The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert by Stephan Elliott; Al Clark; Michael Hamlyn Review by: Susan Barber Film Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Winter, 1996-1997), pp. 41-45 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1213422 . Accessed: 14/05/2013 10:44

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This content downloaded from 161.13.1.14 on Tue, 14 May 2013 10:44:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Tick (Hugo Weaving) in drag queen mode as Mitzi

Wedding); homosexuality (The Ever- lasting Secret Family and The Sum of Us); and politically sensitive areas (white neo-Nazi Australians in Romper Stomper). Set against a stunning backdrop of rainbow-colored sunsets and sweeping vistas-giving the Australian outback the allure that The Adventures Crocodile Dundee gave the bush-Priscilla derives of Priscilla, its name from the lavender-colored bus that transports Queen of the Desert the three to remote desert hotels to perform their drag- show cabaret. For Adam, the trip is a lark; for Tick, a means to rendezvous with his estranged wife and Writer/director:Stephan Elliott. Producers: son; for Bemadette, a chance to ease the of Al Clark, Michael Hamlyn. Cinematogra- young pain her husband's death. Their and hi- pher: Brian J. Breheny. Music: Guy Gross. bitchy infighting Gramercy Pictures. larious interactions with the locals are delicately bal- anced with dazzling show-stopping performances. Significantly, Priscilla's raucous characters-in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the addition to the film's crude and raunchy humor that Desert features the outback trek of two flamboyant primarily focuses, in graphic detail, on male and fe- drag queens, Tick and Adam (Hugo Weaving and Guy male bodies and genitalia-though typical of gay drag Pearce), and an aging transsexual, Bernadette humor, provide a direct link to the "ocker" comedies (Terence Stamp). It represents a bold departure for a from the early 1970s. The ocker was a highly popular mainstream Australian film, par- ticularly for a cinema that has made its reputation with macho swash- . ? . buckling heroes such as Breaker Morant, Mad Max, and Crocodile Dundee. Inspired by the gay male subculture in Sydney, Priscilla can be viewed within a group of films from the late 80s and 90s (fre- quently referred to as the New Aus- , tralian Film Renaissance) which have broken new ground in explor- ing formerly taboo subjects: female sexuality in female-centered narra- tives (Sweetie, The Piano, Muriel's

Cruisingthe outback

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This content downloaded from 161.13.1.14 on Tue, 14 May 2013 10:44:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Hugo Weaving as Mitzi (right)and as Tick (inset right); Guy Pearce as Felicia (left) and as Adam (inset left);

and successful genre within Australia that kicked off dominant British and American cultures that had the film renaissance and included films such as Stork overshadowed Australia throughout much of its his- (1971), The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972), tory. The ockers were also the first group of films from and Alvin Purple (1973). These films feature vulgar the Australian Film Development Corporation and uncouth males (ockers) with a resolutely hedonis- (A.F.D.C.), the initial government film funding tic outlook, and an obsession with bodily pleasures- agency (1971-1975) that proved to be quite success- sex, drinking, and women.' ful in getting the fledgling industry on its feet with a The ockers were true Australian originals, part of deliberately commercial product. a strong and spirited outburst of native cultural ex- The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, for example, pression in defiance of "cultural cringe"; that is, the features a colonial on holiday abroad, demonstrating Australian sense of inferiority vis-a-vis "superior" his Australian uniqueness in comparison to the Brit-

