Australian Book Review -June-July 2018, no. 402

ronan Farrow at MwF

Ronan Farrow will be a guest at this year’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival. The celebrated author/lawyer/journalist will discuss ‘Power, Abuse and Facing Facts’ in an event chaired by journalist Tracey Spicer at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Theatre on Thursday, 30 August.

Farrow, the son of filmmaker Woody Allen and actress Mia Farrow (and grandson of the Australian film director John Farrow), has been a central figure in uncovering cases of sexual misconduct among men in positions of power, particularly in Hollywood. His gutsy reporting in The New Yorker on Harvey Weinstein’s ‘systematic, predatory’ behaviour was instrumental in the wider #MeToo movement in 2017. This reportage subsequently won The New Yorker the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for public service.

Farrow’s new book is titled War on Peace: The end of diplomacy and the decline of American influence (Norton). For more information about the 2018 Melbourne Writers’ Festival visit: https://mwf.com.au/

Jane HirsHField

Jane Hirshfield, one of America’s most outspoken and influential voices in poetry, feminism, and intellectual life, will visit Australia for the first time in July. People in Melbourne, Sydney, and Mildura will have a chance to hear the poet read from her work (she will also conduct a workshop at Writers Victoria).

Jane Hirshfield, chancelloremerita of the Academy of American Poets, has published several collections. She will read at the University of Melbourne on 23 July (6 pm),

a public event that is co-presented with the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics in the Faculty of Arts Monash University (register at http://alumni.online. unimelb.edu.au/hirshfield)

The Mildura Writers’ Festival runs from 19–22 July. Guests will include David Malouf, Robyn Davidson, and James Ley.

We have much pleasure in publishing Jane Hirshfield’s poem ‘Interruption: An Assay’ on page 17.

Prizes galore

Our voracious judges are currently reading their way through almost 1,200 entries in the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which is worth a total of $12,500. As always, we will publish the three shortlisted stories in our August issue. The winner will be revealed at a special event at fortyfivedownstairs on Monday, 21 August (6 pm – see our Events page).

The Jolley Prize ceremony is a free event and all are welcome, but please book via rsvp@australianbookreview. com.au. Readings from the shortlisted stories will precede the announcement.

August is also an exciting month for the world’s most alliterative of literary prizes. Entries for the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize (worth $8,500) will open on 1 August.

Meanwhile, the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize will open on 1 September –the thirteenth time we have presented Calibre.

Sign up to our free monthly eNews newsletter, follow us on social media, or visit our website to get all the latest news about our prizes.

SMH Young novelists

Congratulations to 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize winner Jennifer Down on being named an SMH Young Novelist for the second year in a row, joining previous multiple recipients Emily Maguire, James Bradley, and Sonya Hartnett. Down was chosen in 2017 for her début novel Our Magic Hour, and this year for her début short story collection, Pulse Points, which features her Jolley Prize winning story ‘Aokigahara’.

The other 2018 SMH young novelists are Marija Peričić (The Lost Pages), Shaun Prescott (The Town), and Pip Smith (Half Wild)

More tHan a building

La Mama, one of Melbourne’s iconic theatres, has been seriously damaged in a fire. The blaze, started by an electrical fault, occurred on 19 May. No one was injured, and arson is not suspected.

Jane Hirshfield (photograph by Curt Richter)

‘While there is considerable damage, this has become a restoration project. We will retain as much of the historic structure of the building as possible … we loved our building on Faraday Street, but La Mama is more than a building, and despite our devastation her spirit is strong. Together with our artists, staff and community we will move with strength into the next fifty years and beyond,’ said La Mama Artistic Director and CEO Liz Jones and Company Manager and Creative Producer Caitlin Dullard in a joint statement.

All productions in La Mama’s Autumn season will proceed at different venues. For more information,

Quote of the Month

‘The ASC, the statutory body that distributes grants and governs the Australian Institute of Sport, takes $250 million in federal subsidy and has posted multi-milliondollar deficits in recent years. Young sportsmen and women who attend the AIS are exempt from paying HECS – a privilege not afforded artists and musicians finishing at our tertiary art colleges and conservatoriums.

The point made by the sports correspondents is that elite performance sets the bar high and is something to be admired and emulated: “Performance sport is the pinnacle of participation and in part inspires more Australians to lead active lifestyles.” Substitute sport for the arts in that sentence, and there’s a powerful formulation to argue for greater investment … Almost half of all Australians take part in some form of arts activity … but rarely is the correlation made between support for artistic excellence and a broader policy of encouraging personal involvement.’

Matthew Westwood, writing in The Australian, 22 May 2018

visit La Mama’s website: lamama.com. au or Twitter: @lamamatheatre.

JoHn siMkin Medal 2018

‘Why index?’ asks the indispensable Chicago Manual of Style, now in a sixteenth edition, and sumptuously indexed itself. The answer it provides is compelling: ‘This painstaking intellectual labor serves readers of any book-length text … An index, a highly organized, detailed counterpart to a table of contents and other navigational aids, is also insurance –in searchable texts – against fruitless queries and unintended results.’

Painstaking this essential labour certainly is, as anyone who has devised one can attest, so it is good to know that the craft of indexing is not entirely overlooked. The Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers (ANZSI) is seeking nominations from publishers, booksellers, editors, librarians, and indexers for the John Simkin Medal – an award recognising

an outstanding index to a book or periodical compiled in Australia or New Zealand. To learn more about the John Simkin Medal, visit the ANZSI website: https://www.anzsi.org/aboutus/awards/the-john-simkin-medal/

Melbourne Prize For literature

Entries are now open for the Melbourne Prize for Literature. The Prize, worth a total of $100,000, is open to residents of Victoria who have been published in any literary genre. Information and entry guidelines are available from www.melbourneprize.org

winter reading

Midway through this double issue (June–July), we will publish a smaller online edition with a number of new reviews. Look out for this in the last week of June. If you are signed up for our free e-bulletins, you will receive an email Alert when the mini-issue is published.

Note from the guest editor

Welcome to ABR’s second film and television issue! Our first, in 2015, examined the brooding era of television drama. In our second we turn to film, celebrating the stellar movies of past decades with an exciting survey of readers, commentators, and industry professionals, while also looking at the immense changes in film today. In recent months, the #MeToo movement has deposed Hollywood moguls and sounded a powerful call for equality and the end of abuses in a male-dominated industry. Hollywood’s increasing and overdue recognition of filmmakers of colour, with awards glory and box office smashes, offers hope for a more inclusive film community. The medium is changing, as streaming blurs film with television and sparks new audiences and more diverse stories. At this pivotal moment in film history, ABR aims to start a spirited, timely conversation. From 1940s classics to today’s superhero movies, we discuss the silver screen’s achievements while examining its injustices and complexities. ABR plays a starring role in our cultural discourse. It is a privilege to guest edit the publication where I began my writing career and to reflect on film with colleagues in a great magazine of ideas. I hope the issue will inform, delight, and stimulate discussion but, most of all, share our enthusiasm for Australian and international film.

James McNamara, Guest Editor

June–July 2018

Alecia Simmonds

Richard Walsh

Robert Dessaix

Felicity Chaplin

Peter Goldsworthy

James McNamara

Gail Jones et al.

Judith Bishop

Letters

Kevin Summers, Eve Vincent, Judith Armstrong

Economics

Ian D. Gow and Stuart Kells: The Big Four Rémy Davison

Cultural Studies

Margaret Plant: Love and Lament Paul Giles

Poem

Jane Hirshfield

Fiction

Justine Ettler: Bohemia Beach Fiona Wright

Jesse Ball: Census Beejay Silcox

William Trevor: Last Stories Geordie Williamson

Enza Gandolfo: The Bridge Carol Middleton

Alfred Döblin, translated by Michael Hofmann: Berlin Alexanderplatz Joachim Redner

Film & Television

Felicity Chaplin: La Parisienne in Cinema Philippa Hawker

David Bordwell: Reinventing Hollywood Desley Deacon

‘The Brodie Set’ Sally Grant

David Thomson: Warner Bros Jake Wilson

‘On Black Panther’ Dilan Gunawardana

Mary Tomsic: Beyond the Silver Screen Suzy Freeman-Greene

Brian McFarlane: Making a Meal of It Varun Ghosh

Sexual trauma as a time traveller

Redressing wealth inequality

Philip Hensher’s new novel

Tensions surrounding the #MeToo movement

Hitler’s voracious love of cinema

Television comedy’s new aesthetic

Film Survey

A welcome ‘comeback’ from Philip Mead

Memoir

Phillipa McGuinness: The Year Everything Changed

Paul Morgan

Rozanna Lilley: Do Oysters Get Bored?

Susan Sheridan

Philosophy

Steven Pinker: Enlightenment Now Benjamin Madden

Psychology

Gina Perry: The Lost Boys Nick Haslam

Biology

Midas Dekker, translated by Nancy Forest-Flier: The Story of Shit Lauren Fuge

True Crime

Kate Wild: Waiting for Elijah Johanna Leggatt

Poetry

Philip Mead: Zanzibar Light Judith Bishop

Geoff Page: Hard Horizons

Ron Pretty: The Left Hand Mirror

Dennis Haskell

Interviews

Poet of the Month Philip Mead

Critic of the Month Brenda Niall

ABR Arts

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Anwen Crawford

Peter Rose

Ian Dickson

Fiona Gruber

Jake Wilson

Will Yeoman

Three Tall Women

Still Point Turning

Bliss

The Bookshop

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

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Letters

Blimey, Blamey

Dear Editor,

John Arnold’s review of The People’s Force: A history of Victoria Police by Robert Haldane (ABR, May 2018) is an admirable appraisal of the work, which covers a colourful and important contribution to the state’s history. Arnold is, however, wrong to suggest that Christine Nixon was the most high-profile Commissioner to be appointed. That accolade surely belongs to Major-General Thomas Blamey, who assumed the position in 1925, eighteen months after the Police Strike that resulted in the dismissal of 636 members of the force. Despite his badge being found in a Fitzroy brothel, despite his abrogation of laws protecting the right to protest, despite his giving false evidence to a Royal Commission that ended in his forced resignation, Blamey became Australia’s wartime military leader and our only Field Marshal (let’s not count the duke of Edinburgh). I think he tops the estimable Christine Nixon.

Kevin Summers, Bentleigh, Vic.

A new anthropology

Dear Editor,

Richard Martin’s review of my book ‘Against Native Title’: Conflict and creativity in outback Australia and Katie Glaskin’s Crosscurrents: Law and society in a native title claim to land and sea overlooks some vital aspects of the relationship between anthropology and native title (ABR, May 2018). Martin is a highly experienced native title anthropologist; it is understandable that he would wish to defend the institution of native title and foreground its benefits (which I take care to also acknowledge). However, in declaring his preference for Glaskin’s account, Martin fails to recognise the very different colonial histories, styles of anthropology, and genres of writing represented by these two books. Glaskin insightfully reports on her work as an expert witness forensic anthropologist: her book emerges

from research with claimants on a successful case. My work was undertaken in the midst of disorienting local identity contests, set in train by native title’s codified terms of recognition: I worked from the outside, with people who had come to distance themselves from a process that had hurt them. Martin could have summoned a more perceptive comparative reading, acknowledging the ways in which the vagaries and ahistoricity of the native title regime are enacted in the very trajectories of these two different cases.

I sought to account for a cynicism about native title in the place where I worked that was real. This is the messy, contradictory stuff of grounded politics, of minor realities that might challenge liberal attachments to notions of progress and the national good, but which the fieldworker has a responsibility to take seriously, document, and try to understand. I also describe the renewed and inventive relations some Aboriginal people have forged with Country and with ‘greenies’. Martin mistakes my portrait of a complex empirical reality for ‘utopian’ critique.

There was a time where anthropologists assumed the role of omniscient narrator, authoritatively explaining Aboriginal cultural difference to nonAboriginal readers. But in the shadow of native title’s emphasis on Indigenous otherness, I am one of many pursuing a new kind of anthropology that grapples instead with the relationships – colonial, state, and other – that shape the Indigenous present. Further, more collaborative and responsive modes of engagement with Indigenous analysis demand new ways of writing, which open up the space for reflection, for uncertainty, and, ultimately, for ethical commitments.

Eve Vincent, Lidcombe,

NSW

and uplifting Russian film four stars, then proceeds to misunderstand it, using words like ‘cold’ and ‘despairing’. It is true that the film’s premise, a missing child, is harrowing, and the outcome overwhelmingly tragic. Her implied judgement that the parents more or less had it coming to them, given their selfish obsession with new partners, is also understandable, but it has led her to miss the most important dimensions of the film. The ‘futile’ (her word) generosity of the group of volunteer searchers – ordinary citizens with no incentive other than their instinctive obligation to society – who spend freezing nights in frightening and sordid places trying to find an unknown boy whose own parents hardly cared about him, is, on the contrary, a miracle not only of dogged heroism, but of a sense of the collective which has profound roots in Russian spirituality. No, the boy’s life was not saved; but it is a double tragedy when a critic is blinded to a film’s rugged humanitarianism because she sees only a lack of ‘civic accountability’.

Judith Armstrong (online comment)

Vive la République

‘[Monarchy] has been enriched by corruption, imperialism, racism, slavery, and for me it’s not just suddenly we have a bi-racial bride and that diversity politics erases the history of that institution … [W]e need to be critical and we shouldn’t lose our critical eye when we look at these things and not be seduced by the pomp and ceremony, and recognise what this institution stands for.’

Loveless

Dear Editor, Anwen Crawford gives this superb

Randa Abdel-Fattah speaking on Q&A, ABC TV, 21 May 2018

THANKING OUR PARTNERS

Australian Book Review is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. ABR is supported by: the NSW Government through Create NSW; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland; the Western Australian Government through the Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries; and the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia.

We also acknowledge the generous support of our university partners Monash University and Flinders University; and we are grateful for the support of the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; The Ian Potter Foundation; the City of Melbourne; and Arnold Bloch Leibler.

Australian Book Review

June–July 2018, no. 402

Since 1961

First series 1961–74

Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1)

ISSN 0155-2864

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Published by Australian Book Review Inc.

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This issue was lodged with Australia Post on May 29.

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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Violación

Sexual trauma as a time traveller

Alecia Simmonds

RAPE AND RESISTANCE:

UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITIES OF SEXUAL VIOLATION

by Linda Martín Alcoff

Polity, $39.95 pb, 280 pp, 9780745691923

Linda Martín Alcoff ends her book Rape and Resistance with the question of love, as it has been explored in the fiction of DominicanAmerican writer Junot Díaz. There are no easy moral binaries in Díaz’s writing, she notes. Sex lives are navigated in the midst of intergenerational trauma transferred from mothers who are rape victims to daughters and sons. As Díaz says: ‘in the novel [The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] you see the way the horror of rape closes in on them all. The whole family is in this circuit of rape. And, you know, the point the book keeps making again and again and again is that, in the Dominican Republic, which is to say, in the world that the DR built, if you are a Beli, a Lola, a Yunior – if you are anybody – rape is never going to be far.’ Rape, as a form of colonial violence, ripples out from individuals to affect families, societies, and communities. Masculinity, Díaz argues, becomes ‘a hyperactive retreat from the vulnerability that accompanies real intimacy’. For Alcoff, Díaz represents precisely the kind of thinking she has aimed for in her book – intersectional, community-oriented, and unafraid of ambiguities.

Two days after I put down Alcoff’s

book, a personal essay by Díaz entitled ‘The Silence’ appeared in The New Yorker. ‘That violación,’ he wrote, ‘not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me. The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldn’t be enough.’ Díaz went on to describe the effects of child rape: ‘[it] threw me completely out of orbit, into the lightless regions of space where life is not possible.’ He tells us how ‘trauma is a time traveller, an ouroboros that reaches back and devours everything that came before’. As a boy, he ‘checks the locks on bedroom doors four times a night’, and as a man he lurches from one failed relationship to the next, never able to speak about what happened to him. Díaz documents his depression, his self-protective mask, and, finally, the therapy that healed him.

I wrote a draft review of Alcoff’s book with Díaz’s essay in front of me, marvelling at what a perfect coda his words provided for her work. The article underlined and in a way proved two of her most important arguments: words are hopelessly inadequate to describe rape – our cultural repertoire of concepts and narratives are either ill-fitting or complicit in violence; and survivors need to be accorded epistemic authority. The reason why Díaz has written so

Anne-Sophie Mutter plays Tchaikovsky

The “queen of the violin” returns to Sydney to perform Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto.

David Robertson conductor • Anne-Sophie Mutter violin

15 & 16

Sydney

House

Verdi’s Requiem

Don’t miss the opportunity to hear Verdi’s electrifyingly beautiful showpiece.

Oleg Caetani conductor ∙ Angel Blue soprano

Catherine Carby mezzo-soprano

Diego Torre tenor ∙ Jérôme Varnier bass

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs

21 JUNE, 6.30PM / 23 JUNE, 2PM

25 JUNE, 7PM

Sydney Opera House

A Night at the Speakeasy Rhapsody in Blue

Knock three times and tell them

George sent you! Then enter the shady world of the 1920s speakeasy for an evening of moonshine and martinis in a transformed concert hall.

Guy Noble conductor and compere

29 & 30 JUNE, 8PM

Sydney Opera House

Pictures at an Exhibition

The brilliant Benjamin Beilman makes his SSO debut with a new showpiece violin concert in the classic Romantic style. Then enjoy the vivid and exhilarating Pictures at an Exhibition, a true audience favourite!

Giancarlo Guerrero conductor Benjamin Beilman violin

APT MASTER SERIES 18, 20 & 21 JULY, 8PM

Sydney Opera House

coherently and cleverly on rape was because his experience as a survivor has accorded him knowledge. It is only through privileging rather than pathologising the voices of survivors that we will be able to expand our understanding of rape and move forward.

One week after I submitted the review, the Sydney Writers’ Festival, which had been highlighting Díaz, released a statement: ‘Eventually the past finds you’, they warned, quoting from Díaz’s personal essay, ‘As for so many in positions of power, the moment to reckon with the consequences of past behaviour has arrived.’ Díaz had withdrawn from the festival and other planned events in Australia and was on his way back to America. He had been confronted during the question time following a panel discussion by author Zinzi Clemmons about sexually assaulting her six years previous when she was a graduate student at Columbia. Clemmons later tweeted that Díaz had forced her to kiss him; she was followed by a host of other women who described verbal abuse and bullying. There was not just one past, it seemed, but many pasts, all intermeshed, a jostling of voices and victims engaged in a fraught conversation with the present. Aside from feeling exhausted by the news, my first response was to chop Díaz from the review. How could he stand for the general principle that we need to accord survivors authority when he had failed to account for the harm he had done to these women? Why did women bear the burden of publicly raising private harm, when he had had so much opportunity to do so? Could I say that he wrote cleverly about rape when he had failed to imagine the harm he inflicted upon his victims with the same sensitivity he had afforded himself?

de Leon’s words, but also, Alcoff would add, understanding – a perspective that acknowledges institutional failure, intergenerational trauma, and the way that historical violence can travel between past and present.

Alcoff’s powerful book comes as a welcome moment of pause for those of us who have been at once exhilarated and troubled by the #MeToo campaign. On the one hand, the unprecedented global outpouring of testimony about the harms (mostly) women endure affords the potential for genuine social change, yet too often the debate appears reductive, unnecessarily polarised, and with tendencies towards vigilantism on both sides. As Alcoff notes: ‘the atmosphere around sexual violence can appear to resemble a team sport with clearly demarcated sides and no space in the middle.’ Claims like ‘rape is rape’ are ultimately unhelpful. Rape, she argues, is just as clouded by ambiguity and complexity as sex.

Words are hopelessly inadequate to describe rape – our cultural repertoire of concepts and narratives are either ill-fitting or complicit in violence

But Alcoff is not writing this book from the middle ground; she is writing as a survivor, an advocate, and a feminist philosopher with an interest in metaphysics (how we name the world) and epistemology (how we know what we think we know). Social progressives, she rightly argues, should not baulk at complexity.

Upon further reflection, I decided to leave Díaz in because the episode stands for what is possibly the overarching theme of Alcoff’s book: the need to acknowledge complexity. A juridical approach looks to questions of individual culpability and finds itself confused when the abused become the abusers. A Western approach conflates personhood with agency and falters when victims, perceived to be a kind of degraded humanity lacking in will, respond to violence with violence. The kind of intersectional thinking that Alcoff exhorts is one that sees sexual violation as ‘not just traumatising singular victims’ but altering the victim’s family, community, and future relationships. Sexual violations, she argues, have an effect on ‘relationships of love and sex and on the construction of norms of masculinity as well as femininity’. And it is this ‘toxic’ model of masculinity, this ‘hyperactive retreat from vulnerability’, which links Díaz’s misogynistic verbal abuse with his sexual abuse. We accord him ‘compassion and accountability’, in Aya

Drawing upon philosopher Michel Foucault’s writing on the politics of speech, knowledge, and subjectivity, Alcoff argues that we need to change the way we talk about rape. The book’s seven chapters are thematically porous and certain overarching concerns run throughout, including: how to develop a better language for understanding the harm of rape; how to improve the social conditions within which survivor testimony is received, how to balance a philosophical wariness towards the authority of experience with the need to accord survivors presumptive credibility, and why our conceptual frames for understanding rape need to be intersectional and global.

Alcoff’s analysis of the language of consent is one of the highlights of the book and is particularly relevant in light of the Law Reform Commission’s current review of sexual consent laws in New South Wales. ‘You must explicitly ask for permission to have sex,’ declared Pru Goward, minister for the prevention of domestic violence and sexual assault, when commenting on the review, ‘if it’s not an enthusiastic yes, then it’s a no’. Yet when is sex ever so rational and transactional, Alcoff asks. Her incisive analysis of consent reveals how the application of the clod-footed juridical concept of consent to the delicate shadow-lands of sex can at best create confusion and at worst justify violence. The critique develops over three middle chapters and by the end has the feeling of a crescendo. We begin with some standard feminist criticism: consent implies an

active male who asks and a passive woman who accepts; in court it places the onus of proof on the woman; it presumes that women and men are equal parties and therefore eclipses the structural constraints placed on women’s decision-making, and, finally, merely saying ‘no’ or ‘yes’ provides a very low bar for sexual volition –social scientists are increasingly finding that women will consent to sex to avoid rape. Consent fails to ask about women’s desire, pleasure, and will.

These critiques are useful, but the analysis becomes truly exciting when Alcoff excavates the origins of consent in seventeenth-century ideas of property and contract. Here we have her insight that there is a poor fit between the temporality of contract – the promise to deliver goods over a specified period of time – with sex: ‘to consent to sex does not mean that you can commit to sustain a desire or a mood,’ she notes, and this thinking leads to beliefs that men are ‘owed’ sex if consent has been given. There is also the Lockean conflation of our personhood with property; the idea that contract allows you to consent to bargain out your body’s labour, which is what distinguishes free labour from slavery. When applied to sexual violence this contractual model of consent implies that we make a rational decision to offer up our bodies for sex prior to the act, rather than the act itself constituting our will. In other words, our bodies and minds are not separate; intention is embodied and this is why, Alcoff argues, rape is so damaging. It is not something separate from the self that is stolen; ‘it is not that “my body” has been taken; I have been taken’. This reasoning leads to Alcoff’s alternative to consent: the idea of sexual subjectivity, or the ability to engage in the process of making our sexual selves. Juridical modes of thinking have constrained us, she argues, and they have not been developed from the survivor’s point of view. Sexual subjectivity, on the other hand, grounds the survivor and her experiential knowledge at the centre of analysis. Consent, will, desire, and pleasure are all relevant when considering whether someone’s sexual agency has been violated, and from this vantage point we can see the intersubjective nature of rape – its wider effects upon families, communities, and cultures, and its complicity in colonialism.

At a time when popular feminism appears to have abandoned research, Rape and Resistance is a reminder of the joys of an activist agenda informed by deep thinking, experiential knowledge, and incisive theoretical analysis. It is because, rather than in spite of, its scholarly tone that this book deserves the widest audience. g

Alecia Simmonds is an inter-disciplinary scholar in law and history at UTS and NYU-Sydney, and a writer for Gourmet Traveller and Fairfax Digital. Her book Wild Man: A true story of a police killing, mental illness and the law won the 2016 Davitt prize for best crime nonfiction. She is currently working on a book on the historical relationship between love and law in Australia. ❖

Balancing the books

An engrossing study of accountancy

Rémy Davison

THE BIG FOUR:

THE CURIOUS PAST AND PERILOUS FUTURE OF THE GLOBAL ACCOUNTING MONOPOLY

by Ian D. Gow and Stuart Kells

La Trobe University Press/Black Inc., $32.99 pb, 260pp, 9781863959964

What’s an accountant’s favorite book? 50 Shades of Grey . But in a world of transfer pricing and Special Purpose Entities, suddenly accounting isn’t funny anymore. A 1976 Congressional report noted that the Big Eight accounting firms controlled ‘virtually all aspects of accounting and auditing in the US’. Multinationals, presidents, prime ministers, and pro tennis players hide their vast wealth in offshore tax havens like Panama and the Bahamas. The message is clear: to keep your dosh from the tax collector’s greedy grasp, you’ll likely need a Big Four accountant.

Who are the Big Four? Deloitte, Ernst & Young (EY), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and KPMG are the great survivors of the buccaneering nineteenth-century Gilded Age of silver, wine, art, and gold. Ian D. Gow and Stuart Kells’s book traces the lineage of the original ‘Big Eight’, which became the ‘Big Five’ until Arthur Andersen’s sudden demise in 2002 in the aftermath of the Enron scandal. In 2018 the Big Four employed one million people globally, with 25,000 in Australia alone.

Unsurprisingly, this tale of power, greed, and corruption begins (and ends) with the Medici, that ruthless mafiosi family of bankers whose spawn ascended to become Europe’s queens, dukes, and popes. The Medici’s rise coincided with the burgeoning wealth of the Italian city-states, where the ‘father of accounting’, Luca Pacioli, authored his groundbreaking Summa de arithmetica (1494), which institutionalised the practice of double-entry accounting. The flourishing, Florence-based Medici banking network enveloped the continent, but

it was the accountants who determined which parts of the business were profitable, and which managers were dishonest. Ever the innovators, the Medici created corporate networks, ensuring one part of the franchise was sufficiently autonomous to fireproof the rest of the business from risk. Every modern multinational corporation has duplicated the Medici model; James Hardie Industries learned this lesson well.

Gow and Kells’s argument is clear: the Big Four, like the major banks, are systemically important to the functioning of global finance. Accountants and auditors were critical to the embryosis of the nation-state in the sixteenth century and formed a symbiotic relationship with both government and finance throughout the last 500 years. Recall how French finance ministers Turgot and Necker tried in vain to save Louis XVI from bankruptcy until the revolution and the guillotine severed the link between the monarch and his money. Permanently.

Imagine the clubby atmosphere of nineteenth-century British high finance: the richly-panelled walls; vintage Chesterfields in aged buffalo hide; and the grey men (no women) in suits. Through wafts of cigar smoke, one might discern the Big Four’s founders: Edwin Waterhouse, Samuel Price, William Deloitte, Frederick Whinney (EY), and James Marwick and William Peat (KPMG). This was the heyday of J.P. Morgan and the Rothschilds in the era of the nineteenth-century robber baron. Morgan even owned the Titanic (and her two sister ships), through one of his notorious trusts, just to emphasise how wealthy he really was.

This kind of conspicuous con -

sumption has long merited attention, evidenced by innumerable bank biographies. But curiously, the bankers’ bookkeepers – the accountants – have been overlooked by financial historians; perhaps this is the way the auditors prefer it. There are few tomes focusing upon the chequered history of these behemoths. Gow and Kells’s story of the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms serves as a useful corrective, filling in an important gap in the literature.

Governments for half a millennium have recognised how important accountants are to their financial and fiscal

Every modern multinational corporation has duplicated the Medici model; James Hardie Industries learned this lesson well

stability. Thus, accountants were welcomed into the ranks of other professionals, such as scientists, teachers, doctors, and priests: the state’s ‘foot-soldiers of integrity’. Indeed, many nineteenthcentury accountants were fraud-busters par excellence; William Deloitte and Edwin Waterhouse uncovered numerous lies and deceptions in the booming railway industry, and their efforts not only brought about parliamentary legislation, but also the establishment of mandatory double-entry accounting in Britain in 1868.

