#10: Walkabout
Hey y’all,
How are you this fine Tuesdee?? I have nothing to share except my week was dedicated to getting very into Shit Everyone Already Knew About, like basketball and The Wire. It’s kind of my thing!
8/4 FUND RACIAL JUSTICE/ACTION ITEM:
This week, consider following ShiShi Rose on Instagram. ShiShi is a birth worker and writer who regularly posts links in her stories to GoFundMe fundraisers for Black people in need of some financial support. It is so important that we give directly to people and not just organizations.
8/4 MOVIE BY A BLACK FILMMAKER REC:
Okay, this one is a blast from the past for me: Devil in a Blue Dress directed by Carl Franklin. It is a noir film I saw a looongggg time ago but remember it being pretty, thrilling, and sexxxxy! It’s got Denzel in a moustache so what more do you want, really? Available on YouTube and Amazon.
# 10: Walkabout
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Country: United Kingdom/Australia
Year: 1971
Runtime: 100 minutes
Language: English (and an unidentified Australian Aboriginal language)
**As always, this post contains spoilers**
Hmmmm…..HMMMMMMMM……I don’t know about this one, y’all. I just don’t KNOW. Let’s squawk about it.
Now having seen the entire film, I can fully appreciate how the beginning of it sets the tone so perfectly. It begins with about 10 minutes of short scenes from city life in Sydney cut with scenes of the Outback and its wildlife set to didgeridoo music. One of the scenes is of a classroom of White teen girls in school uniforms delicately hyperventilating together. Eeek. Immediately on edge.
We find one of these teen girls in a VW bug parked in the middle of the Australian Outback with her father and younger brother, who is probably 8 or 9. They are all British and are never named. The boy (played by Luc Roeg, the director’s son), dressed in a school uniform that is a suit but with shorts and a hat, plays with his toy cars on the rocks, while the girl (Jenny Agutter), also in her school uniform, listens to an etiquette program on the radio and lays out a picnic. The father stays in the car and reads a paper on geology, looking perturbed.
In apropos of literally nothing, the father gets out of the car and STARTS SHOOTING AT THEM. They are able to escape unscathed, but he continues shooting and yelling at them to come back so they can go home. The girl sees him set the car on fire and then shoot himself in the head.
This whole sequence was extremely disturbing and unsettling and I DID NOT LIKE IT.
The boy and the girl walk through the Outback for an undetermined number of days and nights because this film lives outside of time. There are tons of macro shots of the vastness of the Outback as well as tons of micro shots of all of the creatures that make it up. I don’t know why, but basically every animal or bug they showed up close sounded very crunchy. The whole atmosphere is dreamy/nightmarish/hallucinogenic/fantastical in a way that spiked my anxiety.
While the girl tries to keep their spirits up, they both start to fall apart rapidly. Their lips are so dry and cracked and peeling that I could not stop licking my own. The girl still has on her pantyhose for some god forsaken reason. They are sunburnt and thirsty, only subsisting on a few picnic foods they had like lemonade and canned cherries and salt. They are covered in sand and flies. But then they come upon an oasis! I still don’t know if this was fully real because by morning all of the mystery fruit on the tree has gone and all the water is dried up. Also, she still has her pantyhose on.
The girl accosts her brother for not taking care of his clothing and says, “We don’t want people thinking we’re a couple of tramps.” To which her brother, sassily and rightly says, “What people?!”
After being lied to again that they aren’t lost, the little boy sees a figure in the distance. “Dad?” he says. Alas, it’s not their weird homicidal dad, but an Aboriginal teen boy (played by the prolific Australian actor David Gulpilil in his first film role) wearing nothing but a belt of lizards, hunting a lizard with a spear-like weapon. He approaches them and begins speaking an Aboriginal language that is never translated nor identified. David himself is a Yolngu man who speaks Djinba, but he was fluent in several indigenous languages, so it could have been any of those.
The Aboriginal boy, who is about 16, does not speak English, so obviously they can’t communicate at all. The girl doesn’t try anything except saying the word “water” and “anyone can understand that!” over and over while her brother, a somehow more thoughtful person at the age of 8, uses hand signals to communicate their need. Soon, they are drinking water from the ground out of a hollowed-out reed straw.
They follow the Aboriginal boy (who is also never named) and from here they just walk. Days pass into nights into days into nights. Again, time is unimportant. We see a lot more wildlife, all of which (snakes, camels, birds, kangaroos, lizards) made us say, “I miss Lenny…” who is our cat who was upstairs, absolutely fine.
This is a warning that there are several real hunting and butchering scenes where real kangaroo, and lizards, and something else I didn’t see are killed and butchered. I respect and understand this is the reality of many, many people on Earth, but I covered my eyes because that’s not for me. Josh told me these scenes were intercut with scenes of Western butcher shops.
