CiNeMa as Public Dreamtime - an Australian example . . .

Film – DVD

Beginning at the End . . .

Last Cab to Darwin (dir. Jere my Sims, 2015) Last Cab to Darwin is based on the somewhat pedestrian 2003 play by Reg Cribb. Supposedly central to the plot is the controversial theme of voluntary euthanasia as Rex (Michael Caton)—a Broken Hill cabbie—learns he has terminal stomach cancer and decides to drive three thousand kilometres through the Australian outback to Darwin, where a doctor has successfully campaigned to decriminalize euthanasia. But Sims’ film offers so much more to reflect upon, and to feel—and it refuses to stay fenced in by the limited range of the for-and-agin-euthanasia polemic. When we first see Rex in his native kitchen he is pure Dionysiac: a long way from sober, and blissfully and obliviously dancing, singing and playing beer guitar to the 1970s song ‘I Am So into You’—an ironic title when considering British-colonial-white-settlerblack-land-culture interpenetration, and even more ironic when we get to see that Rex has less cause for celebration than he might think. He is the quintessential Homeric (in the Simpsonian sense) Aussie, and almost falling off the screen. He is life’s liberating force. He is release of limbs and communion through dance. He is laughter, and music in flutes. He is repose from all cares—his blood bursts from the grape and flows across tables laid in his honour, to fuse with our blood, he gently, gradually, wraps us in shadows of ivy-cool sleep.

This Euripidean dance is later parodied by the ironic non-dance of the Aboriginal unangry young man Tilly, when he promises a seriously native dance to a courtyard full of white beer drinkers, and then merely scrapes out ‘You put yer left foot in, and yer right foot out, and you shake it all about’. But more of Tilly soon. Thus Rex’s dance scene intertwines with one of the most affectionate tantrums on film, which, all too gently, nudges us toward this parallel track of the white-black, love-hate, relationship, and one of territory, boundary, dumping of waste and lack of respect. Polly, Rex’s almost wife (he seems to have forgotten to ask for her hand), lives across the street, and love for Rex does not stop her from giving him an earful for mindlessly dumping his excess garbage into her bin: the issue of white trash—all too literally—being dumped onto black property, mindlessly. How can we not think about Maralinga and nuclear-waste dumping (Muckaty Station) in this serious but beautifully comical, satirical taunting? And how could we ever not realize that white-black relations will always be love-hate? But the film see-saws unerringly

between the serious and the self-depreciatingly comical. When Rex is asked why he calls his dog ‘Dog’, he drones dryly: ‘Rex is taken’. This is one of many deft touches by Sims, given that our life-drained cabbie hero was called Max in Cribb’s original play-script. In a disturbing metaphor of parallels, the image of a tree (called ‘Pussy Willow’) adorned with dead feral cats recurs, and the local pub owner laments that it’s the best hope of a draw for tourism that the town (William Creek) has. Supposedly testament to the problem of feral introduced predators that have caused many Australian animals to become endangered or extinct, the striking image of the tree begs such disturbing questions as: who is the feral culture, and to whom? These are posed in a wry tone that gives the viewer time to reflect. Skittering along the surface of such deep and disturbing themes, the film does provoke a not totally uninteresting argument re voluntary euthanasia, and Last Cab to Darwin could also refer to Charles Darwin, with his British-colonial view of ‘evolution’—and the title enfolds a new tone when we read it that way. Is Life just survival of the fittest, and the amelioration of pain? Is dignity really all that we want in our wavering towards death? And who is to bestow such dignity? Compassionate, brave Nietzsche-Nitschke doctors? Poll- gazing politicians? The great strength of the film is its unobtrusive way of asking such difficult questions without stalling the flow in contrivance. Although held back in some scenes by one of Jacki Weaver’s least convincing performances, notwithstanding that her role is of the Flipper–Lassie–Rin Tin Tin doctor (‘Gotta get help, quick!’), with the McGuffin of the euthanasia argument, the long- ish film does pan out to be a tad under-edited, and drags somewhat by the time we finally make it to Darwin. But, ultimately, the film is not at all about the moral arguments about the right to die via computer-controlled barbiturates. It is about pain, and how easy it is to confuse issues of physical-pain amelioration with the mental pains of an uneasy conscience and the worst of all emotional pain: that of unexpressed love and gratitude. That this becomes inextricably and helically woven through the film with the love- hate shared pains between an English colonial nurse, a royally confused white Australian and a highly complex tragic black Australian is a miracle of visual and psychological painting that Jeremy Sims (mostly) guides unerringly. One intelligent ‘argument’ of the film is that no amount of do- gooding, doctoring or political campaigning can ever be a substitute for squaring up and coming to terms with one’s feelings about Life, and about the people we engage in our individual trekking through its wild and painful land- and human-scape. It becomes clear that this is not another Four Corners–type exposé on the cruelty of denying death with dignity. This is about existential pain, and the impossible futility of turning away from its best palliation and even transcendence.

