You Love to See It: Wake in Fright (Patreon)

At first it seems as though Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 thriller about an English schoolteacher stranded by bad luck and dumb decisions in a desolate mining town, will be a familiar kind of story. A small town with a sinister secret, good-natured locals concealing some conspiracy behind their ruddy faces and welcoming smiles. As one scene of rural monotony and stupid viciousness blends into the next there is a sense that all of this must be leading to the revelation of some central, foundational monstrosity. A supernatural force. A local tragedy echoing and re-echoing through cycles of trauma. A grisly murder covered up and expertly ignored en masse. By the time you realize that no revelation is forthcoming, the simple fact that the film’s malaise is sourceless hits harder than any third-act twist ever could.

Wake in Fright’s joyless marathon drinking sessions, dirt-simple but incredibly stressful gambling scenes, and debauched, pointless kangaroo hunt aren’t the symptoms of some psychic rot afflicting the town of Bundanyabba — “The Yabba” to its citizens — but the town’s entirety. There is no explanation for this culture of stunted, dead-eyed violence beyond the boredom of men with nothing to do but labor under the earth and stare into the dust-colored void of the Australian Outback. Their gambling parlor offers only a single game — the placing of bets on the outcomes of coin tosses — not just because they’re unimaginative but because all outcomes yield the same result regardless. When, during one of John Grant’s fever dreams, he sees a vision of coins reversing their courses through the air to land scratched-side up over the eyes of the alcoholic philosopher-hermit Doc, he’s seeing not just an omen of death in the laying of coins for the ferryman over a corpse’s eyes but a moment of in which random chance and self-imposed fatalism overlap and merge into one entity. 

If the iconic image of the coin-covered eyes encapsulates the movie in a single moment, the infamous kangaroo hunt stretches that same thematic material to the ripping point. Drunk and bored, John and Doc join a couple of local good ol’ boys on a night drive through the Outback, blasting away indiscriminately at kangaroos. The hunt the film depicts is real, and in reality it degenerated into drunken brutality just as it’s depicted in the finished cut. Why do this? They don’t need the meat — a little suffices for Doc’s needs. Is it for the thrill? A chance to alleviate the grinding tedium of their lives? There’s no answer, really, just as there’s no secret motivating horror at the Yabba’s heart. The monster for which we spend the whole film tensed up in anticipation is no more alien or profound than the hot, dusty town and its bored, sweaty inhabitants that greeted Grant when he stepped off of his train.