100% Australian Owned: The Cultural Cringe

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the term ‘cultural cringe’ was invented by an Australian.  Arthur Angel Phillips coined it to summarise the inferiority complex we developed about our own culture post World War II.  The further we move away from that era, the clearer it seems we are stuck in it.  The Australian film industry is a walking case study, wrapped in an enigma, secured safely in a padded cell.

I note this, because I have to conclude there must be some sort of sociological reason why we are incapable of making waves, let alone money with our attempts to tell Australian stories.  It’s not like we’re a boring country, filled with bureaucratic, passionless lives.  Australians are fascinating and flawed, prone to spurts of bravery and mate-ship, rags to riches tales and stubbornness beyond reason.

So why, when looking at the bulk of our recent cinematic efforts, can they be evenly split between wrist slitting dramas of woe, and ocker attempts at comedy (mostly failed).  The horror of both, and the Groundhog Day they represent upon being viewed brings on my own sense of Cultural Cringe – like an up-chuck reflex of fury and shame.

Fury at the waste of money and opportunity.  The director of Somersault was actually quoted as saying she didn’t aim to find a wide audience or make money back.  How lovely for her investors to hear this.  Her investors largely being the government.  So that’s us, throwing cash into a pit as we sidestep it for something we’ll actually enjoy.

Shame because we are so much better.

So what’s rotten in this state of Denmark (aside from the fact that Shakespeare clearly isn’t writing our scripts)?  Is it possible that the cultural cringe has us believing we have to make our movies so ‘worthy’ they are inaccessible?  Or are we so afraid of making fresh tall poppies, we’d rather make a walking cliché of a representation that isn’t aspiring to anything?  If Americans struggle with irony, Australians are mortified by sincerity.  We can only mean something if we’re junkies, or tortured geniuses in some sort of highly abusive relationship.  Otherwise we’re afraid to mean anything too much, or someone else might point and laugh.

It’s been a while since we’ve had what you might class a classic Aussie film.  It feels like we used up most of the good ocker with the abundance found in The Castle.  It’s all the nutty asides, the strange tangents like Muriel’s Wedding and Priscilla Queen of the Desert, that stay with  you long after.  They are unpredictable anomalies.

There was a time when we excelled at the period drama, as if the only way we were prepared to show ourselves to the world was through some sort of historically approved classical painting.  We never did define ourselves properly in the now, especially as a multicultural society.  This lack of definable national identity is why we fall back on the historical constructs we mytholigise – they’re far enough away that there are no tall poppies to bring down.  We have our delightful rogues (take a bow Ned), our soldiers forged in fire (Gallipoli, Breaker Morant), and The Picnic at Hanging Rock.  When they were done right they were a fascinating reflection of the birth of a nation’s character.

Even that seems to have faded a little.  The recent Kokoda barely made a dent on our radar, and the most prominent criticism coming out of preview screenings of Australia (aside from length, melodrama and the immobility of Nicole Kidman’s face) is the use of the word ‘crikey’.  Have we gone backwards?  Is nothing beyond the cringe?

The cultural cringe was originally based on our assumed inferiority to all things British and European.  It was a chip on the shoulder, the last marker of our colonial origins (aside from a monarchy which we just can’t seem to let go of).  Our current complex is brought to us proudly by a former colonial sibling.  We spend a great deal of time bagging out America, but we just can’t get enough of their movies.  Whenever any of us gives some sort of improvised performance we find ourselves prone to pulling on a faulty American accent, as if this somehow makes the role-play more legitimate.

Perhaps it’s because we buy more easily into the American dream than we do our own.  We may love a sun burnt country, but we never quite know what to say about it.  So we take the easy options, the roads constantly traveled because we’re too self conscious to admit we might be anything other than a deeply troubled black sheep of the family prone to clowning around to get attention for the wrong reasons.  No one else in the global family has noticed just how oddly uneven we are because we scrape by on a sports scholarship.

It could be argued that America makes it’s share of bad movies to, they just happen to be shiny enough that they can’t help but sell.  In reply I give you that most beloved of recent films Little Miss Sunshine – accessible, cheering and cheap.  They even make decent high school movies in between the dross (Mean Girls, Heathers, Bring It On), something I can’t recall us ever doing.  We do have teenagers here, don’t we?

It’s time to do something even more ballsy than a full frontal scene pitched at an Oscar nomination.  The Australian film industry needs to invest heavily in script development, pick ideas that people will want to watch (as opposed to write an analytical essay about) and learn how to market its product.  First we need to market it to the rest of Australia, then we need to sell it to the world.  Invade the global cricket pitch.  We need to let go of the cringe and embrace our own stories; then we need to recognize that they can be universal.