The likeable, young ‘irresponsible’ reluctant husband, reluctant father, reluctant-buttalented footballer Tilly—is he a Horatio, or Virgil to the relentless, restless Rex?— chimes, spars and jars perfectly with Rex in making an earthy and convincing exploration of issues of assimilation and culture clashes of ideals of achievement and responsibility. And this is well fused with the issue of alcoholism as a response to identity crises, with the introduction of the feisty barmaid revealed to be an English nurse ‘…in search of the sun’. I mentioned earlier that Tilly is actually capable of a very wise, tolerant and humorously good-natured parodying of the white culture, and himself, when he pretends to embark on a demonstration of Aboriginal dancing and singing, only to break out into a bogan barnyard white- fellah clumsy shuffle. He knows that the two cultures can benefit, and even love, mutually, but the painful difficulty of the enterprise drives him to drink. The beautiful paradox of the film is that Rex (Oedipus the king?) has his pain relieved, nay conquered (as he enters the realm of the Timeless, in death), by facing it squarely. It turns out to be (merely) the pain of unexpressed love, and neglect of his Aboriginal lover and expressive self. Facing that makes barbiturates and euthanasia ethics very small and irrelevant, but Rex’s awakening to what really matters for his own existence is not handled in any sort of clichéd, Hallmark manner. Caton is clearly convinced by the role, and easily convinces the audience of the sincerity of Rex’s discovery. (In fact, so much so that when he thanks the English nurse–backpacker as he returns homeward to love, he calls her by her actor’s name—and no one seems to care.) Another Catonic irony creaks uneasily, as we can’t help but think back, fondly, of Caton’s quintessential Aussie role as Darryl Kerrigan in The Castle. Darryl (‘Tell him he’s dreaming!’) pulls out all stops to fight the corporations that would compulsorily acquire his home and land. The gaping hole in that (white) dream- film of a man’s home being his castle is the lack of a link to the taking, compulsorily, of Aboriginal land and culture. So much, appropriately, has been made of the Dreamtime as a precious and eternal element of Aboriginal culture, but the white culture’s hope lies in finding a language for its own emotional pain—without which we will never truly enjoy any of our gun-gotten gains and toil- ish wealth, and will never truly enjoy a capacity for loving that which is different and mysterious. (Although, we do expect to be loved, eternally, in our eversportive dance of pre-Republic chutzpah charm of abjection. And we do appropriate, Olympically, chunks of Aboriginal culture when it suits us to be loved for our mystery and originality.) Last Cab to Darwin reminds us that we do indeed possess a white Dreamtime, and if it often resembles the nightmarish (Walkabout, Wake in Fright—even Priscilla), it may also dream up some old- fashioned Pandorean, Euripidean hope.

To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait; To hold a hand uplifted over Hate; And shall not Loveliness be loved forever?

If Shelley is right that it is the poets who are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, then our hope for change is not with the endless search for, and mindless faith in, charismatic politicians, but in being truly moved by the ever-dreaming, yet public, thoughtful conscience of our poetically probing moving pictures.

©2016 Neil Maizels