The Big Four audit ninety-nine per cent of the world’s major corporations. No other financial oligopoly enjoys such a level of market dominance. But this hydra has grown many heads; PwC

employs 2,400 lawyers in eighty-nine countries, while Deloitte has 1,300 lawyers in fifty-six countries. Unsurprisingly, law firms are deeply unhappy about this encroachment on their turf. As the authors note, the increasingly beleaguered legal industry has accused the accountants of ‘surrogate’ law practices, prompting defensive ‘Big Law’ mergers globally.

The Big Four’s tentacles are not only wrapped around the legal industry; they have also assumed a vice-like grip upon the lucrative ‘advisory’ market, challenging traditionally dominant players, such as McKinsey’s and Boston Consulting. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, advisory accounted for almost half of the revenues of all of the Big Four. By 2013 more than half of Deloitte’s revenue came from consultancies.

There were sound commercial reasons for transitioning to consulting. The problem with accounting as a business is that it relies upon a mad rush during peak periods. Consulting is also attractive because it provides a solution to the vagaries of the business cycle; how can an accounting firm take advantage of busts as well as booms? The answer lay in entering the insolvency market, thus ensuring accountants truly became men for all seasons.

In China, the Big Four’s expansion saw the government grow deeply resentful of what it saw as plenipotentiaries of American regulatory power trampling on China’s economic sovereignty. Western accounting firms were likely gathering far too much sensitive ‘national economic information’ as well. In 2007, the Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission responded in classic Politburo form: it created a raft of competing Chinese corporations to take on the Big Four.

But will they last? Gow and Kells argue that the Big Four are vulnerable, particularly to litigation. It is clear the authors see a GFC-type contagion effect engulfing the Big Four, just as established banks collapsed in 2008. Congress has recommended all of the Big Four prepare ‘living wills’, like banks, for the orderly transfer of clients and contracts in the event of their demise. They are obvious targets for anti-trust

laws, which may force them to spin-off their accounting, auditing, or consulting businesses. More ominously, digital disruption looms, with the routine tasks of accountancy likely to be replaced by artificial intelligence imbued with smart algorithms. In 2016, EY predicted it might halve its junior intake by 2020.

Gow and Kells have avoided writing

dry, academic corporate biographies. Instead, they have produced an engrossing book full of illuminating and sobering facts. It deserves a wide readership. g

Rémy Davison is Jean Monnet Chair in Politics and Economics at Monash University. His forthcoming book is The Political Economy of the Eurozone Crises.

A law unto themselves

Redressing wealth inequality

Richard Walsh

FAIR SHARE:

COMPETING CLAIMS AND AUSTRALIA’S ECONOMIC FUTURE

by

Stephen

Bell and Michael Keating Melbourne University Press, $59.99 hb, 408 pp, 9780522872279

This is not a book with immediate appeal for the general reader, who is likely to be deterred by the denseness of its analysis. That is unfortunate, because its message deserves to be widely disseminated. It provides a useful account of economic history since the end of World War II, both internationally and in Australia, and ultimately offers a bespoke reform agenda.

The authors’ account begins with the 1977 analysis by the OECD of the stagflation then globally rampant. The inter-government organisation argued that the principal cause of this malaise was ‘the competing claims on resources exerted by different socio-economic groups’. According to Stephen Bell and Michael Keating, the main agents propelling such competing claims are workers, business, capital holders, voters, and community and state élites. Forty years later, the authors see those agents still making their competing claims, but now enormous power is in the hands of the wealthy; the result is the vast inequality highlighted by Thomas Picketty’s influential Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and preoccupying economists and politicians alike.

The authors believe that capitalism

and democracy operate according to competing distributional principles: ‘Democracy entails a system of equal rights in the political sphere, arming citizens with votes, various entitlements and, for many, a source of rent or income. By contrast, capitalist markets are based on a system of unequal property rights that endow capitalists and the propertied with substantial economic and political resources.’ However, each needs the other; in the words of the former governor of the Central Bank of India, Raghuram Rajan, when they work well ‘each of these systems softens the deficiencies of the other’.

During the 1950s and 1960s – the so-called Golden Age – Australia experienced strong economic growth. Electoral contentment was created by the fact that those on middle incomes shared in this prosperity and their expectations were not high; they feared a return to the privations of the Great Depression and the war years. But in the 1970s everything changed. Being economists, Bell and Keating ignore the important social changes at that time and diagnose that demand was exceeding economic capacity; the Oil Shock of 1973 created a global redistribution between oil producers and oil importers. A

more militant work force was prepared to stand its ground, even in the midst of a recession. Ultimately, both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher discovered that they could win elections by persuading voters that the only way to fight inflation was to weaken the power of the working class. This was what John Kenneth Galbraith called a ‘revolt of the rich’, and their victory has continued down to the present day. In the words of Bell and Keating:

Under profit, cost and competitiveness pressures since the 1970s, business interests have fought for lower taxes, a realignment of regulation and wage restraint. ‘Wage flexibility’ and ‘competitiveness’ have become the new business mantras. At the same time, inequality has risen in many developed countries, as powerful market actors at the top of income distribution, and especially in English-speaking countries, have cast aside any sense of restraint themselves and have dramatically increased their share of income and wealth, none more so than in the financial sector.

Of course, the new ingredient in the struggle between competing claims has been the rapid development of new technology during the last twenty years. By producing a dramatic decline in middle-level jobs, this has increased inequality. The authors pay little attention to the fact that it has also created new global behemoths that act as though they are a law unto themselves.

The principle thesis of this book is that diminishing inequality is not merely a moral imperative, but economically beneficial. Very simply, where the majority of people have little disposable income, there is a weak demand for goods and services. In the words of the authors: ‘reducing inequality can assist economic growth and economic growth can help resolve the competing claims that arise from increasing inequality ... In our view, increased government intervention in favour of a more equitable distribution of income will not risk damaging the economy – rather it is likely to be a pre-condition of future economic growth.’

In their account of all these de-

velopments, Bell and Keating are very focused on the business and political environment in Australia. While they regard the extent of inequality in Australia as being broadly comparable to that of many other advanced countries, the overall increase in income inequality here during the last decades has been less than elsewhere. Nonetheless, lessening inequality has to become an urgent objective.

In pioneer countries like Australia (and the United States), we have traditionally prided ourselves on equality of opportunity. But housing unaffordability, a disproportionate loss of jobs in outer suburbs, and poorer educational provision are exacerbating inequality. The most passionate advocacy by Bell and Keating is for the provision of a sound education for all. They regard the reduction in spending on education during the last decade as alarming. They believe that vocational education and training is under-funded and poorly conceived: it is ‘currently too focused on training for today’s jobs, and trainees are not learning the adaptability skills that will enable them to compete for tomorrow’s jobs’. More money needs to be spent on retraining those thrown out of work, and they are particularly impressed by the results obtained by the Danes in a system dubbed ‘flexisecurity’.

The authors are scathing about the clamour for company tax reduction. They say that the evidence suggests that Australia has never experienced difficulty in attracting investment (including from our near neighbours, who have always had lower company taxes) and that this will continue, with or without a reduction in our company tax rates. They want to persuade us that both our current business and personal tax rates are reasonable. Their conclusion is adamant:

Our examination of the evidence shows that Australia is an exceptionally lowtaxed country compared with similar advanced economies, and having regard to the standards of public services and welfare that Australians expect. This and other evidence also strongly suggest that Australia could afford to raise a little more revenue by increas-

ing taxation without risking future economic growth. Assuming that some of the extra revenue were to be spent on improving education and training, promoting innovation and on properly evaluated infrastructure projects, this would most probably lead to an increase in economic growth.

This is a complex book, bursting with insights and ideas that will stimulate debate. It is impossible in a review of this length to do justice to the facts and the arguments it has mustered. For the non-economist, it is a challenging read; but well worth the effort. g

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Wider resonances

A wide-angled approach to Australian arts

Paul Giles

LOVE AND LAMENT:

AN ESSAY ON THE ARTS IN AUSTRALIA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

by Margaret Plant

Thames and Hudson, $60 pb, 512 pp, 9780500501238

Love and Lament offers a bracingly revisionist and upbeat account of how the arts flourished across a broad cultural spectrum in Australia over the course of the twentieth century.

Margaret Plant, an emeritus professor of the visual arts at Monash University, argues explicitly with the thesis propounded by Keith Hancock, Donald Horne, and others that Australian cultural taste was ‘conservative and backward’. In ranging widely across architecture, film, photography, music, dance, and popular culture, as well as literature and painting, she demonstrates convincingly that, as she puts it, there was ‘no dormant period’ in Australian cultural and artistic life during this time.

Plant’s book is organised conceptually in terms of decades, with ten chapters stretching from ‘Bush, Desert, Film and Federation: 1900 to 1910’ through to ‘The 1990s: Conflicts, Museums, Ceremonies and the Millennium’. The strength of such an approach is that it enables a multivalent, wide-angled portrayal of each different decade, showing how well-known figures intersected in sometimes circuitous ways with the cultural politics of their time. It also integrates a great many fascinating oddball details, as for example with her account of the theosophical radio station 2GB that operated in the 1920s, or of silent cinema director Charles Chauvel’s efforts to run a ‘Chauvel School of Scenario Writing’ in Sydney from 1933 to 1936.

Heterogeneity and diversity are the watchwords of this book, but the risk it always runs is superficiality, of attempting to cover too much ground too quickly. Sometimes the descriptions of

major authors seem too brief and encyclopedia-like to be useful to anyone other than those seeking basic background information. Though Plant is good on Norman Lindsay and on the ‘manyvoiced texture’ of Percy Grainger, her treatments of Patrick White and Les Murray, for example, are radically oversimplified. The insistence on separating out individual decades is also detrimental to her consideration of these major figures, since neither writer’s oeuvre can readily be categorised in terms of the cultural politics of any given decade. This lends Plant’s book at times a repetitive strain, since she finds herself compelled to trace the fortunes of key figures across several decades in successive chapters. However, she cites here Graeme Turner’s critical work on ‘decadology’, and one of the virtues of Love and Lament is its implicit awareness of the advantages and disadvantages of the author’s own analytical approach. The book is particularly perceptive about situations where cross-cultural forces intersect with one another, and she writes illuminatingly about, for example, the importance of Randolph Stow’s librettos for the music of Peter Maxwell Davies. It is also open to discussions of international influences, with Plant observing how the spirit of Jean Baudrillard and postmodernism first manifested itself in Australia through a series of academic conferences held in the early 1980s. This is definitely not an isolationist cultural history, but one informed by comparative perspectives. The wide-angle lens also allows the author to take into account theoretical questions of gender, and she comments, for example, on how Vance Palmer’s critical work

during the Menzies era served effectively ‘to confirm the Australian tradition of the masculine bushman’. But the individual sections on writers such as Henry Handel Richardson, Christopher Brennan, and Christina Stead are more fragmented, and Plant seems more comfortable when she can explain artists and artworks synchronically, in terms of the contemporary influences that helped to shape them, rather than diachronically, in relation to their own internal complexity and the artist’s evolution across time.

The reader might infer here a book shaped in significant ways by editorial policy, with Thames and Hudson perhaps wanting a reference work that would be accessible and useful to readers in a wide range of institutional contexts. Such demands would also help to account for the multiplicity of subheadings here, a feature that breaks up the flow of the argument and gives the book a discontinuous feel, even though these subdivisions do make it easier for readers to find particular morsels of information. It is true that many of Plant’s observations are telling, if brief, and overall the author does a remarkable job of capturing the richness and variety of Australian cultural life. She is particularly good on music, making astute comments about the significance of jazz in the 1940s and on the role played by astronomy in Richard Meale’s classical music of the 1960s. Indeed, in terms of the eclectic nature of its purview, it is hard to see how this book could have been bettered. Inevitably, given the wealth of information provided here,

there are a few minor errors. The poet Robert D. FitzGerald is spelt incorrectly throughout, while the official title of Don McLean’s musical tribute to Vincent Van Gogh is ‘Vincent’, rather than, as is suggested here, ‘Starry Starry Night’. There is no real conclusion to this book other than that the twentieth century provided ‘rich cultural offerings’, since the trajectory of this narrative is not polemic but accumulation. Nevertheless, the book is extensively documented, so that readers can consult the plentiful footnotes to chase up any particular topic that might interest them, and given the breadth of its cultural coverage Love and Lament would be an ideal acquisition for public libraries. Yet the intellectual scope of this book carries a wider resonance, in the way that it seeks not only to describe but also to justify an idiosyncratic Australian tradition. Plant cites with approbation Humphrey McQueen’s ‘brilliant study’ The Black Swan of Trespass (1979), and her own work carries a similar kind of iconoclastic charge. In its adumbration of a rich cultural field where high and low cultures intersected in manifold ways, Love and Lament provides a welcome and indeed necessary corrective to the old-fashioned idea that Australia in the twentieth century suffered from a cultural time lag. Though Plant’s book does at times suggest a packaged format, it has also been very handsomely produced and, more importantly, it encompasses a wealth of fascinating and sometimes off-beat material between its covers. g

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English Literature at the University of Sydney.

Interruption: An Assay

Sometimes you took the shape of an unseen mosquito, sometimes of illness.

Presumed most of the time to be passing, yet importunate as a toddler who demanded her own way, as a phone that would not stop ringing long after it should.

Unignorable pavement slap of the gone-flat tire.

All afternoon the thunder was interrupted by sunshine. All night the rain was interrupted by trees and roofs.

And still, as rusting steel is uninterrupted by dryness and hunger uninterrupted by sleep, interruption and non-interruption sat in the day’s container as salt sits in milk, one whiteness disguised by another.

As a fish in a tank is interrupted by glass, and turns, a person’s fate is to continue despite, until.

Death: an interruption not passing, weighing one hundred and fifty eight pounds, carried on cut plywood with yellow straps.

Birth: an interruption between two windows, trying to think of a joke, a tune, that is new.

Between them: this navigation by echolocation and Lidar, the weathers of avalanche, earthquake, tsunami, firestorm, drought; a moment that sets down – gently, sleepily – its half-read novel on the bedside table whose side turned toward the wall stays unpainted, confident the story will be there again come morning.

Jane Hirshfield’s most recent books are The Beauty and Ten Windows: How great poems transform the world (both 2015). A chancellor emerita of The Academy of American Poets, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Jane Hirshfield ❖

‘The mistake, it’s your life’

Myriad puppets from a consummate ventriloquist

Robert Dessaix

THE FRIENDLY ONES

by Philip Hensher

Fourth Estate, $32.99 hb, 579 pp, 9780008175641

‘Nothing matters very much,’ says Hilary Spinster, one of the main characters in Philip Hensher’s mammoth mêlée of a novel, ‘and most things don’t matter at all’. How true, we think to ourselves, how liberating! Is this the aphorism (borrowed from Lord Salisbury) that will finally pinpoint the Big Idea underlying the story? Given all the lives ruined by people making wrong decisions in these pages, it has been tempting to think something matters.

But no, Lord Salisbury’s bon mot pinpoints nothing. In the first place, there is no single Big Idea in The Friendly Ones. Hensher juggles many ideas from several cultures. He is a superb conjurer, but never an ideologue. In fact, Big Ideas are to be avoided in Hensher’s world. The Friendly Ones, those Pakistani murder squads that have given their name to the novel, had a very big idea indeed. In any case, Lord Salisbury’s maxim is clearly untrue, as are most of the adages both the English and Bangladeshi characters come out with in the course of their long, chatty lives.

In Hensher’s hands, though, we will believe almost anything anyone says while they are still speaking. He is a consummate ventriloquist. All the same, he does run on. Sometimes the blather is mesmerising, sometimes you wish he’d just shut up. For some six hundred pages, spanning whole lifetimes on two continents, he records in minute detail the kaleidoscoping conversations and relationships of two Sheffield families, the Sharifullahs from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and the Spinsters next door – and their aunts, uncles, boyfriends, flatmates, flatmates’ friends, taxi drivers, hairdressers, work colleagues, and many, many others. On

the way, he ventriloquises through the myriad puppets on his knee the voices of characters as diverse as a London banker’s wife, Bengali-speaking servants in Dhaka in the 1970s, a hopelessly selfdeluded Italian student, the young millionaire owners of Fuck That Games (a video games company), a veiled Muslim woman on her honeymoon in Land’s End, a couple of foul-mouthed Cypriot barbers, any number of vile children from witches to violent bullies, and the Sharifullahs’ daughter, who eventually becomes, through her charity work, a baroness.

While the spectacle is spellbinding, it is hard to care deeply about any of these characters. What, indeed, in this age of rambling fictions, makes a reader care about the characters (whatever ‘care’ might mean)? Hensher does better than some. Arundhati Roy, for instance, the virtuoso Indian writer with whom he has been compared, also tells complicated stories with flashbacks about several generations of unravelling families, framed by political turmoil and brutality, yet, while Roy teaches us a multitude of things about Indian society and the violence in Kashmir, the human heart, the focus of all caring, remains a total mystery, and all hope of redemption or transformation fades. Hensher teaches us more about this enigmatic yet vital organ than Roy does, seducing us through deft shifts in linguistic register into sharing for a few pages a dazzling array of viewpoints. And transformation is sometimes possible in Hensher’s world – rarely, but it does happen. Even so, are there simply too many players in this drama for us to care about any of them more than superficially? Ironically, the metafictional game-playing that gives us access to the characters’ individ-

ual ways of seeing the world also underlines their role as puppets. Puppets have no hearts.

A couple of Hensher’s characters – Hilary’s son Leo and Aisha, the daughter of Hilary’s Bangladeshi neighbours – are set up to interest us in more complex ways. They are based, Hensher tells us, on Pushkin’s Tatyana and Eugene from Eugene Onegin: Aisha does indeed write Leo a letter confessing to an infatuation (although not quite the poetic masterpiece Tatyana’s was). Leo

In Hensher’s hands we will believe almost anything anyone says while they are still speaking

brushes her aside and then, years later, on meeting her again, shows a spark of interest, only to be rejected in his turn. However, Aisha and Leo are figures in a congested suburban landscape that we instantly recognise, leading lives so real in every scrupulously recorded particular that the reader has no need to imagine anything, becoming a mere spectator. Pushkin trusts us to share in the act of creation, allowing us to discover depths in ourselves while exploring fictional characters from a society that disappeared two centuries ago. There are many intriguing thematic threads weaving in and out of the fabric of Hensher’s polyphonic performance. Our ventriloquist gets his dolls talking illuminatingly about what makes a nation, for instance. Indeed, it is surely one of the most civilised, most nuanced presentations of the problem of nation-

hood in these times of mass migration and instant communication yet attempted. Hensher does not just want us to consider the importance of knowing people who are not like us: he wants us to think in their language so as to change the way we see and understand.

Another major theme concerns whether it is class or race that divides us into hostile camps. Aisha, on her way up the social ladder to becoming a member of the House of Lords, thinks it is class. For most of the novel’s characters it looks like something with less of a Marxist ring: status. Most of those who seek status are dealt with harshly by the puppet-master.

On a less political, yet in some ways more cutting, level, The Friendly Ones confronts each one of us with the awful possibility that, like Hilary’s dying wife, Celia (his ‘booby-prize’, as he callously calls her), we too may well have made a ‘terrible mistake’ early in life only to discover that ‘the mistake, it’s your life’. Almost everyone with a name in this novel makes a terrible mistake at a pivotal moment when still quite young, especially, but not only, when choosing a husband, wife, or lover, perhaps echoing the mistakes Tatyana and Eugene made. However, in The Friendly Ones the mistakes are too specific to touch us deeply. One of Hilary’s sons catches the bus blown up by terrorists in Tavistock Square, for instance. A bad choice of bus. There you go.

Is there any redemption for our mistakes? Right at the novel’s end, there is a sort of coming together of all the factions and branches of the two central neighbouring families. This general merrymaking on Hilary’s hundredth birthday is pleasingly Shakespearean, as it’s meant to be – The Winter’s Tale was apparently the model. It’s amusingly artificial, reprising the party the novel opens with, but it looks like closure rather than redemption.

This is a fascinating performance, but the narrator talks too much. People do, of course, but The Friendly Ones is art, not life. g

Robert Dessaix is a novelist, essayist, and memoirist. His latest book is The Pleasures of Leisure (2017).

Dream states and scapes Fiona Wright

BOHEMIA BEACH by Justine Ettler

Transit

Lounge

$29.99 pb, 324 pp, 9781925760002

Bohemia Beach is a highly anticipated novel – the first work by Justine Ettler in twenty years. In many ways, it is a continuation of her oeuvre: a fast-paced, almost madcap tale about a wildly careening woman and the violent men she is drawn to, with obsession and addiction driving much of the narrative and narration. The novel is set largely in the Czech Republic in 2002, when the country was on the cusp of change: still dealing with the legacy of communism, but also turning towards the European Union and the market forces and systems that it entails.

The novel opens on the titular beach, in a dream-state narrated by the main character, Cathy, a prodigious concert pianist, whose increasingly erratic behaviour and alcoholism have caused her life – career, marriage, sense of self – to fall apart. Cathy has been hospitalised following an accident during the Hundred Years Water floods earlier that year, the worst floods ever to hit Prague, which saw widespread evacuations and destruction across the city (and elsewhere in Europe). What follows is an account of the chaotic and confusing events that preceded Cathy’s accident, as well as her attempts to recover her physical and emotional health in its aftermath, assisted by her pop-psychology-spouting ‘life guru’, Nelly, and her kindly doctor, Edgar.

These names are deliberate references to Wuthering Heights, and there are other characters, in Prague, named after counterparts from Czech writer Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Tomas, Franz, and Sabine. Indeed, Cathy also adopts the name Tereza – her middle name – while she is in Prague, in part in homage to this text. This is a technique also at work in Ettler’s

first novel, The River Ophelia (1995), whose two main characters bear names drawn from the text that informs its story of sexual obsession and power play, the Marquis de Sade’s novel Justine (1791), which in turn informs the narrative that Ettler superimposes upon it.

It is not hard to see other similarities here too. Cathy, like Justine, is attracted to unkind and uncaring men who treat her badly; both characters rely on a steady supply of drugs to keep their equilibrium, both feel powerless within their own lives, trapped and unable to change. At times, even the narration of both characters is similar – in The River Ophelia, Justine states: ‘What’s wrong with me? […] Nothing can help me […] I’m never going to be happy. I’m never going to believe I can be happy. I’m never going to be in control of my life.’ This sentiment is echoed in Bohemia Beach by Cathy, speaking on the telephone to Nelly, ‘I can’t keep doing this … And it’s always like this … I’ve tried and tried […] But there’s just no point –it always turns out the same.’

Ettler’s gritty, punky aesthetic, one of the strongest characteristics of her earlier works, is also present in Bohemia Beach, but it is complicated here, and made more complex, by frequent irruptions of the Gothic. Often, this is expressed through landscapes, and especially buildings: many of the key events take place within a dilapidated castle, belonging to Tomas’s family, and with a long history of dispossessions and repossession; elsewhere, there is a bedroom with a ‘secret passageway’ and a library full of H. Rider Haggard and M.R. James ghost stories, a Prague nightclub with a hidden room for special guests. But it is an updated kind of Gothic, explicitly, rather than just implicitly, linked to repressed or ‘original’ traumas, be they family secrets, unexpressed for many years, or broader histories affecting the entire nation of the Czech Republic. These two scales of trauma converge on the figure of Odette, Cathy’s mother – a Czech dancer who migrated to London during the communist era, and whose history is one of the central mysteries of the book. These secrets and palpable ambiguities give the book much of its energy – it feels, at times, like a psychological

thriller, albeit a remarkably intelligent one – and they also make it an intriguing read. Ettler is interested in the subjective and the irresolute, and also in shaping a female narrator who is both unreliable and often unlikeable – and these are both refreshing and bold choices, and important politically, as well as aesthetically. At times, Cathy’s drunken and self-deluded stream-of-consciousness narration can become overbearing, especially as it is often circular, often

Ettler’s gritty, punky aesthetic is present in Bohemia Beach

fixated on alcohol and men – but this is to be expected, given that these are the two objects of her addictions. Similarly, not all of the dream-states and -scapes that she describes are entirely successful. But Cathy’s voice is strong, and distinctive – frantic but often funny, hurting but holding it together, if only for now.

Bohemia Beach, an ambitious novel, weaves together different modes and temporalities, and relies on gaps and absences as much as what is openly expressed to draw the reader along. A book of excess as much as it is about excess, it is every bit as raw and gripping as Ettler’s earlier works. Its wildness and energy are refreshingly offbeat, and unique in our contemporary fiction landscape. Ettler’s patient fans will not be disappointed. g

Fiona Wright is a writer, editor, and critic from Sydney. Her latest poetry collection is Domestic Interior (Giramondo, 2017).

Census time

Beejay Silcox

CENSUS by Jesse Ball

Text Publishing

$29.99 pb, 272 pp, 9781925603446

You have come to see a magic show. You arrive at the theatre, take your seat. Before the show begins, the magician steps onstage in his street clothes and explains what you are about to see; where the mirrors are hidden – every trapdoor, false bottom, and wire. When the lights go down, impossibly – even after everything you know – you don’t see the trickery, you see magic. Such is the strange conjuring that is Jesse Ball’s Census

‘My brother Abram Ball died in 1998,’ the author begins, addressing his readers directly in a candid letter that precedes the novel. ‘He was twenty-four years old and had Down syndrome.’ Census, we are told, was born of a desire to capture his brother’s life on the page, not by recharting its course through memoir, but by evoking its nature: ‘something so tremendous and full of light’.

These opening pages are both wholly earnest and an act of literary misdirection, for what a reader might expect now that the emotional mechanisms have been laid bare is not the show to come. Census is no wistful weepy or eloquent polemic – cynics take note: it is an absurdist metaphysical parable, reminiscent of Beckett, Kafka, or Calvino. In short, it’s a Jesse Ball novel; the thirtynine-year-old’s eighth in just over a decade and further evidence that he is one of America’s most interesting highconcept voices.

In the fine tradition of absurdist metaphysical parables, Census opens with an unnamed man digging his own grave. He is a former surgeon, a widower, a father, and our narrator. It is no mystery that his story will end in this lonely patch of dirt, but until then he is waiting: ‘as I wait images circle – of my life, of my son, of these most recent days’. Census is an account

of these most recent days, the days after the man learns he is dying and volunteers as a census-taker, driving with his son through a melancholy country of consecutively lettered towns, from A to Z: ‘It will give us something to do, a last season together, a purpose that has essentially as much purpose as a thing can have, yet no purpose at all.’ Part odyssey, part fool’s errand.

Of the son, we learn everything that matters and nothing that can be pathologised. We learn that he can ‘leap out of his heart into some empathy with the thing observed, whether it is a Ferris wheel or a tortoise’; that he fills their journey with song. We learn that when people meet him they ‘stop at a distance they consider safe’, but tellingly, ‘it is never the same distance’. As Ball has explained in an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, ‘The use of any of the language associated with disability and handicap immediately forfeits any possibility for a full portrait.’

The terrain of this strange country is surreal and somnambulant, as if imagined by Dr Seuss and populated by David Lynch – a Vaseline-lensed kingdom of convivial menace. There is a train that travels west on even-numbered days and east on odd-numbered days; a town where parents cut off their children’s thumbs to save them from a life in a misfortune-prone rope factory. There are puzzle-makers and aging nymphomaniacs, a mayor who wishes she were a cormorant, a doctor in a too-white coat. After participating in the census, each person is marked (somewhat sinisterly) with a tattoo on a designated rib.

The ideas may be fantastical, but the prose is not: ‘I would rather go about the thing plainly,’ our narrator explains. This sparseness allows Census to strain credulity by rendering the phantasmagorical as ordinary. It largely succeeds. Ball, like his narrator’s clown-mimic wife, is ‘one of those performers who gives a sense that there is no performance, it is just life and we happen to see it’.

Linguistic austerity does not belie emotional austerity. Like Ball’s previous work, Census is precise rather than frigid. The novel is stoically irreverent, riddled with existential riddles. Its closing paragraphs are some of the finest in

recent American fiction – wrenching and raw – and its final pages contain a wordless coda that description ruins. Ball is a writer who knows that the art of seeing can be diminished by the act of looking: ‘out in the world I have come to see that he who looks too hard for any particular thing, though he may find it, will certainly miss the most wondrous and strange things he passes, though they stare him in the face’.

The terrain of this strange country is surreal

and somnambulant

As the narrator and his son drive deeper and deeper into the alphabet, the narrator strays from his census-bureau script – he stops looking and starts seeing. He begins by allowing his son to choose the houses where they stop, then he amends the questions they ask. Soon he abandons the questions altogether, though not the quest, for it is the son who is the novel’s true measure, its census. His innocence is confronting in its perfection, in how much it demands of others in demanding nothing at all: ‘It is hard to feel someone owes you anything when they live without regret. What you do for them you do for yourself, isn’t it so?’

