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 good and evil [….] all conspire to make the viewer co-experience the anguish and insecurity’.9 There is a similar relationship between audiences and the contemporary Australian crime genre at the cinema with its commitment to challenging

moral iterations and ambivalence that triggers a pursuit of authenticity and real, recognisable material such as true crime.

True Crime

True crime, according to Rosalind Smith, is ‘a genre that relies simultaneously upon a rhetoric of truth claims and the activation of myth, superstition, gossip and story as its narrative strategies’.10 Australian true crime films capture that imaginative space between the creative treatment of reported events, media sensationalism, and the narrative staging and stylistic choices made by directors. The cinematic treatment activates audiences’ recall of the reportage of the events and the film’s interpretative strategies highlight the dirty nature of narratives that have gone through multiple discursive processes of the law, the media, community commentary, and film criticism. Chopper, Animal Kingdom, Snowtown, Ned

Kelly (Gregor Jordan, 2003), and Hounds of Love are prime examples of Australian true crime films that captured festival prestige and critical acclaim while enjoying solid box office returns and audience impact. These films assert fictionalised claims to truth that may potentially contradict real events, but it is the depiction of how things happened that engages local viewers. Andrew Fraser, a former solicitor for the Melbourne underworld before being imprisoned for cocaine importation, suggested that understanding the public fascination for true crime is simple: ‘it’s like people watching a car accident—they can’t help themselves.

They are appalled by it, but at the same time they are fascinated by it’.11 I argue that it is also more than that. Audiences are activated morally and engaged as investigators. The films’ stylistic choices around mood, character portrayals, and the structuring of ethical issues are staged for a knowledgeable viewer who do not require an extensive backstory. The police do not figure as detectives, yet these films are an investigation of a sort, where audiences are invited to make sense of how the events unfolded. Part of the fascination for audiences is

negotiating between what they know of an event and its presentation between various films and television shows. Australian true crime captures a curious dichotomy: they explore high profile, decidedly sensationalised material, but their focus is on uncovering the ordinary in the extraordinary. These films also go to great lengths to aestheticise the domestic, the mundane, and the suburban ugliness of lower middle-class Australia.

Australian true crime mixes naturalism, sensationalism, and an explanatory social realism.

The subgenre also combines the extreme with the mundane. Film critic Paul Byrne explains the genre blend best: ‘Violent crime in Australian cinema, when it’s really nasty, is usually pegged to a true story. Snowtown was about the bodies-in-barrels killers in Adelaide; Animal

Kingdom was a lightly fictionalised story of a real Melbourne crime family. The Boys was based on the Anita Cobby killers in Sydney’.12 Australian true crime films are often violent, yet they avoid judging the villains. They illuminate the suburban settings of the crime, while avoiding narrative closure. In Snowtown and Animal Kingdom, the action is seen through the eyes of passive young men, who become implicated by succumbing to social deviance and by their failure to extricate themselves from the adult criminal milieu. They oscillate between good and evil, failing to stake a clear position before being sucked down to the savagery of their adult mentors. The protagonists of both films, Jamie and Joshua ‘J.’ Cody respectively, experience abuse and witness atrocities before becoming killers in their own right. Murder for them is ordinary, a form of self-preservation from the pressures exerted by the hardened criminals who surround them. The young victim-hero provides the cinematic point of view for an audience positioned to share their moral ambivalence around participating in the adult criminal world where pointing a gun in the face of aggressive street hoons is fun, or avenging paedophiles by graffitiing their house with ice-cream is a satisfying game. These two true

crime films successfully created the given circumstances for an audience to co-experience the characters’ anguish and insecurity of the moral landscape and accept their troubled choices.

