The first shot of Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright is a 360-degree panorama of the remote Outback hamlet of Tiboonda, the camera swiveling away and back to the starting point of a small riser platform that serves as a train stop to emphasize that apart from a few scattered buildings and a rail line, nothing exists in this patch of Australia’s desert save sand and rock. It’s the sort of place that only exists for a few fortunate souls to say they escaped from it. It’s not the sort of place that naturally invites outsiders, which partially explains why transplanted schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) emanates rage at being stuck there when he is first introduced silently counting down the seconds until he can dismiss his one-room schoolhouse for the Christmas holiday.
A self-described “slave” of Australia’s system of holding new teachers to a usurious bond that forces them to accept any remote assignment, John immediately stands out from his surroundings. Bond, an English actor, retains his own accent and trained diction, giving John a practiced, haughty tone at odds with the thick accents and regional argot of the rural Australians around him. John can scarcely contain his snide sense of superiority speaking to others as he prepares to go back to Sydney for holiday, making no attempt to conceal from locals his belief he is returning to “civilization.” First, though, he must stop over for a night in the mining town of Bundanyabba, a.k.a. “The Yabba,” a city only compared to a place like Tiboonda.
It is in the Yabba that John’s imperious smugness finally starts to earn the enmity of those he treats as beneath him. A local policeman, Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), amiably welcomes the man to the town and even treats him to a few drinks, but small tremors of suspicion and annoyance pass over his otherwise cheerful face at some of John’s dismissive statements about the place and the Outback in general. In what will become a recurring element of John’s interactions with locals, any attempt he makes to politely turn down an invitation to drink is met with bafflement and barely disguised hostility, and it takes precious little for people’s hospitable natures to warp into sneering laughs when the man makes a fool of himself, as he does when he loses all of his money on a communal gambling coin toss game.
Now stranded in the Outback, John must rely on the kindness of strangers who take clear delight in his predicament, and the film soon sinks into a morass of the protagonist’s alcoholic stupor as he is kept constantly in lager by people who themselves drink all day to forget their lives. Wake in Fright is now billed as a horror film, but there are no real monsters or stalking killers to speak of. Instead, it draws its unease from confrontations with the psychological impact of being trapped in a dead-end town, where the only things to do, to paraphrase Pulp’s “Common People,” is drink and screw and, for the men at least, fight and hunt to release pent-up aggression. The camera increasingly veers and wobbles in a dazed, overheated, dehydrated descent into madness as John is drawn into a culture of hostility where frenzied kangaroo hunts, backyard wrestling and emotionless sexual encounters mingle into a bleak haze. The film is steeped in alcoholism, but it has an all-too-sober view of the madness that can creep into hopeless places, where economic deprivation and social isolation breed a resentment that explodes out from behind painted-on smiles in the form of idle pleasures of drink, gambling and violence. It’s not so much about what befalls John as what surrounds him, the hopelessness that many can only live with by drowning it in beer.
Acting as a kind of ambassador to this hellish way of life is Doc (Donald Pleasence), who serves as a dark foil for John in that he too is possessed on an erudite, educated nature, but he has completely succumbed to the malaise of his surroundings, spending all day gleefully drinking and subsisting on a slurry of kangaroo meat that looks like wet dog food. Drunkenly philosophizing as he lounges around with sweat beading his skin and his shirt unbuttoned so far down his torso it looks slashed open with a knife, Doc gives the impression of having “gone native,” albeit among his fellow white Australians. (Aborigines are conspicuously absent in this travelogue of savagery, avoiding any reactionary or overly guilty depictions of indigenous peoples to keep all focus on what colonial descendants have made of their conquest.) Still, there’s a kind of honesty to his own wasted intelligence, as when he counters John’s contemptuous assessment of the Yabba’s provincial inhabitants by noting “It’s death out here to farm. Worse than death in the mines. Do you want them to sing opera as well?” Later, he becomes the most extreme example of the protagonist’s feelings of superiority being horrifically stripped from him in a scene that makes unmistakable without being too graphic that Doc commits sexual assault on the man.
Despite being helmed by an American, adapted by a British-Jamaican screenwriter and casting two British actors in the leads, Wake in Fright has come to be seen as a classic of Australian cinema that even helped to ignite that country’s artistic new wave. Not unlike James Joyce’s Ulysses, it holds an unflattering mirror up to a nation whose stagnation into drink and misery produces first shock, then resigned recognition in those it reflects. At its heart, the film is a kind of moralistic fable, thrusting a man who thinks life can’t get any worse into a pure hell that leaves him grateful to emerge out the other end. In that respect, the horror film it most resembles might, however improbably, be said to be Saw.
Photo courtesy of Drafthouse Films
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