains could be seen to represent the consumer society that is always yearning for more while at the same time shirking their responsibility to earn their fair share. While the oil drillers can be seen as following a tradition of extracting mineral wealth beneath the soil, they can also be seen as infected by greed more than need in their determination to keep it all. The feral kid and to a lesser degree the helicopter man are best seen as society’s misfits, both reluctantly accepted by the oil-drillers but not acknowledged as having any particular worth. The feral kid can be seen as an evolutionary step in an effort to accommodate the white desire to throw off their fear of the Aust
ralian landscape in that he appears to contain both white and dark DNA in his makeup while at the same time belonging to nobody “he is a primitive animal being in need of something that will recruit him into the social group” (Dermody and Jacka 2: 174). The fact that the kid has no history marks him as a distinct side-step to all those around him and his familiarity with the landscape paints him as above all those except Max, a voice over explains that he grows up to become the “leader of the White Tribe” (2: 174). The feral kid relates to Max instantly with a bonding that is not paternal as much as it is symbiotic; they are both indigene, only Max more so. The helicopter pilot on the other hand is not cut from the indigenous cloth but could be said to have reached an accommodation with the landscape on a superficial level; he is happy to soar over the landscape like a new-age Icarus or bury himself beneath the sand in order to snare his victims “only the monsters of flesh and blood hold terror for him not the land” (2: 174). Max, like Jimmie Blacksmith makes the mistake of trusting the oil-drillers to keep their word and drives the tanker of fuel out of the compound. At the end of a bloody chase with the tanker overturned and spilling sand rather than fuel from its belly Max realises he has been tricked yet shows no rage or desire for revenge. Unlike Jimmie Blacksmith, Max has learnt that the modern society is full of tricks and nothing that he can ever do will change that fact. For Max there is only one important thing to do and that is to continue his spiritual journey, his walkabout, after what was just an interruption along the way. Ross Gibson in his book South of the West says this: “Given that the Mad Max films deal explicitly in the symbology of Australian landscape, it can be argued that the trilogy analyses the myths of failure by dramatizing white society’s traditional conflicts with the land.” (174). The failures Gibson is referring to are those of our early explorers mythologised as heroes regardless of the success of their deeds, but more often than not mythologised for their failures (Burke and Wills). Gibson may see in the Mad Max films an attempt to overturn the long history of validating failed heroes, something like a transformation.
Chapter 8
New Horizons, old fears
The making of Australian horror films did not stop after 1981 but they did change. It was as though a cathartic release had been obtained, not to be repeated. Few Australian horror films since these have been written about and commented on to any great extent until the release of Wolf Creek (2005). I shall use an analysis of Wolf Creek as a prequel to the conclusion to this discussion in order to show that the message is still out there, in the landscape, still waiting. Wolf Creek, in a manner similar to the realist horror films described in the early chapter of this thesis, uses historical reminders to the audience of serial murderers in Australia’s recent past. That these serial murders occurred in the bush (Ivan Milat murdered several backpackers in and around the Balanglo Forest in New South Wales) and the outback slayings attributed to Murdoch is still fresh in the memories of many Australians. In simple terms Wolf Creek doesn’t have to be real in order to provoke real memories and real feelings. Where the film announces its new-age attitude to horror is the graphic detail of rape and torture followed by execution, something that owes more to the endless output of slasher films such as Friday the 13th and Cabin Fever derivatives. In a nutshell, Wolf Creek has gone offshore for its inspiration and thus its narrative. Unlike Wake in Fright, Picnic at Hanging Rock and to a lesser extent The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, this more recent Australian horror film leaves little room for pondering the deeper implications of a demonised landscape except perhaps for the final scene. Wolf Creek opens with an enticing shot of a familiar landscape: the beach, the sea and the mythical familiarity of an Australian belonging. This is where we arrived so many years before and this (the beach) is where we invest our hopes and dreams. This is the Australia presented to the world through our tourist commission when they focus on a representation of our landscape that is other than the outback, it is also a recognition that Australians have not resiled from their belief that our beach landscape is “both a real and symbolic locus” (McGregor 219). Like Picnic at Hanging Rock, with its opening presentation of Colonial bricks-and-mortar safety and security; that is soon challenged by an unwise adventure into the vagaries of nature. Like The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, using the anaesthetic of misty picturesque views before the horror begins; so too does this image seek to calm the early perceptions of the spectator of Wolf Creek. However, there is another message implicit in this particular view of an Australian archetypical landscape, one that may be seen as nature in the raw, untameable and uncontrollable, hostile and benign, bold and beautiful, a place of life and a place of death. One of the victims to be, Liz, wakes up on the beach and deciding to take a swim, removes her top and plunges into the water. This scene is more than little reminiscent of the famous horror film Jaws (1975) and sets the pattern for much of the reflexive moments throughout the film. Also like the girl in Jaws Liz briefly disappears beneath the surface but not into the maw of a giant shark. Liz figuratively disappears into the landscape in much the way the schoolgirls vanished in Picnic at Hanging Rock. The dwarfing of Liz and her companions by the enormity of the Australian landscape continues through the film as they journey toward a meteor crater in the outback known as Wolf Creek. The journey itself is planned as a Cooks-Tour of many of the iconic representations of Australia, seemingly worshipped by those who make the pilgrimage either for their annual holidays or a quest for a sea-change, with the final pay-dirt of the Great Barrier Reef being their goal; of course they don’t make it – this is after all a horror film.