Ball describes Census as a ‘hollow’ book, designed around the memory of his brother. ‘I would place him in the middle of it, and write around him.’ In clumsier hands this would read as a trick – a narrative carapace. In Ball’s, it is sorcery. g

At the edges

Geordie Williamson

LAST STORIES

by William Trevor Viking

$29.95 pb, 214 pp, 9780241337776

‘In nearly all Trevor’s stories,’ wrote V.S. Pritchett almost four decades ago, ‘we are led on at first by plain unpretending words about things done to prosaic people; then comes this explosion of conscience, the assertion of will which in some cases may lead to hallucination and madness.’ Even here, in this collection drawing together those final stories left after William Trevor’s death in 2016, the same method holds true. Take ‘The Crippled Man’, the second piece of ten. It begins with an exchange between an older Irishman and two foreign workmen in the kitchen of a crumbling smallholding in County Kildare about the possibility of their painting his house. There could be no more homespun opening than the question of price based on one coat or two while a black cat pounces on pieces of bark fallen from firewood.

Still, there is so much more trembling at the edges of the story. The crippled old man is not in full charge of the moneys with which he intends to pay the painters.The painters aren’t Polish, as they claim to be. And the middle-aged woman who lives in the house, caring for her distant cousin on the understanding that his house and land will become hers on his death, has lost patience with her ward.

And yet Trevor’s approach is, as always, implicative as opposed to revel-

atory. We cannot know what moves the woman to act. We don’t even know what it is she’s done; only that, at a certain point over the coming weeks, the old man disappears from his home. Instead, readers are sent to follow the two painters, brothers and undocumented migrants from a forgotten corner of Eastern Europe, and witness what they may over their shoulders as the task is done:

Once, through the grimy panes of an upstairs window, the younger brother saw the woman crouched over a dressing table, her head on her arms as if she slept, or wept. She looked up while he still watched, his curiosity beyond restraint, and her eyes stared back at him but she did not avert her gaze.

This is realism, in the sense that authorial intelligence or knowledge is restrained by the shape of the character inhabited, by that necessarily limited perspective on the world. There is no mythic reverberation or overt symbolism, no easy leap into some godlike position to resolve some mystery or other. Just stories regarding individual human privacies – whether good, evil, or banal –glimpsed or overheard by others in partial form.

In ‘Mrs Crasthorpe’, the perspective of a newly minted widow is crosshatched with that of a man, living in the same London streets, who loses his wife to some awful disease. Where he is gentle, reserved, sealed up in his grief, she is keen to escape the memory of a boring if financially secure marriage, and once again engage with the sensual world. We have no idea what Etheridge – to give the man his name – looks like until brassy Mrs Crasthorpe happens across him one day in the street. Their meetings in the months that follow are brief and unintended (especially on Etheridge’s part), but he does see her from the window of a restaurant during a work lunch one final time. She is involved in an altercation with a younger man, one that ends in his being removed by police in handcuffs. Etheridge thinks little of it until, sometime later, he reads of the discovery of her dead body. We readers know that the altercation involved her son by an earlier relationship, a man who

Beejay Silcox is the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow.

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became a recidivist convict and a spiteful creature. We know because this acutely class-conscious woman visited him regularly, against his wishes and against the grain of her snobbery, in prison.

Etheridge knows nothing of this: he only knows she was pushy and forward, a woman who could have been like him (in their mutual grief), but was not. He avoided her but couldn’t help feeling a pang of remorse at news of her sad end. It is only in death – far too late to make amends – that he returns to their shared ground and does some sleuthing: ‘Etheridge guessed his way through the mystery of Mrs Crasthorpe, but too much was missing and he resisted further speculation. He sensed his own pity, not knowing why it was there. He honoured a tiresome woman’s secret and saw that it was kept.’

If pressed to explain the low-key magnificence of William Trevor – the reason why he was so fêted and for so long; the reason why his reputation as one of the great short story writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries remains so durable – it would reside in a closing sentence such as this. Like Chekhov – and like Victor Sawdon Pritchett, his great English predecessor – Trevor weighed the entire universe on a modest set of kitchen scales: the very best and the very worst of what people are capable lay in his purview; he did not place so much as a thumb to tip these.

While he may be regarded as a superb novelist and novella writer (his short long fiction ‘Reading Turgenev’ must be included in any round-up of the best novellas of our era), the short story remains the ideal pitch for his aesthetic action. It is here that the kind of glancing insight which is nothing and everything at once may be generated: only the fragment can, as German Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk suggest, meet such demands: ‘Fragments, cripples and hybrids formulate something that cannot be conveyed by the common whole forms and happy integrities; intensity beats standard perfection.’ g

Geordie Williamson is a Picador publisher and the author of The Burning Library: Our greatest novelists lost and found (2011).

Collapse

Carol Middleton

THE BRIDGE

by Enza Gandolfo Scribe

$32.99 pb, 375 pp, 9781925713015

‘Accidents happen.’ In the aftermath of a fatal car accident, one of two accidents that frame the narrative of The Bridge, these words are tossed up in the turbulent minds of a grieving relative. But accidents, unlike natural disasters – earthquakes, floods, droughts – don’t just happen. Whether it’s the collapse of the Westgate Bridge or a car crash, accidents are due to human error. Lives are cut short; others are damaged irrevocably. The survivors – family, friends, co-workers – struggle, sometimes for a lifetime, with the fallout: where to apportion blame, how to assuage the guilt, how to survive the trauma? These questions permeate The Bridge, consume the grieving characters, and undermine the whole community living in the shadow of the Westgate Bridge. The stuff of tragedy.

Enza Gandolfo’s second novel is set in Yarraville, in the western suburbs of Melbourne, where the author grew up in a migrant family. In 1970, when the Westgate Bridge collapsed during construction, Gandolfo was thirteen, a student at the local high school. The industrial accident that left thirty-five men dead had a lasting impact on the working-class community and on the author, who uses the disaster as a springboard for her novel. The arc of the bridge – romantic in its conception, monstrous in its incarnation – overshadows the story, an ominous presence that binds the characters into their grief and inhibits any attempt to forget.

The bridge’s collapse is told through the story of a twenty-one-year-old rigger from Sicily. Antonello, a finely wrought character, is newly married to Paolina. We meet them first in tender moments, happy and optimistic, when the bridge is just another half-made dream, one that Antonello sketches at sunset on the banks of the Yarra. When

the bridge collapses, so does their dream. With three of his closest workmates dead, Antonello struggles to live with the shame of being a survivor. Although it is easy to blame the accident on the companies or the engineers, the survivors also carry a burden of guilt. When the bosses take shortcuts, removing bolts to force the two spans of the bridge into alignment, the workers know the dangers. Their reluctance to speak out contributes to the disaster.

The Bridge has echoes of Gandolfo’s previous novel, Swimming , which I reviewed for ABR in 2010. It too is set in the western suburbs and driven by a wave of memories, regret, and guilt. Semi-autobiographical, Swimming alternated between first and third person, with the first person woman’s voice more intimate and moving. While The Bridge’s third person account lacks some of that intimacy, it is a more dramatic and dynamic novel.

Within fifty pages, we have moved on almost forty years, skipping a generation, to 2009, but still in the shadow of the bridge. Antonello surfaces as a broken man, a stranger within his family. His wife is gravely ill. When tragedy strikes again, he is caught up in the trauma. The Westgate Bridge is now a barrage of traffic, the neighbourhood crowded and noisy. Gandolfo conjures up Melbourne in vivid detail: the smells and sounds of the western suburbs, the beggars on Swanston Street, the gleaming city towers, the European and Gopals restaurants.

A new protagonist emerges. Jo, nineteen and about to sit her VCE exams, lives with her mother in a cramped house near the bridge. Anxious, insecure, she fights her mother for some kind of autonomy. She has one: her driving licence, and the responsibility of being the designated driver among her slightly younger friends. But, unlike her best friend Ash – beautiful, secure, full of promise – her future is uncertain.

Jo’s character promises a comingof-age story of teenage angst, friendship under stress, and family conflict. But Gandolfo uses Jo as a tighter focus for the theme of culpability and an opportunity to concentrate her empathy on someone who is both perpetrator

and victim. When an accident rocks the foundations of two families in the neighbourhood, the onus is on Jo, who blames herself. So does everyone else, including her mother. The frail young woman retreats to her room, where we are privy to her despair, her suicidal thoughts, and her bodily distress. Through her, we experience the impact of trauma, grief, and the confusion of moral quandaries. No one – Jo’s mother in particular – is free from blame, but the law is clear: Jo is under interrogation. In times of grief, the older women still turn to their rosary beads. Others invoke fate and luck, but, as Sarah, the wonderfully shambolic but clearheaded Legal Aid lawyer, states, ‘All human tragedy is caused by the failure of someone to understand and conquer their own flaws.’

This is a novel about everyday tragedy written in everyday language. Clarity prevails over lyricism. Dialogue is colloquial and lively. Carefully articulated sentences give way, in moments of anger, to more truncated phrasing and, in the closing chapters, to snappier prose that creates a sense of urgency. Overall, more rigorous editing of superfluous words would have made for greater elegance.

Gandolfo’s prose may not have the subtlety of some stylists, but her skill as a storyteller and her ability to create complex and empathetic characters gives weight to her fiction and invites the reader to question her own integrity and sense of self-worth, not without compassion. g

City of the mind

A

new translation of the great anti-war novel

Joachim Redner

BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ

by Alfred Döblin, translated by Michael Hofmann

New York Review Books Classics, US$18.95 pb, 480 pp, 9781681371993

Revered in Germany as one of the founders of literary modernism, the equal of Robert Musil and Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) has remained something of a mystery to English readers. Some are aware of Berlin Alexanderplatz: The story of Franz Biberkopf, translated by Eugene Jolas soon after its appearance in 1929. But even this great novel of the modern metropolis seems to have been largely displaced since 1980 by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s brilliant but distorted film version, which presents women as passive, even willing, victims of the male violence prevalent in postwar German society – and thus saddles Döblin with Fassbinder’s own misogyny. Michael Hofmann’s new translation, more attuned than Jolas’s to the coruscating irony in Döblin’s treatment of his anti-hero, provides a welcome opportunity to re-enter the world of Berlin and to more fully experience its agony and its vitality in the year before the Great Depression tipped Germany over into totalitarianism.

Germany had borne the brunt of the catastrophic Great War. Two million soldiers died, half a million returned, disabled, embittered, attracted to fascist militias. The civilian population, mainly women, survived starvation, the turmoil of a failed socialist revolution, and imminent economic collapse. Then American capital came to the rescue in 1924, giving Germany’s first experiment in democracy a chance. By 1928 the Weimar Republic had established a welfare state: women’s rights, public health care, and the dole. The Nazi Party attracted only two and a half per cent of the vote that year. Berlin was ‘abuzz’, undergoing frenetic reconstruction, and recovery looked certain.

But Döblin, for one, was sceptical. As a former army doctor, psychiatrist, and GP in the proletarian district of Berlin, he had first-hand experience of the longevity of trauma. People do not ‘recover’ just because their prospects improve. Döblin understood how deep-seated violence, both political and sexual, is in in the human psyche, saw the lower classes experiencing both on a daily basis, and looked at the city in this light. Berlin Alexanderplatz is not about the metropolis as such, like American novels of the period, such as Manhattan Transfer (1925) by John Dos Passos. It is first and foremost about the traumatic violence unleashed by World War I and its long afterlife in civilian society. And as trauma can only be experienced in the minds of those who suffer it, the Berlin that Döblin shows us is primarily a city of the mind.

For all its documentary realism, stacking up slice after slice of the city’s daily life, creating a great collage of urban locales, Döblin’s Berlin is a subjective place, shaped by collective memories of war, defeat, and ignominy: an imaginary Whore of Babylon for many old soldiers, with whom they are locked in a permanent battle of biblical proportions. There are many minds in this city, of course – many memories and many struggles – and we should not expect their mental horizons to match. The pieces of the great urban collage don’t and can’t fit together, any more, for example, than the pieces in Otto Dix’s postwar Dada murals. So we hear fragments of different stories, told by different narrators; some normal, some disturbed, none ‘objective’. But to understand one mind is difficult enough, so Döblin gives us the story of a returned soldier, Franz Biberkopf –

Carol Middleton is a journalist, arts critic, and author, based in Melbourne.

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a little man, no hero – who thinks and feels like many at the bottom of Berlin society. At the heart of the story is Franz’s longing for a male friend, a ‘good comrade’, the type invoked in popular soldiers’ songs. This blind need exposes him to violence in a form beyond his comprehension: a cold and dark malice worthy of Iago, through which evil takes hold in his world.

Franz, by contrast, is guileless and, we are told, means well. He is obviously no stranger to violence, but it is the everyday variety, tolerated in this milieu where men routinely rape and beat their women. He went too far once, and when we meet him he has

The Berlin that Döblin shows us is primarily a city of the mind

just emerged from prison after serving four years for killing his girl, Ida, a prostitute, in a jealous rage. He seems determined to reform, but this looks dubious. In the vertiginous first hours after his release, when the nightmare city in his mind is collapsing on him, he consoles himself for his diminished manliness by shrieking patriotic songs from the victorious Franco-Prussian War and only feels ‘himself’ again when he has raped Minna, Ida’s sister, in the very room where he had killed Ida. As a psychiatrist, Döblin knew all too well where that repetition compulsion comes from, and where it leads. Nevertheless, he encourages readers to give the little man a chance.

One of Döblin’s many narrators, a street balladeer, introduces Franz in the Prologue as one of life’s hapless victims: his fatal assault on Ida was just ‘stupid stuff’; he will soon suffer three terrible blows from what ‘looks an awful lot like fate’, but he will recover and reform. We see Franz relating to a number of women: his beloved Mitzi, naïve and vulnerable; his loyal friend Eva, strong and streetwise – so we can judge for ourselves what his recovery involves. The balladeer believes in Franz, but worries about his need for a friend. There is no mention at the end of the sinister gangly figure posing as an ‘old comrade’, whose

blue army greatcoat swings to the medieval tune of the ‘Reaper, Death yclept’. But others, we hear, might mislead Franz: ‘link arms and right and left go marching into war’, until ‘one stops still, the other falls down’. Unfortunately, the old spruiker doesn’t seem to know how to assess the threat; his last song sounds like a nursery rhyme: these might be toy soldiers falling down. Readers must turn elsewhere for judicious comment on Germany’s Destiny.

But whose voice rings true in the endlessly reverberating polyphony? Some scorn fate: Orestes may have been doomed to commit matricide and suffer the furies of conscience but, says one narrator, ‘Consider the changed situation.’ And an old wit comments: ‘I’m not a believer in fate. I live in Berlin, not Greece.’ Biblical injunctions are less easily rejected. Different narrators remind us about Abraham and Job. Obedience to God’s Law is ingrained in European collective consciousness; and belief in the value of self-sacrifice. But whenever that subject arises another grim narrator refers darkly to the little calves in the city slaughterhouses. Döblin uses wit to cut through the ideology of sacrifice, to distinguish between victims and perpetrators, while suggesting that many people, like Franz, are both. And he asks his readers to hear and heed the multifaceted irony. In this they will be greatly assisted by Michael Hofmann’s keen ear. In this new translation, the dissonant voices ring out boldly; we can tell when someone is being mimicked and wickedly sent up, enjoy the black Berlin humour, even though it is at the expense of a deeply traumatised society. For Döblin is never sentimental, or hysterical. He just gets us to listen to the drumbeat of violence throbbing in this city of the mind. Berlin Alexanderplatz is one of the great anti-war novels of our time. g

Joachim Redner is a Melbourne-based professional translator of literary and scholarly works. He co-translated The Specter of Capital by Joseph Vogl (Stanford University Press). He is currently working on a translation of Alfred Döblin’s novellas written around the time of World War I. ❖

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Tensions surrounding the #MeToo movement by

Felicity Chaplin

Earlier this year, following the infamous Barnaby Joyce affair, Malcolm Turnbull called for a rethink of the parliamentary code of conduct to ensure this ‘shocking error of judgement’ on Joyce’s part did not happen again. New ‘guidelines’ would prevent senior politicians from engaging in a sexual relationship with their staffers, even if the sex was consensual. It was an oddly draconian captain’s call which received bipartisan support, reflecting what Turnbull called the ‘changing values’ of the workplace.

Such a reaction – some might say ‘overreaction’ – is part of a larger cultural shift which can be traced back to the first stirrings of what has come to be known around the world as the #MeToo movement. Of course, consensual sex between two adults from the same workplace may seem a far cry from the alleged abuses that prompted the #MeToo movement. Nonetheless, the underlying assumption of both cases is that what we are dealing with here is not sex at all but power, what Van Badham, writing for The Guardian, called ‘a delectable indulgence not of sex, but of advantage’.

The #MeToo movement is very much a debate within feminism itself

declared by many to be ‘finished’, at least in the West? Or is it, to the contrary, a betrayal of the ideals of the feminist movement, of the image of the ‘liberated woman’ who can not only control her sexuality but fend for herself whenever this control is threatened, replacing this image with that of the cringing wallflower terrified of the advances of men? There may be no clear answers to these questions, but one thing that is clear is that the #MeToo movement is very much a debate within feminism itself, not only over what constitutes abuse, but also over the status of women, men, and the entire culture we have for so long called ‘patriarchal’. It is a debate between so-called ‘good’ and ‘bad’ feminists, between those who are ‘with us’ and those who are ‘against us’.

This may seem an old chestnut, one which feminism has held as its central tenet for decades, where even consent can be understood as an effect, rather than an exercise, of power. It may seem like nothing new; but it does beg the question: why now? Why a return to these arguments, to these views of sexuality which some critics of the #MeToo movement have labelled ‘Victorian’? Is the movement an extension of feminism, part of an ongoing project which had, only two decades ago, been

This debate – if that is what it can be called – is centred around a number of critical distinctions: between rape and harassment, between seduction and coercion, between violence and what the French reaction to the movement called ‘the awkward attempt to pick up someone’, between sex and power, between women as ‘victims’ and women as ‘empowered’, between actresses and so-called ‘real’ women, between experts and laypeople, between political correctness and free speech, and between due process and ‘witch hunts or ‘trial by Twitter’. This list is probably not exhaustive, but it goes some way to demonstrating the complex and multifaceted issues raised by the #MeToo movement, which cut across almost all aspects of Western culture.

Despite these wider cultural ramifications, how-

ever, the #MeToo movement is essentially a movement within one specific cultural milieu: the film industry. It was in the film industry, and particularly – although by no means confined to – Hollywood that the scandals which would lead to the movement first broke. These were centred on one man, influential Hollywood producer and founder of Miramax films, Harvey Weinstein. The hashtag #MeToo, which predates the Weinstein scandal, was made popular by Alyssa Milano; its use quickly spread to include more high-profile posts from female stars like Jennifer Lawrence, Uma Thurman, and Gwyneth Paltrow, all claiming to have experienced ‘inappropriate’ advances from Weinstein. One of the movement’s most outspoken advocates, Rose McGowan, claims to have been raped by Weinstein. These accusations quickly culminated in a mass movement within the industry which used red carpet events such as the Oscars and the BAFTAs to promote the cause. Actresses (and some actors) wore black to promote the #MeToo movement, and acceptance speeches became a platform from which to declaim the rise of a new feminism which took aim at a hitherto male-dominated Hollywood. However, not everyone – and more importantly, not every woman – in the industry agrees with the militancy of the #MeToo movement.

by an ‘internalised misogyny’.

Not everyone – and, more importantly, not every woman – in the industry agrees with the militancy of the #MeToo movement

The main resistance to the movement came from France. In an open letter to Le Monde, one hundred French women, led by Catherine Deneuve, challenged some of the basic assumptions and aims of the #MeToo campaign, claiming that the movement represents a ‘puritanical … wave of purification’ driven by a growing ‘hatred of men and of sexuality’. Michelle Perrot, professor emeritus of contemporary history at the Paris Diderot University, describes the #MeToo movement as a ‘new moral order’ which introduces ‘a new censorship against the free movement of desire’. Director Michael Haneke agrees with this criticism. He sees the more militant strains of the #MeToo movement as a ‘crusade against any form of eroticism’, comparing it to ‘witch hunts’ which ‘should be left in the Middle Ages’. Haneke makes veiled reference to the fate of Kevin Spacey, who was cut from Ridley Scott’s latest film in post-production, his scenes reshot with Christopher Plummer as J. Paul Getty. Both Perrot’s and Haneke’s remarks echo those of the French 100, who argue that the #MeToo movement – along with its French equivalent #balancetonporc or ‘dob in your pig’ – is driving a ‘New Puritanism’ based on the hatred of men rather than directed at patriarchal culture as such. The views of Deneuve and the other signees have in turn been criticised for their anti-women stance. Actress and director Asia Argento described the French 100 as having been ‘lobotomised’

In an op-ed piece for RT, outspoken Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek represents the kind of middle ground taken by many left intellectuals when considering the #MeToo movement: ‘Women’s protests are a great awakening, but with many dangers.’ Žižek views the movement as ‘revolutionary’ and as in ‘every revolutionary upheaval, there will be numerous injustices and ironies’. Thus, for Žižek, while these protests are ‘bringing out the dark underside of our official claims of equality and mutual respect’, they run the risk of turning into ‘just another case where political legitimization is based on the subject’s victimhood status’. It is precisely this notion of ‘victimhood as a form of empowerment’ that is, for Žižek, one of the two main dangers posed by the #MeToo movement. The other is that it remains too obsessively focused on the realm of sexual exploitation within a very narrowly defined milieu, with little or no relevance for, or impact on, the lives of women in the ‘real’ world. This is an assessment of the movement with which Susan Faludi, author of the landmark feminist study Backlash: The undeclared war against American women (1991), agrees. In an op-ed piece for the New York Times, Faludi argues that the ‘challenge today is ... how to bring the outrage over male malfeasance to bear on the more far-reaching campaign for women’s equality. Too often, the world’s attention seems to have room for only the first.’

And what of the film industry itself? Has the outrage over Weinstein et al. become bogged down in a futile back-and-forth over ‘men behaving badly’, or are there more serious implications for cinema? Already the signs are there that this ‘revolution’ has the potential for far-reaching effects within the industry, including the end of the so-called ‘cult of the [male] auteur’, the blacklisting of certain actors and directors, the cancellation of retrospectives and public appearances by actors and directors, and the re-evaluation of films in light of emerging accusations against male filmmakers.

In October 2017 in Paris, a retrospective of Roman Polanski’s films, held at the Cinémathèque Française and attended by Polanski himself, was disrupted by protests. The demonstration was ostensibly against the veneration of Polanski who is wanted in the United States for statutory rape and who faces at least four other accusations of sexual misconduct. In January 2018, also in Paris, #MeToo advocates forced the cancellation of a screening and public discussion of Brigitte Sy’s 2015 film, L’Astragale. Sy, who was scheduled to speak at the screening, is one of the signatories of the open letter to Le Monde. Responding to the actions of the local feminist group who had organised the screening, Sy remarked: ‘I did not think one day I would be deprived of the right to speak,

or banned from debate or showing my film, censored only because of a signature.’ Across the Atlantic, Casey Affleck bowed to pressure from #MeToo and declined to present the Best Actress award at the 2018 Academy Awards. Affleck had been accused of sexual misconduct on the set of his 2010 mockumentary I’m Still Here. Many in the industry rallied to defend him. Kenneth Lonergan, who Affleck worked with on the Oscarwinning Manchester by the Sea, called the actor’s treatment at the hands of the #MeToo movement ‘abominable’.

What these cases indicate is the growing tendency to equate the work with its creator, viewing films as an extension of their creators and even in some cases an expression of their sexual politics. Possibly the most cited example of this which appeared in the firing line of the #MeToo movement is Woody Allen’s film Manhattan (1979), in which Allen plays a forty-two-year-old writer involved with a high-school student played by Mariel Hemingway. The film has been revisited through the lens of the child abuse allegations against Allen, and according to Steven Kurutz has emerged as ‘the archetypal work of malechauvinist art, a byword, for some, for everything that’s wrong with Hollywood and the patriarchy’. Allen’s is a divisive case, particularly when it comes to those who have worked with him. Many actresses who have collaborated with Allen (including Diane Keaton, Kate Winslet, Cate Blanchett, Emma Stone, and Scarlett Johansson) have come out in support of the filmmaker or have at least chosen to remain silent on the issue. Others, like Ellen Page, who starred in Allen’s To Rome With Love (2012), feel differently; she considers working with the director ‘the biggest regret of my career’. (In 1993 a fourteen-month investigation by the New York Department of Social Services found no credible evidence to support the allegations against Allen.)

In a less public – and in some ways more reasonable – case of cultural revisionism, actress Molly Ringwald, best known for her work in the 1980s with indie auteur John Hughes, ‘re-visited’ one of the most enduring of their collaborations, the 1985 cult hit The Breakfast Club. In an article for the New Yorker, Ringwald says that watching some of the scenes today made her ‘uncomfortable’, scenes that, in hindsight, she probably would not agree to again. Despite granting Hughes’s films some cultural currency, Ringwald also suggests that some of his writing, particularly when it came to the portrayal of women, was ‘inappropriate’: ‘If attitudes

WRITTEN WORD

toward female subjugation are systemic, and I believe that they are, it stands to reason that the art we consume and sanction plays some part in reinforcing those same attitudes.’ Despite what Ringwald calls some of the ‘glaring blind spots’ in Hughes’s script for The Breakfast Club (including, in addition to those concerning women, those concerning race and homosexuality), there is no suggestion of banning the film.

‘Erasing history,’ Ringwald writes, ‘is a dangerous road when it comes to art.’

Perhaps the most potentially significant consequence of the #MeToo movement for cinema is what Ryan Gilbey, writing for The Guardian, called ‘the end of the auteur’, by which he means the end of the male auteur. There are a number of female directors who can be considered auteurs, such as Agnès Varda, Claire Denis, Sofia Coppola, and, more recently, Lynne Ramsay, to name just a few; however, the term itself is loaded and tends to evoke the image of the visionary male director with an indelible personal style. In light of the latest claims – historic or otherwise – against more than one auteur, that which was once a major selling point for a film could become, according to Gilbey, its greatest ‘liability’. The list of auteurs whose work is under threat from the #MeToo movement includes Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernardo Bertolucci, Quentin Tarantino, Terry Gilliam, and Michael Haneke. The threat to Haneke is not that any accusations have been made against him, but rather that he has chosen to speak out against the #MeToo movement, which adds the issue of freedom of speech to that of freedom of artistic expression.

Haneke’s main concern is that filmmaking in the post-#MeToo world will face a new form of censorship based primarily around funding. Producers and funding institutions would be wary of backing a film which is likely to draw criticism for its use or depiction of sex, or because it is directed by or stars a ‘suspect’ director or actor. Perhaps this is what Žižek means by the ‘ironies’ and ‘injustices’ of a revolutionary movement. g

Felicity Chaplin is a Scholarly Teaching Fellow in French Studies at Monash University. Her book, La Parisienne in cinema: Between art and life (2017), published by Manchester University Press, is reviewed on page 33. She is currently working on a monograph on Anglo-French actor Charlotte Gainsbourg. ❖

Films of the finest metal

Hitler’s voracious love of cinema

Peter Goldsworthy

HITLER AND FILM: THE FÜHRER’S HIDDEN PASSION

by Bill Niven

Yale University Press (Footprint), $54.99 hb, 312 pp, 9780300200362

History is written by the Oscar winners in our time, which makes the responsibilities of serious historical scholarship never more important. Despite its realist pretensions – it looks as real as life – film is a dreamy, poetic medium, too often prone to simplicity, conspiracy theory, sucking up to the Zeitgeist – and, above all, not letting messy facts spoil a ripping story.

Hitler won no Oscars, and he lost the war he started – a historical loser, in the end – but he was the first grandmaster of using the then-new, mesmerising art form to control the historical and political narrative. Aided by his Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels (oh for the days of honest job descriptions) his control was total, and omnipresent: twenty million Germans saw the first of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nuremberg rally films; the number only rose with those that followed. ‘Films could change the world,’ Hitler told her, and dreamt of ‘films made of the finest metal’ that would last ‘a thousand years’.