Ben Young’s Hounds of Love (2016) is a curious example. The director vehemently denied that his film was a true crime based on the murder spree of David and Catherine Birnie.13 The film’s audience also struggled to define the film’s genre; some viewer regarded it a ‘thriller’, while for others it was a ‘torture porn horror’.14 The generic confusion is understandable given the visceral intensity of the material, even though the director was at pains to avoid showing gore on screen. However, the grating soundscape, the implied violence, and loaded cutaways is as harrowing as any horror film. Esteemed film critic David Stratton mused that

‘some may understandably argue why this sort of horror should be turned into a piece of cinema entertainment, and it’s a reasonable point’.15 This comment highlights the complications of marketing and audience reception for the true crime genre. Kate Moir, the real-life survivor who was kidnapped from a Perth suburban street by the serial-killers at knife point, and was raped and abused, was incensed that a film with a premise remarkably similar to her ordeal was funded by government money. During the marketing of the film,

Young acknowledged that ‘our intention was never to provide notoriety for those not worthy of it’,16 but he did ultimately craft a deeply disturbing portrayal of a serial-killing couple that circulated as high-end entertainment. Most critics did not accept Young’s claims that the film was a work of fiction. The origins of Hounds of Love are undeniable: with a narrative clearly following the extensive factual reportage of the Birnies’ exploits, and the set design and wardrobe choices for the main characters also strongly influenced by the actual case. The controversy apparently spooked Screen Australia with reports that they would not provide future support to true crime stories.17

Stylistically, Hounds of Love, and the aforementioned true crime films, share a strong common aesthetic; the symbolic realism of saturated hues and slow camera moves that stand in stark contrast to otherwise dynamic and gritty television docudramas. The opening sequences of Snowtown and Hounds are remarkably similar—slow, stylised left to right tracking shots across a landscape that will soon become the scene of multiple crimes. The social context for these films is a mundane and careless suburbia with the television always on and the sprinkler oscillating. The pace is slow, deliberate, and menacing. The camera adopts the perpetrator’s point of view stalking their targets. Yet the camera purposefully maintains a distance during the most gruesome moments, although the soundtrack provides harrowing details that are otherwise avoided. One of the most shocking scenes is the first rape in Hounds of Love. After the initial struggle, the camera forces the audience to look at the action from a distance down a long corridor, framed next to a plain Formica kitchen table, as the victim is forced onto the bed and abused while the Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White

Satin’ drowns out the teenager’s screams. The next scene is arguably even more disturbing.

An ominous left to right shot tracks down a suburban street presenting a slow motion series of tableaus of mundane life: jump rope, sprinkler games, lawn mowing, and car washing.

This sunny suburbia is at grotesque odds with the horrors taking place next door.

A key reason that true crime is so popular is that it asks important questions about truth, style, and ethics making the audience an active participant in a bigger social quest. The elegant cinematography of Snowtown and Hounds of Love aestheticises the poverty and mundaneness of suburbia into a depiction of the banality of evil where horrendous crimes appear conventional in the absence of ethical authority.

Outback Noir

Outback noir is a genre inflection that continues the Australian landscape cinematic tradition while foregrounding a post-colonial investigation into buried histories and contemporary corruption.18 Outback noir draws on incongruities—the sunlight of the outback that seems to expose all shady deals as well as reveal a history of corruption that is blindingly in plain view. Outback noir combines sunburnt crime drama set in isolated rural locations with conventions of the revisionist Western. At its core, this generic form exposes the continuity of colonial hegemony. The critical category ‘outback noir’, originally attributed to Ivan Sen’s

Mystery Road, can also be applied to films such as Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris

(1974), Goodbye Paradise (Carl Shultz, 1982) and more recently Gone (Ringan Ledwidge,

2006), Cactus (Yuen Carrucan, 2008), Red Hill (Patrick Hughes, 2010), Swerve (Craig

Lahiff, 2011), The Rover (David Michôd, 2014), Downriver (Grant Scicluna, 2015) and

Goldstone. It is a surprisingly slippery category with a long history in Australian cinema.

Curator Richard Sowada controversially programmed Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) as part of a selection of Australian noir films: a genre classification that had not previously been applied to the film. In explaining his reasons, Sowada stated that ‘[the film] just confounds you at every turn. It’s set in the outback, but it’s so claustrophobic that you feel like there’s never any air. I think that that’s one of the noir traits, that the environment that the characters inhabit is actually a player in itself and forces them to do certain things that they wouldn’t necessarily do’.19 This contradictory proposition of claustrophobia within vast landscape settings where isolated characters clamber for survival are at the heart of outback noir.