The deflation of the group’s expectations of delight and wonder as they explore the ruins of Emu Creek might be seen to remind the spectator of earlier Australian films which painted the failure of outposts in “the middle of nowhere”, an expression used repeatedly by the frustrated travellers in this film. The film Walkabout (1971) also featured a deserted outpost in “the middle of nowhere” but in Walkabout it is viewed as harmless, harbouring no evil toward those who may come across it, just simply a cast-off of the disposable society. The run-down and bullet riddled buildings of Emu Creek speak of something far more nasty, reminding the viewer of the many American horror movies featuring poor-white-trash dwellings allowed to crumble and decay, by way of reflecting their inhabitants attitude to their own life and that of others. The young tourists’ meeting with Mick Taylor, who pretends to fix their vehicle only to ultimately make them captives, is an almost paint-by-numbers method of many horror films out of the American slasher/torture stable of the last decade, Hostel (2005) and The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2008). The main departure from a host of like movies is in the characterisation of Mick and his place in the Australian landscape. The Mick of this film is the antithesis of his namesake Mick Dundee, the iconic larrikin of Crocodile Dundee (1986). Where the Mick of 1986 was an easy-going laconic bushman with colloquial sense of humour, the Mick of 2008 is a twisted sociopath in keeping with Norman Bates of the open-all-hours motel fame. To put it quite simply, this Mick is sick. Unlike the booze-soaked yokels of “the Yabba” in Wake in Fright, this sick-Mick has chosen to haunt the place he occupies because he is cast as other. This Mick would be more unwelcome in “the Yabba” than a flock of schoolteachers like John Grant. Because the film attempts to paint this dark-Mick as part of the landscape, marking him as much a part of the terrain as the meteorite crater of Wolf Creek, it ultimately fails. Whereas the horror films discussed in the bulk of this piece encouraged continued thought about our place in the world and the human condition after the cinema had gone dark Wolf Creek is like a chewy caramel, all surface and no centre. Certainly the xenophobic attitude to foreigners, or outsiders, is on display like those exhibited in The Cars That Ate Paris, when Mick declares that he’s doing the world a favour by killing (culling) the tourists. Yet it is an in-your-face statement that requires little ongoing thought rather than the subtle changing of outsiders to “fit in” to the populace of “Paris”, whether as zombies or an adopted son. The
prolonged scenes of rape and torture in Wolf Creek are more of an appeasement to the visceral appetite of new-age horror fans, weaned on slasher/horror since the 80s, than an effort to fuel a sense of loss for vulnerable young women as in Picnic at Hanging Rock. That the killer-Mick simply blends into the landscape as the film ends can be seen to intimate that he is still out there, it could also hint that all that is out there now are his bleached bones (however, there is also Wolf Creek 2 to consider). Wolf Creek contains little that can be seen as mystery but is simply an exercise in terror, and it can be seen as an example the current state of horror film production in much of the western world. The most interesting thing that is implied in this film is the same message that has run through all the films discussed in this dissertation; the landscape rejects you, and will remain a demonised place for you.