A former watercolourist himself, Hitler got to paint on a much bigger canvas. He was interested in all the arts – painting, music, architecture – but he was addicted to film. He was renowned for his binge-watching stamina; he even planned to have a film projection unit installed in his car. Bill Niven’s Hitler and Film: The Fuhrer’s hidden passion documents all this meticulously, from Hitler’s private screenings to the commissioning and micromanaging of what the German people were permitted to watch, from newsreels to feature films. In the pre-war years, especially when staying at the Berghof, his mountain fastness, he would rise late, tend to business

briefly, then drag his retinue into endless screenings of old favourites: westerns, musicals, Disney cartoons, revue films, thrillers, historical epics – plus the latest Nazi propaganda films. What the public were permitted to see and what Hitler and his circle watched were very different: even Jewish actors might appear on the screen behind those closed doors. Hitler was fascinated by actors, and loved to be around them; he intervened routinely to help their careers, even to the point of overruling directors on casting decisions.

One of the most astonishing stories in the book is of the night the Fuhrer had a newsreel featuring Stalin rewound and replayed numerous times, while he closely studied the face of his fellow dictator and sworn enemy. Eventually, he announced he could do a deal with this man; three days later Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow and the infamous Hitler–Stalin pact was signed.

Digressing from Niven’s book for a moment, it is worth noting that Stalin was also a film buff, who had a habit of rising late then rounding up minions to watch films with him. One of his usual gang, Nikita Krushchev, wrote, ‘As soon as he woke up, he would ring us – the four of us – and invite us to see a film.’ As with Hitler, westerns were staple fare –including the John Wayne film-withinthe-film in the recent tragical-comicalhistorical The Death of Stalin (2018). Perhaps Uncle Joe had also been studying Hitler’s face on newsreels. They never met, but it might explain his stubborn refusal to believe the news when Hitler broke their pact and invaded Russia.

In those pre-subtitle days, Hitler would often watch foreign movies in

languages he didn’t understand. Admittedly, he had grown up in the silent era, and the painted image was his first love – but night after night? Niven suggests that the power of the image was at least as important to him as the power of words. Who would argue in our era, when the manipulative, simplifying image is king, and the firstchoice from ministries of propaganda of all kinds, whether from governments, businesses, advertising agencies, NGOs, or the all conquering social media. A picutre is worth a thousand words? 140

Film is a dreamy, poetic medium, too often prone to simplicity, conspiracy theory, sucking up to the Zeitgeist

characters, certainly; Hitler would also have loved the simple-minded world of Twitter.

Emote first, think afterwards – or not at all.

Cinematic imagery seems particularly powerful, and leaves deep, mind-bending residues. Frederick Crew’s classic book The Memory Wars (1995) describes – among other things – how the false memories that patients ‘retrieved’ under hypnosis often had imagery straight from Hollywood, whether of being subjected to improbable narratives of ritual satanic abuse, or (probably more plausibly) alien abduction, with anal probes de rigueur.

At the core of Niven’s book is Hitler’s relationship with Riefensthal: actress, dancer, and brilliant filmmaker. This ground has been much raked over, from

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all kinds of perspectives – including her own self-serving one – but Niven offers an excellent account of the verifiable historical facts to this point, with some new (at least to me) insights. And no, they weren’t lovers – although that would make a ripping movie. Goebbels was a serial couch-caster, but Hitler just wanted to take tea with his favourite actresses –and perhaps a vegetarian meal.

Another fascinating thread that runs through the book is the pagan, natureworshipping Hitler’s Nietzschean war against Christian influence – and imagery – in movies. He was creating his own religion in a way: a crank mix of atheism, tree-hugging nature worship, Old Norse myths, and Nietzschean will-to-power. But film worship also seems in that mix somewhere.

Are filmmakers, not poets, the unacknowledged legislators of the world? Maybe, but a more serious problem seems to be when artistic, poetic souls are given acknowledged legislative power. Mao Zedong, the third and most effective of the great mass murderers of the Century of Genocide, wrote a lot of poetry, but he was also a film buff. He wept while watching Bruce Lee in Fist of Fury, and watched it several more times. I’m not sure what this means, except as another case study in the creepy sentimentality of power-corrupted monsters. In our polarising era when the so-called National Socialism of Hitler, or the avowed Marxist–Leninisim of Stalin and Mao, have a renewed attraction at the

political extremes, the psychopathology of the totalitarian sensibility seems worth revisiting. As does the relationship of art to visionary, utopian politics. Mao was a pretty good poet; it’s even possible he was the most widely read poet who ever lived. Radovan Karadžć, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, was another wellregarded poet, in his student days, giving readings in the bohemian haunts of Greenwich Village.

An infinitely better poet than either was W.H. Auden, who, like Plato, thought that poets – read visionary artists of all stripes – should be kept well away from the levers of power. He has the measure of them all, and their creepy poetic souls, in ‘Epitaph for a Tyrant’.

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

For poetry, read film, in the case of Hitler. Films in the Third Reich were always very easy to understand. g

Peter Goldsworthy’s most recent book is The Rise of the Machines and other Love Poems (2015).

Hitler and Goebbels on the set of Gerhard Lamprecht's film Baracole in 1935 (from the book under review)

Frenchness

Philippa Hawker

LA PARISIENNE IN CINEMA: BETWEEN ART AND LIFE

by Felicity Chaplin

Manchester University Press (Footprint) $166 hb, 213 pp, 9781526109538

On the cover of Felicity Chaplin’s La Parisienne in Cinema: Between art and life, Audrey Hepburn, arms aloft, reigns triumphant in a strapless scarlet evening gown and organza shawl. This is a scene from Funny Face (1957), in which she plays a shy Greenwich Village bookshop employee transformed into a high-profile fashion model.

At first glance, this image might seem a surprising cover choice. Is Hepburn – a British citizen, born in Brussels, brought up in Belgium, England, and the Netherlands before becoming a Hollywood star – an emblematic Parisienne? In Chaplin’s terms, yes, without a doubt: as the author makes abundantly clear, the subject of her study is a figure with fluid, contradictory, evolving qualities. She is not defined by her origins. Some of the most representative examples of ‘la Parisienne’ she cites are, like Hepburn, from elsewhere: Ingrid Bergman, Anna Karina, Jean Seberg, and Nicole Kidman, for example. The films do not have to be set in Paris: characters carry their ‘Parisienne’ qualities with them. These works can be made by French directors; they can be the product of the Hollywood imagination; they can represent a cross-cultural combination.

‘La Parisienne’, as Chaplin explains, stands for an image of the city personified by a female figure. In the mid-nineteenth century, this became synonymous with the figure of an urban woman, an emblem of modernity whose mode of dress expressed her identity. She can be both artist and muse. Her class origins are not fixed: she might come from the demi-monde or the bourgeoisie. In context, she can embody sexual openness and experimentation, or refined elegance and restraint.

Chaplin begins with a historical overview that locates the figure in art, fashion, literature, and popular culture, before examining her subject’s cinematic manifestations, an area of study that is surprisingly under-explored. Her Parisienne is not a stereotype but a type, ‘recognisable through certain recurring motifs, yet also constantly being reinvented’.

Chaplin’s embrace is catholic: she includes arthouse films, classics, popular movies, and lesser lights. She cites scores of titles, but focuses on twenty or so: of these, the earliest is Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman In Paris (1923); the most recent is Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011). Many come from the 1950s or early 1960s, a period in which Hollywood was drawn to a certain image of ‘Frenchness’, in which the figure of the Parisienne played a significant part.

In six chapters, Chaplin defines six categories of ‘La Parisienne’, bringing her examples vividly to life. These are distinct but also elastic categories: examples can and do reappear under more than one heading. Some of her film choices emphasise themes that stretch across definitions. In the first chapter, on the muse, three very different films all make use of the Belle Époque as an era to conjure with, as do works in other categories. The section on the ‘Courtesan’, for example, includes Nicole Kidman, as the figure of Satine, in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001).

Her second chapter, on the ‘Cosmopolite’, reminds us that Paris is not simply a geographical location. Julien Duvivier’s 1937 crime drama Pépé le Moko is set in Algeria, and includes a character known as ‘Gaby the Parisienne’; Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969) gives us Anouk Aimée as the embodiment of Paris in Los Angeles; and another Hepburn film, Billy Wilder’s Sabrina (1954), in which her character’s makeover takes place off screen – the fact that she has been in Paris for two years is enough to explain her newfound elegance and desirability.

Chaplin has a chapter entitled ‘Icon of fashion’: self-fashioning is the emphasis, however, rather than couture

and style, in this chapter and in others. It makes sense that Jean Seberg – a New Wave American in Paris in Godard’s À bout de souffle (Breathless) – is in this chapter: her cropped hair, T-shirt and cigarette pants are an enduring look. Yet, as a lover turned betrayer, she also belongs in the next category, ‘Femme Fatale’, alongside figures from classics by Marcel Carné and Jules Dassin. There is also a case for her to be included in the final chapter, ‘Star’. Here, Chaplin summons up images of four Parisiennes in four signature roles. She cuts from one to another, almost as if they are contemporaries in the same movie: Brigitte Bardot, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Anna Karina, and Jeanne Moreau, four actresses who, in different ways, bring elements of their off-screen life and image to their performances on screen. This narrative strategy emphasises a theme: the temporal fluidity of the Parisienne figure, her ability to exist in more than one era, to carry over her qualities from one decade to another, one world to another.

In the case of Bardot and Karina, their movie work from the 1950s and 1960s has an enduring impact, a quotable visibility in fashion, film, and popular culture. Gainsbourg combines an It Girl cultural status with an appetite for challenging film roles and a music career on the side.

La Parisienne whets the appetite, invites further speculation. Chaplin acknowledges that her work is a starting point, and that there are many ways in which it could be taken further. She mentions Bande de filles (Girlhood ), Céline Sciamma’s 2014 coming-of-age film that focuses on a young black woman (Karidja Touré) intent on making a life beyond the limitations imposed on her. Chaplin’s definition, she says, ‘leaves room for Parisiennes from any number of national or ethnic backgrounds’.

In her deft, dense, intriguing book, Chaplin has delineated an area of research; she has also created a space or set of possibilities for studies that can take her project further, deeper, into more specialised areas or specific forms of critical engagement.  g

Philippa Hawker writes on film for The Australian

‘The

drama of it’

Television comedy’s new aesthetic by James McNamara

Since I wrote about the golden age of television for ABR’s first film and television issue in 2015, the medium has evolved. Streaming has roared to prominence, with online services like Netflix disrupting television’s form and market as dramatically as cable did to broadcast television in the early 2000s. But where the stars of the cable era were dramas – great, brooding epics of American anti-heroes – the foul-mouthed stars of the streaming era are increasingly its comedies, which are delivering some of the most poignant stories on screen. This is, in key respects, because streaming is changing the way comedies are viewed and written. ‘We really feel,’ Transparent creator Jill Soloway has said, ‘like we’re inventing an art form.’ In the traditional model, sitcoms aired weekly, favouring episodic stories and characters who didn’t change, resetting the show each week. In its purest form, Bart and Lisa will never age, Wile E. Coyote will always chase the Road Runner, and Tom and Jerry will forever try to beat each other to death with frying pans.

Streaming services now release shows a season at a time. According to chief content officer Ted Sarandos, Netflix thinks of a show’s first season, not its first episode, as the pilot. This encourages creators writing for streaming services (or aspiring to be picked up by them) to think in longer arcs, encouraging serialised narrative (ongoing stories) in comedy, which in turn facilitates greater character development. Because streaming services cater to increasingly fragmented niche audiences, rather than whole countries, there is more experimentation in form and subject. Add vast commissioning budgets, a hunger for new content, the genre’s smaller production costs, and a platform without censors or advertisers, and comedy has the tools to consider richer and wider-ranging stories.

This is not to say that television comedies weren’t poignant or serialised before. Blackadder’s finale is a beautiful elegy about the folly of war. Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, and Parks and Recreation have satisfying multi-season character arcs. My point is that streaming

has given all this a Bottom-style kick up the arse.

A shift has occurred in romantic comedies in particular. The demise of feel-good date night rom-com movies – where straight white boy meets straight white girl and, after some trials and tribulations, there’s a wedding – has been well-documented. As studios cut financing to mid-budget features like rom-coms in favour of blockbuster franchises, television filled the gap, as HBO did with dramas in the late 1990s and 2000s. Love stories that might have been movies in 2000 are now six-part half-hour streaming series. But the longer narrative space of television, combined with the structural freedoms of streaming, have prompted rom-coms to evolve into something very different.

Where rom-coms typically began with a ‘meet-cute’ and ended with wedding bells, streaming comedies dwell in the messier bits of love before and afterwards. These shows are bleaker, more comfortable exploring the grainy emotional and physical aspects of sex and love. Consequently (with the glaring exception of LGBTQ stories), streaming comedies offer more realistic portrayals of relationships in shows that blur comedy with tragedy, as love so often does.

I want to discuss four comedies that represent this new aesthetic. All began on domestic broadcasters but moved to streaming services Netflix and Amazon, which – in the main – co-produce and distribute the shows as ‘original series’. All bar one are British, not because other nations aren’t delivering, but because the wry, darker sense of British humour is uniquely well suited to this new tone.

Vince Gilligan described Breaking Bad as ‘the in-between moments’ you don’t see in crime movies. Catastrophe (Amazon), co-created and co-written by, and also starring, Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, does something similar to the rom-com, gleefully upending the genre’s sweetness to probe the realities of marriage, pregnancy, and parenthood. When ‘Rob’, an American on business in London, meets ‘Sharon’, an Irish teacher, in a bar, their ‘meet-cute’ is a

week of sex (in park bathrooms, on pizza on hotel beds) ending in a cheerful goodbye. When Sharon learns she’s pregnant, Rob flies back and moves in. Instead of the will-they-won’t-they of traditional rom-com, Catastrophe’s first season whiplashes near-strangers into a relationship and pregnancy, taking in cervical dysplasia, pregnancy hormones, fears of a Downs syndrome diagnosis, and depicting a new sexual relationship in a way that – as those familiar with Delaney’s iconic Twitter feed will appreciate – is majestically vulgar yet also somehow warm and full of heart.

Horgan says she’s ‘just trying to put the most honest version of what I think onscreen’, and that shows. In Catastrophe’s later seasons, we see the toenail clippings and morning breath of love, as Rob and Sharon navigate parenthood, post-partum depression, ailing parents, career regrets, infidelity, and Rob’s alcoholism, offering an unvarnished look at two people loving each other, being awful to each other, and ultimately trying to survive together.

‘It’s really hard being married,’ Sharon says, ‘sometimes I just want to scream.’

The seriousness of subject is leavened by Rob and Sharon’s chemistry: a needling, hilarious, profane bantering intertwined with true affection that reminds me of a swearier (and hornier) Benedick and Beatrice. The comedy is wry and vinegary, situational and character-based, offering a perfect foil for the show’s poignancy. Before an amniocentesis, Sharon confides that she is struggling with ‘the nightmare scenario of having a needle stuck into my belly, into my baby’s neck, risking miscarriage’. Afterwards, Sharon thanks Rob for being supportive: ‘Sorry I sent you out of the room. I would’ve let you stay, if you weren’t audibly crying.’

(Lucy Durack), who discovers motherhood is more incontinence than Instagram perfection; Ester (Sacha Horler) and Ruben (Leon Ford), who navigate the power-balance of a corporate mum and stay-at-home dad. The humour is refreshingly blunt and the show’s view of parenthood is so unflinching the comment I hear most from new mothers is ‘hilarious, but so realistic it (literally) hurts’. A bit different from Love Actually

Even further from Love Actually are the streaming comedies set before marriage, which treat sex with a frankness not seen in traditional rom-coms. Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum (Netflix), which she created, wrote, and stars in, pursues a similar conceit to coming-of-age sex-comedy American Pie: the

As Megan Garber writes in The Atlantic, ‘instead of the shininess and fuzziness of the traditional rom-com, the show offers a grittier – … much more relatable – vision of what romance is all about’.

So does The Letdown (Netflix), the stellar Australian comedy co-created by Alison Bell and Sarah Scheller. Starring Bell as Audrey, a brand new mother, The Letdown examines ‘Act 6’ of a rom-com: immediate post-pregnancy. Perpetually exhausted, with a group of childless friends who dump her to go clubbing, and a husband (Duncan Fellows) who describes looking after their daughter as ‘baby-sitting’, Audrey finds reluctant solace in her mum’s group. From that anchor-point, The Letdown branches into stories of other members to depict the multivalence of new parenthood: Martha (Leah Vandenberg), a lesbian single mother whose well-meaning sperm donor won’t stay away; Sophie

humiliations of trying to get laid for the first time. But instead of white high school bros, Chewing Gum is about Tracey, a twenty-four-year-old British-Ghanaian virgin who lives on an East London council estate with her immensely religious mother Joy (Shola Adewusi) and sister Cynthia (Susan Wokoma), and is engaged to a celibate and very closeted gay Christian, Ronald (John Macmillan). Drawing on aspects of Coel’s life, Chewing Gum is a fresh take on the virginity comedy, where the deeply sheltered Tracey’s ardent but naïve attempts to embrace a secular, hyper-sexualised culture lead to her fellating her boyfriend’s nose, nearly suffocating him by sitting on his face (while still wearing pyjamas), and an accidental drug experience that ends with her devil-fearing sister performing an exorcism. Alongside Coel’s frank exploration of sex and God (‘two most taboo things that I’m the most obsessed with … something that everyone’s so private about’), Chewing Gum shares something of Zadie Smith’s aesthetic in its vibrant depiction of multicultural life on an estate.

Alison Bell as Audrey in The Letdown (image courtesy of the ABC)

Like Chewing Gum, Fleabag (Amazon) originated as a one-woman show, but is far bleaker. It follows Fleabag – played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who created and wrote the series – after the deaths of her mother and of her friend, Boo (Jenny Rainsford). This is no lip-wobbling drama. Fleabag is a sweary, boozy, red-lipped, chic-dressed twenty-something who processes her grief with glass-shard humour, flashing bright and jagged at the world. A mesmerising chaos-figure, she expresses pain by prodding, piss-taking, revelling in awkward silences, and fearlessly disrupting social situations. Her family – a closed-off Dad (Bill Paterson), teeth-grindingly stressed sister Claire (Sian Clifford), and godmother-too-soon-turned-stepmother (Olivia Colman, soon to play Queen Elizabeth in the Netflix series The Crown) – are birds to her claws: ‘Visiting Dad is hell for Claire. I see it more as sport.’ Fleabag is

need for empty sex to feel wanted and powerful has become her life’s destructive nexus, a drug she uses to escape which compounds her pain and loneliness. She also uses sex to ask questions about an age that simultaneously embraces feminism and a porn/Tinder culture: ‘I wanted[ed] to write someone who is unapologetic about her confusion.’ ‘Are there rules’ for feminism, Waller-Bridge asks, ‘Is there a right way to do this?’ In one of Fleabag’s poignant flashbacks to Boo, they slump drunk at a table and make up a song: ‘Another lunch break, another abortion, another piece of cake, another two – fuck it – twenty cigarettes and we’re haaaappy, so haaaaappy to be modern women!’

like a funnier Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, not least because Fleabag regularly breaks the fourth wall to address camera, throwing smirks and confessions that gleefully beckon the audience on a romp to smash the champagne bottles of her life.

That confessional structure allows Fleabag to be famously frank about sexuality: when her family ask over lunch how she met her current boyfriend, she throws the camera a look and whispers, ‘Fucked me up the arse.’ But Fleabag’s explicitness is always purposeful, never prurient. As she sits on a toilet, in a scene that’s a bit Jonathan Swift meets Sylvia Plath, Fleabag turns to camera and reveals: ‘I’m not obsessed with sex. I just can’t stop thinking about it. The performance of it. The awkwardness of it. The drama of it. The moment you realise someone wants your body …’ Then, ‘Not so much the feeling of it.’ Waller-Bridge explores how Fleabag’s

Waller-Bridge writes black-tar humour – mordant, shocking, savage – which serves a wider dramatic purpose: puncturing every moment of tenderness to show how Fleabag can’t confront the horror of her grief and won’t let herself heal. Her exquisite tonal control as writer and performer makes this work, shifting from hilarious to heart-crushing in a beat. As every episode circles closer to the truth about Boo’s death, Waller-Bridge pulls us into the nocturnal world of Fleabag’s psyche, exploring irredeemable moral brokenness spackled over with snark. Seamus Heaney described reading Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters as ‘the psychic equivalent of the bends’. Watching Fleabag feels similar – just with better jokes. Where 1990s and 2000s rom-coms aspired to a glossy wedding and life in a dreamy house in Notting Hill, 2018’s streaming comedies reflect a different era: where marriage means merging student debts and worrying about how you afford kids in a shifting-sands economy, how you buy a house in an inaccessible market without scream-laughing or selling a kidney. Today’s relationship comedies are bleaker because the times are. Happily, streaming lets us put that on screen. The permission to explore the grimier aspects of relationships – to find humour and beauty in them – is key to streaming comedy’s bleak realism. So is the fact that stories are being told by a broader range of voices than the straight white male-dominated rom-com movies, with a long-overdue increase in representation of female creators and filmmakers of colour – a trend with a long way still to go. But ultimately that realism has a limit: until we see more LGBTQ relationships on screen, whole sections of our culture’s stories are left silent. And without them, we’re not seeing love in full colour. g

James McNamara, the issue’s guest editor, is a television writer based in Los Angeles. He was recently named a BAFTA LA Newcomer.

Michaela Coel as Tracey Gordon in Chewing Gum (Netflix)

Goosebumps

Desley Deacon

REINVENTING HOLLYWOOD: HOW 1940S FILMMAKERS CHANGED MOVIE STORYTELLING by David

Bordwell

University of Chicago Press (Footprint)

$84.99 hb, 572 pp, 9780226487755

With the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement reminding us all too vividly of flesh and blood Hollywood, David Bordwell’s cerebral Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s filmmakers changed movie storytelling seems to come from another planet. But Bordwell, who is the Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has spent a lifetime writing about ‘the genius of the system’ that is classical Hollywood, rather than the system’s individual geniuses. Generations of film students have absorbed his 1979 textbook Film Art: An introduction, now in its eleventh edition and translated into at least ten languages. His seventeenplus books (many co-authored with his wife, Kristin Thompson), his long tenure on the editorial board of Cinema Journal, his blog, and his numerous consultancies all over the world make him one of the most influential film scholars of his generation. His planet, therefore, is mainstream American academia.

Bordwell is unabashedly a fan of Hollywood in the 1940s, when it became, especially in the ‘Five Fat Years’ between 1942 and 1946, ‘a machine for producing pleasure on a scale the world had never seen before’. He recalls in his preface how he grew up watching the classics of his parents’ generation on television – The Magnificent Ambersons, His Girl Friday, The Best Years of Our Lives, Notorious, How Green Was My Valley, Meet Me in St Louis – giving him ‘goosebumps of delight’.

This fandom sits awkwardly with his academic scrupulousness. In Reinventing Hollywood, he focuses at great length on the ways in which 1940s Hollywood played brilliantly with standard

narrative devices and invented new ones. In multi-chapter sections on chronology, the patterned flow of narration, and new forms of storytelling, he discusses flashbacks, the voiceover (‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’), dream sequences, the quasi-documentary, and much more. Here he is concerned to sample Hollywood films in an unbiased way. ‘Quality,’ he asserts, ‘isn’t my sole concern.’ The result is a bewildering – if scientifically justified – torrent of references to, and analysis of, movies most people have never seen, or are likely to see. But Bordwell, like the rest of us, has his favourites, and he indulges his enthusiasms in ‘depth soundings’ in ‘Interludes’ that allow him to analyse ‘the Masters’, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, major innovators such as Joseph L. Mankiewicz and John Sturges, and the emblematic 1940 Academy Award winner, Our Town. Despite its length and its mindnumbing references to almost every movie made in the period, Reinventing Hollywood convinces us that the 1940s was indeed a glorious time for film. Audiences had money to spend; fan magazines proliferated; studios brought out more ‘A’ pictures; radio, novels, plays, and magazines borrowed from each other, developing what he calls a ‘user-friendly modernism’ that reworked the way stories were told. Bordwell is especially interesting in his discussion of the mystery, which became, in his words, a ‘mega-genre’ in the forties. As he puts it, the mechanics of suspense were lifted to a new respectability in such films as Rebecca (1940). An element of mystery was added to comedies, westerns, family dramas, war stories, romances, and exposes; and it encouraged the use of such devices as flashbacks, replays, voiceovers, restricted viewpoint, and suppressive narration; the story could be told from the viewpoint of the victim, as in Rebecca (1940), or of the bystander, a 1940s technique that reached its apogee in Rear Window (1954). These mysteries, which were increasingly ‘A’ releases, were often psychological, with films such as Laura and Gaslight (both 1944) women-centred thrillers with killers who were no longer criminals on mean streets but urbane charmers operating at cocktail

parties and in classy restaurants.

The general reader turns with relief to Bordwell’s ‘Interludes’ and the familiarity of his heroes, Welles and Hitchcock. Rebecca (1940) of course won the Academy Awards Best Picture in 1941 and made Australian-born Judith Anderson an enduring icon of movie menace. Bordwell demonstrates how it introduced or built upon a variety of narrative devices that became standard over the next decade: the enigmatic husband – is he or is he not a murderer? extreme restriction of viewpoint – what does Mrs Danvers know that the wife does not? subjective sound and camerawork – the sound of the sea and the effect of shadows in conveying the wife’s mental state. Hitchcock’s innovations were quickly copied, and directors such as Billy Wilder were out to ‘Out-Hitch Hitch’ in such films as Double Indemnity (1944).

In an interesting concluding chapter, Bordwell discusses the influence of Hollywood on postwar Europe, where the ‘Young Turks’ of Cahiers du Cinéma saw Hollywood as a ‘chosen land, that haven which Florence was for painters of the Quattrocento or Vienna for musicians in the nineteenth century’; and he argues that ‘the syntax of 1940s Hollywood remains basic to modern moviemaking’. Bordwell does convince us that how the story is told is at least as intriguing and exhilarating as the movie story itself. So dip into this book judiciously if you want to capture that exhilaration, or you will be drowned in the detail, and enjoy the many fascinating images from more movies than you are ever going to see. g

Desley Deacon is an academic and writer living in Sydney.

The Brodie set

Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

by

Sally Grant

Idon’t remember how old I was when I first saw the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. As a young girl growing up in north-east Scotland, I didn’t know that it had been adapted from a 1961 novel of the same name by a writer known for her keen observational skills and biting wit called Muriel Spark, or that the story had first appeared, almost word for word, in the pages of The New Yorker. Indeed, I highly doubt I had heard of that august publication, let alone understood the writerly prestige of having an issue of The New Yorker devoted to one story.

But I do remember that when the indomitable schoolteacher Miss Brodie, as channelled by the equally formidable Maggie Smith, said this to her pupils, in her distinctive Edinburgh burr, I was smitten:

Little girls, I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.

Having grown restless in my latter years of school, this story of a passionately inspiring teacher, and the impact she has on the lives of her pupils, was like a tonic (not that I didn’t comprehend Jean Brodie’s dangerous influence). And the characters were Scottish, like me. Nearly fifty years after the film’s first release (2018 is the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth), The Prime of

Miss Jean Brodie has lost none of its power. It remains my favourite film.

Muriel Camberg was born in Edinburgh in 1918. When she was nineteen, she moved to Southern Rhodesia to marry Sydney Oswald Spark, whom she had met in Scotland. They had a son, Robin, but Sydney proved to be dangerously unstable and Spark subsequently returned to the United Kingdom on her own in 1944 (her relationship with her son, who returned a year later, would be strained throughout her life). From a young age, Spark was recognised for her excellence as a poet. Back in Britain, she continued to write poetry while she also worked, after a wartime position at the British Foreign Office, in the publishing world as a literary critic and editor. In 1951 Spark won a short story award run by the Observer newspaper, but it was not until 1957 that she published her first novel, The Comforters. In the early 1960s, Spark moved to New York, where she was an admired figure in literary society (The New Yorker provided her with office space in which to work). Later that decade, Spark, ever the exiled Scot, relocated to Italy, where she would live until her death in 2006.

Of the twenty-two novels that Spark would ultimately publish, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is the best known and most loved. The Scottish Review of Books, in its recent Spark centenary issue, pronounced it to be ‘the greatest Scottish novel of the twentieth century’. It was inspired by Spark’s school years and, in particular, by a

fascinating teacher, Miss Christina Kay. Set in the early 1930s, it tells of a charismatic teacher at Edinburgh’s conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and of her special group of girls, ‘the Brodie set’. Firmly in her prime, as Miss Brodie frequently declares, she is adored by both Mr Lloyd, the art master, and Mr Lowther, the music teacher; worshipped by her girls; and disliked by the rest of the staff, most particularly the headmistress, Miss Mackay, partly on account of Brodie’s students ‘being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorised curriculum … and useless to the school as a school’.

