Wake in Fright, the 1971 film-cum-anthropological study by Ted Kotcheff understands Australian men, it understands Australia’s drinking culture, and it understands the way those two things intersect – which is to say it understands games.
Dick-measuring contests, arm-wrestling bouts, two-up, binge-drinking: Australian masculinity is a series of ongoing games with the promise that if you complete all of these contests you will be the winner – the mannest man. Of course, it’s an illusion: Australian men never really escape the playground rules of the handball court, which turn a swathe of casual interactions into high-stakes opportunities to prove ourselves.
Which is where both Wake in Fright and drinking come in. Wake in Fright follows the increasing horrors inflicted on to a school teacher, John Grant (Gary Bond), as he finds himself stranded in the small town of Bundanyabba – known by locals as the Yabba. In its purest form, the film is a series of contests that poor old John cannot best. He cannot speak in the relaxed, ocker vernacular of the other townsmen. He cannot understand their references. He cannot kill kangaroos as effectively as the rest of them. And at each turn, he is humiliated – and eventually drenched in kangaroo blood.
Crucially, he cannot win the competition known as the Australian man’s relationship to alcohol. Booze is Australian masculinity’s final boss. The nefarious concept of “cold ones with the boys” cuts across class barriers and subcultures. It’s not just that the default for male social interaction is often drinking – it’s that the drinking is pushed to an extreme. Australian men are expected to drink to excess. He who “can drink everyone under the table” is he who has won the game.
Of course, the game is not that simple. Although getting blasted in a round of two-up is the norm, showing that you are blasted is not. You must get wasted – but if you vomit, or you blow all your money, both of which John does in Wake in Fright, then you lose. Even winning is a sort of defeat, and the ever-complex, ever-changing rules of boozing only become obvious to you when you’ve broken one. John’s masculine victories in the Yabba hurt him as much as his losses do. Games are, after all, always made up. So are their rules.
Wake in Fright is not the relic, or the time capsule, that it is sometimes described as. Masculine drinking culture has not changed one iota. As a sober Australian male – sober because I have to be, because the alternative will kill me – I am exposed daily to the disappointment of men around me who are sad I’m not playing the game.
To be sober in this country is, often, to be seen as the kid who takes their ball home before everyone else is done playing. “You don’t drink?” is a common question, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. And if, pushed enough, you reveal that you played that game for a decade but could not best the bottle – because nobody can – you will be a loser. Either you don’t drink enough, and the boys will have something to say to you. Or you do drink enough, and then the bottle will have something to say to you too.
Wake in Fright’s Doc (Donald Pleasence) proves that. A washed up, alienated alcoholic – and longtime Yabba resident – he has drunk his way to social respect and appraisal, but is totally non-functional outside the parameters of his relationship with the boys. He can’t move outside the Yabba because that which is considered godly within that town – the ability to imbibe an eye-watering amount of booze – is considered a terminal affliction everywhere else.
Again: even when you win, you never win.
The film concludes with this kind of pyrrhic victory too. After a failed suicide attempt, John leaves the Yabba in a typical “hero walks into the sunset” sequence, leaving via the train that deposited him into the hellhole.
But at the same time, he doesn’t leave, will never leave, cannot leave, because the Yabba is not actually a remote town in the middle of the desert. It is the place in which men always gather, wherever they are. It is the place where games are played. And it is the thing that happens in your friend’s eyes when you tell him that you’re thinking about going home, and he says, “One more round?”
A new restoration of Wake in Fright is showing in select Australian cinemas now before a physical media release in June
Joseph Earp is a critic, painter and novelist. His book, Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated, will be published by Pantera Press on 29 April
