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Chapter Five: New Australian Crime Drama Greg Dolgopolov ORCID.org/0000-0002-5752-8864 Abstract Crime stories have been increasingly prevalent on Australian screens over the last two decades. While there have been no breakout box office hits, crime has nevertheless been one of the most sustained genres of Australian cinema in the twenty-first century. The crime genre in Australia is unique in its broad domestic audience appeal, strong sense of national identity, and inimitable visual style. Most crime films are consumed by domestic audiences, with the genre treading the fine line between commercial entertainment and quality cinema. Not all examples of the genre are clearly billed as ‘crime’, with many hybrids of comedy, thriller, drama, Western, or biography. Of the more than 150 films produced since 2000 that could be regarded as Australian crime films, three of the most popular or critically significant stylistic variations on cinema screens, are: ‘true crime’; ‘outback noir’, as an Indigenous Australian variation of neo-noir; and ‘crime comedies’. Introduction Crime stories have been increasingly prevalent on Australian screens over the last two decades. While there have been no breakout box office hits, crime has nevertheless been one of the most sustained genres of Australian cinema in the twenty-first century. Most crime films are consumed by domestic audiences with 12 appearing in the Top 100 Australian Films of All Time (as ranked by total box office), including Two Hands (Gregor Jordan, 1999), Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000), and Animal Kingdom (David Michôd, 2010), among others.1 However, not all examples of the genre are clearly billed as ‘crime’, with many hybrids of comedy, thriller, drama, Western, or biography. Even so, the crime genre in Australia is unique for its broad domestic audience appeal, its strong Australian accent, and its inimitable visual style. Of the more than 150 films produced since 2000 that could be regarded as Australian crime films, three of the most popular or critically significant stylistic variations on cinema screens, are: ‘true crime’; ‘outback noir’, as an Indigenous Australian variation of neo-noir; and ‘crime comedies’. The crime genre in Australian cinema can be understood as a national inflection on an international genre. Crime, as Thomas Leitch points out, is a ‘genre that is not a genre, even though an enormous audience recognizes and enjoys it’.2 Framing the hybrid tendencies of Australian crime films, it is worth noting Leitch’s key question about the genre: ‘whether the crime film is a genre or an umbrella term for a collection of diverse genres like the gangster film, the detective film, and the police film must be added another question: What does it matter?’.3 It matters because scholars in genre studies tend to examine diverse crime subgenres without acknowledging the perpetual oscillations between international crime conventions, national inflections on these formulas, and the mixing of crime with other genres. In this chapter, I follow an oscillating genre framework with a focus on production and how the films are marketed. I also examine how Australian crime films are a specifically national response to the crime genre. Albert Moran and Errol Vieth highlight the Australian crime genre’s ‘variety and subtypes’ in what they call Poe’s Triangle, which connects the criminal, the detective and the victim.4 They suggest that in Australia, filmmakers typically focus on the relationship between criminal and detective and examine crime as a business with a preponderance of armed robberies that occur for ‘more personal and less mercenary reasons’.5 They also observe that there is a dearth of films about murder that minimises the role of the victim in Australian crime films. Moran and Veith follow genre scholar Stephen Neale in examining the far more recognisable subgenres of crime in shaping a national inflection on an international genre. Contemporary Australian crime films are therefore shaped by genre hybridity, moral ambiguity, and a distinctly national accent. They exemplify a distinctive feature of television, and what John Hartley refers to as, ‘the power of dirt’ to address the largest possible audience. For Hartley, dirt ‘encompasses notions of ambiguity, contradiction, power and social relations all in one’.6 Australian crime films are dirty in that they avoid clearly defined genre rules. The prevailing examples are hybrid generic forms that unite seemingly contradictory ideas and localise them. Of the 150 Australian crime films listed on IMDb.com, the majority are blended with drama, comedy, the thriller, or the Western, and are often hyphenated with multiple subgenres. They are impure, indigenised inflections on international genre expectations. I argue that contemporary Australian cinema eschews genre purity in pursuit of the broadest audience appeal. Director of the post-prison-gay-buddy crime drama Cut Snake (2014), Tony Ayres, describes his film as: ‘a crime thriller but it’s also a love triangle […] Personally, I love films that have that ‘cross genre’ element … And as filmmakers, we’re all trying to work out how to get Australian audiences to see our films. Having a genre element hopefully can make the film more broadly appealing’.7 Ayres is clearly ambivalent about genre—‘having a genre element’ appears to be a celebration of dirtiness and a call for its hybridisation in order to maximise audience numbers. In this chapter, I argue that Australia crime cinema has a complex relationship with the genre. Contrary to Mark David Ryan’s assertion that ‘genre film-making … in Australia can be contrasted with so-called ‘prestige’, ‘art house’, ‘specialty’ or ‘quality’ cinema which often challenges classical generic form’,8 Australian crime cinema consistently negotiates this quality/popular entertainment binary. It is not an either- or debate on genre. Australian crime films tend to blend genres, dirtying the categories but not foregoing festival prestige and a mainstream audience. While there is a commitment to commercial production outcomes and distribution to a broad audience, Australian crime cinema is not antagonistic to festivals and the speciality audience; prominent filmmakers such as Ivan Sen, David Michôd, and Shane Jacobsen seek to achieve both. The history of Australian crime cinema is inscribed with a fascination for bushranger films which flourished during the early years of silent cinema. This trend continued with several armed robbery films in the 1970s, including Money Movers (Bruce Beresford, 1978) and Heaven’s Burning (Craig Lahiff, 1997), and more recently, Two Hands (Gregor Jordan, 1999), The Hard Word (Scott Roberts, 2002), Bad Eggs (Tony Martin, 2003) and Gettin’ Square (Jonathan Teplitzky, 2003), which featured larrikin characters that rob banks for fun. Some of these films blur the line between hard-nosed crime films about robbery and crime comedies and often feature stupid crooks and gallows humour. The history of Australian crime tends to emphasise the high jinx of armed robbery rather than murder investigations. While tough guy crooks have long been preferred on the big screen, from the 1960s Australian television series were devoted to police investigations and noble cops (HomiCide [1964-1977], Division 4 [1969-1976], Matlock PoliCe [1971-1976], Cop Shop [1977-1984], Blue Heelers [1994-2006], and Water Rats [1996-2001] to name just a few). In the twenty- first century, the armed robbery cycle of films morphed into mainstream crime comedies that comprise the bulk of recent crime cinema. The best of these blend the hardened criminals of the past in often perversely funny situations and include: Dirty Deeds (David Caesar, 2002), Crooked Business (Chris Nyst, 2008), Fat Pizza (Paul Fenech, 2003), A Man’s Gotta Do (Chris Kennedy, 2004), Kill Me Three Times (Kriv Stenders, 2014), The Mule (Tony Mahony and Angus Sampson, 2014), Down Under (Abe Forsythe, 2016), and Brothers Nest (Clayton Jacobson, 2018). Drawing on this rich history, I examine three crime subgenres: the true crime subgenre, which emerged in the wake of The Boys (1998) and Chopper (2000); the relatively new generic development of outback noir; and crime comedies. I elaborate on each of these subgenres in later sections. Across these subgenres, the battle lines between good and evil that are typically central to the crime genre are blurred. Representations of the police force as moral guardians are confined to television drama, while contemporary Australian crime cinema focuses predominantly on ordinary (rather than markedly criminal) people doing heinous things in a morally vacillating universe where criminality is relative and the notion of ‘good’ is conditional and uncertain. Depictions of evil are equally slippery: central characters range from smiling corrupt cops, likeable suburban psychopaths, and charming but dodgy businessmen. Heroes, if any, are compromised. They are either brave survivors of evil such as Vicki Maloney (Hounds of Love); or guys like either Ray Jenkins (The Mule) who valiantly endured incredible punishment or complex, tarnished hero Detective Jay Swan (Mystery Road and Goldstone [Ivan Sen, 2016]) negotiating the boundaries between black and white Australia. Of course, this is not new. In the 1950s, film noir was characterised by a moral ambivalence that ‘disorientates the spectator, who can no longer find the familiar reference points. The moviegoer is accustomed to certain conventions: a logical development of the action, a clear distinction between