The genre’s incongruity is appealing in its inversion of the traditional noir iconography of the nocturnal urban landscape. The sundrenched noir becomes a strategy in its own right. Film critic Eddie Cockrell sees clear comparisons between Ivan Sen's Mystery Road and Roman

Polanski's 1974 crime drama Chinatown: ‘Both are sun-drenched films noirs, both feature commanding protagonists who spend much of the film doing wrong things for the right reasons, and both feature climactic showdowns in places laden with metaphor’.20 The resonances with Chinatown are even stronger in Goldstone.

Eschewing desperate hard-boiled characters prowling city streets, this group of recent outback noir films examine the moral rottenness of small towns with their sheen of decency concealing dark and repressed secrets. Isolated from centres of authority, characters have succumbed to moral ambiguity, old certainties have disappeared and there is a desperate attempt by figures of authority to hold on to their power at any price. In Red Hill, Mystery

Road and Goldstone the status quo is upset by the intrusion of an outsider, a cop forced to unravel the source of corruption in order for the community to survive.

What unites these disparate outback noir films is not just the aesthetics, including expansive and brutal landscapes, similar production processes and modest budgets, and an analogous style and mood, but also the prevailing themes of the perversion of authority, political corruption, the abuse of women, and a pervading sense of social hopelessness. Many of these films are dark, sardonic tales of cops gone rogue. The rogue cop as the ambivalent source of authority is a prevailing theme from Wake in Fright—with its senior police officer precipitating the protagonist’s downfall with an introduction to illegal gambling—to the crooked policemen of The Cars That Ate Paris, Swerve, Cactus, Red Hill, Mystery Road, and

Goldstone.

Outback noir films are shaped by the stylistic strangeness of dark themes set in daylight landscapes and blinding pastels under a sun that eliminates any shadows that could have

offered a place to hide. What marks the more recent films is a focus on interrogating post- colonial trauma, Indigenous retribution, and the disappearance of binary certainties of good and evil. The tag line on the poster of Swerve is explicit: ‘even a good man can make a wrong turn’. Whether examining criminal actions against Indigenous people or uncovering dark secrets from the past, the outback noir films examined here are committed to an investigation of repressed histories of violence and crime that are connected to the law and the land. This cycle of films feature corrupt cops and dodgy officials as symbolic of decayed figures of authority. Outsiders or liminal characters caught between two worlds are often the only possible saviours of the community. Detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen) is a key figure in this cycle as a troubled cop who is nevertheless the only person capable of standing up to the bad guys.

Red Hill is a primary example of outback noir that blends the neo-Western with a thriller narrative focused around indigenous vengeance for past trauma. Ben Goldsmith argues that the film ‘should not be dismissed as an entertaining but ultimately insignificant genre film

[… as the] story opens up the questions of frontier violence, contemporary racism and the silences of local history, as well as issues around environmental protection and the economic future of once-thriving rural towns’.21 The indigenous past of Red Hill is presented in multiple modes—as a venerated cultural tradition and symbolically as a source of kitschy irony. In the main street there is a ‘historical display’ that features a mannequin of a near naked Indigenous male hunter in a forest. As Kit Harvey notes, ‘the display, quite literally, puts Aboriginal culture safely behind glass, as something consigned to history, a museum piece best appreciated as a relic of the past’.22 This tacky display plays an important symbolic role in the film as it is perceived differently by the various characters who pass it. For the

knowing audience it represents an anachronism that is no longer acceptable but one that needs to be moved beyond.

Shane Cooper (Ryan Kwanten), an ambitious young police officer, arrives in the quaint town of Red Hill with his heavily pregnant wife to start afresh away from the dangers of the big city. But on his first day on the job, he is confronted by the escaped convict, Jimmy Conway

(Tommy E. Lewis), who returns to Red Hill to avenge the police and other townsfolk who raped and murdered his wife and framed him for the crime. Conway has no grudge against

Cooper and lets him live, but he is ruthless with those who wronged him. Conway’s

Indigenous agency is a brutal response to ancestral trauma that is foregrounded in his relentless pursuit of his victims. This inevitable fatalism is not too dissimilar to the way in which Anton Chigurh (Xavier Bardem) in No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen,

2007) is a cunning, instinctive, and unstoppable force. But unlike Chigurh, he is not positioned as inexplicably evil, rather it is the Head of Police Old Bill (Steve Bisley) who is damned for corruption, cowardice, and murder. Conway, teaming up with Cooper, brings about a strange, but cathartic justice to the town; with the bloody destruction of the rogue cops finally putting to rest the wrongs of the past.