Such was the popularity of Spark’s novel that, in 1966, the American screenwriter Jay Presson Allen adapted the book into a play, which was staged in London (with Vanessa Redgrave in the lead role) and, two years later, on Broadway (Zoë Caldwell). Allen wrote the script of the 1969 film, which was superbly directed by Ronald Neame. Maggie Smith won an Academy Award for her magnificent portrayal of the eccentric mentor. Upon reading the book for the first time a number of years after watching the film, I found it remarkable that many of the lines I knew by heart were already there in Spark’s concise novel (though the scalpel of wit that Spark deploys to depict human fallibility is even sharper in book form). What is equally remarkable is how Allen retained the story’s essence while synthesising it so skilfully for the screen.

The film opens with an overhead shot of the rooftops of Edinburgh in 1932, and quickly focuses on Jean Brodie as she leaves her flat and mounts her bicycle to ride to school. Maggie Smith, who was in her mid-thirties then, is strikingly beautiful and, with her strawberry blonde hair and impeccable dress, she is an alluring figure. Neame emphasises this cinematically by washing the school set in institutional grey, a colour which is also picked up by the children’s sea of grey uniforms, and against which the bold hues preferred by Miss Brodie stand out. Gradually, we meet each of the other main characters as they convene at Marcia Blaine for the start of a new school year: Mr Lloyd (Robert Stephens, Smith’s then husband), Mr Lowther (Gordon Jackson), the four girls of the Brodie set – Sandy (an exceptional Pamela Franklin), Jenny (Diane Grayson), Monica (Shirley Steedman), and Mary Macgregor (Jane Carr); and the headmistress Miss Mackay (Celia Johnson, as a worthy nemesis to Miss Brodie). The director wastes no time in getting to Miss Brodie’s classroom, where the story’s principal themes and the characters’ personalities are brilliantly, humorously established.

After introducing two new pupils (including the attractively mouldable Mary Macgregor) and delivering her ‘old heads on young shoulders’ speech, Miss Brodie tells the class of pre-teens that she has summered in Italy, assuring them, ‘I am truly in my prime’. When she asks the girls who is the greatest Italian painter and they nominate ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, she corrects them

BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DIRECTOR JAMES EVANS

– Giotto ‘is my favourite’. Proceeding to pin a Giotto reproduction over a portrait of ex-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, which is inscribed with the headmistressapproved slogan ‘Safety First!’, Miss Brodie informs her girls of the falsity of this claim, declaring: ‘Safety does not come first. Goodness, truth, and beauty come first.’

Enunciating these sentiments in her distinctive Scottish accent, while elegantly attired in a slim-fitting maroon dress and a vibrant red scarf, Miss Brodie is clearly a romantic figure for her pupils. This early scene, which culminates in comic farce as Miss Brodie rhapsodises about her lost love, Hugh, who ‘fell on Flanders Field’, immediately establishes the captivating hold she has on her girls (and on men), but also her vanity and the enmity between her and the headmistress. Miss Brodie’s misguided political sympathies – her admiration for Mussolini (‘the greatest Roman of them all’) and for Franco –will reveal themselves soon enough. It is these elements and their repercussions on the characters’ lives that are the driving forces of this humorous, stirring, tragic story.

perplexedly: ‘you’d think that the urge would have passed by the time they got their clothes off’.

While the scenes with her male admirers/lovers are integral to The Prime, it is Miss Brodie’s conversations and confrontations with other strong-willed women, most notably her ‘dependable’ student Sandy and Miss Mackay that are most powerful. Honouring the complexity of the character created by Spark, such interactions show the incredible passion Miss Brodie has for education. She expresses with emotion to Miss Mackay that she wants her girls to experience ‘all the possibilities of life’, and cautions her set that ‘you must always remember you are citizens of Edinburgh. City of Hume and Boswell. You are Europeans. Not dowdy provincials.’ And yet, the portrayal is not as simple as that. Aside from her alarming political sympathies, Miss Brodie manipulates her girls into roles of her choosing, thereby limiting the ‘possibilities’ she professes to offer. This short-sighted egotism will ultimately lead to Miss Brodie’s betrayal.

The Prime follows this particular Brodie set through their secondary school years. They attend class, but also go on outings of ‘enrichment’ with Miss Brodie to Edinburgh’s old town or to Mr Lowther’s estate at Cramond, where the girls invent scenarios of the two teachers’ sexual affair. They are also introduced to the studio of Teddy Lloyd. The girls quickly realise that the married art teacher is Miss Brodie’s true love. These interactions are conduits to their understanding and the film (like the book) is a warm, funny representation of young girls’ burgeoning awareness of sex. It captures their naïveté, curiosity, and trepidation, such as when Sandy and Jenny discuss, over tea and toasted buns, how their parents ‘don’t have primes’; ‘they have sexual intercourse’, adding

The filmmakers’ skill, like Spark’s, is that the viewer still admires Miss Brodie. Watching The Prime after all these years only amplifies my belief in the kind of passionate, lifeenhancing education that this curious teacher embodies, irrespective of her vanity and harmful influence. This is Spark’s great gift: she revels in the fullness and contradictoriness of individual lives; she recognises the peculiarities in each of her characters and dissects them, clearly and coldly, but she does not minimise them or accept them as easily explainable. Neame’s warm and wonderful film similarly celebrates this individual complexity, as it raises the challenges of moral choice, from its opening shots to its moving closing scene. g

Sally Grant is a freelance arts and culture writer based in New York.

Muriel Spark at the Library of Otago (Wikimedia Commons)

Warner auras

Jake Wilson

WARNER BROS: THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN MOVIE STUDIO

by David Thomson

Yale University Press (Footprint)

$39.99 hb, 220 pp, 9780300197600

David Thomson has been an essential writer on film for around half a century, but in certain circles his reputation has long been in decline. The reasons are obvious enough. He writes too much, and sometimes carelessly; he lets his feelings run away with him; an Englishman who followed his dream to the United States, he hardly pretends that Iranian cinema, say, could possibly be as important to him as Hollywood. He has also developed a habit of launching sweeping attacks on the medium itself, which have the tang of personal bitterness, as if he regrets not dedicating his gifts to a more worthy muse.

These weaknesses are by-products of Thomson’s greatest strength, which is that all his work is fuelled by passion: his many books on cinema are the record of a long, one-sided, and often agonised love affair. This includes Warner Bros, misleadingly packaged as the latest in the Jewish Lives series of ‘interpretative biographies’ from Yale University Press. This is far from being a definitive biography of the four immigrant brothers (originally the Wonsals) who founded and gave their name to one of the great Hollywood studios. But it is a fine example of Thomson’s loose, essayistic method, which consists of letting his thoughts wander and seeing what insights turn up.

As he underlines, the book is called Warner Bros rather than Warner Brothers, leaving us with the somewhat tedious puzzle of whether this is ultimately the story of a family or a studio and to what extent the two stories coincide. Clearly, the significance of Warners as a brand was not determined solely or even primarily by the business-minded brothers, in no sense artists and not too encour-

aging of open attempts at artistry (they had little use for Ernst Lubitsch, who decamped to Paramount just before the coming of sound). On the other hand, by the early 1930s Warners had established a tough, fast, irreverent house style which was not the property of any single individual: to explain where this came from, it makes sense to begin with the guys at the top.

This is what Thomson does, although his method is always to look for the myth underlying the facts rather than vice versa. Relying more on poetic intuition than research, he homes in on the two brothers central to Warners in its heyday, highlighting their differences as if they were rivals in a melodrama (family feuds, we are reminded, were a popular plot device at Warners, though possibly no more so than elsewhere). The respectably conservative Harry Warner, based in New York, was the company president, but Harry’s younger brother Jack, head of production in Los Angeles, was the real force behind the scenes. Jack is the brother Thomson loves, with his wisecracks, his pencil moustache (predating Errol Flynn’s), and his vulgar confidence about what the public might be persuaded to buy. The book paints him as a borderline crook and unambiguous sexual predator, but also as the dynamic spirit of the studio incarnate. Indeed, for Thomson he appears to personify something essential about the very nature of cinema, as well as about the United States – linked, in both cases, with the drive toward selfreinvention otherwise known as the American Dream.

There are moments here when Thomson, who has published a couple of novels, seems on the verge of writing one about the Warners. Perhaps someday he will. Or perhaps he will find inspiration in another pair of brothers, the Weinsteins, whose story in so many ways is the spiritual sequel to this one. Fiction, however, would leave little room for the extended critical riffs that take up a large portion of the book. These show that Thomson still has the nearly unique ability to write about movies in words that have some of the spontaneous magic of the films themselves, and to revivify the reader’s own memories,

even when he is discussing something as shopworn as Casablanca (1942). He writes well about Howard Hawks and Busby Berkeley, about Al Jolson and James Cagney, about Rin Tin Tin and Bugs Bunny – and quite magnificently about Bette Davis, the heroine of the book, whose combative personality is seen as both the ultimate challenge to the Warners ethos and its ultimate embodiment (one chapter is titled ‘Bette v. Everyone’).

Running through the book like a drumbeat is Thomson’s ambivalence about the antisocial energy so abundant in Warners films, and so crucial in general to what cinema has meant to him over all these years. Like the late Pauline Kael, he is fond of the first person plural, but where Kael aimed to draw the reader into agreement, Thomson often gives the impression that he is speaking mainly for himself but is too shy to admit it. ‘We have always wanted to idealise gangsters, and that reveals something reckless in us, something that was catered to by the movies.’ If you say so, buddy. At other moments he turns pious, as if the ghost of Harry were looking over his shoulder: ‘We have long since exhausted the aura of old Hollywood, and there is no reason to romanticise it.’ That might be the least convincing sentence in the book, if the same paragraph did not go on to lament that the ‘romantic attitudes of movies hindered rational thought and social progress’. As if Thomson, in his heart, gave a damn for either. g

Jake Wilson is a film reviewer for ABR and Fairfax media.

On Black Panther

by Dilan Gunawardana

The Marvel film Black Panther has currently earned more than US$1.3 billion dollars at the box office worldwide since its release on 13 February 2018, which places it high among the most financially successful films of all time. Such an achievement isn’t necessarily indicative of quality – the Fast and the Furious and Minions films are on the same list – but countless column inches have been devoted to Black Panther’s engaging narrative, its eye-catching aesthetic, and its complex heroes and villains. Moreover, the film was directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler, an African-American man, and features a cast almost entirely comprised of black actors. Its success has reconfigured conventional depictions of black people in large-scale blockbusters, and recast them beyond one-dimensional Hollywood thugs, sidekicks, buffoons, action film fodder, or objectified and exoticised bodies. It is also noteworthy in that its story originates from a comic book – a medium once derided as trashy and lowbrow.

In the early 1950s, unsold comic books from the United States were used as ballast in ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Britain; such was their value. Crime and horror yarns landed in major ports from Liverpool to London. Retrieved by collectors before they could be pulped, they were sold furtively and in small bookshops. The burgeoning underground scene paved the way for Marvel Comics with their vibrant yet flawed superheroes and sympathetic monsters, to proliferate among British fans in the early 1960s. Handfuls of these gems made their way to the market stalls of Northampton, where a young Alan Moore first came across them.

his many gripes about modern comic book-to-film adaptations was the inability of filmmakers to capture the nuances and effects created by a largely literary medium, to portray relatable characters, or to produce stories that resonated with contemporaneous hopes and fears. In an interview with Vulture, Moore asks: ‘What are these movies doing other than entertaining us with stories and characters that were meant to entertain the twelve-year-old boys of fifty years ago? Are we supposed to somehow embody these characters?’

He has got a point. In Moore’s own narratives he centralised the pressing issues of his time; namely the twin threats of nuclear destruction and Thatcherism. Antagonists in the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) of films (2008 to the present) have included dark space elves, hulking abominations, and a death goddess – hardly relevant concerns for those dealing with today’s crises, such as political corruption and catastrophic climate change.

Black Panther’s success has reconfigured conventional depictions of black people in large-scale blockbusters

However, Marvel has a deep well of characters and stories to draw from, and so Black Panther, a superhero created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, has emerged as the first such adaptation to address more earthly issues in an intelligent way; namely the divide between African people and their American cousins across the Atlantic. Ryan Coogler’s outstanding direction has also fixed many of the genre’s flaws, including generic villains, endings that devolve into battles with ceaseless waves of inconsequential minions, and underdeveloped and underused female characters. The result is fun, engaging, but also deeply resonant.

In the noughties, Moore allowed some of his most lauded works, such as Watchmen (1986–87) and V for Vendetta (1988–89), to be bastardised on the big screen for the sake of his collaborators’ financial well-being, though he distanced himself from each flop. Among

Following on from his previous Marvel outing in Captain America: Civil War (2016), Prince T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) assumes the throne of Wakanda following his father’s (John Kani) assassination. In doing so, he takes on the title of ‘Black Panther’, a totemic war-

rior king who gains superhuman powers from drinking a herbal elixir grown in soil enriched with ‘vibranium’, a metal harvested from a giant meteorite that landed in Wakanda aeons ago and gave its people the ability to develop advanced technology; unbeknown to the rest of the world, which assumes that Wakanda is an impoverished hermit kingdom. When Eric ‘Killmonger’ Stevens arrives in Wakanda to challenge his cousin T’Challa for the throne in combat, and wins, T’Challa and his allies rally to reclaim their homeland and to stop Killmonger from executing his plan to arm people of African descent around the world with Wakandan technology to violently overthrow their oppressors.

The ideological conflict between the African T’Challa, and the African-American Killmonger is central to the question of ‘how would an uncolonised technologically superior African nation use its power?’ T’Challa is honour-bound to keep Wakanda’s people hidden, safe from the corrupting influences of the outside world, while Killmonger wants the nation to use its resources to emancipate black people of other nations, albeit violently. In the end, T’Challa prevails, but he also sees merit in Killmonger’s more benevolent ideals and opens the nation’s borders. Killmonger, too, realises that his desire for vengeance has robbed him of the chance to appreciate his heritage, but this occurs to him only moments before his death. Marvel films rarely afford its heroes moments of genuine selfrevelation, let alone its villains.

Aside from Chadwick Boseman’s cool and dignified portrayal of T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan’s fiery Killmonger, Black Panther’s world abounds with fierce and intelligent women, from queens to scientists, spies to warriors; they guide and even revivify T’Challa. Danai Gurira’s scene-stealing portrayal of Okoye, T’Challa’s protector, even has an arc that replays Black Panther’s central moral conflict in microcosm – her partner’s alliance with Killmonger offends her traditionalist beliefs and her fierce loyalty to the throne.

plot together, is made all the more interesting by the fact that its combatants are Wakandans of different tribes, fighting for differing ideological purposes, rather than hordes of faceless, generic monsters. Black Panther’s success is a testament to films that strive for authenticity above simple showmanship

However, Black Panther is by no means the vanguard of a larger ‘afrofuturist’ movement. Sci-fi writers like Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, and Ta-Nehisi Coates (who is currently penning the most recent comic-book iteration of Black Panther); musicians and performers like Janelle Monae, Donald Glover, and Kendrick Lamar (who composed the Black Panther soundtrack); and filmmakers like A Wrinkle in Time director Ava DuVernay and Jordan Peele (Get Out, 2017) have been slowly eroding the levees of mainstream culture in recent years

by taking control of the narratives of black lives. Black Panther may simply be the culmination of the years of toil by black artists that has preceded it, rather than a foundational work.

The rich, colourful mosaic of African cultures that make up Wakanda is best expressed through its architectural styles, which draw heavily on the cactus-like mosques of Timbuktu and the stone-cut churches of Lalibela, and also the stunning array of costumes designed by Ruth Carter, including Zulu Isicolo headdresses and Lesotho blankets adorned with shells, gems, and Adinkra symbols, repurposed with futuristic flair. Ryan Coogler’s Wakanda is not the homogenised Africa so frequently represented in Hollywood portrayals of the individual countries that make up that vast continent. Even the obligatory large-scale end battle, which in other Marvel films serves as a lazy device to tie their

On his fortieth birthday, Alan Moore, believing that he had conquered prose, reached the next logical step in his progression as a writer, and declared to his bemused friends and family that he would become a magician. When asked, ‘What makes you a magician’, he would simply answer, ‘Because I say so.’ Perhaps films like Black Panther simply give non-white creative practitioners the same sense of certainty that comes with having control over their own stories, ultimately giving them the opportunity to manifest better futures for themselves. It is difficult not to be excited by the possibility of a new golden era in black storytelling. g

Dilan Gunawardana is a Deputy Editor of ABR.

Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa and Michael B. Jordan as Killmonger in Black Panther (image courtesy Matt Kennedy / Marvel Studios)

Hidden history

Suzy Freeman-Greene

BEYOND

THE SILVER SCREEN: A HISTORY OF WOMEN, FILMMAKING AND FILM CULTURE IN AUSTRALIA 1920–1990

by Mary Tomsic

Melbourne University Publishing $49.99 pb, 261 pp, 9780522871227

In 1971, Australian filmmaker Joan Long wrote the script for a film about gentrification in the Sydney suburb of Paddington. At a screening in London, it was introduced by director Peter Weir. When asked who the scriptwriter was, Weir replied that she was a housewife, according to a friend of Long’s. Around this time, director Gillian Armstrong applied for a job at the ABC, only to be told that they didn’t interview women for jobs in camera, sound, or editing; she was asked to send in details of her typing speed.

Such depressing anecdotes are two of many in Mary Tomsic’s Beyond the Silver Screen, a history of women in film from 1920 to 1990. It is interesting to read the book at this historical moment. These days men are smart enough to pay lip service, at least, to ideas of equal opportunity. Yet the allegations against Harvey Weinstein suggest that a powerful man in a bathrobe operated an unofficial casting couch for decades in the United States and that almost no man working in film had the guts to call him out.

In Australian film circles, no claims of Weinstein-like behaviour have so far emerged. Still, in late 2016 our Oscars equivalent, the AACTA awards, was crashed by women in sausage costumes condemning ‘the sausage party’ that is the local film industry. Screen Australia research released in 2015 showed that just thirty per cent of producers, twenty-one per cent of writers, and sixteen per cent of directors working on Australian feature films from 1970 to 2014 were women. In response, it mounted a $5 million plan to address this gender imbalance. Last year, it announced that forty-seven per cent of

screen productions it had funded in the past two years were led by women. Still, men dominated nominations for the 2017 AACTA awards in areas such as directing, cinematography, and editing.

Tomsic’s book, though threaded with tales of discrimination, is an attempt to reclaim women’s hidden film history. During the 1920s, women were prominent in Australian cinema. Lottie Lyell, our ‘first film star’, co-directed The Blue Mountains Mystery (1921). The actor Louise Lovely ‘got the picture bug’, went to work in Hollywood, and returned to co-direct Jewelled Nights (1925). The McDonagh sisters – Isobel, Phyllis, and Paulette – made numerous feature films. By the early 1930s this activity had largely fizzled out. Tomsic writes that Armstrong’s film My Brilliant Career (1979) was ‘the first mainstream Australian feature film’ to be directed by an Australian woman since Paulette McDonagh’s Two Minute’s Silence in 1933.

What happened during those forty-six years? Tomsic, a historian, argues that women were continually involved in a variety of ways. All too often, though, they were undervalued and patronised by men. Media coverage invariably emphasised a woman’s gender and physical attributes rather than her skills. When the American filmmaker Winifred Walker came here in the 1950s, a newspaper headline read: ‘Woman Arrives to Make Colour Film on Australia’.

Over in the Commonwealth government’s film unit, women such as Catherine Duncan, Jennie Boddington, and Long worked on nation-building documentaries. But chances to shine were limited. In the 1950s, one woman was told she couldn’t work as a ‘cameraman’ as she lacked the strength to carry equipment. Boddington recalled that women couldn’t go on location because it was feared they might have affairs with men. They could only be ‘assistants’ and, as Long put it, were given the ‘fag end’ jobs. Yet they plugged away, working on films about topics such as immigration, Australian universities, and Sydney Harbour.

Tomsic casts her net widely to show other ways in which women contributed

to film culture. Some advocated for censorship to protect children’s moral development. Others later campaigned against censorship as members of suburban film societies. Tomsic looks at the women who made films for activist organisations such as the Grail Film Group (part of an international youth movement for Catholic girls) and the Waterside Workers’ Federation Film Unit (which employed three filmmakers in the 1950s). She describes how women had to sacrifice creative goals for motherhood and examines the surge in feminist cinema in the 1970s. Two crucial factors that led to more women becoming filmmakers were the development of film schools and an increase in female producers wanting to tell women’s stories.

All too often women filmmakers were undervalued by men

Unfortunately, this book reads like a long article in an academic journal, with constant foregrounding of what the author is about to say and repetitious summing up. While I appreciate Tomsic’s commitment to unearthing women’s hidden contributions, some of them are pretty minor. She is, it seems, opposed to perpetuating ‘a Hollywood ideology, valuing one type of filmmaking over others’. But starting a film club in Croydon or making a doco about a Eucharistic Congress in Newcastle is hardly on a par with writing or directing your own film for a mainstream audience. The latter brings creative and financial rewards, and a fair bit of influence.

Perhaps the most useful lessons taken from Beyond the Silver Screen were about the importance of affordable tertiary education and feminist activism. The opening of a government-funded national film school in 1973 offered more women the chance to study filmmaking, but, according to Armstrong, it took years of lobbying by feminists before the school would admit them equally to men. g

Suzy Freeman-Greene is the Arts and Culture editor of The Conversation

Bouillabaisse

Varun Ghosh

MAKING A MEAL OF IT: WRITING ABOUT FILM

by Brian McFarlane

Monash University Publishing

$29.95 pb, 380 pp, 9781925523416

One of my favourite podcasts at the moment is called The Rewatchables. It deconstructs movies (mainly from the 1990s and 2000s) and offers an enjoyable mix of amusement, nostalgia, and insight. It also speaks to the desire, particularly strong in the internet age, to hear what other people think about content already enjoyed. Brian McFarlane’s Making a Meal of It: Writing about film offers a somewhat similar experience in written form. The book – divided into three parts that play on its prandial title – is a collection of previously published reviews and essays by one of Australia’s pre-eminent film writers.

The first part of the book, ‘Starters’ , is a loosely connected and chronological assortment of film and book reviews. McFarlane’s impressive qualities as a critic are evident from the start. He has the ability to go right to the heart of a film or scene and explain its significance with insight. Of Hope and Glory, a 1987 film about a family living in London during the Blitz, McFarlane writes: ‘Ah, one thinks, a rites-of-passage movie, but the nostalgia for childhood itself is recognised for what it is. Childhood is seen as a time of incomplete understanding and the film is wry and tough enough to see that adults mostly botched things as well.’ McFarlane also has a good turn of phrase when skewering. Of The Great Gatsby (2013), he writes: ‘Luhrman has taken a slim, elegant book and made a fat film from it.’ Of a book about Annette Kellerman: ‘No cliché is left interred.’

The second part – comprised of longer essays and appropriately titled ‘Mains’ – is the real pleasure of the book. Across a series of essays about the film biography industry and films that deal with artists and ideas, McFarlane’s ex-

perience and erudition come to the fore. He can be, at turns, sensitive and unforgiving. Describing the challenges of being ‘a Hollywood staple’ – say, Katharine Hepburn or Henry Fonda – he writes: ‘To be as universal an icon as a film star is makes preposterous demands on the sanity, balance and humanity of the often otherwise unremarkable human being just beneath the glamorous surface.’ On the hollowness of epics such as Troy (2004), Alexander (2004), and King Arthur (2004), McFarlane is direct and polemical:

I resent the sheer mad waste of these films. I resent how little there is to show for all the time and effort as well as money that has gone into them. I resent the way they take on big themes and vulgarise and emaciate them in their search for the huge audiences they need, and, I fear, often find.

In ‘The Critic as Artist’, Oscar Wilde posited that the highest criticism is really ‘the record of one’s own soul’ and a strong sense of McFarlane’s own preferences and judgements emerge through the book. He deprecates films that patronise the audience or oversimplify their subject matter, preferring what he calls ‘films for grownups’. Of Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (2005), he writes that ‘it is a film that assumes that what goes on between people is about the most interesting narrative topic to be had’. McFarlane clearly agrees with that assumption.

The treatment of films about Australia and sense of what it is to be an Australian is another highlight. In a thoughtful, jingoism-free review of the film Gallipoli (1981), he observes: ‘Gallipoli is not, then, a “war film” so much as a film about war; about the kinds of attitudes Australians and particular individuals took towards it in 1915: about, in a broader sense, what it felt like to be Australian then – and perhaps still does feel like.’ On the portrayal of country towns in Australian film, McFarlane writes with real feeling.

Too often, the townspeople are depicted as essentially out of touch with the mainstream of contemporary life or …

seen as being, in their sly, simple way, actually sharper than city folks. Both views seem to me, in their apparent opposition, to be equally patronising; both seem equally remote from treating the inhabitants of country towns as individuals who are as worthy of sustained attention as bush heroes or city sophisticates.

Perhaps because it does have significant strengths, Making a Meal of It can be a frustrating book. The third part – ‘Afters, or Just Deserts’ – contains a series of elegiac pieces that ‘are essentially more personal than critical’. It is an indulgence. I also found myself wanting the author to deploy his extensive scholarship and skill as a writer to draw deeper insights and fresh conclusions about film, particularly Australian film. Yet, in its present form the book is too long at nearly four hundred pages, and the chronological structure is tedious. At times, this structure actually seemed to emphasise the pointlessness of reading a decades-old review about a moderately good movie. More careful curation was required.

Minor errors tend to irritate, particularly when McFarlane himself is critical of other authors for sloppiness. Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki is rendered as ‘Dubecki’. Less forgivably, McFarlane misquotes one of Archy Hamilton’s more memorable lines in Gallipoli – ‘As fast as a leopard’ becomes ‘Like a leopard’.

Nevertheless, at a time when the cinemas seem crowded by studio tentpoles and transparent Oscar bait, Brian McFarlane’s Making a Meal of It is a welcome reminder of the importance of films that ‘take serious subjects and deal with them intelligently against diverse backgrounds’. g

Varun Ghosh is a Perth barrister.

SURVEY

My favourite film

We invited some writers, film critics, and film professionals to nominate their favourite film – not The Greatest Film Ever Sold, but one that matters to them personally.

Gail Jones

Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948) is the tale of a poor man (Antonio) and his son (Bruno) living in postwar Rome. Antonio, searching for his stolen bicycle, moves in restless anxiety around city locations. Scenes recall de Chirico, Antonioni, and Pavese, but at its centre are the desperate, irresistible faces of the father and son. Men with movie posters ride bicycles holding ladders; a truck driver who finds movies boring veers through cinematic rain; father and son mop their faces with the same wretched handkerchief; a near drowning; an epileptic fit; restraint; tenderness. The ending: see it and weep.

Dion Kagan

The passionate cultivation of unforgettable women characters becomes a manifesto in Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother (1999): an intimate homage to drag, performance, and female melodrama. High camp mixed with high sincerity, this is Almodóvar’s signature ensemble portrait of women on the verge, women navigating unendurable worlds. The quintessential work of queer matrocentric desire.

Lauren Carroll Harris

Of all the films Paul Thomas Anderson has directed, The Master (2012) is his favourite, and mine. In it, shellshocked, alcoholic war veteran Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix) gravitates to the charismatic founder of a therapeutic cult, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Though many expected a Scientology exposé, Anderson thought about his story in relation to the idea that the best time to start a cult is after a war. Indeed, The Master exquisitely captures a world at a crossroads and a life in flux. It is alive with symbolism and alert to the psychology of obsession and dependence.

Alice Addison

An Angel at My Table (d. Jane Campion, 1990) tells the story of the writer Janet Frame from childhood to her literary success. Recalling the film, I think first of colours – the green of New Zealand and the vivid orange of Frame’s distinctive red hair. The film contains the twin pleasures of its subject’s writing and that of Laura Jones, the screenwriter, who collects a series of moments in a life – some harrowing, some hopeful, all human – and weaves them together to create something wondrous and wholly life-affirming.