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This content downloaded from 161.13.1.14 on Tue, 14 May 2013 10:44:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ish. Barry's difference is played out in a variety of a mainstream film subject in the 70s, when Australian comical and crass scenes that enhance his Australian culture was more narrowly defined by a dependable virility. For example, to impress a British woman and commercial genre that initially repressed a di- whom he is wooing, Barry dumps curry down his verse culture and history in terms of gender, class, and drawers, because he has heard that "British women race. Priscilla represents the evolution of the film like it hot." Or to show his ingenuity during a studio industry in the last two decades, free of censorship and fire, Barry and his mates chug a case of Foster Lager, shaped by film-makers able to take advantage of more urinating on the flames in order to put them out. flexible financing structures and willing to take risks Throughout the film, Barry's male potency is under- on otherwise marginalized aspects of Australian cul- scored by a stream of phallic references, such as ture. "Percy the Python" or "My one-eyed trouser snake"- Unlike the maligned ocker, Priscilla has not been the latter is even put to song! an embarrassment for the industry and country. The The ocker's crude bathroom and phallic-centered darling of the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, it quickly humor soon led to accusations that these films were achieved worldwide popularity as the first of a wave "culturally debased" and too gauche for export. For a of gay drag films, earning the coveted status of a cross- large Australian contingent-including industry ac- over film that appealed to both gay and straight audi- tivists, film-makers, critics, and even members of ences with its cheeky camp style and audacious yet Parliament (many of whom had pushed for a govern- endearing characters. Duly praised for its sympathetic ment-subsidized industry)-the ockers were an em- treatment of gay men, Priscilla was also voted the barrassment. This was a particularly sensitive issue most popular film at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian for a country interested in making a bid for interna- Film Festival. This international validation boosted tional recognition with a revived national cinema. the film's reception at home in Australia, for Priscilla Subsequently, the new funding policy of the grossed $15 million (an outstanding response from a A.F.D.C. (soon to become the Australian Film Com- country with a population of 18 million). shifted mission) away from commercial concerns to a However, Priscilla's fame and high international more serious-intentioned quality cinema of which the profile have been at the expense of its three female country could be proud. And the films that received its characters, for the film lashes out at 01' Shirl, the bar financial such as Picnic at support, Hanging Rock patron (June Marie Bennett), Cynthia the stripper The Chant Jimmie (1975), of Blacksmith (1978), My (Julia Cortez), and Marion, Tick's estranged wife (Sa- Brilliant Career and Breaker Morant (1979), (1980), rah Chadwick). This misogyny exceeds the frequent world attention subsequently brought to Australia as and irritating sexism exuded by the original ockers, well as to the directors who to helped shape the 70s which essentially reduced women to sex objects and/ Renaissance: Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, Gillian or nymphomaniacs. and Bruce Beresford. Armstrong, (Ironically, Bruce Clearly ingrained in the ocker genre is a fear of Beresford was the director of The Adventures of Barry female sexuality and women's power that can be di- McKenzie, as well as its sequel, Barry McKenzie rectly linked to the larger social upheavals of the early Holds His Own.) 70s, when the women's movement gathered momen- Priscilla Twenty years later, conjures up the tum and when feminists boldly challenged the tradi- ocker via its familiar drunk and rowdy scenes in bars tional ideology and culture of sexism in Australia. on the road, as well as scenes done in deliberate bad Within a decade, women achieved equal status by law. taste: Adam, who is far more outlandish and crass than Thus, the chauvinism of the ockers operated in the Barry, proudly shows off an "Abba turd" in a bottle to dual sense of the word-hyper-inflated masculinity as a startled Beradette. This almost seems intended to well as spirited and patriotic nationalism. The postur- the scene one-up where Barry McKenzie graphically ing and flaunting of Australian machismo served as a vomits "chunder" on the hair of his unsuspecting psy- smoke screen for male fears over the loss of authority, chiatrist. Tick also carries on the tradition of the power, and sexual prowess. ocker's humor his tale of phallic-centered through a Priscilla is very telling about ongoing male anxi- friend the "cracking fat"-enlarging his penis. eties over the increasing empowerment of women. Yet Priscilla's world of and trans- gay dragsters What starts as a wild and rollicking ocker romp across sexuals is far from the heterosexual world of blatantly the outback soon turns into a full-blown misogynistic Barry McKenzie, Stork, and Alvin Priscilla's Purple. and racist attack on the films's females that surpasses milieu and characters would not have been possible as even the frequent misogyny of gay drag itself. (This