Similarly, in Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road and Goldstone there is an examination of the injustices of the past, the buried ancestral trauma and the divisions between black and white Australia as issues of the ambivalence of figures of authority. In contrast to Red Hill, the Indigenous protagonist is not destroyed in the process of retribution as there is a recognition of a more complex social context. Both films feature white cops who are seemingly stuck in a racist paradigm, albeit unexpectedly turning out to be decent men. Both films create genre ambiguity. Film noir protagonists are seldom creatures of well-lit exteriors. However, in the

Australian outback daytime, the light conceals far more than it reveals. It is in the bright midday sun of Goldstone where the Mayor (Jacki Weaver) makes threats over tea and freshly made cake. It is in the heat of the day that bribes are offered, murders executed, and honest cops attacked. But it is in the dim glow of neon-lit brothels that the pursuit of truth is initiated. Most of the drama happens in ramshackle cabins and inside seedy bars. In the wide- open expanses of the outback, it is claustrophobic interiors that draw characters closer together.

Jay Swan is an ‘Abbo copper’ caught between two worlds—alienated from his Indigenous community and ostracised by his white workmates. ‘Are you one of them “black trackers” who turns on his own?’ asks a sneering landowner in Mystery Road. Jay’s family are no more trusting: ‘At least I know who I am,’ declares his habitually drunken estranged wife, contemptuous of her former partner's ‘big house’ on the other side of town, dismissing his concern for the welfare of their teenage daughter as ‘10 years too late’. Jay negotiates a complex world between black and white folk and it is his ability to draw at times unwilling allies from both groups that is the source of his success. Interrogating ancestral trauma is at the core of the investigation. Both films ask hard questions about cross-cultural collaboration, the mistreatment of marginalised woman, and about methods for healing historical trauma.

According to director Ivan Sen, Goldstone ‘is a Western, a crime thriller, a murder mystery, a genre film but from an indigenous perspective’. Against the wishes of the community’s powerbrokers, Jay Swan investigates the disappearances of Chinese women working in an illegal brothel that services the mine. Jay is met with a smiling wall of resistance by the white authorities as he tries to uncover what happened to a young, marginalised woman. Only this time part of the smiling resistance is by Indigenous powerbrokers. Corruption is not black

and white. Tommy (Tom E. Lewis) the corrupt Aboriginal Land Council boss is being bribed from the mine and shares an interest in quashing the investigation. Jay’s former swagger is gone, and he drinks to forget. He is haunted by the past and has suffered terribly since his last triumph. He is met by young local white cop Josh (Alex Russell) who makes it clear that he is unwelcome. Jay and Josh’s criminal investigations and ensuing action become an exploration into the fractures at the heart of Indigenous and white relations. The mining boss (David

Wenham) is seeking expansion and has nefarious designs on Indigenous lands. The mining company is the largest employer in the area, but its operations are riven with a history of corruption and exploitation. Detective Swan’s primary role is to motivate Josh to forego his

‘light duties’ and commit to investigating the truth of what happened to the Chinese women.

What makes Jay so compelling as a truth-seeker are his challenges: he is haunted by his past and weakened by a sense of despair that all his good work is not having a lasting impact. In contrast, Josh seems untroubled by the past. Finally inspired to investigate the case, he speaks to May, a Chinese prostitute imprisoned in the outback brothel. When she provocatively asks him ‘what are you looking for?’, he proudly states, ‘the truth’. She asks, ‘and what are you going to do with the truth?’ That question is as much for Josh as it is for the audience. What is to be done with the truth? Will the vulnerable be protected?

In the context of Hollywood cinema, film noir traditionally explores the moral trauma of war or corruption on its protagonists. Characters are often escaping disturbing incidents from their past. Red Hill, Mystery Road and Goldstone examine ancestral trauma—both Indigenous and settler. Their narratives challenge official versions of events that cover over and forget historic massacres (or put them up as a ‘historic display’ for tourists). The noir protagonist is often pursued by the past—an outsider escaping from something intangible. Jay Swan’s trauma is his dispossession from the land of his ancestors, his community, and his family. He

undergoes a form of spiritual healing while being taken on a journey by Jimmy (David

Gulpilil) in what is perhaps the finest scene in the film—the dreamy, wordless slow passage in a bark canoe down the narrow passage of Cobbalt Gorge past red boulders and rock art.

