Porpoise Spit and the (New?) Cultural Cringe
by Dominic Pettman

10.30p.m. New Year's Eve in a SoMa pub, San Francisco. My partner and I are sitting at the bar, combing through the street-press trying to find somewhere suitably festive to be when the calendar ticks over to 1999. Even though we have helium balloons tied to our wrists (a seemingly spontaneous condition of entry) things aren't looking too promising. I can't help thinking that we are a little behind the times, given that I watched the Sydney Harbour midnight fireworks on TV a few hours earlier. Most of my friends would be snoring themselves through a minor coma, or seedily sniffing multi-coloured bacon strips from the fridge.

The couple next to us catch my attention. The male is surly and generic, but his girlfriend is ravishing in a totally over-dressed and over-madeup kind of way. Looking like one of Nanny Fine's bridesmaids, she turns to ask us if we have the time. Upon catching the accent, she goes into the "Oh you're Australian?!" routine which still hovers around the 50% rate in the States (the other half merely shrug before asking, "so you gonna buy that or what?"). Preparing myself for something involving koala bears or Paul Hogan, she throws us something from left-field.

"Oh I just saw Muriel's Wedding . . . (which could maybe explain the dress) . . . and now I really want to go and visit Porpoise Spit. Have you ever been to Porpoise Spit?"

Nearly choking on my beer, I quickly scan the patchy Australian atlas section of my brain. Her eyes are suddenly so luminescent that I barely have the heart to tell her that it isn't a real place, that it is (at least to my knowledge) a joke name. She becomes instantly deflated, and I try to regain some ground for the national cause by saying that there are plenty of places like Porpoise Spit - Tweed Heads, Coffs Harbour, etc. - but they don't have such colourful names. This doesn't impress, but she manages to steer the conversation back to the movie itself, and how much she enjoyed it.

"I also liked that Priscilla movie," she goes on. "That was soooo funny." As it turns out, these are the only two Australian movies from this decade which she has seen, and the conversation soon fizzles out until she and her mute boy-toy bundle themselves into a taxi bound for some wacky-neon-disco-theme party.

* * * * * *

Their absence left a strange hole in the evening, or at least unravelled one which was already there. Something about the subtext of the conversation left me feeling like a third-world diplomat who feels compelled to explain his country's enormous debt during a formal dinner-party. If movies are gifts, as everyone from anthropologists to producers agree, then we owe the Americans big time. Sure they shovel a lot of shit onto the world-market, but a good percentage of classic flicks are American. While we don't churn out nearly so much crud, this seems more due to a lack of funds than anything to do with a good hit-and-miss ratio.

Currently, any article about the Australian film-industry includes the term "soul-searching," mainly because domestic audiences are keeping away in droves. The release of Dear Claudia was something of a last straw, provoking such hostile outrage that I even started feeling sorry for the first-time writer/director responsible (even after I found out he had a background in advertising). While I am sure that this film is as pungently lame as it seems from the previews, I don't agree with the yardsticks that most Australian critics are using to measure subsequent success and failure. Strictly Ballroom, Priscilla, and Muriel's Wedding are trotted out as the triumphant triumvirate of local cinema for being both successful and representative of an idiosyncratic Australian aesthetic. This particular visual sensibility has also leaked out into Hollywood via the post-parodic kitsch-glitz of Baz Luhrman, as well as American co-productions such as the Babe movies.

The problem is not a lack of these success stories, but rather the over-flow of "quirky" movies following in their wake (yes Cosi, I'm looking at you!). It is my contention - often argued to the stage of breadroll throwing with my mother - that Australia just keeps making the same movie ad infinitum. And this ur-movie is obsessed with an insecure nation's growing pains, along with an ironic acknowledgment of our overwhelming anglo-grotesquerie (e.g. Tina Sparkles, Titsy Boobarinie, etc.). Of course there are exceptions - Stone, Summer Holiday, Wake in Fright, Mad Max, and most recently, The Boys - but these are forever excluded from the Film Commission canon, serving only to solidify the rule. Certainly nothing to break out the AFTRS dinner-mints over.

Of course these are merely my own opinions and shouldn't really concern anyone not in breadroll-throwing distance, however I know for a fact that I am not alone, and that this cynicism regarding local talent is endemic to a particular subset of my generation. Without getting too anti-Boomerish, the cultural cringe seems to have skipped a generation when it comes to Australian films, and the question must be asked if it is the same strain as that which infected our artsy intelligentsia from the 1920s to the 1950s. To answer this question, it seems prudent to turn to the celluloid thonglines which unravel like tickertape tentacles from the Australian Film and Sound Archive in Canberra to all corners of the continent.

One jewel from the archive has been recently dusted-off by the researchers for Barry Humphries' Flashbacks TV show. This was a mid-70's interview with television producer Bruce Gyngell, who was asked if bad Australian television criticism was a reflection of bad Australian television. His reply began with a bashful laugh before his eyes glazed over in one of the most astonishing real-time captures of "the dawning truth" ever filmed. An agonizing pause, accompanied by unfocused contemplation, precedes his eventual candid admission that this was indeed probably the case. Gone are the days of such honesty, but not perhaps, the occasion for its admission.

All movies, to some degree, reflect the culture from which they were produced. French movies all seem French, just as every other nation has a cinematic tradition from which it draws. In the 1970s, a group of German directors did some "soul-searching" regarding their film-industry, and decided to write a charter-cum-policy statement for the future. In short, they decided to promise not to keep making such dross. Whether they succeeded or not is a matter for debate. Klaus Kinski, who worked in many Werner Herzog films, described the Teutonic new-wave as largely "brain snot," but you still have to admire the intention. Not one to usually encourage following German examples, I applaud this conscious and committed break with the past. Delusory or not, it may at least avoid such catastrophes as Love and Other Catastrophes.

I have already mentioned the word "quirky," and I believe that all the Australian film industry's woes hinge on this heavily loaded term. In all my 27 years I have never seen an Australian being quirky. Bizarre, yes. Furtive, sure. Even downright insane, but never quirky. We are not a quirky race (or combination of races) but rather a run-of-the-mill strange one. Yes, I suppose we are "a weird mob," but no more than, say, the Dutch (and anyone who has seen The Flodders Go To America will know exactly what I'm talking about).

The New Zealanders, via Peter Jackson, have managed to inject more conviction and interest into their cinematic self-examinations than we have, from the abject hilarity of Meet the Feebles to the stately claustrophobia of Heavenly Creatures. (Let's not get into the kiwi-poaching of Jane Campion, Sam Neill and other cross-Tasman stars, when it comes to increasing the list of "successful Australians," something also rabidly practiced in the music industry.) It seems that whoever started the Australian caricatured catharsis of self-loathing (see me after class Starstruck) has a lot to answer for.

Of course one theory for the origins of cultural cringe refer to the old adage, "familiarity breeds contempt." While this may be true of a movie like Monkey Grip (reeking, as it does, of 80's desperation), The Year My Voice Broke is less abrasive to my invisible aesthetic antennas. Director John Duigan felt no need to make the characters or situations quirky, resulting in a far more satisfying "Australian" film, which confronted the anglo-grotesque without hiding it behind distorted masks. Unfortunately it was a direction which few people decided to emulate.

It seems that our film industry has relied for too long on the simplistic equation: quirky equals good, pretentious equals bad. More imitation than innovation, Australian movies are often satisfied with importing small screen ideas to the 35 mill. format. If I'm ever to see David and Margaret scrap the system whereby Australian movies are automatically awarded an extra-star, then we have nothing to lose from promoting pretentiousness over quirkiness. Sure, this may result in a wave of cinematic puff-pastry and re-fried Godard (yes I'm talking to you Kiss or Kill), but it may also produce something closer to The Thin Red Line, ironically the best movie made (partly) in Australia for many years.

At a time when the Australasian region is being aggressively targeted by Hollywood big-wigs looking to cut-costs, it becomes crucial that we resist the George Lucasifying effects of Sydney's Fox Studios. Not in order to protect the fragile ego-system of our current film-industry, but to forge a new one from the moist ashes of Adrian Martin's tears.

So to answer the question posed earlier as to whether the current cultural cringe is the same or different from our grandparents, the answer must be - as always - yes and no. Yes, it connects to the embarrassment of a young, insecure nation trying vainly to escape the shadow of trans-Atlantic formulas, and no, because it is born from the belief that we can do better (or rather from the disbelief that we haven't, yet).

Of course, everyone is a critic, and it is easy for arthouse-wankers like myself to point fingers at the Australian film industry and say "not good enough." You would be correct in reminding me that I haven't made any cinematic masterpieces lately. But I do feel I have the right to identify a weary tone in the majority of our flicks which must be scrapped if we are to put ourselves on the movie map in the next millennium. If we follow the thonglines from the rusty drive-ins to the old theatres which still play "God Save The Queen" before the feature, and from the outdoor moonlight cinemas to the gaudy suburban multiplexes, we can catch a glimpse of a uniquely Australian movie magic which no amount of George Miller voice-overs can ruin.

* * * * * *

Flying home from San Francisco after a new year's eve only slightly less anti-climactic than the southern hemisphere kind. The in-flight movies are Sliding Doors, The Mask of Zorro, Snake Eyes and Armageddon - unspeakable, every single one of them. Unspeakable, but not insufferable (especially in the context of a 12 hour journey). Had they been Australian, however, I daresay lives would have been lost; being already only ten minutes of Doing Time for Patsy Cline away from a psychotic episode. This sensitivity corresponds to the relationship between international politics and the domestic kind. No matter how cringeworthy American politics is, or how dull and tawdry the House of Lords, the home-grown kind can never be beaten for its pure bile-inducing wince-factor, mainly because it's impossible not to feel somehow responsible or implicated. Surely the best reason to travel is to not hear the words John Howard or Peter Reith - a peerless spiritual balm. The same with movies. The flaws of Walt Stillman or Pedro Almodovar are someone else's problem, whereas Welcome to Woop Woop is something all Australians have to come to terms with. Only then can we contemplate opening a Porpoise Spit Movie-World in the heart of California.