The rest of their time together is very dreamy and surreal. The brother and sister in some scenes are fully clothed, in some they are wearing much less clothing and their bodies have been painted. They all play together, climb trees, and listen to the radio. The brother gets a terrible sunburn on his back and the Aboriginal boy rubs animal blood into it. While they walk, the brother tells a really meandering story about a guy and a ladder and literally no one cares or listens.
The girl swims nude in a little lake (called a Billabong!!), which even though the actress was 17 at the time of filming, was deemed “not indecent” and therefore okay. I DUNNO.
At one point, a scene of them all playing in a tree is juxtaposed with a group of Aboriginal people finding the dad’s burnt up car and body, which is now in a tree. They play in the car, but when the radio turns on, they leave.
Cut to a group of 6 or so White people in the middle of the Outback doing truly god knows WHAT. There are: giant weather balloons, a large New Zealand flag, a group of dudes playing cards ogling their only female colleague’s stockings, binoculars, lab coats, and a man in a mesh shirt and sunglasses examining a rock under a microscope. The man in the mesh shirt starts sucking on the woman’s fingers and then one of the weather balloons flies away. Later, the little boy will find the balloon. I DUNNO.
Cut to a remote compound with several Aboriginal people casting and painting statues of people and kangaroos. A White man in the shiniest yellow shirt I’ve ever seen and a safari hat with shit hanging off of it WHICH I JUST FOUND ON EBAY is seemingly in charge.
The three kids eventually stumble upon a building that looks like it could be occupied. This girl RUNS at the sight of four walls and a roof, finding it unoccupied and abandoned. She is sooo bummed but they decide to stay for a while.
The Aboriginal boy sees several donkeys and gets very excited and runs briefly toward them until they reach a road. He tries killing a water buffalo, but it gets away as he wrestles it. Two white dudes in a truck arrive and shoot it and butcher it as he watches, stunned. We see him walking away, past the house, crying.
In the next scene we see him lying in a field of water buffalo skeletons with his body and face painted with white paint and feathers stuck to him while a Didgeridoo plays in the background. He sits up quickly then dances outside the house, where the girl has her shirt off, startling her. She is super freaked out by what I assumed to be a ceremonial courtship dance.
Her brother shows up and asks, “What’s he dancing for?”
She says, “I don’t know.”
It is night fall and he is still dancing, but looking more and more exhausted. The brother and sister ignore him as the girl explains that they will be leaving and going off on their own tomorrow because it is best. It is then that her brother reveals that there’s a road. The Aboriginal boy, still trying to dance, looks super distraught and collapses, possibly crying.
The next morning the brother and sister wake up and he is gone. She speculates that he’s gone home and that’s why he was dancing: it was his way of saying goodbye to people he loves. As they prepare to leave, they discover him propped up and hanging in a tree with his arms in a T position with the branches under them, dead. Neither of them seems upset by this at all. She brushes a few ants off of him and they walk to the road.
They discover a cluster of modular buildings and an old man who they ask for help. He says it’s private property and he works for the government. He’s a total asshole and won’t even let them inside, basically telling them to keep walking.
Cut to Sydney: a businessman walking out of a building, driving home to a condo we saw in the beginning of the film. Inside is his wife who is chopping meat, with a brief flash to the Aboriginal boy butchering the kangaroo. His wife is the teen girl, but older now. Her husband walks in and drones on about his job. As she looks past him, we see a scene of her, her brother, and the Aboriginal boy naked, swimming and playing in a Billabong.
Hmmmmmmm.
On one hand, this film does an incredible job of creating atmosphere with its constant juxtaposition of life, both big and small and its use of music and soundscapes. The young actor who plays the girl, Jenny Agutter, and David Gulpilil do a great job. It is a haunting story and I walked away feeling like I had taken one of those terrible hot naps where you half-dream and wake up feeling worse, which counts for something.
But here’s what I struggle with: even though he was her lifeline, the girl didn’t ever really try to communicate with the Aboriginal boy. But he did. And the results were so disastrous he died. Later, in her metropolitan life with a fully stocked kitchen and monetary wealth, she fantasizes about her time in the Outback. It feels almost…romantic? The film title, Walkabout, is in reference to a rite-of-passage that some Aboriginal boys must complete: many months alone surviving in the Outback. But we never get to hear his words and in the end he dies, essentially, because he can’t communicate with a Westerner, someone that he likely would not have ever encountered and would have otherwise lived had he not met. The girl, on the other hand, does live and seemingly thrives, and yet from her literal tower she dreams of a “simpler” “wilder” life that she never expressed curiosity about or care for while she was actually living it. The thing that led to his death is, in part, her cultural tourism fantasy. Maybe this is the point, but ultimately, I couldn’t tell who the director wanted me to feel for and that bothered me a little bit so, like I said: I DUNNO.
Next up is a movie I have actually seen before! The Seventh Seal is described as a “Swedish historical fantasy film”! Luckily, my memory is a bridge burning behind me so I only remember a bald man with a very white face.
XOXO,
Steph