This connection gives him strength and starts his healing.

The past of a noir protagonist is no fleeting phantom. In outback noir, the past and present are inextricably linked. Outback noir films are preoccupied with characters lost in a landscape that is epic and scarred by colonial violence. Yet the way that the landscape is presented in these films, often as omniscient and as an accomplice, offers a form of healing to historical wounds by crafting a kind of investigative communal ceremony that exposes the corruption and softens the light on those affected. It is through the detective work of its protagonists, performed in collaboration between Indigenous and white people that a glimmer of hope is offered against noir fatalism.

Crime Comedies

Australian crime comedies, in comparison to the subgenres discussed earlier, are arguably committed to maintaining established genre conventions. Key Australian conventions for this subgenre are a narrative focus on dumb criminals, class antagonism, and suburban moral contradictions presented as dry, black comedies. Of the more than 40 Australian crime comedies made since 2000, there are few box office hits. Aside from Gettin’ Square, receiving 14 Australian Film Institute nominations, crime comedies have not enjoyed serious critical recognition or acclaim. Nevertheless, the finest recent examples of the genre include

Dirty Deeds (2002), The Hard Word (2002), Fat Pizza (2003), A Man’s Gotta Do (Kennedy,

2004), Get Rich Quick (2004), Crooked Business (2008), Kill Me Three Times (2014), The

Mule (2014), Down Under (2016), The Menkoff Method (David Parker, 2016), and Brothers

Nest (2018). While these films are very different, they are all low budget productions, and share high stakes, low-grade humour, and a casual disregard for the law. They tend to focus on the misadventures of a group of not-too-bright criminals, gruesome situations, ironic laughs, and black comedy revolving around bogan hotheads who have scant regard for the law.

The origins of this on-going cycle can be traced to films such as Malcolm (Nadia Tass, 1986),

Death in Brunswick (John Ruane, 1990), Idiot Box (David Caeser, 1996) and blackly comic transformations of the aforementioned armed robbery films. Post-2000 crime films in this subgenre are frequently influenced by Tarantino’s sharp-witted criminal characters and the absurdity of suburban domesticity of The Sopranos (1999-2007). Rose Capp has suggested that Australian crime comedies ‘seem particularly suited to the collective temperament of

Australian audiences’,23 and it is evident that the Australian subgenre’s codes and conventions are remarkably consistent and fulfil audience expectations. There is very little genre purity here. Moran and Vieth claim that in Australian crime comedies there is a ‘Robin

Hood impulse of robbing the rich to give to the poor’, where the heroes are motivated ‘to turn the tables on others, to outwit and outdo those in authority and in control, to administer a kind of rough justice’.24 They argue that crime comedies provide unexpected results in that they are not morally or socially conservative texts. Rather their narratives are about an ‘absurd or comic climax to events that nobody fully comprehends or controls’.25 The unexpected twist, gag-style ending is a staple of Australian crime comedies. Highlighting national stereotypes

Capp argues that ‘given the ingrained anti-authoritarian streak in the Australian national character, our history of venerating rogues and outlaws and our equally celebrated ethic of

‘mateship’, it is not hard to see why the caper film might have singular appeal’.26 Audiences derive pleasure from observing social transgression and the success of the underdog. Like

true crime, the Australian crime comedy emphasises the stories of lower class characters, in this case driven by a pursuit of easy money. Narrative action typically takes place in suburbia with laughs largely self-directed at the expense of poor, disenfranchised, and stupid criminals.

The misunderstood underdog is a dominant character type that often takes the form of the seemingly dumbest small-time crook who outwits the crime bosses and the police. The most celebrated example is the anti-authoritarian character ‘Johnny Spitieri’—the much-loved, seemingly inept, and hopelessly drug-befuddled small-time criminal played by David

Wenham in Gettin’ Square. The character ultimately tricks all the hardened crims, cops, and lawyers before disappearing with the loot. There is clearly the appeal of the daring criminal challenging the authorities, the establishment, and the criminal hierarchy with foolhardy, brazen endeavour. Crime comedies are full of contradictory suburban gangsters such as

Pando (Bryan Brown in Two Hands), who patiently made origami with his kids while organising a cold-blooded execution. Australian crime comedies are full of these idiosyncratic, character contradictions. The narrative focus is often on the conflict between the haves and have-nots where the casual suburban criminals snub their noses at tradition and expectations.