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This content downloaded from 161.13.1.14 on Tue, 14 May 2013 10:44:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions point of view was not lost on the organizers of the sums up the perspective of the ocker towardwomen. Sydney Gay and Lesbian MardiGras, who refusedto Like her ancestors, Cynthia must be controlled and give the film or writer/directorStephan Elliott their punished for her aberrantsexuality. Indeed, she is support.)The film denigrates 01' Shirl and Marion, roughly dragged off the stage by her husbandBob who are lesbians, as well as Cynthia, an oversexed (Bill Hunter),and painfully held againsther will. Filipino, all of whom presentspecific threatsto white Significantly, Cynthia's excessive sexuality and male patriarchalsociety. Coupledwith this misogyny lewd behaviorare linked to her Asian heritage.Thus is a racism specifically directed at Asian women that she is a female incarnationof what is perceived as a reveals current white male alarm over shifting very real threatto the purityof white Australiansoci- ethnicities of Australia, attitudes fueled since the ety. The growing number of Asian immigrantshas 1970s, when the postwarwhite-only Australianimmi- been perceivedby white Australiansnot only as com- gration policy changed, opening up the country to petition for decreasingjobs, but also as a drainon the non-Europeans,specifically Australia's Pacific Rim social system in the areas of welfare and unemploy- neighbors, and thus dramaticallyaltering the ethnic ment benefits. In fact, within the past few years, anti- mix. Asian sentiment has fueled tensions in urbanareas, Beradette's scorchingremarks to 01' Shirl in the and spawned openly racist groups such as the neo- first town where she, Tick, and Adam performmakes Nazi National Movement. the film's position toward lesbians quite clear. 01' Adam's parody of a geisha girl (one of his drag Shirl has an unbecoming slovenly and masculine ap- outfits on the road) seeks to diminishthe Asian "men- pearance.With her unkemptshort hair and her garbof ace." His silly, cartoonlike costume, adorned with undershirtand trousers,she is coded as butch or les- pastel-blue rubberhair, matching pink-and-bluefur, bian, which in Australianculture is linked to the un- and satinbodice andG-string, blurs all diversenation- natural,even the perverse. Further,01' Shirl's rough alities into one Asian-Pacific stereotype,just as the demeanor,as well as her broken English, suggests a film reduces all Asians into a grotesquefemale type. low-class white trash, conjuring up a "bulldagger," Adam's outlandishappearance is non-threateningbe- which carrieswith it a grotesqueand very realthreat to cause his Asian-ness and feminine appearanceare a masculinity. As if to "unsex" 01' Shirl, Beradette masquerade, whereas Cynthia's is uncomfortably quickly bombardsher with an openly hostile and vi- real. This new Australianis disruptive,inappropriate, cious outburst which also implies a violent rape: and clearly out of place. "Whydon't you just light your tamponand blow your Accordingly, Bernadette and Adam banish box apart,because it's the only bang you're going to "Cynthia"from the film altogether.The life-size in- get!" Shocked and humiliated, 01' Shirl hangs her flatable plastic sex doll which they use to signal for head in shameas the men in the barbreak into guffaws help aftertheir bus breaksdown clearly alludesto her: of laughter. "Cynthia"disappears into the sky over the outback, If 01' Shirl is attackedas an awesome and offen- and after the film's conclusion and final credits, she sive sexual deviant,Cynthia's raunchy and outlandish lands in an unnamedAsian country, suggesting that burlesque act codes her as obscenely sexual. this is where Asian women really belong-certainly Cynthia'smain claim to fame is a trickwith ping-pong not in Australia. balls: she seductively insertsthem into her vagina and With 01' Shirl and Cynthiaousted from the film, then pitches them at the bar's frenziedmale audience. Bernadette takes center stage as the film's ideal Pouredinto a provocativeand tight-fittingblack satin woman,or "God'sPolice." Coined at the beginningof bustier and thong with electric black-and-whitespi- the 19th century, this other male-defined stereotype raled stockings, Cynthia conjures up the "damned deemed women a civilizing role within family and whore," a historical male-defined Australianstereo- society. As the young nation grew out from under type for women coined during the early days of the convict status into social respectability,these "good country'ssettlement in the late 18thcentury, when all andvirtuous women" (usually wives andmothers, and female convicts were categorizedas objects of sexual clearly delineatedfrom the damnedwhores) were ex- gratificationwhether or not they became prostitutes. pected to look after the moral interests of the nation By deeming all women damned whores, men could under the paternalmetaphor. Moreover, their duties relegate then to an inferior status, yet maintain the frequentlyincluded the policing of otherwomen, ajob power dynamic, still reaping the benefits of using thatBernadette undertakes with greatrelish upon set- them for sexual gratification. This attitude clearly ting her sights on 01' Shirl and Cynthia. It's as if