Anwen Crawford

Practically everyone with access to a television has seen The Wizard of Oz (d. Victor Fleming, 1939), probably when they were too young to conceive of film (or television) as anything

more or less than images set in motion by an unseen power. Who put this girl and her dog and the witch and a scarecrow inside a box that I am watching in my house? No number of viewings could resolve the mystery. Last year I saw the ruby slippers at the National Museum of American History. I practically cried. Judy Garland’s feet were narrow. She flashes through my mind.

Emile Sherman

There’s nothing like a Coen Brothers film, and the one I keep returning to is The Big Lebowski (1998). It’s not the story itself, which, like many of their other films, is a little hokey, although enjoyably so. It’s the worlds they create, that particular tone, that music. Above all else, it’s those characters. The genius of The Big Lebowski, and of the best of the Coen Brothers’ work, is the way the filmmakers ride that fine line, creating archetypal characters that feel at once mythic but equally human. Balancing on this line is impossibly hard. Too archetypal, and you move into caricature, and we lose connection. Too human, and you lose the epic resonance and the bounce. The Big Lebowski gets it all right.

Philippa Hawker

During my first year of high school, my English teacher showed our class a print of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). Less than half an hour long, it consists of black-and-white stills and a single moving image, a voiceover narration, and layers of sound and music. It is, among other things, a story of time travel, memory, obsession, and inevitability, a work about science, nature, surveillance, the human face, the everyday. I didn’t see it again for years, but I carried it within me and could recall it in an almost tactile way. It feels new every time I watch it.

Stephen Romei

It was directed by a Canadian and starred two Englishmen. It was panned by critics on its release in 1971, degraded in its VHS format, and then almost lost forever, with the original film and sound version rescued en route to the tip in 2004. Yet Wake in Fright, based on Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel, directed by Ted Kotcheff, shot in Broken Hill, and starring Gary Bond as a bonded schoolteacher and Donald Pleasance as a mad, alcoholic, menacing doctor, is the greatest Australian film yet to be made, an unflinching examination of life in the outback, where everyone is an outsider, even the two-upping, roo-shooting insiders played by Chips Rafferty and Jack Thompson. When the educated teacher says the locals are stupid, the doctor pulls him up. Their lives are a living hell, he observes. ‘You want them to sing opera as well?’

Desley Deacon

The psychological western Pursued (d. Raoul Walsh, 1947) is a fascinating product of the 1940s – mystery, trauma, repressed memories, flashbacks, voiceovers – moodily shot by James Wong Howe in the brooding landscape of New Mexico. With Judith Anderson as a frontier woman whose adultery sparks a series of tragedies that haunt her family, and a young Robert Mitchum as her adopted son, it is both tough and intimate, with Mitchum and his estranged brother sweetly singing ‘Londonderry Air’, and a no-nonsense Anderson toting a shotgun to save Mitchum from a hanging.

Kylie du Fresne

I’d opt for Desperately Seeking Susan (d. Susan Seidelman, 1985). There was something prescient in its energy, storytelling, and soundtrack, announcing that it knew ‘cool’ before it happened. You can see that vibe through so much of the casting: hip NYC musos John Lurie and Arto Lindsay, as well as Laurie Metcalf, John Turturro, and Giancarlo Esposito. But the script’s classic screwball elements with two strong female roles for Rosanna Arquette and Madonna seduced me at the age of twelve in that magical way that movies have. I wasn’t aware then the film was written, directed, and produced by women. More than thirty years later, this alone makes the film exceptional and such an example for the industry.

Felicity Chaplin

From its monumental prologue set to Wagner to the spectacle of its apocalyptic ending, Melancholia (d. Lars von Trier, 2011) extends the definition of art house cinema in the digital era. The film is great for its careful use of digital technology, sublime imagery, allegorical treatment of its subject, blend of bleakness and comedy, unsettling atmosphere, and inspired casting. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst give subtle yet audacious performances, supported by such greats as John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, and Stellan Skarsgård. Best described as an ‘art house disaster movie’, Melancholia intellectualises the ‘pleasure in annihilation’ disaster movies tap into, without the deus ex machina of the Hollywood ending.

Brian McFarlane

‘Let’s go home, Debbie’ may not, out of context, seem like the most profound line, but, uttered by Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) as he picks up the niece years ago abducted by Indians, it pulls together so much of what makes The Searchers (1956) such a great film. Ethan’s racism has made him equivocal about rescuing her from her ‘contaminated’ years as a squaw, and it also reminds us that home – and Ethan’s lack of it – is one of the film’s underlying motifs. Home, in John Ford’s complexly stunning western, is a frail defence against a majestic but daunting landscape.

James McNamara

I first saw Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) as a teenager, when some friends and I shuffled to the movies

and went in the wrong door. Afterwards, I acted all sullen ‘yeah yeah’ cool, but inside it was like Baz had poured sherbet on my brain and cranked the music up to eleven. The kinetic modern setting, the smash and fizz and dazzle of his aesthetic, perfectly captured the rage of feeling in Shakespeare’s text, and brought R&J roaring gloriously to life for a new generation, inspiring my love of Shakespeare and a career in television. I love it so.

Jake Wilson

Fans have been debating recently whether David Lynch’s magnum opus, Twin Peaks should be considered a film (1992) or a television show (1990, 2017). Self-evidently it’s both – a single story extending over two seasons of network television, the harrowing ‘prequel’ feature, Fire Walk With Me, and the long-awaited follow-up mini-series shown on cable last year. What began as a quirky soap opera has by now evolved into a masterpiece without precedent on the big or small screen, both a bona-fide religious epic and a liberating vision of what the world might look like if we gave up demanding that things make sense.

Craig Pearce

When I first stumbled across Wake In Fright on late-night television, I was young enough to be terrified by its nightmarishly familiar portrayal of Australian masculinity – and old enough to thrill to its savage brilliance. I sat mesmerised and appalled. I didn’t know much of that world, but the film’s grotesque intensity spoke truth to me that night. Most know that this great masterpiece was lost and then found and resurrected. When a few years ago I finally saw it projected on a big screen, it was still all true.

Nick Prescott

By the time David Lynch released Lost Highway in 1997, he had educated his viewers in the predilections of a deeply idiosyncratic auteur. Blue Velvet (1986) suggested to us, and Wild at Heart (1990) confirmed for us, the fact that Lynch was far more interested in the allure of mystery than in anything as mundane as a linear, traditional ‘solution’. Lost Highway represents the pinnacle of Lynch’s cinema: the film’s fever-dream intensity keeps its viewers perfectly off-balance throughout, and delivers them a work replete with the power of the most compelling and disturbing of dreams.

Peter Rose

As a boy of ten I happened upon Laurel and Hardy’s silent film Big Business (d. James W. Horne, 1929), a work of singular perfection in eighteen minutes. All of life seemed to be there: bluster, farce, commercialism, amour-propre, violence. When Laurel and Hardy call on James Finlayson to flog him a Christmas tree, all hell breaks loose. Tempers fray and Finlayson’s house is soon destroyed while he dementedly wrecks the tree salesmen’s car. Even an innocent piano is demolished amid this weird suburban havoc. My lifelong love of ruination was strangely seeded, plus my reverence for these two comic geniuses.

Odyssey

Paul Morgan

THE YEAR EVERYTHING CHANGED:

2001

by Phillipa McGuinness

Vintage

$34.99 pb, 400 pp, 9780143782414

Every era imagines its own future. We always get it wrong, of course; often comically, sometimes tragically. The year 2001 was emblematic of ‘the future’ for decades, thanks to Stanley Kubrick’s visionary film of the same name. Videophones! Robots! Spaceships elegantly ascending to a Strauss waltz! With the approach of the new millennium, we imagined The End of History, as Francis Fukuyama put it in his 1992 book. In the post-Cold War world, nuclear weapons would be dismantled and conflicts peacefully resolved. The ‘world wide web’ would dispel ignorance and distribute knowledge to all. Liberal democracy would spread inevitably as market forces created educated, progressive middle classes around the world.

How the gods must have laughed at our hubris as reality unfolded: wars breaking out as Cold War tensions thawed; the horrors of religious fundamentalism; the internet becoming a channel for ignorance and hatred; robots replacing humans, serving at supermarket checkouts and roaming the skies armed with missiles. For many people, 2001 is when everything started to go wrong. The spectacular terrorist attacks in September made it a year none of us can forget, but how critical was it in reality? This is the question that Phillipa McGuinness sets out to answer in The Year Everything Changed: 2001

It was an extraordinarily eventful year, in Australia as well as overseas, with one shocking event overtaking another with dizzying speed. McGuinness presents her material in twelve chapters, each covering the events of a single month and their implications. This works well when there is a single topic on which to focus. For example, ask ten people about the significance of

2001, and I doubt whether many would mention the centenary of our country’s foundation. In January, McGuinness watched the Federation parade in Sydney and recognised ‘a fizzer’ when she saw it. Like it or not, she writes, Anzac Day is our national celebration, commemorating the first time that an Australian army fought under one flag. As Paul Keating remarked, Australia was not founded on grand ideals, but ‘put together by lawyers and businessmen ... who set us up as a British satellite’. In June, McGuinness focuses on finance and how it affected our lives. She describes the cascade of business failures in Australia during the year: Ansett, Harris Scarfe, South Pacific Tyres, Daimaru, and more. Thousands lost their jobs. China’s economy ranked sixth in the world in 2001 (lower than California); by 2017 it had risen to second place. In the United States, meanwhile, George W. Bush became president, inheriting a budget in surplus. By 2017, thanks to Republican tax cuts and the cost of Middle East adventurism, the US federal debt exceeded $20 trillion.

The 9/11 terror attacks remain so familiar that they are difficult to encapsulate in any meaningful way. McGuinness does this through an account of visiting the World Trade Centre memorial, tenderly describing the exhibits. It is the shoes which undid her, she writes. Hundreds of shoes are all that remain of so many: a pair of high heels covered in blood; a battered pair of loafers which ran down thousands of stairs; a brogue shoe worn by a businessman who jumped to his death. ‘9/11 rebooted our imagination,’ she writes.

Another chapter focuses on what McGuinness terms John Howard’s ‘Falklands Election’, won after the infamous Tampa and SIEV X incidents. The government’s response ‘created its own demand, igniting elements of nationalism, populism, and racism’, wrote Paul Kelly. Since 2001, Australia has been poisoned by these toxins released into the body politic. McGuinness picks apart the long-term harms done by the government’s cynical exploitation of the refugee smuggling crisis. The worst consequence was the incitement of fear and hatred of refugees, especially Muslims,

opening up the ‘Overton window’ of acceptable discourse to include racism. John Howard was a dangerously masterful politician. This is nowhere more evident than in his skilful manipulation of the media to dehumanise the refugees, demanding that their faces be pixelated on news reports and whipping up outrage that children had been thrown into the sea (a claim exposed as a lie by a subsequent Senate inquiry).

Other chapters are less successful, sweeping material into a single month under a general rubric such as human rights or technology. An exception is December. McGuinness describes the stillbirth she experienced and its impact on herself and her family. The chapter is poignant but sits uncomfortably with the chatty, fact-filled tone of the rest of the book. There is also a colloquial tone in some sections which strikes a false note. ‘It’s part of my schtick,’ she writes, ‘don’t get me started ... what’s not to like ... here’s a doozy ... go figure.’ Presumably intended to make the text more approachable, this only succeeds in being grating. The book is let down, too, by the cramming of excessive detail about events into each chapter. As McGuinness might have written,‘Lots of trees.Wood, not so much.’ This reflects an unresolved tension in the book between being a month-by-month almanac and a more thoughtful thematic analysis of that momentous year. Allowing herself space to do the latter would have made for a more complete understanding of this first year of the twentieth century and the strange, unsettling period that has followed. g

Paul Morgan is a Melbourne-based novelist and editor.

Cognitive science to the rescue

Steven Pinker’s salvific mission

Benjamin

Madden

ENLIGHTENMENT NOW:

THE CASE FOR REASON, SCIENCE, HUMANISM AND PROGRESS

by Steven Pinker

Allen Lane, $35 pb, 573 pp, 9780241337011

For a book announcing ‘the greatest story seldom told’ – that is, the triumph of the Enlightenment and its ‘stirring, inspiring, noble’ ideals – Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress frequently hits an incongruously sour note. Since The Better Angels of our Nature: Why violence has declined (2011), Pinker has been at pains to assure us that humanity’s prospects are good and getting better. Now, he wants to explain why this is the case: in short, the values of ‘reason, science, and humanism’ articulated and propagated during the Enlightenment. Although the earlier book was rapturously received among centrist technocrats like its author, the scepticism expressed in other quarters about its thesis has clearly piqued him. The result is Enlightenment Now,a book in three parts. The middle part reprises many of the data-driven arguments of The Better Angels, while also expanding their methodology into diverse areas of human well-being. In each of these, the news is also good.

I am not qualified to comment on Pinker’s statistical methods, and will leave that to others. But data are always susceptible to framing and interpretation, and thus the book’s first and last parts surround this exposition with a polemical framework that tries to give an account of the ways in which the earlier book failed to convince some readers. One of these factors is a set of cognitive biases common to all of us that makes us more receptive to negative accounts of our present situation and pessimistic predictions about the future. But, concludes Pinker, there must be more to it than that, and so he turns his attention to a hazily defined counterEnlightenment, whose allegedly obtuse

and misanthropic ravings find their strongest constituency in the modern humanities. Pinker reprises C.S. Snow’s famous division of the intellectual landscape into ‘two cultures’ characterised by mutual suspicion and hostility, while adding a peculiar twist: he refers throughout to the literary side of Snow’s dichotomy as the ‘Second Culture’, and the scientific side as the first. Pinker acknowledges in a footnote that ‘Snow never assigned an order to his Two Cultures, but subsequent usage has numbered them in that way’, citing as evidence a volume from called The New Humanists: Science at the edge (2003). Has it? Nothing in my reading suggests that subsequent usage has done any such thing, even in the book Pinker cites, and least of all in Stefan Collini’s comprehensive account of the debate. This sleight of hand and slight against the humanities gives us a sense of Pinker’s basic project: the Enlightenment doesn’t just need defending in the public sphere, but from from its traditional disciplinary custodians as well. Cognitive science to the rescue.

But Pinker’s salvific mission quickly runs into difficulty. His definition of ‘Enlightenment’ tries to encompass both the event in European thought of the late eighteenth century (historically contingent and culturally specific) and the values of ‘reason, science, and humanism’ that it articulated (putatively transhistorical and universal). Pinker is certainly aware that to assert the universal validity of a Western set of values is to invite condemnation, so he hedges: Enlightenment ideals ‘are rooted in reason and human nature, so any reasoning human can engage with them. That’s why Enlightenment ideals have been

articulated in non-Western civilizations at many times in history.’ Pinker has been careful here to inoculate himself against the charge of Eurocentrism, but one may therefore be moved to wonder why none of these putative non-Western Enlightenments has had a significant effect on human well-being (the late eighteenth century remains the baseline for Pinker’s argument), or indeed why the Western Enlightenment should appear to be the lasting one.

One reason for the latter must be the era of European imperialism with which the Enlightenment coincides: European powers, already benefiting from material conditions propitious to exploration and conquest, and shortly to be bolstered by industrial production, spread their dominion over nearly the whole planet. Pinker takes up imperialism and its legacy in the contemporary world not once. Raising the historical correlation of Enlightenment philosophy and European imperialism is not in itself to show that the Enlightenment should be ‘blamed’ for European conquest. But Enlightenment thought played handmaiden to that destructive project all the same. David Hume, one of Pinker’s Enlightenment heroes, once averred that he was ‘apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation.’ One could adduce similar statements from Kant. (If it seems unfair to impute racism to Hume on the grounds of these brief remarks alone, I would observe that it only takes five sentences from Nietzsche for Pinker to diagnose him as a genocidal maniac.) Thus attributing to themselves racial

and civilisational supremacy, Europeans flattered themselves as the natural custodians of the rest of mankind while ruthlessly expropriating their resources, destroying their institutions, and denigrating their cultures.

That the modern humanities have devoted much time and effort to documenting and trying to understand these historical travesties is a point not lost on Pinker, but where a moral concern with the crimes of the past shades over into mere political correctness for him is never clear. At one point, Pinker cites ‘context, nuance, historical depth’ as the ‘qualities we prize in humanities scholars’. I heartily agree, but when humanities scholars have brought those values to bear on the Enlightenment itself, Pinker tends to become enraged by the result. But where the Enlightenment and science have been complicit with oppression and violence, it behoves us to pay attention and to learn something about their limits. Values can be articulated and defended in the abstract, but we must also give an account of their shortcomings in the moment of

their historical articulation.

Consequent to his refusal to brook any criticism of the Enlightenment beyond the milquetoast piety that its adherents were ‘men of their time’, Pinker regards the humanities as hopelessly in hock to historical declinism and cultural pessimism. The Western tradition’s ‘prophets of doom’ are also the ‘all-stars of the liberal arts curriculum’, and Pinker lists Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Foucault, and many others. It is a peculiar list, cutting across centuries, nations, disciplines, and politics; if one had read these figures deeply, would one feel as if they could be so blithely lumped together? The answer is no, but Pinker hasn’t read them deeply: his chief informant on the present state of the humanities is a little-known scholar called Arthur Herman whose The Idea of Decline in Western History is an artefact of the 1990s conservative campaign against postmodernism (and also cited in the introduction to The New Humanists: this connection gives some indication of the thinness of Pinker’s engagement with

recent humanities scholarship). Were he to have looked, he might have encountered, for instance, Jürgen Habermas’s mighty effort to vindicate Enlightenment reason through a deep engagement with its critics (whom Pinker feels entitled to wave away with a flick of his rhetorical wrist), or perhaps Foucault’s moving call in his late essay ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ (reprising Kant) for the Enlightenment project of critique to continue, not only as a body of doctrines but as a way of life. To demand that Enlightenment values be subject to their own standard of critical interrogation is not to descend into a morass of relativism and self-contradiction; it is rather to inhabit Enlightenment as an ethos. If the breach between the two cultures is to be repaired, and there is evidence that Pinker earnestly wishes for it to be, it will have to start from a position of interdisciplinary respect markedly absent here. g

Benjamin Madden is a scholar of modernist literature. He presently teaches literature at the University of Adelaide.

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Lost and found

Nick Haslam

THE LOST BOYS: INSIDE MUZAFER SHERIF’S ROBBERS CAVE EXPERIMENT

by Gina Perry Scribe

$32.99 pb, 400 pp, 9781925322354

Social psychology has a few iconic experiments that have entered public consciousness. There is the shaken but obliging participant who delivers potentially lethal electric shocks to another person in Stanley Milgram’s obedience research.There are the young Californians who descend into an orgy of brutality and degradation while enacting the roles of prisoners and guards in Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. Below this celebrated group of studies there is a second tier of field-defining experiments, many conducted in the mid-twentieth century in the shadow of the Holocaust and the Cold War, which aimed to lay bare the roots of compliance, conformity, and prejudice. Many embodied a liberal but anti-collectivist world view: people do not act immorally because they are intrinsically evil or spineless but because social influence is powerful, and because it is powerful it must be resisted.

In her penetrating book Behind the Shock Machine (2012), Australian psychologist Gina Perry exposed the disturbing underside of Milgram’s obedience research. Her interviews and archival inquiries revealed the harm Milgram did to some of his participants, the ethical shortcomings of his work, and the disturbing discrepancies between how the studies were conducted and how they were presented in the scientific literature. In her new book, The Lost Boys, Perry turns her attention to a line of second-tier research and sounds some similar critical notes. Muzafer Sherif, an increasingly forgotten figure of mid-century American social psychology, comes off only slightly better than Stanley Milgram, and in Perry’s verdict his most famous study has limited value. Robbers Cave was a field study,

conducted in rural Oklahoma in 1954, that aimed to test Sherif’s theories about the origins and resolution of inter-group conflict. With a team of junior associates, he took twenty-two carefully selected eleven-year-old boys for a summer camp that was organised into three phases. The boys started the camp in two separated groups and spent a few days forming bonds. The groups were then brought together for a series of competitive challenges that became increasingly hostile, inflamed by the research team’s orchestrated provocations. In the final ‘integration’ phase, the tensions were relieved by shared activities that united the groups in cooperation. As it is normally presented in textbooks, the study offered early support for ‘realistic conflict theory’, according to which prejudice is driven by competition over resources, social contact alone – as in multiculturalism – is not sufficient to overcome inter-group frictions, and the pursuit of shared, superordinate goals is the key to reconciliation.

Perry turns a sceptical eye on this uplifting gloss, and tells the story based on interviews with Sherif’s associates and former ‘lost boys’ and a recently released trove of records. Before turning to Robbers Cave itself, she uncovers a nearly identical study that Sherif conducted in 1953 which was aborted and then suppressed when it failed to go to plan. In her reconstruction of Robbers Cave she shows how the group dynamics were engineered by the research team’s interventions, and how the boys’ awareness of being manipulated complicated those dynamics. Perry argues that these interventions make the study a biased attempt to confirm rather than test Sherif’s hypotheses. Similarly, because the researchers functioned as a third group, Sherif was wrong to frame Robbers Cave as a binary study of us versus them.

Perry is decidedly unsympathetic towards Sherif as a person. He was certainly hard to love: temperamental, arrogant, dictatorial, obsessed with his work, and resentful that he had not received the accolades he felt he deserved (a near-universal private grievance among academics). Some of these failings take on a different cast in light of

his late-life diagnosis of bipolar disorder and a significant brain injury he suffered as a child in Turkey after being kicked unconscious by a camel. Sherif also faced the heartache of seeing that country erupt in ethnic atrocity as a young man and close its door on him as an older one. He experienced anti-communist persecution in his adopted country, where J. Edgar Hoover set the FBI onto him. Although Perry’s portrait of Sherif is rich in historical detail, it is painted in cool colours.

Perry’s reading of Sherif’s work is also a little ungenerous and dismissive. She is rightly troubled by the deception and ‘casual cruelty’ of the Robbers Cave study, but these aspects were typical of research with human participants at the time. Principles of research ethics were sketchy, oriented to medical experimentation, and not yet applied in formal reviews. We might wish that Sherif had been more compassionate and enlightened, but it is questionable to apply contemporary standards to work carried out sixty years ago. Equally, Perry sometimes presents Sherif’s ideas as if they were self-evident and his studies as too flimsy and artificial to justify claims of relevance to real-world conflicts, writing off Robbers Cave as ‘a Cold War bedtime story to give people hope in a time of fear’. Although it would indeed be absurd to imagine that the squabbles of pre-teen boys are equivalent to the struggles of nations or ethnic groups, it is not absurd to explore mechanisms of animosity and its alleviation on a small scale.

According to its epigraph, no social science is more autobiographical than psychology, but The Lost Boys never quite settles on how Robbers Cave reveals the truth of Muzafer Sherif. Was it an attempt to wrestle with the convulsive conflicts of his youth, an expression of an immigrant’s feelings of alienation, or the pseudo-scientific project of an ambitious monomaniac? Perry may not have all the answers, but she has written an enthralling exploration of the question. g

Nick Haslam is a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is Psychology in the Bathroom (2012).

Anus Station

Lauren Fuge

THE STORY OF SHIT by

Midas

Dekkers, translated by Nancy Forest-Flier

Text Publishing

$32.99 pb, 293 pp, 9781925355178

‘People who write books about shit are regarded with suspicion,’ declares Dutch biologist and writer Midas Dekkers. But like the dungbeetle-worshipping ancient Egyptians before him, Dekkers understands a fundamental truth: ‘The world is round and held together by shit.’

In The Story of Shit, Dekkers yanks the discreetest moments of our lives out of the bathroom and into the spotlight. He sees defecation not as a shameful bodily function, but as an integral part of being human – something enjoyable and even enriching. From toilet etiquette around the world to the uses of faeces throughout history to the science of digestion, he isn’t afraid to muck in and get his hands dirty.

Seemingly no topic is off-limits. All are treated with Dekkers’ forward personality and brazen prose: he writes as he talks. He revels in using language to shock, playing into the reader’s squeamishness and making them challenge their own disgust. It is delightfully freeing to read ‘shit’ and ‘turd’ freely scattered across every single page, but Dekkers also casually throws in ‘cunt’ or ‘coolie’. On the whole, though, the conversational style is enjoyable, packed with humour and metaphor. In one memorable chapter, the reader is taken on a visceral trip through the ‘black box’ of our body, following food’s journey from mouth to anus. The stomach becomes:

a single station on a long underground line that starts at the throat, dives through the oesophagus … and, after a long and winding ride through the small intestine via the Caterpillar ride of the large intestine … arrives at Anus Station, its final destination. One way only; no return tickets available.

Dekkers does, however, constantly double up on metaphors; in the space of a couple of pages, the stomach is referred to not just as a station, but a ‘warehouse’ and a ‘waiting room’ with ‘snacks available’, a quirk that becomes exhausting when every object is explained multiple times. It should be mentioned that The Story of Shit was translated from the original Dutch by American-born translator Nancy Forest-Flier. Since it is packed with a world of toilet-related slang, this was no trivial feat, but ForestFlier masterfully keeps Dekkers’ spirited language intact.

The book is also filled with browngold nuggets. Over coffee with friends, you can explain that the sought-after Kopi Luwak coffee is actually the poop of Asian civets; or at a dinner party, you may muse about how nineteenth-century Englishman Dean Buckland was known for collecting fossilised turds and showing them off to his guests. Over tea with your grandmother, you can explain that elderly people are often thin because ‘the papillae in the intestines that absorb food get worn out, so that more food is transported unused’. At the beach, you can enthuse about how biologist Richard Martin calculated that ‘all the whales together fart a gigantic 200 billion litres a day’.

The inclusion of so many fascinating gems makes it all the more frustrating when Dekkers wanders off track. His conversational style may be easy to read, but it also produces meandering prose, unrelated stories, and repetitions – as most of us are guilty of in everyday conversation. At one point, for example, Dekkers embarks on a long-winded discussion of the shape, colour, and composition of sausages, only to eventually make the enlightening point that sausages and turds are remarkably similar.

Dekkers also makes bizarre choices, such as when he describes growing up as ‘innocent children’s tissue’ being ‘transformed into a tremendous penis or massive breasts’. Later, he declares that ‘it can be tempting to see your own turd as a living animal’, but laments that ‘what a turd lacks in order to be numbered among nature’s living creatures, besides four legs, is reproduction’. The statement’s utter absurdity makes the

humour fall flat.

The book is also speckled with unsolicited personal judgements – whether or not to swaddle newborn babies, eat brains, feed your child commercial baby food, or eat a vegetarian diet. Dekkers even has a short tirade about technology: ‘Armed with their mobile phones, people have demanded the right to spout their drivel at the slightest pretext.’ It is frustrating that pages are wasted in this way when a more rigorous edit would have resulted in a book that was a third shorter but more enjoyable for it.

Some of this space could have been repurposed for a better cause: science. Since Dekkers is a biologist, I expected a better treatment of the science of shit than what was delivered. Such topics tend to be inserted as throwaway thoughts and jargon pops up without explanation, like the contextless statement that ‘in the small intestine the waste turns yellow from bilirubin’, then ‘bacteria convert it into urobilinogen, which oxidises into stercobilin’. It reads as if Dekkers is rushing to get away from scientific terms, when a mere half a sentence would have explained them perfectly adequately.

As a reader who loves a good footnote, I also found Dekkers’ referencing lacking. Though the appendix is packed with sources, they aren’t linked to his claims throughout the book, which was frustrating in the countless moments I was left staring at a sentence, wondering whether the seemingly outlandish claim was really true.

On the whole, The Story of Shit is an enjoyable romp through culture, science, and history. It reads like a casual and often crude chat with a knowledgeable mate whom you sometimes want to shake when he launches into yet another tenminute tangent. g

Lauren Fuge is an Adelaide-based author and science writer. ❖

Questions

Johanna Leggatt

WAITING FOR ELIJAH

by Kate Wild Scribe

$35 pb, 394 pp, 9781925322736

In a 2017 essay for the Guardian, author Charlotte Wood spoke about the shame artists often feel when they discover a distinguishing characteristic in their work, something that separates them from their cohort. ‘In the beginning, and for a long time, an artist can be most embarrassed by the very thing – sometimes the only thing – that gives her work life and verve. You’re ashamed of it because you don’t see it in other people’s work.’ ABC journalist Kate Wild’s début work, an investigation into the police shooting of twenty-four-year-old Elijah Holcombe in 2009, has a touch of the artist’s shame about it. Wild is drawn to the case partly because she has much in common with the Holcombe family. Her parents and the Holcombes both hail from the same patch of country New South Wales; there is a history of mental illness in both families, to varying degrees; and Wild, like Elijah Holcombe, has battled depression. Wild’s writing comes alive when she touches on her struggles with mental illness, but it’s drip-fed to the reader like a shameful secret. ‘We hide what we think is unspeakable in silence, believing if we starve a thing of words it will disappear,’ she writes.

Waiting for Elijah is Wild’s attempt to understand why Holcombe’s life ended in an Armidale laneway, hundreds of kilometres away from friends and family. Holcombe was studying psychology

and philosophy at a Sydney university, and was a talented musician with a part-time job. He was loved fiercely by his family and was devoted to his young American wife, Allison, although their relationship had become increasingly strained. The question haunts Wild: why was Holcombe shot by police when he had no prior record and was, according to his family, ‘absolutely non-violent by nature’? Wild expects the story to unfold predictably: a family enraged by a ham-fisted and trigger-happy police force, and a son with a secret drug habit or history of random violence. It doesn’t take Wild long to realise the case is much more complex than that. The family refuses to indulge in feelings of bitterness – although the civil claim they launch against the police baffles Wild – and while Elijah was difficult to manage when suffering from delusional paranoia, he was also, by many accounts, sensitive and gentle.

Senior constable Andrew Rich maintains that he had no choice but to shoot Holcombe after he ran towards him with a ‘roar’ while holding a butter knife. During the coronial inquest into Holcombe’s death, five witnesses alleged that Holcombe moved two or three steps towards Rich. Four people claimed he turned to face Rich, but did not move. One said he might have stepped back, while another maintained that Holcombe turned and ran at Rich. Nine said that Holcombe did not speak at all to Rich, but two saw his lips move without hearing what he said, and one swore Holcombe said ‘shoot me, shoot me’. Wild despairs at the capacity for such a variety of recollections from witnesses who purportedly all saw the same incident.

Supplementing her reports of the inquest are Wild’s investigations into broader questions surrounding the treatment of the mentally ill within the community. We learn that the recent migration of mental health care from psychiatric institutions to communitybased facilities has had widespread ramifications. It is much harder these days to schedule someone. This may protect the human rights of the mentally ill person, but can often mean that serious cases are not seen until very

advanced stages. Stuart Thomas, who has as PhD in forensic mental health from Kings College, London, says that change is needed. Thomas is careful to state how remarkably compassionate many police officers are when dealing with distressed members of the public, but he argues that the ubiquitous nature of mental illness demands a review of police procedure: ‘Given half of us will experience some sort of mental illness over the course of our lives, and one in five of us will in a year, there’s arguably a systemic shift needed in the way police respond.’

Of course, the person Wild really wants to talk to is Senior Constable Andrew Rich, but despite emails and numerous entreaties to his lawyers, he remains tight-lipped. When coroner Mary Jerram compels Rich to the witness box, Rich says that he can’t recall the shooting, a memory gap his psychologist attributes to post-traumatic stress disorder. That Rich has been impacted by his decision to shoot that day is undoubted, but his reasons for pulling the trigger are a mystery to an increasingly frustrated Wild.

Wild’s courtroom reportage is comprehensive, sometimes laboriously so. Despite public perception of courtrooms as great theatres of emotion and activity, they are often dull places. It behoves a journalist to omit the tedious legalese and superfluous courtroom machinations, but Wild includes extraneous courtroom detail that unnecessarily pads the story. The real achievement of the book is Wild’s lyrical flair, a rare trait in a news journalist. Wild describes her mental illness as an agony that ‘would fall like a piano from the sky, unannounced and crushing’. She writes that a reply to a question ‘fell in loops at my feet, heavy and rough like rope’.

By the book’s end, Wild has received few definitive answers to her original questions, but not only have those questions changed, you get the sense she is no longer thinking in absolutes. As Holcombe’s father, says to Wild at one point, ‘There’s no black and white here, just a lot of grey.’ g

Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based journalist.

Shooting gallery

Susan Sheridan

DO OYSTERS GET BORED?: A CURIOUS LIFE

by Rozanna Lilley

UWA Publishing

$29.99 pb, 228 pp, 9781742589633

At the centre of this book is Oscar, the son of Rozanna Lilley and her husband, Neil Maclean, and Oscar’s particular way of encountering the world. Unpredictably (by most people’s standards), he is indifferent to some things, sharply affected by others. His fears – of the outdoors, of night and the watching moon, of dogs, for example – are frequently disabling for him and unnerving for other people. He also has an endearing capacity for humour and theatricality. For instance, inspired by his reading of the Mr Men series (supposedly good for helping him to understand different emotions and personalities), he responds to his mother’s reproaching him for greed at a hotel buffet. ‘He looks me up and down. “Mum, you are Miss Perfect,” he comments neutrally. “Who am I? Mr Greedy or Mr Messy?”’

Despite a diagnosis of ‘autism disorder’ when he was three and seemed to be linguistically disabled, Oscar eventually attends a regular school, has his friends to visit for a tenth birthday party, and reads his new comic encyclopedia with such excitement that ‘he paces the living room, flapping and groaning with pleasure’. As Lilley writes, her son is ‘in many respects an ambassador for this most modern of conditions’.

Oscar is intensely but selectively curious about a world that is shaped by his fears, but also by his fascination with words and his enthusiasm for making up stories drawn from his beloved game and television shows. I began to understand, as never before, how much an autistic person’s life may be shaped by fear, and to admire his parents’ dedicated, sometimes exasperated, attempts to deal both with their extraordinary child and the world’s perceptions of him. They value his difference, but refuse to

romanticise it. As Lilley writes, ‘autism is a shooting gallery, a passing parade occupied by stereotypical figures created through a heady mix of prejudice, ignorance and voyeuristic fascination’.

A recent New York Times review of To Siri with Love: A mother, her autistic son, and the kindness of machines by Judith Newman, refers to ‘the fastgrowing library of autism lit’, remarking that Newman’s book is distinctive in this context because, ‘As she removes the zone of privacy from herself and her family, she is edging into the world her son occupies.’ That is, she writes as if saying whatever is on her mind, however unconventional, even appalling, it may be.

Rozanna Lilley’s book has something of the same quality, candidly revealing her own phobias or her parents’ failings, as well as her son’s fears and demands. Indeed, it becomes as much her story as Oscar’s, as the stories move back and forth between her present family life and her memories of childhood, and her precocious and precarious sexual comings-of-age. The emotional terrain of the book’s present time is marked by her father’s decline into dementia and death, and grief for the loss of her mother some ten years earlier.

The memoir, made up of short prose pieces, is complemented by a collection of poems which expand on her memories, including some horrendous exploitative sexual encounters with older men. Allusions to Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath suggest their generic affinities with confessional poetry. Other poems touch on intensities of experience that can’t be sustained in daily life, offering a counterpoint to the world of the memoir.

This is indeed ‘a curious life,’ even given its focus on autism. There was never a safe ‘zone of privacy’ for this writer. Her parents were poet and dramatist Dorothy Hewett, one of the most talented writers of her generation, and her third husband, Merv Lilley, a rough diamond from rural Queensland who shared her passions for poetry and anarcho-communist politics. Rozanna and her sister Kate grew up in a chaotic libertarian household with Dorothy’s three sons from a previous marriage.

Knowing something of the two great mythologisers who were her parents makes a disconcerting difference to the way we read Rozanna’s anecdotes of Dorothy’s carelessness, or Merv’s belligerence. Yet she maintains control over the way they appear in her book, imagining them finally in a suitably theatrical funereal tableau: ‘My mother holds a book of romantic verse in one chiselled hand and a cup of tea in the other; a rifle leans nonchalantly across my father’s leg as he whistles for his loyal kelpie.’

The book draws on hard-won selfknowledge. Lilley writes: ‘sometimes I suspect that it’s anxiety that really stitches us together, a complex web of half-remembered connections, of fears that stretch tautly to reinforce established thread’. Caught in this net, we mutter stories about heroes and demons, or count to one hundred, ‘the spells that keep us both safe from harm and distant from the incessant demands of the world’. This perceptive comment about the self and its strategies also serves as a marvellous image of the way these stories work.

The title piece, ‘Do oysters get bored?’ describes a family holiday at Patonga on the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney. Unimpressed by the place (‘nothing but islands and boats’), Oscar begins busily to think about the marine world: ‘If you were an oyster, would this entire place be the known universe?’ In the narrative the mother’s state of distress, arising from the wreckages of her own life, is the continuing undertone. Over this, the boy’s questions and observations (of the river: ‘It’s as flat as a book’) bring her moments of reassurance, like the spells. In some miraculous way, he provides her solidity, as she does his. g

Susan Sheridan’s most recent book is The Fiction of Thea Astley (Cambria, 2016).

‘Even if it’s late’

Judith Bishop

ZANZIBAR LIGHT

by Philip Mead Vagabond Press

$24.95 pb, 104 pp, 9781922181701

There is a shimmering, ludic intelligence to this collection of poems, Philip Mead’s first since 1984. The word ‘comeback’ is apt, with its grace note of gladness for renewed possibilities. Opening any new work, the anticipation is acute: will I be changed by reading this, and if so, how? What might I think, feel, or recognise that I have not before?

The title and opening poem, as in many collections, are intentional signals, and set our expectations. To begin with, the country of Tanzania is absent from these poems. The common lyric frame of ‘X Light’ is at once made visible and dismantled, as in René Magritte’s famous painting of a pipe, Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe). In the same vein, the title of the opening poem, ‘Cumquat May’, flirts with the vernal shades of May that arise despite our hemisphere, but neither May nor citrus is anywhere in sight. ‘Come what may’ is heard instead, a pointed allusion to the temporal resignation that is the weather of this book. It is not surprising to find clouds in many of the poems, as we do in John Ashbery – neither poet shuns the lyric trope of cloud as volatility. The clouds may be a signifier of affinity with

that poet. As Mead writes in ‘Cumquat May’: ‘We’re bound together by a long arc of occasions / and a future that’s semi-fictional.’

In Zanzibar Light, lyric devices, and the daily tropes of language, are cleverly revealed as such by Ashberian processes of estrangement by disjunction. Mead prepares the reader, at certain points, for what they will encounter: ‘The constellation of sunset / clauses rolls away from every possible referent I can imagine’; ‘What kind of methods are available, anyway, for tragic views? / It’s irresponsible but I just wanted to drift through the scenes / getting lost in the stacks … ’; ‘It’s more about what steps you happen to take, rather than / any syllogism of intent. Your steps, not predictive text’; ‘… any old dream, dissolving, is somewhere you can belong’.

Throughout the book there is a kind of gentle ambush going on: one imagines the poet hiding linguistic and cultural grenades and running for cover before the reader comes. Part of the pleasure lies in ferreting them out. I am reminded of Stephen Burt’s notorious definition of ‘elliptical poets’ in the Boston Review (1998), as those for whom the coherence of the poem, its speaker and its time, are placed in question by a plethora of knowing devices. Thus, a number of the poems in Zanzibar Light proceed by statement and elaboration – a near-ubiquitous move in poetry – but both steps are parodied by substituting odd referents within the familiar-sounding frames (e.g., below, ‘X has happened … ’, ‘Y announces itself … ’, ‘Z has fallen across … ’; ‘I need an X … ’, ‘now that it’s time to Y … ’), and sometimes, oblique equivalents: ‘shedload’ for shitload, and elsewhere, ‘iguanadon’ for elephant):

A shedload has happened though, the family continues to adjust a bright, twirling salad announces itself in the titles a strange distortion has fallen across all official things and I need a hub for my learning community, that much is clear

now that it’s time to think about the strange piers of natural light I’ve been experiencing, half cartouche, half self-portrait against a field of icy green crystals …

The book is divided into five sections. Most poems are untitled. Many are fourteen lines long, thus nodding, at some distance, to the sonnet (turned floating signifier). The punctuation (sometimes present, sometimes not) and divisions between the poems are deliberately ambiguous, wavering between continuity and completion. One poem ends, ‘announcers who have come through a cancer-scare, linear’, while the next begins, ‘thinking often ends in tears, because that’s where the steps’.

The word ‘comeback’ is apt, with its grace note of gladness for renewed possibilities

The third section of the book contains three slightly longer poems. One of these, ‘Romadur and Kümmel’, presents a faux analysis of a non-existent Occitan romance. It is a light but wellsustained exercise in the half-comedic emptying and refilling of poetic signifiers – half-comedic, because the sting in the tail is the lost belief in authenticity: the nicely resonant names of hero and heroine, as it turns out, are the pairing of a German cheese and a Dutch liqueur.

Despite the entertainment, a weariness is communicated: if all Xs can be Ys, all surface, nothing depth, where to rest our minds, that doesn’t slide away from under us? Perhaps a clue lies in the book’s many poem dedications. The act of sharing a poem, and the experience of language and life that inheres in it, creates a ground of sorts. As Mead writes in ‘After the Flood’: ‘whatever you do, finish with a song if you can, even if it’s late’. g

Judith Bishop has twice won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (2006, 2011). Her second collection is Interval (UQP, 2018).

Voices

Dennis Haskell

HARD HORIZONS

by Geoff Page

Pitt Street Poetry

$28 pb, 63 pp, 97819220080783

THE LEFT HAND MIRROR

by Ron Pretty

Pitt Street Poetry

$28 pb, 97 pp, 9781922080806

Ihave no idea if Pitt Street Poetry is located in Pitt Street, in the centre of Sydney’s CBD, but it has certainly made itself central to poetry publishing in Australia. Its list includes such fine poets as Eileen Chong, John Foulcher, Jean Kent, and Anthony Lawrence; that reputation will be added to by these books from Geoff Page and Ron Pretty, two stalwarts of poetic activity in this country.

Hard Horizons is a surprising title from a poet as genial, balanced, and humanly moderate as Geoff Page. It comes from a title poem which appears to be about insects (‘Mostly they appear by night / to … / … scuttle up the walls of cupboards’); then shifts to the questions, ‘What is the secret of their breeding? / Why is it they keep coming back?’

The poem shifts again with T.S. Eliot’s ‘last twist of the knife’ in its bald last line, indeed in its last word: ‘Hard horizons. Hopeful boats.’ Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers is surely something we will look back on with shame, the contemporary equivalent of the White Australia policy. Page’s anguish is unstated: the poem shows a poet of experience, one who knows that less is often more.

Some of his titles – ‘Lone Gunman’, ‘Assisting Police with Their Enquiries’, ‘Wikipedia’ – demonstrate that Page sees poetry as deeply linked to daily news and culture. There is nothing snobbish in content or manner about Page as a poet: his poem with the grandest title, ‘The History of Western Thought’, is characteristically ironic – it is a jokey title about a ‘senior’s moment’ (a two day ‘moment’) trying to remember the name of G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel’s writing is about as tortuous as any philosopher’s

gets (which is saying something), so Page’s plain person’s speech (‘For two whole days he disappeared’) provides both witty contrast and relief.

This plain stance belies the intelligence and knowledge that inform Page’s poems. His irony, wry humour, and emotional understatement mark an aesthetic of ‘Art is that which hides art’ – in my view, the most valuable aesthetic of all. Page writes mostly in stanza form with short lines (i.e. shorter than pentameters, our poetic standard gauge) and adept rhyming, so skilfully that at times his poems might seem too cut and dried, but he writes against easy certainty, against cruelty, against arrogance. His poems in fact celebrate ‘an openness to doubt’. He can enjoy ‘the pleasures of the evanescent’ but conveys a sense that human nature is a constant, and that human mistakes are repeated through history in different contexts. His is a compassionate, empathetic, forgiving voice; in a world of Putins, Trumps, and Hansons, we could do with more such voices.

Ron Pretty’s The Left Hand Mirror is a major, substantial volume, covering human life from birth to our possible future as cyborgs (‘Silicon Valley may yet be making our unmaking.’). Geographically, it ranges from Australian country towns to Europe and, especially, Sri Lanka. The book is divided into three clear sections; the last shares and explains the book’s unusual title. Pretty is old enough to have Page’s concern with ageing, but is more given to its rewards than to a worrying about life’s close. Memory is a ‘vibrato’ (the title of the first section) in consciousness, and for all the troubles invoked, human life seems rich and rewarding.

In considering a still evening he is aware that ‘nothing as perfect as this / can long endure’, and the first section includes a number of in memoriam poems, some explicitly so, some implicitly. Pretty is a keen portraitist, of individuals such as the poet Deb Westbury and a grizzled fisherman nicknamed ‘Burley’, and of Australian types, especially male. In a witty, fast-paced yarn, ‘Parks & Wildlife’ is named for a character who ‘drinks … in the empty bar’ because ‘shaved head’ and others desert it when he comes in.

Pretty is a more discursive, more descriptive poet than Page, and his poems have a strong narrative bent. The brilliant ‘Stentman Sonnets’ are unrhymed sonnets in various forms (e.g. the first is a sestet followed by an octet) which recount the process of having nine stents inserted with grim humour and no self-pity. ‘The Doubting’ is a sequence which retells the Genesis, Lazarus, and Easter stories in a parodic style that Nietzsche would have loved (‘There was light. Let there be God said the waters.’). Lazarus’s sisters get on his wick because a ‘meddler’ (Christ) has stopped them getting their hands on his land. In Pretty’s view, we are very much physical creatures dealing with the heat of primal urges fragilely controlled by the ‘cooling shift of culture’ and with no easy answers to our condition. We can only love one another and die.

Most poignant of all the narratives is the third section’s sequence, which tells of adopting and bringing up in Australia orphaned children from Sri Lanka. Pretty clearly has an affection for the country itself, and its recent bloody history enables him to make great use of its physical shape resembling a teardrop. The poems contrast individual human warmth with the impersonal, often murderous acts that make up large-scale history. Humanity in the nation which he otherwise admires is ‘suspended by a single, fragile thread’, and that is most obviously shown in the helpless babies given up for adoption by poor unwed mothers. Adoption by affluent Westerners saves some children and leaves others behind, ‘their arms raised up’. Even the saving raises ‘Doubts’ (the title of one memorable poem). The problems of taking children from their birth mothers and their birth culture into a more comfortable Western life are ones whose solutions are beyond the human, but there is no doubting the honesty and ethical urgency of the poet’s questions.

It is not too much to say that The Left Hand Mirror is a book by a skilful, intelligent, and thoroughly decent person. Although it is most often ignored, that last adjective may be the most important of poetic qualities. g

Dennis Haskell is a Perth-based poet.

Poet of the Month with Philip Mead

Which poets have most influenced you?

You learn very different things from different poets, from formal aspects, some of them minute, to whole revelations about what a poem might be. This is always developing, and influences tend to come in waves or moments, with anthologies and magazines, subcultures and discoveries. But there are a lot of poets you keep going back to. You can learn from the astonishing ways Emily Dickinson ends a poem (End-grams?), or how Anna Akhmatova’s images are moving because they’re so commonplace: a shoe-heel, an ashtray, a train station. And influence is a free space, whatever is possible: what can you learn about strange conjunctions, like the Medieval and Dada, in Hugo Ball’s line: ‘Destruction was my Beatrice’? The closest influences are the adventures in poetics that one’s contemporaries are involved in.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

It’s more like they pile up, but some of them need special attention.

What prompts a new poem?

Some bit of everyday language that seems unusual or puzzling, something veiled in it, or misheard fragments of conversation, a snowclone, a flickering tag of ordinary language that seems a bit strange – the sign on a van driving past – something that needs to be translated, or worked out, or that’s funny, or ironic, or unfair. Some random order of words, never grand, looking for a home. Gadji beri bimba: they’re gypsies, Beryl, not kids.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

As with any kind of writing, an unpredictable combination of distraction and no interruptions.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

Many, but I don’t count them!

Which poet would you most like to talk to –and why?

Arthur Rimbaud – to ask him where he went and what he got up to between August and December 1876, after he deserted from the Dutch army in Jakarta.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Ern Malley’s The Darkening Ecliptic; T.G.H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie? I guess, both.

What have you learned from reviews of your work?

That readers live in different worlds, which is a thing.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

Maybe Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, a revelation of disarming emotion and the everyday. ‘Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?’ Hopefully it might rattle Plato’s tyrannical philosophers, leave them wondering about their program.

What is your favourite line of poetry?

This changes every day, but just at the moment: ‘the barrel organ, in the twilight of memory, made me dream desperately’ (‘Autumn Lament’ by Stéphane Mallarmé.)

Is poetry generally appreciated by the reading public?

I think it is. People understand how deeply language is a part of them. It’s ordinary, but in poetry it’s not just ordinary, which is why it’s arresting. But not because it means something, or because it’s safe.

Philip Mead’s poems have appeared in journals and anthologies in Australia and internationally. Zanzibar Light (Vagabond, 2018) is his first collection since the 1980s. In the 1990s he edited, with John Tranter, The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. He was Lockie Fellow in Creative Writing and Australian Literature at the University of Melbourne and inaugural Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia. He has also published criticism of Australian poetry and edited the work of several Australian poets. His critical study Networked Language: History and culture in Australian poetry won the 2010 New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Literary Scholarship.

ABR Arts

Theatre Bliss

Fiona Gruber Theatre

Loveless

Anwen Crawford

Peter

ABR Arts is generously supported by The Ian Potter Foundation and the ABR Patrons.

Brian McFarlane on Breath

Three Tall Women

Rose Film

Tim Winton on the set of Breath (Roadshow Films)

Breath

Brian McFarlane

In Simon Baker’s film, there is a visually stunning moment – one among many – of a giant curving wave on the verge of breaking that recalls the Japanese artist Hokusai’s famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa What these two images share is the sense of rapturous beauty that doesn’t underestimate the challenge it offers. It seems appropriate to start on this note as the cinematography (the work of Marden Dean and Rick Rifici) highlights from the outset the centrality of the surf to the film, as indeed it is in Tim Winton’s 2008 novel.

Winton has in recent years been well served in the matter of his novels’ being adapted to the screen. The television miniseries Cloudstreet (2011) captured the novel’s poetic dealings with the possibility of reconciliation between contrasting approaches to living, and the threehour Turning (2013), for which Winton co-authored the screenplay, miraculously wove seventeen of his short stories of interlocking lives into a coherent panorama – or mosaic? – of turning points and convergences in a coastal community. In Breath, his voice is heard on the soundtrack as that of Bruce Pike (‘Pikelet’), a mature version of the film’s youthful protagonist, drawing on the novel’s perceptions, as he intones: ‘Never had I seen something so beautiful, so pointless and elegant, as if dancing on water was the best thing a man could do.’

The film dispenses with the novel’s opening episode involving the older Pikelet, but the voice-over performs some of the same distancing effect, ‘distancing’ in the sense of suggesting how the boy has fared since the days of his youth. The ‘coming-of-age’ scenario was important in the early years of the Australian film revival of the 1970s and 1980s, and in some ways Breath’s narrative recalls this. There are two boys aged about fourteen, Pikelet (Samson Coulter) and the aptly named Loonie (Ben Spence). Despite character and social differences, they are best friends, and the film, like the novel, is interested in both, but it is really Pikelet who has ‘come of age’ by film’s end. He has two crucial encounters, to

do with surfing and sexual initiation, that will lead him to a degree of self-knowledge likely to elude Loonie terminally. Pikelet has learnt that ‘There’s fear in all of us; it’s how you deal with it that counts.’

After the evocative opening shot of the limbs of two boys darting about underwater, a moment reprised at the film’s ending, the voice-over of the adult Pikelet informs us: ‘I was an only child, solitary by nature.’ The film then reveals the boy out in a boat on a river with his unadventurous father (Richard Roxburgh) who doesn’t want to venture further into the daunting waters of the bay. When we next see Pikelet and Loonie hurtling on their bikes, it’s clear that Pikelet is the more cautious of the two, and Baker maybe implies an element of genetic inheritance. But only an element – quite soon the two boys will have acquired their first surf boards, and once Pikelet has breasted his first big wave, he is hooked.

This life-changing moment coincides with the appearance of Sando (Simon Baker), a ‘hippie’ type who lives with his American girlfriend, Eva (Elizabeth Debicki), in a rambling hut in the woods and who allows the boys to leave their boards at his place. Don’t imagine that Breath is another of those Australian surf movies of several decades ago, films made entirely for aficionados. The screenplay for Breath certainly examines, and celebrates, the rapture that the waves can induce, but it is written and directed with a real concern for the kind of life from which Pikelet has emerged. His parents are conventional but not dull or repressive, and Baker, in his dual function as director and co-author, imbues the scenes depicting the home life they provide with warmth and precision. When Loonie stays with them, he compliments Mrs Pike (Rachael Blake) on the dinner, and the Pike meals are a homely meat-and-three-veg affair. In a small, revealing detail when the boys eat at Sando’s place, they are offered smashed avocado on toast, two lifestyles quietly contrasted.

What really takes Pikelet’s eye is the leggy beauty of Eva, who is also keen to catch that eye. While Sando is in Asia, Pikelet, at fourteen, loses his virginity to this decade-older woman, and he can no longer honestly play along with his school girlfriend. When I wrote that he has come to self-knowledge in two matters, I meant that he knows both that ‘it [the surf] is not for me’ and that the adolescent trajectory has been disrupted, however keenly he has surrendered to both.

Drawing on Winton’s eloquently haunting novel, Baker has made an engrossing and finally moving study of a boy coming to terms with life’s challenges, a little battered but also strengthened by experience. g

Breath (Roadshow Films), 115 minutes, directed by Simon Baker. (Online: 30 April 2018)

Brian McFarlane’s most recent book is Making a Meal Of It: Writing about film (Monash University Publishing, 2018), reviewed on page 45.

Loveless

Anwen Crawford

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a cold, despairing film, befitting its title. It opens and closes in the depths of winter, with wide, lingering shots of an ice-bound river; in between, it delivers a portrait of a marriage that has hardened into estrangement, with a child lost to the void that exists between his parents. No character is improved by their trials, much less redeemed. No thaw ever comes.

In an outer district of contemporary Moscow, where unwelcoming streets are lined with identical-seeming apartment blocks, Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) are preparing to divorce. Their marriage was hastily made, in consequence of Zhenya’s unplanned pregnancy; twelve years later, all that remains of their youthful ardour is an anxious, lonely son, Alyosha (Matvey Novikov), whom neither wants to be burdened with. An early, heated argument between the ex-partners about their child’s future culminates in a wrenching shot of the boy himself, hidden behind the kitchen door, silently devastated by what he has overheard. Built interiors function in Loveless as both setting and metaphor. Boris’s younger lover, Masha (Marina Vasileva), lives in a homely flat where the two of them frequently retreat to imagine their future. Her pregnancy seems to augur a revitalisation in Boris’s life, as well as the fulfilment of Masha’s own ambition as the very picture of a competent woman. In contrast, Zhenya’s older lover, Anton (Andris Keyshs), resides in an apartment of sleek lines and floor-toceiling glass windows that make the couple’s sensual trysts feel like acts of conspicuous, self-conscious gratification.

These differing schemas are a touch too neatly laid out, and, when added to Zhenya’s reflexive habit of browsing her phone, or Boris’s unsubtle enquiries at work as to the potential penalties for divorce – his employer is a fundamentalist Christian – their respective new abodes demonstrate to a viewer what we have already deduced: that the husband is immature and hypocritical, and the wife vacuous. But Zvyagintsev clearly has an ongoing interest in property and its role in present-day Russian life. His previous, magnificent film, Leviathan (2014), was partly about land expropriation and corruption in a rural town.

More unsettling, because more ambiguous, are the many shots of literal ruin that follow when the overlooked

Alyosha goes missing, or runs away. (Whether it’s one or the other, or when one becomes the other, remains unresolved.) The task of finding him falls to a private, volunteer search party – the local police are too busy to care – who seem to specialise in the business, which raises the question of just how many other children are missing in Moscow, and where, if anywhere, they might be. Combing the district for any sign of Alyosha, the search party keeps returning to an abandoned residential block, where any remaining objects of comfort – a common lounge area, a kitchen stove – have now decayed into a state beyond salvage. And yet this is just the kind of place that a child might find enchanting.

Zvyagintsev and his regular cinematographer, Mikhail Krichman, intersperse their austere, often frontal framing of these various interior locations – and the surrounding forest and river – with unnerving push-ins that threaten to reveal some terrible, explanatory detail, but never do. Also deferred is any sense that this crisis might bring Boris and Zhenya to a rapprochement. They feel for their missing child, but they cannot conceive of their grief as a shared burden. Instead, it only exacerbates the blame they locate in each other for their failed marriage.