The Mule (2014) is key example of a recent crime comedy about an anti-authoritarian underdog. Ray Jenkins (Angus Sampson) is an unwitting drug mule detained by police in a hotel room who tries desperately not to excrete his lethal cargo while enduring all manner of police torture. It is a clever po-faced story about Ray and his capacity to control his bowel movements to frustrate the police. Not surprisingly, the story is based on real events. The film is set symbolically at the same time as Australia II’s unexpected victory at the 1983

America’s Cup yacht race. The story is about a seemingly simple, below average, everyman who lives in Melbourne’s western suburbs with his mum, who, despite a series of naïve mistakes, outwits the authorities and a gang of ruthless criminals. At the end of a trip to

Thailand, Ray is tricked by his friend, Gavin (Leigh Whannell), into importing a kilogram of heroin in his stomach into Australia but is caught at the airport. He is incarcerated in a cheap hotel while the police wait for him to defecate the evidence. Meanwhile, the crime gang that owns the heroin, and Gavin, attempt to intervene. Ray does not betray his friend, or implicate his family. Ultimately, he outlasts and outsmarts the police, and gets away with the drugs.

For a simple, compliant bloke, Ray is surprisingly transgressive. He overcomes his bodily functions in the face of various tortures. He contests and out-manoeuvrers people in authority and even brings down the criminal boss—all without leaving the confines of a fetid hotel room. The film overturns the conservative moralising of crime films with their credo that

‘crime doesn’t pay’: Ray triumphs by escaping arrest for drug importation, while the story also ignores the moral issue of bringing in a kilo of heroin into the country and benefiting from its subsequent distribution. Furthermore, The Mule overturns ethnic stereotypes in

Australian cinema as the real bad guys are not the stereotypically ethnic foot soldiers, but privileged Anglo Australians.

The film is also a critique of privilege. In his quietly passive way, Ray takes on all the authority figures in his life and triumphs. He refuses his mother’s signature dish (laced with laxatives), he does not evacuate his bowels for longer than any other suspected drug mule in the world, he withstands regular bashings by the cops, and stands up for his mate Gavin. Like a toddler’s petulant assertion of their resistance to the authoritarian oppression of their parents’ enforced toilet training demands, Ray’s controlled constipation frustrates authority

figures. His seeming apathy, metaphorically not giving a shit, asserts his dominance in a world where the little man triumphs over the privileged. Here the unexpected narrative twist comes with a reversal of expectations and plays with the ambiguity of evil that pervades the genre. Detective Paris (Ewen Leslie), the seemingly ‘good cop’, the one who plays by the rules, turns out to be crooked as he callously murders Gavin and seeks to destroy Ray. The clean-cut cop is part of the drug importation racket and wants the kilo of heroin for himself.

What marks him as an anti-hero is that he is driven by class hatred for the people of the western suburbs. As he is about to murder Ray he sermonises:

You ‘Westie’ cunts really have life figured out haven’t ya. You drop out of school to

stand in front of a conveyor belt all day. Piss away your wage on darts and bourbon.

Knock up some slut in the public toilets who smokes her way right through pregnancy

and then shits out some dickhead kids to continue the whole sad cycle.

But far from being a eulogy, it becomes the turning point where Ray turns the tables on

Detective Paris and, with his former partner (Hugo Weaving), gathers all the necessary evidence to nail him. Here is the unexpected black comic narrative twist. Ray has stolen from the rich, overturned the authorities, and gotten away with the drugs. The moral question of what Ray is going to do with a kilo of heroin remains unresolved.

Crime comedies articulate the Australian penchant for symbolic socially transgressive material. Such films arguably create a cinematic space for audiences to enjoy taboo material focussed on ordinary suburban blokes surviving a series of exciting misadventures. They remain an ongoing, regular feature of mainstream genre film production with at least one film in this mode released every year.

