Aussie Aussie Aussie! yawn yawn yawn

As a Young Aspiring Australian Director (YAAD), the single most vital skill I could hope to possess is not artistic, but social. Before artistic brilliance even has a chance to rear its head, a young director must have mastered the art of the weasel. One‘s inner weasel must not only be able to:

A) Seduce some poor property owner into letting you and your unkempt crew trample all over their property for a day while armed with 1000W lights;

B) Coax disillusioned actors and malnourished crew to sacrifice their time (all on the same day) and turn up god-knows-where at god-knows-what hour of the morning to bust a nut making YOUR dreams come true,

But also:

C) Do all of the above by paying everyone SOLEY in reject shop lollies.

However, the guile and charisma exhausted by a YAAD in such efforts pale in comparison to the exquisite charm and nous one must command in order to weasel one’s way into the virginally narrow pockets of “The Industry” (an ominous, amorphous body of dejected artists upon whose whims your creations depend). Though perhaps I am painting the necessities of the YAAD in too broad strokes, for there is only ONE vital interpersonal skill that is essential to a YAAD’s inventory. One social kingpin upon which all your other charms depend. That talent is Dissimulation (or the ability to hide ones true feelings). Before you can get the haughty (though hot) actor to do what you want, you simply MUST be able to hide the fact that you think they’re an uppity wanker of lukewarm talent, otherwise your whole weaselly enterprise will crumble into a chaos of capped toothed screams and manicured slaps. You MUST be able to conceal from the boozy script guru that their ideas on writing are naive and ridiculous before you can convince them that their sagacious advice was integral to the formation of the 7^th draft of your script, and that were they to fund the creation of this film, they’d really just be sponsoring their own brilliant project.

My dissimulative abilities have been cultivated through the ‘school of hard knocks’. Once, my face was a veritable kaleidoscope of every malicious thought and conflict-friendly opinion that happened to cross my blackened, cynical little mind. However, after a series of actor tantrums and crew walkouts, I chiselled myself into the most unrelentingly optimistic and congenial fellow ever to have cared about your feelings. Now, I’m one seriously affable motherfucker. However, my amiable Achilles still has his heel. There is one subject upon which I cannot, no matter how hard I try, to disguise my unpopular sentiments. It is seriously debilitating, but I just cannot help it. It is though there is an unbreakable neural circuit between my ears and my face which curls my lips and rolls my eyes as soon as I hear certain phrases. I could be facing the head of the Australian Film Institute, it matters not. As soon as I hear the terms ‘Uniquely Australian’ or ‘Aussie Cultural Icon’ spill from the mouths of potential funding bodies, a huge neon sign erupts from my face that reads “I DON’T LIKE AUSTRALIAN FILMS.”

It’s not that I think Australian filmmakers are shit. If there is one thing 5 years of weaselling around amateur and student film circles has taught me, it is that I am a small fish in a threateningly large pond of talent. In almost all sectors of the Arts we are a nation with talent coming out our sunburnt ears, so why is it that I am always left feeling underwhelmed (and mildly depressed) as Aussie credits roll? The only explanation for the disjuncture between local talent and the mediocre output of our commercial film industry is that there is something going wrong with the institutions that allow local ideas to become commercial films: our funding bodies.

Based on the international, feature-length output of the Australian film industry over the past 10 years, I cannot help but infer that the funding bodies responsible for producing these films (both public and private) have a pathological fixation on creating ‘uniquely Australian ‘ films. ‘Uniquely Australian’ can be defined here as a film that ham-fistedly reminds an audience that they are indeed watching an Australian film with every passing frame. There are the exceptions of course (the stellar Lantana being the most obvious candidate) but by and large, Aussie films seem to be debilitated by a constant need to re-affirm their status as Australian.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with a film being overtly set within Australia (truth be known, I’m really quite fond of this place). However I feel there is something very wrong with our funding passing over good scripts in favour of tepid, unsubstantial films that trade on the hallmarks of our culture.

The Widely Accessible Aussie Film (WAAF) unrelentingly demarcates itself as ‘Australian’ by doing at least one of three things:

1) Fetishising the Australian Landscape;

2) Fixating itself on decorative cultural traits (such as accents or turns of phrase); or

3) Exploring Australian culture by identifying what that culture is not, often through focussing on an outcast, someone who struggles to ‘fit in’

The recently televised Japanese Story is a prime example of the first technique: two unlikely companions caught in the thrall of the vast and savagely beautiful outback terrain of Australia have a transcendent love affair (before the savage-beautiful landscape claims one of the lovers as its victim). The second tendency is, of course, exemplified in recent comedies such as Kenny, Crackerjack, and Razzle Dazzle. Aside its lapses into romantic comedy, what is Kenny outside of a fixation on the way Australians talk about poo? The final technique is utilised by ‘fitting in’ films as Little Fish and Looking for Alibrandi, where marginalised characters go about the complicated task of fitting into Australian culture (thus, negatively inferring what Australian culture really is).

Now, all of these examples, while being quite good films, say nothing substantive about what Australian culture really is, and thus leave one feeling just that little bit disappointed. Much like a Hollywood sex scene, they all flitter about the point, tantalising us with what promises to be unique Australian cultural modalities without really delivering the goods.