Although these two are not monsters, there is nevertheless a moralising, fable-like undercurrent to this story of a child who vanishes because his parents are selfish. Spivak, playing the more abrasive character, strains against that quality in the script. Zhenya is deeply unsympathetic, but Spivak makes us feel her circumstances. She is a mother who never wanted to be a mother, and at least admits it, unlike her husband, whose fantasies of domestic bliss are only that. Also strong, in a smaller role, is Aleksey Fateev as the search party coordinator. This volunteer group is the only source of generosity in the film, but its ordinary selflessness seems like a futile gesture in an endemically uncaring place.

Loveless is mostly set in 2012, when, says Zvyagintsev, people in Russia ‘were full of hope’ in the aftermath of a presidential election that saw Vladimir Putin elected for a third term. By the film’s conclusion in 2015, a kind of grim fatalism, hard to distinguish from indifference, has set in. In their respective homes, Zhenya and Boris watch the renewed conflict in Ukraine on the television, and turn away.

Zvyagintsev’s feeling for Russia’s past is never nostalgic, but it is mournful. In that decrepit building where the search party calls out for Alyosha, there also dwells, or so Zvyagintsev seems to suggest, a dangerously neglected national history, and by neglecting it, the people have made for themselves a barren future. Something vital, his films intimates, has been lost in Russia, and perhaps not only in Russia – some warmth of the soul, a sense of civic accountability. As with the child, no one even noticed it slipping away. g

Loveless (Palace Films), 128 mins, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev. (Online: 23 April 2018)

Anwen Crawford is the 2017–18 Writer in Residence at the UTS Centre for New Writing.

Three Tall Women

Peter Rose

It’s easy to forget how young Edward Albee was when he wrote his first plays, The Zoo Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance. Perhaps it was his choice of subjects and types that obscured the New Yorker’s precocity. In a way, Albee was always middle-aged – like his great characters, with their dashed hopes and jaded marriages. Terror, loath-

came box-office poison in the 1970s and 1980s. Broadway, where Martha had rampaged for 664 performances, wouldn’t touch him. Audiences had changed, America had changed: it began to elect people like Ronald Reagan. Then came Three Tall Women, Albee’s thirteenth full-length play. It would win him his third Pulitzer Prize for drama (with A Delicate Balance and Seascape). Like many of Albee’s early plays, Three Tall Women had its première in Europe (Vienna, 1991). Then it opened Off Broadway in 1994 before moving to the Promenade Theatre, where it played for more than a year. Three Tall Women came to Australia in 1995, an STC production directed by Wayne Harrison. Ruth Cracknell was a commanding A, and Pamela Rabe (eligibly tall) relished B’s sarcasms and acidities (‘Calm down; adjust; settle in. Men cheat; men cheat a lot. We cheat less, and we cheat because we’re lonely; men cheat because they’re men’).

Now Glenda Jackson – returning to Broadway after a regrettably long career in British politics – assumes the celebrated role of A. At eighty-one, Jackson’s voice is undimmed, almost explosive at times – and such diction.

Three Tall Women may not be as brilliant as Virginia Woolf or A Delicate Balance, but Joe Mantello’s meticulous and beautifully acted production freshens our interest in the play. The story in Three Tall Women is a familiar one: old wars, stubborn hurts – a twenty-year sulk. It is based on Albee’s well-known childhood: adopted by theatre-owning Reed Albee and his third wife, Frances; often expelled from tony schools; precociously homosexual; ultimately dismissive of his conventional, socially ambitious mother. The play is about fear, loss, abandonment. Always we hear George’s bleak reminder, ‘We regret everything’ – the drumbeat in Albee’s oeuvre.

ing, disaffection, in Albee’s syntactically lethal world, were the norm. Yet Albee was in his early thirties when he created Martha (greatest of American monsters), with her brilliant zingers about the wreckage of a twenty-year marriage. As B remarks in Three Tall Women, currently being revived at the Golden Theatre in New York under Joe Mantello’s direction, ‘It’s downhill from sixteen on! For all of us!’ She goes on to fantasise about six-year-olds learning about death at the age of six (‘Make ’em aware that they’re dying from the minute they’re alive’). It gets a laugh in the stalls, a queasy laugh.

After the early laurels, the epic seasons, Albee be-

There are three characters: A, B, and C. Pastelled and permed, irritable and incontinent, A – a ninety-two-year-old dowager – is nursing her incurably broken left arm. Glenda Jackson has perfected the old woman’s tics, down to the slow, calming tapping of her right, slippered foot. A hectors B, her companion-carer and general mopper-up (Laurie Metcalf), and she torments C, the young lawyer who has been sent to sort out A’s finances. C, bored and disapproving, is unamused by the old woman’s capriciousness and decrepitude. The banter is delicious as A and B gang up on the disapproving C (‘Miss Perfect over there’), just as George and Martha do in Virginia Woolf – getting the guests. Nothing, refreshingly, is done to temper A’s vicious and bigoted asides. There were gasps in the stalls at some of her audacities. (In cautious Australia, one suspects, producers would balk at her racist and

Glenda Jackson in Three Tall Women (photograph by Brigitte Lacombe)

anti-Semitic remarks.)

A’s selectively muddled memory introduces some of the play’s themes – class, business marriages, infidelity. Act One culminates in an almost bashful account of the night A’s ‘penguin’ of a husband (aware of her penchant for jewellery) brought her a diamond bracelet on his ‘little pee-pee’ and let it slip into her lap when she, averse to fellatio, rejected his penile offering. A then has a stroke, and B summons the doctor – and the absent son.

The two shortish acts (played here without a break) are fundamentally different. On paper, Act One is the more brilliant, because virtuosic in its repartee, but in the theatre Act Two acquires a gravity and poignancy that Act One lacks.

Miriam Butler’s set is ornate and generic. Local references are few, but this feels like a five-star New York hotel – ‘everything Louis’, as Barbra Streisand once said of her décor. The set is reversed in Act Two, with a mirrored wall at the rear which rises at the end to reveal the supine A on her vast bed.

In a celebrated coup de théâtre early in Act Two, A returns to the stage, newly upright and unfractured, though still in her nineties. B and C become younger versions of A, fond now, sisterly, all in silk. The son appears, bearing freesias but always mute, as if Albee (even Albee) couldn’t stomach one last clash with his adoptive mother. (Joseph Medeiros, as the Boy, looks eerily like the young Albee, it must be said.)

After the brisk interplay of Act One, the second ends with a series of extended monologues, often delivered at the front of the stage. Alison Pill, though vocally outshone by Metcalf and Jackson, is affecting in C.’s long speech towards the end of the play – a plea for reassurance (‘Is it like this? What about the happy time … the happiest moments? I haven’t had them yet, have I? All done at twenty six?’).

Likewise, Metcalf – so fine as the bleak, abiding mother in Lady Bird, and last year’s Tony Award winner in A Doll’s House, Part 2 – makes the most of B’s long stoic speech: ‘What I like most about being where I am is that there’s a lot I don’t have to go through anymore … It opens up whole vistas – of decline, of obsolescence, peculiarity, but really interesting!’

Then it is Glenda Jackson’s turn, and here she is compelling and profoundly moving. Again those inimitable cadences fill the theatre as A, beyond rancour now, welcomes death and thinks of herself in the third person, ‘without being crazy’. Downstage she moves to apprise the audience of ‘the happiest moment. When it’s all done. When we stop. When we can stop.’

It is a moment of vindication and restoration, like seeing this greatest of actors in a new, sharp light. g

Three Tall Women, directed by Joe Mantello, continues at the John Golden Theatre in New York City until 24 June 2018. (Longer version online: 19 April)

Peter Rose is the Editor of ABR

Still Point Turning: The Catherine McGregor Story

Ian Dickson

In the introduction to her seminal memoir of life as a transgender person, Conundrum (1974), the author Jan Morris makes it clear that she is not concerned with merely narrating the facts of her condition. ‘What was important’ to relate ‘was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love, and to know ourselves, however peculiar, disconcerting or unclassifiable, at one with the gods and angels’.

In a decidedly earthier and more Australian style, this is exactly what the remarkable combination of Catherine McGregor and Priscilla Jackson have sought to achieve in Still Point Turning. However, the world has moved on since Morris wrote those words, and although we are all, in our own ways, undoubtedly peculiar (and the feisty McGregor can definitely be disconcerting), McGregor and Jackson show us that the area of gender studies has no longer made the transgender community unclassifiable.

McGregor’s story is by now well known. Born in 1956 in the then extremely conservative town of Toowoomba, Catherine, then Malcolm, struggled with feelings of gender displacement from an early age in an era when little to nothing was known of the condition. Determined to crush what he felt were unacceptably feminine yearnings, he fell into a pattern of over-achievement in what were then considered strictly masculine pursuits. He played first grade cricket in Toowoomba and, as did Jan Morris, joined the army. These high achieving periods were followed by breakdowns and retreats into alcoholism, drug abuse, and depression. This sequence followed McGregor through careers in the law, politics, and journalism. He managed to kick the drug and alcohol habits, but the depression and anguish remained. It says much for his ability, strength, and tenacity that he was able, in the midst of acute emotional distress, to remain

not merely functional but successful in these occupations. Catherine relates the moment when Malcolm received the Member of the Military Division of the Order of Australia. What should have been a peak moment was instead a nightmare of panic. Finally, Malcolm had his gender dysphoria confirmed, began hormone therapy, and came out. The play both relates this story and shows us what life is actually like for a transitioning person.

Still Point Turning is based on interviews which Jackman recorded with McGregor, and is told almost entirely in McGregor’s words. As both director and writer, Jackman has been able to edit and shape what could have been a static, didactic lecture into a riveting piece of theatre. Occasionally, there are moments when the theatrical adage ‘show don’t tell’ might have been applied and stories told might have been more powerful as scenes acted. Perhaps the most moving moment in the play is a dialogue between the transitioning Catherine

and a Qantas employee. Catherine, due to fly to Sydney, is worried that security will question the name on her boarding pass. The Qantas employee’s response is a miracle of compassionate understanding. A miracle, that is, to those of us who regularly fly the national airline. Alan Joyce take note. The gaiety in the scene set in that long-gone bastion of camp exuberance, The Unicorn Hotel, seems a little forced. But these are quibbles in a production which flows effortlessly across decades and through cities.

Jackman is ably assisted by Michael Scott-Mitchell’s simple and effective design. Much is made of a hospital-style curtain, and the windowed wall behind which the public gather to express their opinions makes a sinister effect. The public’s malicious and positive responses are picked up in Steve Francis’s effective sound design. Nick Schlieper’s lighting is exemplary as always.

Although everything revolves around Catherine, the rest of the excellent cast have moments to shine. As cricket legend Rahul Dravid, Nicholas Brown is a still, calm, and imposing presence. Georgina Symes’s Ayala reacts to her friend and fellow transgender soldier with warm and slightly ironic support. Ashley Lyons is powerfully moving as the increasingly desperate Malcolm.

But the play stands or falls with the actor playing Catherine, and in Heather Mitchell’s hands Still Point Turning doesn’t merely stand, it soars. Prowling the stage with scarcely contained nervous energy and ad libbing freely with the audience, Mitchell is in complete command even when the character she is playing is anything but. Funny, acerbic, and vulnerable, she presents us with a complex, flawed, valiant, obstreperous heroine. She is especially moving when relating to two of McGregor’s great heroes, Sydney’s famous drag legend Carlotta and cricket’s aforementioned luminary, Rahul Dravid. Mitchell has shone recently in STC’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls, but this performance has to be a highlight of her distinguished career.

At the play’s conclusion, as Mitchell coaxed an obviously deeply moved McGregor on to the stage, the opening night audience rose to its feet to acknowledge a brave, indomitable trans woman and the actress who played her with such vigour, understanding, and compassion. g

Still Point Turning (Sydney Theatre Company) was performed at the Wharf 1 Theatre from 21 April to 26 May 2018. (Online: 30 April)

Ian Dickson is our Sydney theatre critic.

Heather Mitchell as Catherine McGregor in Still Point Turning (photograph by Philip Erbacher)

Bliss

Fiona Gruber

The opening of Peter Carey’s satirical novel Bliss (1981), where the body of Harry Joy lies dead on the lawn while his spirit hovers above, is one of the most memorable in modern Australian literature. Harry’s laconic out-of-body narration hovers like a spare and airy jazz riff until a defibrillator jolts him back into the land of the living, and a newly recognised living hell. It is not an easy scene to stage, and in Tom Wright’s adaptation at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, it’s been dismembered. Instead of lying there and letting others do the talking, Harry Joy, in his famous grubby white suit, enters the bare stage and tells us the story of how his father met his mother, ‘the vision splendid’, during a flood of biblical proportions. In the novel, this comes later in Part One, partly to establish that Joy is a vivid storyteller. But in the play’s opening scene, another actor steps forward to tell us what we see in the novel; that Harry is about to die. Instead of a green lawn, or the bare floor of the stage, Harry enters a small glass greenhouse and expires there.

It is not the most promising of openings but the play improves, thanks to pacey direction by Matthew Lutton and an ensemble cast that crackles with talent and energy. Especially enjoyable is Marco Chiappi’s performance as Harry’s colleague, Alex Duval, who assumes Joy’s identity, in an exaggeratedly languid performance, later in the play. Toby Truslove plays Harry more as a mild-mannered, troubled everyman than as a charismatic Good Bloke, an archetype that Carey uses to sum up the male-dominated, parochial, and mediocre society of 1980s Australia. But then, the Good Bloke, with his self-satisfied bonhomie and unexamined sense of entitlement, is what Harry, after his short death, has ceased to be. He is now the Questioning Bloke, the Angst-ridden Bloke, the Bloke with a Social Conscience, who realises that some of the products his successful advertising agency sells cause cancer.

Meanwhile, his wife, Bettina, played ferociously by Amber McMahon, longs to replace her husband at the agency to produce ads of wit and brilliance. She is sick of the way the world revolves around average men like Harry (the

set revolves too, not always to any real purpose) and longs to reach her ultimate goal, a job in New York. Australia’s love–hate relationship with America is at the heart of Carey’s novel. We love its wealth and success, the shiny goods and fast foods, the aura of power and confidence. We hate its brashness, its arrogance, its ignorance about everywhere that isn’t America, its lack of irony.

The American good life is tangible, material, you can buy it, you can be sold it. And the ad men do the selling. Back in the 1980s, the advertising world was a blokey place, especially in Australia, and this country’s advertisements were often local versions of American ones. Many things that were being sold were ruinous to your health or wrecked the planet, but no one cared, as long as they made you feel good. Carey was a highly successful ad man, so he knew that, and he knew that the Australian/American dream was also a nightmare.

Harry’s nightmare, his hell, surrounds him on all sides. His wife, ‘whose niceness cracked and broke on the third martini’, is being unfaithful to him with his fleshy American junior partner, Joel (played with smarmy charm by Mark Coles Smith). His son David is peddling drugs, his fifteen year-old daughter Lucy is a communist (this really dates the book, and the play), they’re dabbling in commercially driven incest (she wants drugs, he insists she earns them on her knees), and everyone thinks that Harry is cracking up and needs to be committed to an asylum.

Into this maelstrom, while Harry pads around in a suite at the Hilton, avoiding the men in white coats, steps Honey Barbara, a hippy whore and beekeeper. She knows about the healthy life, the true path, but can Harry find his way there, through her? Honey Barbara, played by Anna Samson, is the warm heart of the play; she lives in a commune and only prostitutes herself for two months of the year, in order to pay for the commune’s needs: ‘a water tank. A stove … half a horse’. (Carey lived for several years in a commune called Starlight, north of Brisbane, writing part time and selling himself one week a month writing advertising copy in Sydney).

At three hours long, Bliss is a stretch, especially as so much of it is narrated rather than acted. There is also a meta text that amuses at times, jars at others; Bettina throws a cup that doesn’t break. ‘Clearly a prop,’ says Harry, commenting into his dictaphone. Later on, an inmate in the mental asylum appears with the same dictaphone. ‘Where did you get that?’ demands Harry. ‘The props table,’ he answers. The spare set, lighting, and soundscape are also insufficient to lift the words truly into the world of theatre. Only in the final scene, up in the rain forest with Honey Barbara and her communards, do we get a sense of the possibilities the set has to offer. Maybe hell is a wasteland of bright lights and glass walls. g

Bliss (Malthouse Theatre) will be performed at the Merlyn Theatre, Melbourne, until 2 June 2018 and at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney from 9 June to 15 July. (Online: 11 May)

Fiona Gruber is a Melbourne-based journalist and producer.

The Bookshop

Jake Wilson

Watching The Bookshop , adapted from the Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1978 novel by the Catalan director Isabel Coixet, admirers of the English novelist have the chance to test their memories. Which parts of the dialogue and the third-person voice-over narration (delivered by Julie Christie), come directly from the book? Which are newly invented? And which have been sourced from elsewhere?

The hunt for the answers leads down some unexpected paths. ‘When we read a story, we inhabit it.’ This sounds too sententious to be authentic Fitzgerald: it turns out to be a quote from Coixet’s late friend John Berger, to whom the film is dedicated. ‘A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.’ This comes originally from a passage in Milton’s Areopagitica, adopted as a motto by Everyman’s Library; Fitzgerald cites it with quiet irony, whereas Coixet treats the sentiment as straightforwardly inspirational. But when the film’s narrator declares that human beings are divided into ‘exterminators and exterminatees’, there can be no doubt who first expressed the thought. This is the sort of offhand but chilling remark we trip over from time to time in Fitzgerald’s work, and one which no reader of The Bookshop is likely to have forgotten.

Fitzgerald’s novel is about the exterminators and the exterminatees – and many other subjects, including the gap between life and literature. Told in little more than a hundred pages, the story is a simple one. The heroine is the middle-aged widow Florence Green (played in the film by Emily Mortimer), who decides to open a bookshop in a crumbling old house in the significantly named East Anglian town of Hardborough, where she has been living for ten years (the period is the late 1950s). Not all the locals approve, especially not the well-connected Violet Gamet (Patricia Clarkson) who is bent on establishing an ‘arts centre’ in the same spot. But she finds allies, too, among them her tenyear-old helper Christine (Honor Kneafsey) and the reclusive Mr Brundish (Bill Nighy), the subject of many local legends.

So it goes too in Coixet’s telling of the story, with due allowance made for the requirements of cinema. Mortimer is not the physically nondescript Florence of the book: she has the kind of face which a less good novelist than Fitzgerald might describe as ‘sadly pretty’. All the same, she fits the part, with her determined smile and anxious eyes that convey a perpetual sense of not fitting in. Some of the supporting players struggle to pinpoint a tone halfway between comedy and drama: James Lance is a bit too broad a caricature as Milo North, a louche fellow from the BBC who takes an

interest in Florence’s enterprise. By contrast, Clarkson seizes what opportunities she has to make Violet more than a one-dimensional villain, though she can only do so much to fill out a character whose deeper motives are never entirely clear.

One of Coixet’s wisest choices as a screenwriter is to increase the prominence of the awkward but genuinely sensitive Mr Brundish, without allowing his tentative rapport with Florence – in the book, the pair come face to face only once – to develop into overt romance. The result gives full scope to Nighy’s universally recognised though not quite definable charm, which stems partly from his way of hovering above and to the side of any story he appears in. The scene where Florence and Brundish meet over afternoon tea is a highlight of the film, staying largely true to Fitzgerald’s dialogue and letting Nighy make the most of moments like Brundish’s puzzlement at the idea of an arts centre. ‘How can the arts have a centre?’ he demands.

In outline, The Bookshop could well be seen as a version of a story we are used to seeing in cinema, pitting fresh liberal thinking against the forces of stuffy conformity. The objection to the film is that it leans into this side of the material while systematically softening the sharper or odder aspects of Fitzgerald’s vision. The pretty scenery (the locations were on the Irish coast) tends to undermine the premise of Hardborough as basically forbidding; gone are most of the pointed references to local poverty, and the details which underline the town’s decay, like the rusted tin strips, relics of former advertisements, which hang in the breeze at the railway station. Gone too, sadly, is the poltergeist or ‘rapper’ haunting the bookshop: an important presence in the novel, treated in the same matter-of-fact manner as everything else. Still, Coixet retains the essentials of Fitzgerald’s plot, which brings home the message that good intentions are rarely enough, though the all too realistic ending has been reshaped into something both more melodramatic and more upbeat.

To complain that a film adaptation of a novel differs from the original is, as we all know, a waste of time. Just the same, there is something dismaying about a film that purports to champion books yet verges on being a sentimental betrayal of its own source. Then again, the intrinsic value of literature is a theme that Fitzgerald was at pains to avoid, at least on the surface. ‘Culture is for amateurs,’ she has Florence declare early on. ‘Shakespeare was a professional.’ Perhaps she would approve Coixet’s changes after all, considering that they may give the film a fighting chance of making some money. g

The Bookshop (Transmission Films), 113 minutes, directed by Isabel Coixet. (Online: 21 May)

Jake Wilson is a freelance writer who lives in Melbourne and reviews films regularly for Australian Book Review and The Age.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll

Will Yeoman

Black Swan State Theatre Company’s terrific new production of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll joins other recent revivals such as those by Belvoir Street Theatre (2011) and State Theatre Company of South Australia (2015) in showing that Ray Lawler’s 1955 classic has lost none of its power to entertain and provoke.

Some of the themes explored in the Doll – set in Melbourne in 1953–54 and first seen in Perth in 1956, a year after its Melbourne première – have, if anything, assumed greater significance for West Australian audiences in light of the state’s current reliance on FIFO workers. But so much else has changed – appropriate for a play which is all about change. The ease of staying in touch has radically altered the nature of long-distance relationships. Indeed, the nature of relationships full stop has radically altered. To what extent Australian audiences also recognise themselves in what was seen as a ground-breaking work of social realism depicting, for the first time in this country, the real lives of real working class Australians, is debatable.

On a superficial level, The Doll is now a period piece, and on that level director Adam Mitchell treats it as such. However, that doesn’t equate with nostalgia, and while Bruce McKinven’s costumes and set design firmly place the play in 1950s Australia, the ‘lightbox’ configuration of the set, together with Trent Suidgeest’s efficiently expressive lighting and Ben Collins’s psychologically astute sound design, is thoroughly contemporary. The resulting dissonance between these elements and the 1950s kitsch décor, replete with previous summers’ sixteen kewpie dolls scattered across the back wall like a disorganised skein of the once ubiquitous flying wall ducks, is one of this production’s chief joys. But the play’s the thing. For sixteen years, Queensland canecutters Barney (Jacob Allan) and Roo (Kelton Pell) have come down to Melbourne for the five-month lay-off season, staying with Olive (Amy Mathews) and her mother

Emma (Vivienne Garrett) in their Carlton house. Olive is Roo’s girl; Barney formerly ‘stepped out’ with Nancy, who has since married; widow Pearl (Alison van Reeken), who, like Olive, works as a barmaid, has been invited by her friend to stay as a kind of replacement for Nancy. Olive, Emma, Barney, and Roo have watched next-door neighbour Bubba (Mackenzie Dunn), now twenty-two, grow up, and she is treated as part of their ‘family’.

It has been customary each year for Roo to present Olive with a kewpie doll. This year’s doll, the seventeenth, will be the last. Barney and Roo – the former an ageing Lothario, the latter once a gun cutter and respected ganger but now superseded by young canecutter Johnnie Dowd (Michael Cameron) – find themselves increasingly at loggerheads; the situation is not helped by the fact that Roo has turned up in Melbourne broke.

As tensions mount and spill over into physical violence, relations also deteriorate between Roo, who finally seems resigned to change, and Olive, who is anything but. Only a burgeoning relationship between Bubba and Johnnie strikes a note of optimism, but even here Lawler’s excellent script introduces sceptical overtones.

Despite the centrality of the relationship between Roo and Barney on the one hand and Roo and Olive on the other, this is very much an ensemble effort, and the cast is uniformly excellent. But there are firsts among equals. Pell – the first Aboriginal actor to play Roo – stands out for his quiet power, utterly natural delivery, and eloquent, unforced facial and bodily gestures. Allan’s Barney is surprisingly layered and complex. We are never sure whether he’s a chancer, a larrakin, a braggart, or a good mate capable of genuine self-reflection.

Amy Mathews, as Olive, is equally convincing as the woman who refuses to grow up, bringing a subtly deranged quality to the part, especially in the final act, while van Reeken makes palpable Pearl’s conflicted personality as she swings between propriety and desire. Veteran Garrett is a hoot as Emma – the New Year’s Eve singalong at the piano is delicious – while, at the other end of the career spectrum, newcomers Dunn and Cameron bring a freshness but also a prophetic archness to Bubba and Johnnie.

There is some unevenness in sustaining the ‘ocker’ diction, while Mitchell’s direction is not always as smooth as one would wish. Perhaps the design could also have made more of that counterpoint between bush and suburban mythologies. But overall this new production is an extraordinary achievement which manages to straddle the requirements of ‘period’ fidelity and contemporary innovation in the way the best Shakespeare production might, or even the best historically informed performances of classical music. g

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (Black Swan State Theatre Company) was performed at the Heath Ledger Theatre from 5 to 20 May 2018. (Online: 11 May)

Will Yeoman is a Perth-based arts writer and literary editor for The West Australian. He guest curated the writers program at the 2018 Perth International Arts Festival.

Critic of the Month with Brenda Niall

Which critics most impress you?

From many possibilities in Australia and elsewhere, I choose James Wood. Given enviable space in the New Yorker and the London Review of Books, Wood doesn’t waste it. His shrewd, elegant reviews show a critic at ease with diverse talents, He knows where his writers are coming from and where they’re going. Calm, scholarly, but passionate when passion is called for.

What makes a fine critic?

Enthusiasm, eloquence, a distinctive voice, openness to the unexpected, a well-stocked mind, wit, and humour: some or all of these gifts would make the ideal reviewer.

Do you accept most books on offer, or do you prefer to be selective?

There’s not so much on offer in these days of shrinking review pages, so I usually accept what the editor has chosen, knowing that selection has already taken place. Sometimes I find myself reviewing something I didn’t much want; and it occurs to me that perhaps I do a better job when forced to think about something that at first sight isn’t congenial.

Do reviewers receive enough feedback from editors and/or readers?

I get some feedback from other readers, swapping opinions on books I’ve reviewed. Not much from authors, though. Now and then someone writes to me and that’s wonderful – at least when they’re happy with the review. I don’t think that, in nearly sixty years of reviewing, I have scored more than two or three letters to the editor, either to complain about me or to correct a mistake. It’s not so often that a reviewer hears an author’s pleasure or surprise at the way a work has been understood. Instead of ‘You got me wrong’, it would be good to hear: ‘That’s just what I hoped someone might find in my book.’

What do you think of negative reviews?

You need strong reasons to write a wholly negative review. There must be cases in which serious misrepresentation needs correcting. But I wouldn’t bother with the patently shoddy or the obviously feeble. Of course, a demolition job can be fun, but I’d advise sleeping on it and rereading before pressing Send. It may not be as funny as you thought at the time of writing.

One of the first reviews I ever wrote was in the form of a parody. I’d been sent a Morris West novel (The Shoes of the Fisherman, 1963), and I had amused myself by counting the number of times the characters ‘heaved’ themselves out of their chairs. It didn’t occur to me then that a writer of West’s public stature would take any notice of an unknown graduate student’s review, if in fact he even read it. But he did; he was seriously upset, and so was I when I heard how angry he was. I think I was right about West’s clichéd style, but I know that I was having fun rather than looking at the novel as a whole.

Some negative reviews are useful and illuminating; they tell the reader something about the critic as well as the book. If a literary editor had said, ‘Tone it down, Henry’, when Henry James turned in his essay on the work of the great Russian novelists, we would have lost ‘loose and baggy monsters’ and ‘fluid puddings’. These wonderfully memorable phrases show the contrasting values of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and Henry James, for whom economy and selection meant so much.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

I avoid reviewing people I know. Because I taught in the English Department at Monash University for thirty years, I am occasionally offered a book by a former student. If there’s a risk of reverting to the mind-set of Pass, Credit, Distinction, High Distinction, I drop it at once. It’s a reminder that reviewers shouldn’t be didactic, and that the review should engage the likely reader with a promise of the kind of pleasure the book offers. It isn’t an assessment.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

I think the critic must put the book first. Not the author, nor the journal the review is written for, though these must also have their due. A reviewer who flattens the life out of the book fails on all counts.

Brenda Niall is a Melbourne author and former academic, best known for her award-winning biographies. These include The Boyds: A family biography (2002) and Mannix (2015). Mannix won the 2016 National Biography Award and the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal. Niall’s most recent book is Can You Hear the Sea?: My grandmother’s story (Text, 2017).