Conclusion

Australian crime films have been released regularly in the twenty-first century, offering a national inflection on an international genre. Though distinguished by their broad domestic appeal, strong Australian accent, and marked visual styles, the Australian crime genre is nevertheless ‘dirty’: it is a hybrid form that negotiates the fine line between quality cinema, sensationalist exploitation, and commercial mainstream entertainment. This chapter has argued that the three most popular or critically significant sub-genres of the Australian crime film in the 2000s are the true crime, outback noir, and—the most popular—the crime comedy. Across these subgenres, Australian crime films are often socially progressive in their ambivalent attitude to traditional genre certainties, particularly around ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and highly aestheticised in their spectacular representation of the mundane.

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1 Screen Australia, “Top 100 Australian Feature Films of All Time: Ranked by Total Reported Gross Australian Box Office.” Screen Australia 2020, https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/fact-finders/cinema/australian- films/top-films-at-the-box-office. 2 Thomas Leitch, Crime Films, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1-2. 3 Ibid., 2. 4 Albert Moran and Errol Vieth, Film in Australia: An Introduction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 73. 5 Ibid.,76. 6 John Hartley, Tele-ology: Studies in Television, (London: Routledge 1992), 39. 7 Quoted in Gary Maddox, “Australian Filmmakers Find True Crime Does Pay,” Sydney Morning Herald, August 19, 2014, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/australian-filmmakers-find-true-crime-does- pay-20140819-105h4q.html, accessed 12 August 2018. 8 Mark David Ryan, “A Silver Bullet for Australian Cinema? Genre Movies and the Audience Debate,” Studies in Australasian Cinema 6, no. 2 (2012): 143. 9 Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, “Towards a Definition of Film Noir” in Film Noir Reader. Alain Silver, James Ursini. New York: Limelight Edition (1996), 24-5. 10 Rosalind Smith, “Dark Places: True Crime Writing in Australia.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 8, September (2008): 17-30. 11 Tom Noble, “Why We Love True Crime,” The Weekly Review, May 27, 2010, 8. 12 Paul Byrne, “Hounds of Love a Fine Horror Debut,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 30, 2017, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/hounds-of-love-a-fine-horror-debut-20170530-gwgkm4.html 13 Tim Clarke, “Survivor Blasts ‘Birnie’ Film,” The West Australian, July 29, 2016, https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/survivor-blasts-birnie-film-ng-ya-114131. 14 For audience and critics comments see: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/hounds_of_love/reviews/. 15 David Stratton, “Film Reviews: Hounds of Love, 20th Century Women,” The Australian, June 3, 2017. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/film-reviews-hounds-of-love-20th-century-women/news- story/84353a3baaf6fafdf69ba732a520bd0a. 16 Clarke “Survivor Blasts Birnie Film”. 17 Shane Danielsen, “Lowlife in the Suburbs,” The Monthly, June, 2017. https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2017/june/1496239200/shane-danielsen/lowlife-suburbs. 18 Emily Blatchford was the first to use the term “outback noir film” to describe Mystery Road in an interview in 2013. Blatchford, Emily, “Road to Success,” Inside Film 156, December, 2013: 14. Accessed 1 December, 2016, http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=154104488911179;res=IELLCC> ISSN: 1447- 2252. 19 Richard Sowada quoted in Greg King, “Australian Noir Retrospective – Interview with Richard Sowada, ACMI’s Head of Programming,” (2009) https://filmreviews.net.au/australian-noir-retrospective-interview-with- richard-sowada-acmis-head-of-programming/ 20 Eddie Cockrell, “Sun-drenched Film Noir,” The Australian, August 17, 2013, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/sun-drenched-film-noir/story-fn9n8gph-1226698413712 21 Ben Goldsmith, “Red Hill,” in, Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand 2, ed. Ben Goldsmith, Mark David Ryan, and Geoff Lealand (Bristol: Intellect 2015): 220. 22 Kit Harvey, “Red Hill (Patrick Hughes, 2010),” Senses of Cinema, no. 64 (2012), accessed 2 August 2018, http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/key-moments-in-australian-cinema-issue-70-march-2014/red-hill-patrick- hughes-2010/. 23 Rose Capp, “Our Very Own Crime Wave,” RealTime, 60, April-May 2004: 20. 24 Moran and Vieth, Film in Australia, 76. 25 Ibid. 26 Capp, “Our Very Own Crime Wave,” 20.