All the characters in Japanese Story are able to say of the Australian Outback (the overwhelmingly poetic landscape that catalyzes their unlikely relationship) is that it is Big and Old, Outside of these inanities, they seem to be able to say no more, they stutter, and the film compensates for this vacuum with thick lashings of sweeping landscape shots.

Devoid of their accents, is there anything ‘uniquely Australian’ about Kenny or Razzle Dazzle? Does America not have self-aggrandizing dance instructors? Do other nations not laugh at their shit? The turns of phrase that these films employ to identify themselves as ‘uniquely Australian’ on the international stage are merely decorations disguising conventional plotlines (such as Kenny’s romantic comedy).

Finally, in films like Little Fish or Looking for Alibrandi, we only get the sketchiest indication of what is essential about Aussie culture (what it really is) through the study of what it is not (the individuals who can’t fit in). The archetypal ‘struggling to fit in’ Australian drama shows us the misfits that surround the puzzle of Australian culture without ever giving us its centrepiece.

Why is it the WAAF can never provide us with anything that is substantially and essentially Australian, and instead only fuzzy outlines and decorative quirks? And why do the funding bodies persist in sponsoring such films?

In answering this question, I would first ask you to look at the eerie parallel between the means by which WAAFs demarcate their ‘Australianess’ and the techniques our politicians are using to consolidate our ‘National Identity’. The rhetorical techniques that the Howard government attitude employs to invoke it’s australianess seems to perfectly mirror the 3 WAAF methods outlined above.

Like the ‘struggling to fit in’ film (Little Fish), our Government is increasingly attempting to define Australia by what it is not, as opposed to what actually is. In my view, no politician in either of the major parties has succeeded in forcing Howard to clarify what ‘unAustralian’ means through concretely defining what it means to be really Australian. It almost seems that it is conceded on both sides that to be Australian is simply not to be unAustralian (for instance, not a radical Muslim, homosexual, or a latte-sipping elite). Like the filmic comedies (Kenny), our politicians give their doings a unique Australian feel through employing phraseology (like ‘fair go’ and ‘mateship’) when, in truth, our social, economic and foreign policies are becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate from those of the United States. They are but decorations around a conventional political plot.

Like Japanese Story, our politicians stop short of being able to tell us just what is essential about Australia and its people. Howard claims that the primary achievement of his government has been to ‘restore national pride’ without ever telling us, ‘pride in what?’ Anyone who dares question of what actions exactly we should be recently proud, or what it means to be Australian, must be unAustralian and aggressively opposed. Real Australians don’t need to know what ‘Australianness’ is, they just need to have that Australian feeling when they look at the flag (or drape it round their shoulders).

My suspicion is that this striking resemblance between the mechanics of the WAAF and the Howard Government campaign to restore ‘national pride’ arises from a common root: an anxiety over the dissolution of Australian culture. . UnAustralian is almost impossible to distinguish from anti-American. Cultural values are disintegrating into the singular axiom of capital. There is no value to education outside of the money you can make from it, your health matters only to the extent that your wellness contributes to the economy. Your work only has really value insofar as your employer can gain from it – the socio-cultural value of your work is all but negligible. What is important is that you turn a profit. Globalisation has introduced a massive influx of new, niche marketed lifestyles - again, each only as valuable in as much you are willing to pay for them (the clothes, the car, the hair). Lifestyle branding has now made our identities an aestheticised and commoditised consumer choice. All that seems to be left of our culture seems to be the decorative quirks and phraseologies. Virgin airlines can become Australian by calling red ‘Blue’. American policies become Australian by using the terms ‘mateship’ and ‘fair go’. You are now Australian by virtue of your decoration and your not-unAustralianess, and little else.

Like any other institution of a neo-liberal state, the prime motivation of our film industry’s funding bodies is capital: to get bums on cinema seats.

The cultivation of a society in which value is only placed upon endeavours which are profitable, that disregard welfare, and in which individuals differentiate themselves through arbitrary consumer choices has, unsurprisingly, resulted in a marked degradation in social solidarity. And, for good reasons, this has scared the shit out of our politicians who now try to manufacture social solidarity through the creation of ‘outgroups’. We become a nation united by common enemies (unAustralians). However, unable to give any sort of definition of what Australianism actually is (because perhaps there isn’t one) the Government instead cultivates an ‘Australian feeling’ through the use of cultural aesthetics (such as the flag, or specific language).

And it is not just the Howard government who is gravely concerned with this profound loss of communitarian cultural values and ‘National Identity’. As our society fragments, we as Australians are likewise becoming acutely concerned with ‘what it means to be Australian’. Our film funding bodies, being primarily motivated by capital (like everything else operating under a neo-liberal economic orthodoxy), know all too well of this fixation and cannot help but cater to this widening market. Films that attempt to answer the insoluble riddle of ‘what it means to be Australian’ get bums on seats. But sadly, as a result of the aforementioned atomisation of Australian culture, the WAAF will never provide a satisfactory account of what distinguishes us from other privileged Western states. There will always be that little note of disappointment and depression as the credits roll.

Perhaps our Film funding bodies are not responding to the same anxiety that afflicts our Government..Perhaps they simply have no confidence in the abilities of our screenwriters to differentiate their films as ‘unique’ on the international stage without employing Australian symbology. Whatever the case, I believe it is high time that we started sponsoring films that are simply ‘unique’ as opposed to ‘uniquely Australian’.

Published In Voiceworks Magazine # 69

http://www.expressmedia.org.au/voiceworks.php