When discussing Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 psychological thriller Wake in Fright with fellow cineastes, the only real talking point that seems to gestate is its status as a curio piece among the famously “lost films”. Nominated for the Grand Prix du Festival (now known as the Palme d’Or) at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, the film was presumed lost due to its master negative being destroyed, leaving the only means to watch it being bootleg VHS tapes or censored film prints that didn’t adhere to the director’s intended vision. This was until editor Anthony Buckley discovered long-lost film and sound prints in 2004, restoring them over a five-year period. Though overshadowed by Nicholas Roeg’s decidedly more positive Australian film Walkabout and Sam Peckinpah’s revenge epic Straw Dogs at the time of its initial release, the film was reevaluated upon its 2009 rerelease at the Cannes Film Festival as a masterpiece, with Rex Reed of The Observer going as far as to call the film the “greatest Australian film ever made”. Looking beyond all of the hullabaloo over the film’s history in-and-out-of-print, one will find a film of visceral brutality and putrid filth. A film that seeks to portray Australia as a phantasmagoria populated by vicious brutes who seek to dominate and retain power in order to continue thriving in their land of vice.
With Wake in Fright, Kotcheff seeks to put his vision of Australia in communication with the history of the continent, specifically the ways in which the minority populations have been suppressed throughout its history. During the film’s opening sequence, which sees John Grant (Gary Bond) boarding a train for Bundanyabba (called The Yabba by the characters in the film), Kotcheff purposefully blocks the interior of the train to show all of the drunken white Australian men sitting in the back of the train, whereas a single Aboriginal passenger sits silently in the front. This unnamed Aboriginal passenger stares solemnly out of the train’s window, gazing on at the world that was once his that has since been slowly corrupted by the influence of white people. Kotcheff’s interrogation of the dynamics of power doesn’t necessarily end with this admittedly subtle reference to the ostracization of Aboriginal peoples. The only woman with any sort of agency is viewed purely as a sexual object, her body an object for John to use to his own ends. (He ultimately doesn’t, as his constant drinking prompts him to vomit, ending the sexual encounter.) More generally, the film portrays the citizens of The Yabba as they exert their power over John during his journey, who slowly transforms from a sensitive schoolteacher in the film’s opening sequences to a violent brute by the film’s conclusion. Kotcheff peppers John’s journey through The Yabba with plenty of literary allusions – appropriate given that John is an English teacher – with his journey mimicking Dante’s in his epic poem Inferno.
When examining the allegorical meaning of Dante’s Inferno, one can interpret it as the pious soul of the traditional Christian being exposed to the horrors of true sin for the first time. In Inferno, Dante wanders through Hell with the poet Virgil, resisting temptation on his quest for spiritual salvation. Kotcheff subverts this quest for salvation, portraying the downfall of an impious man corrupted by sin and vice. When John initially reaches The Yabba, his first stop is the hotel’s bar where he meets Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), the local police chief. After a few rounds of beer with Jock, John is introduced to the game of “two-up.” John’s drinking and gambling act as his initiation into The Yabba’s “Circles of Hell,” with these acts representing the circles of gluttony and greed, respectively. After losing all of his money by drunkenly gambling his $400 away in two-up, he meets “Doc” Tydon (Donald Pleasance), the Virgil to John’s Dante. “Doc” assists John in his descent into the lowest Circle of Hell: Violence. After downing copious amounts of alcohol, “Doc” takes John on a kangaroo hunting trip, nearly getting John killed when he attempts to drunkenly wrestle a kangaroo. It’s after this transgression where John tries and fails to escape The Yabba, trapped like the sinners who’ve been damned to Hell in Inferno. After failing to escape, John attempts suicide, with Kotcheff treating this act of self-mutilation as the ultimate sin. To Kotcheff, John’s attempted suicide is his means to try and escape his world of vice without punishment, effectively forcing him to stay in The Yabba for this rest of his life. Kotcheff’s nihilistic sense of morality turns John’s holiday into a descent into sin and vice, effectively chastising greater Australian society and its ability to transform the most sensitive and caring of the population into a slovenly brute. To Kotcheff, there is not heaven or hell, merely a purgatory where one must aimlessly wallow in their own moral bile.
Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright offers the viewer a vicious critique of 70s Australia, portraying the mining town of Bundanyabba as a hellscape whose very existence acts as an existential threat to the moral fabric of the entire continent. Kotcheff’s moral didacticism helped usher in the Ozploitation movement of the 1970s, particularly in the ways in which it exposed the underbelly of Australian society. Though not the most purely enjoyable film experience, Wake in Fright offers the viewer a thought-provoking snapshot of a not-so-distant Australia – full of lost souls doomed to spend their waking lives drinking, fighting, gambling, and wandering the scorched earth.
