The Ignoble Savage: Thoughts on Ted Kotcheff’s “Wake in Fright”
One of the great pleasures enabled by the internet is the ability to track great niche films from the ancient stacks of cinema. One of the best finds I’ve recently discovered is Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film “Wake in Fright.” The story got under my skin in a way that few works of art have ever managed to. The movie may be over 40 years old, but the masterful cinematography captures images of a sort of bleak surrealism that feels truly timeless, which is fitting, because the story itself explores the conflict between the Id and the Superego that has likely played out inside the human psyche since civilization began.
I suspect the movie may move a bit slowly for most modern tastes, but it’s subtle evolution is part of the film’s virtues. It draws us inexorably deeper into the darkest parts of our hearts every bit as masterfully as Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” except that rather than the Congo River being the conduit into the shadow, “Wake in Fright” employs the harsh countryside of the Australian Outback.
The story follows John Grant (played by Gary Bond), a city-dweller who has become disillusioned with his professional office as a school teacher in a backwater town, a position foisted upon him as a requirement of his education.
Grant’s journey to Sidney is disrupted and he winds up in a strange, vaguely forbidding little town named Bundanyabba. A night of drunkenness sets off a chain of events that has his gradually falling into the nihilistic uber-masculine culture of the place. For the remainder of the film, he is simultaneously attracted and repulsed by the violence and sexual depravity that he encounters, and is gradually led far outside his ethical boundaries. His journey culminates with a gruesome nighttime kangaroo slaughter and a homosexual encounter, two things which he’d previously not identified with and thereby badly shake his sense of self. His psychological and moral collapse, combined with his seemingly cursed inability to escape the town, eventually drive him to attempt suicide.
The film dramatizes the dilemma of the modern man, as he is pulled between the responsibilities of civilization and the drives of his most basic nature, simultaneously repulsed by both the demands of bureaucracy and the savagery of freedom, seeking in each a respite from the other, and consequently feeling torn in two and never psychically or emotionally whole. Civilization demands that he work a job he hates in order to earn an education; the unrestrained subculture of Bundanyabba demand that he stays perpetually intoxicated and uncontrolled. Neither is fully satisfying.
Grant’s dilemma is illustrated at its extremes by Doc Tydon, whose character is rendered by Donald Pleasance in a role so masterfully performed that it would justify the immortality of “Wake in Fright,” even if the film’s other considerable virtues didn’t exist. Tydon is a medical doctor who has left behind the prominence of his position to live a meager existence in Bundanyabba. He accredits his decision to alcoholism and a wandering nature, but bits of his dialogue suggest that he has arrived at his hedonistic existence as a result of his own existential questions. One gets the impression that he has looked long and hard at the pretty veneer of civilization and found it wanting. As a result, he not only embraces his base impulses, but makes that embrace the cornerstone of his philosophy. In some ways, he is the film’s ‘villain’— if such a simple notion can be ascribed to such a subtle and complex film—because he is responsible more than anyone else for leading Grant down his dark path. But Tydon seems to have no wicked notions, as at the end of the film he is instrumental in covering up Grant’s suicide attempt and helping him escape the town. One is left to assume that Tydon had no motive of self-gain. He was merely offering what Grant seemed to want, which is a life free from the shackles of civilization’s monotony.
Grant doesn’t take Tydon’s road. In the end, he elects to escape Bundanyabba and return to his life as a school teacher. As demanded by the Hero’s Journey, he comes full circle, back to where he began, but having new wisdom and insight because of his experiences.
The depravity of life in Bundanyabba holds little appeal on the film, yet Grant’s return to his job doesn’t seem to offer much better, either. There is none of the senseless violence of the kangaroo hunt, but instead there is more boredom and drudgery. In that way, the film maintains to the very end an ambiguity offers no easy answers, but instead inspires deeper questions of self and of civilization. The eternal push-and-pull doesn’t disappear. It’s still there, waiting for each person to explore on their won. The journey is never easy and rarely pleasant, but it’s part of what it means to be human. It’s a struggle that has been in our hearts since day 1, and one that will probably always be in our hearts.
The question I’m left asking is whether or not Grant’s fright began upon waking up in Bundanyabba, or waking up to his conditions of servitude in the school house. One of those places offers the horrors of violence and nihilism, but the other offers the horrors of perpetual monotony and restraint. Perhaps a meaningful life lies in the battlefield between those dual impulses, or perhaps it lies in some country far beyond the borders of both. I’m not sure yet, but “Wake in Fright” has had me asking these questions ever since I stumbled upon it, and that’s the highest mark of quality that I can think of for any work of art.