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This content downloaded from 161.13.1.14 on Tue, 14 May 2013 10:44:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Bernadette has realized her calling, transforming from Beradette stands as the new standard for Australian a brooding widow and lackluster performer to a womanhood-the bastion of reactionary "family val- zealot, as she recivilizes this "intemperate social envi- ues" that privilege the male. There is no room for ronment."2 lesbians or Asians. If God's Police functioned in the 1840s amidst the In speaking of Priscilla, Australian historian/so- dramatically changing male-dominated society where ciologist Chris Berry has commented, "The misogyny women were defined according to the needs of the of the [transsexual and] drag queens in Priscilla . . . nation as the foundation of the patriarchal family unit, [allows] filmmakers and audiences (implied to be then Bernadette is the 1990's rendition of God's Po- white, heterosexual and patriarachal) to hide behind lice, with an evangelical furor fueled by racist white someone else. 'We didn't say that, ... it was the drag male anxiety over deviant women-lesbians and queens."' Recall Adam's snide solution for the oversexed foreigners-who have threatened the tradi- "Cynthia problem"-to "sell her off' before he and tional social status quo. Beradette send her off-as well as his contemptuous the time By Bernadette, Adam, and Tick reach assessment of Marion-"She could sandbag the holes their final destination in Alice Springs, Bernadette has of old tankers with that tongue." Thus Bemadette and taken as Bob's chaste Cynthia's place very paramour, Adam are used as vehicles, suggesting a homophobic a role consistent with the puritanical aura associated (and transsexual-phobic) strain in the film. with God's Police. We wonder how Marion, Tick's Priscilla dresses up the once embarrassing and lesbian wife will fare. Will she (estranged) be a gauche ocker genre for international consumption, damned whore like or as Cynthia, designated perverse using the alluring and exotic flamboyance and spec- like 01' Shirl? To our surprise, she typifies God's tacle of drag and transsexuality to vent hostilities to- Police. Not is she only a model mother, having raised ward women who challenge traditional male ideals of her son on her own a successful (while developing womanhood and singling out Asian women in particu- career as entertainment director in a but a large hotel), lar as scapegoats for all those Pacific Rim immigrants and tolerant saintly wife, open-minded about Tick's who "taint" white Australian society. Just as the ocker gay lifestyle and vocational choices. revealed male anxieties over women's empowerment in a dramatic However, shift, the film quickly in the early 70s, even as it celebrated (and countered demonstrates that Marion is completely fickle and with) aggressive male prowess as part of a wave of of the unworthy title; she is not only a bad mother, but spirited Australian nationalism, Priscilla unveils cur- also a deceitful wife. (It's as if Elliott conceived of rent white male fears in Australia-fear of female Marion only to chart her Marion's most "regression.") sexual freedom, aberrant Asian women, single moth- serious is her sexual misstep orientation, which has ers, women in the business sector-as women con- distracted her ability to mother, a fact not lost on her tinue to make critical strides in Australian society, and son, Benj, who strongly implies that he felt in as the compe- country becomes more ethnically heteroge- tition with his mother's lover, and unfairly shunned. neous. Further, Marion him betrays Tick, causing to be pub- * Susan Barber teaches at Loyola humiliated in front of licly this son, as if she were Marymount University in Los Angeles threatened by Tick's presence. She deliberately lies to and is writing a book on Australian Tick, telling him that Benj will not be present at his cinema. drag performance, then she brings him anyway- much to Tick's embarrassment. His distress is so great that he faints and ruins the show. Marion further un- Notes dercuts Tick's attempts to be a good father by ostenta- My thanks to Sue Scheibler and tiously and inappropriately trying to pair him up with Joseph Lee who made the hotel helpful comments in earlier versions of this review. busboy, when an embarrassed Tick is clearly not interested in taking on any lovers. Marion's pun- 1. ishment for her aberrations is Though frequently grouped with the ockers, Alvin him- the loss of her job as self is not an ocker at all, but a shy, repressed boy-man entertainment director, replaced by none other than who does not resemble the more rambunctious Barry Beradette. Marion is also ousted as mother, for Tick McKenzie or Stork. and Adam will serve as the new parents and heads of 2. Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God's Police (Sydney: rev. household back in Sydney, where they take Benj. Penguin Books, ed., 1994), p. 347. With Marion, 01' Shirl, and Cynthia out of the film,

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This content downloaded from 161.13.1.14 on Tue, 14 May 2013 10:44:18 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions