by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Evoking a rich generic ancestry of crazed-beasts-gone-wild films from Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Razorback (Russell Mulcahy, 1984) to a slew of werewolf variants, Rogue is the story of a killer crocodile’s reign of terror over a group of tourists visiting a deserted Northern Territory river .The film is positioned amongst the long melo-horror tradition of innocence threatened by pointy-toothed villainy, and it utilises these generic assumptions to subvert broader notions of national identity. Through its sophisticated sound palette, it negotiates the unutterable complexity of Whiteness in contemporary Australia.
When Thomas Elsassear established melodrama as a feasible site for critical investigation in his 1972 essay ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations of the Family Melodrama’, interest in the area was sparked in the context of the films of Douglas Sirk and the so-called ‘woman’s film’ of the 1950s. Later work by critics such as Steve Neale, Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, however, resituates melodrama as a dominant narrative modality, what Gledhill defines as a ‘genre-producing machine’ rather than a genre itself. Melodrama provides the narrative foundations upon which a range of narratives may manifest, predicated upon a belief of a universe that is fundamentally moral in nature as outlined by Peter Brooks’ The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (1976).
The influence of this ‘genre-producing machine’ upon horror is demonstrated in a typical melodramatic scenario: a young girl (white dress, blonde ringlets) is tied to train tracks, screaming. A villain menacingly twirls his moustache as a steam train hurtles towards the girl. Urgency grows as the train draws closer, the spectator wondering, ‘Will the hero arrive in time?’. He does (it is almost always a He), saving the girl and ‘the day’. His act saves not just her life, but restores the moral universe—good has conquered evil. In horror, the key actions may not change, but the area of fascination for the spectator shifts: ‘What will she look like if the train hits? Do I dare look?’. Even if it is that very assumption that its aims to subvert, horror narratives are frequently predicated upon the moral universe constructed by the melodramatic imagination.
Like many horror films with a clearly defined monster, Rogue targets the melodramatic imagination. This is made no clearer than when a beer-fuelled Simon (Stephen Curry) refers to the villainous croc as ‘a steam train with teeth’, drawing an instant parallel with the above scenario. Rogue demonstrates the dominant narrative modality of melodrama within the generic horror text: when innocence is threatened by villainy, that villainy must be conquered (or potentially be conquered) to restore moral equilibrium. Rogue utilises this simple melodramatic structure, but defamiliarizes it and laden’s it with extreme ambivalence to create its final impact. That Rogue adopts a melodramatic framework does not mean it ‘is’ a melodrama as such, of course—rather, it questions the entire category of melodrama in terms of how it relates to the very notion of “Australian-ness”. Melodrama itself is racialised, and the carnivesque nature of the horror genre itself throws the whole category of ‘rogueness’—and Whiteness—into question.
Australian national cinema has historically sat uncomfortably with what it views as imported, ‘Hollywoodised’ aspects such as genre and melodrama. But horror finds itself in a unique situation: despite its clearly non-Indigenous status, Australian horror often caters specifically to popular notion of what Australian films ‘are’ because the open and ambiguous endings that mark the ‘arty’ Australian cinema are also a common generic feature of horror. While spawned from the ‘genre-producing machine’ of melodrama, horror uniquely does not demand happy endings: it doesn’t even necessarily require endings that make sense. Part of the pleasures afforded by the genre—in all its frenzied glory—is that it loves to keep questions open, either from a cynical desire to keep franchise options for the notoriously sequel-friendly genre open, or in ‘classier’ horror, an internal, narrative-driven goal of maintaining dread after the film watching experience is completed. It is a generic function for killers to not really be dead, for ghosts to not be completely exorcised and demons not totally put to rest: for Picnic at Hanging Rock’s Miranda never to return, for Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor to vanish into thin air, and for the Harlequin’s legacy to live on in a small boy with DIY mud-pie eyeliner. Australian horror films are capable of bridging the gap between being ‘real’ Australian films by leaving endings open and inconclusive, but by also satisfying audiences by uniting them with distant (American) audiences under the rubric of the moral universe and the collective moral imagination.
As many have noted, the Gothic feature of ‘forbidden space’ manifests in Australian horror film (and perhaps Australian cinema more generally) as the frequent utilisation of the outback as a setting for narrative action. The outback/bush is represented in Australian cinema (as with other arts) as aged and wise, unfamiliar and alien to white settlers, a paradox of unpredictable beauty with chaotic and extreme violence (or, at least, the threat of violence). The dark and beautiful world of the Gothic is paralleled by this mythology of the Australian landscape in horror, the shadow, mystery and enigma lending themselves frequently to powerful images of danger and isolation. Wolf Creek, Razorback, Night of Fear (Terry Bourke, 1972) and Lost Things (Martin Murphy, 2003) all to varying degrees emphasise how the locally produced horror film engages through this popular image in Australian cinema with a wider mythology about the land as an overwhelming, uncontrollable physical, spiritual and moral force.
Horror has proven to be a highly appropriate forum for specifically Australian concerns, the iconic Little Aussie Battler taking the shape of the downtrodden hero or heroine battling the odds (and landscape) to survive in a display of visual, visceral excess. Horror creates a forum for specific local issues to be examined: what in horror is a standard generic element—the hero-villain, final girl or protagonist who is commonly an out-of-towner—in Australian horror is frequently used to explore aspects of national identity in crisis. Many Australian horror films adhere to the broader convention of the Outsider: all the films previously listed involve travel to a new location where the drama unfolds. Wolf Creek, Razorback and Rogue follow foreign travellers, engaging with this Outsider figure in a way that signifies an Anglo-Australian sense of ‘not belonging’, but simultaneously representing this in a figure that does not identify as Australian. Horror’s fascination with this notion of the Outsider offers a significant vehicle for exploring non-Indigenous tensions and insecurities in their relationship to the land. ‘Natural’ knowledge in Australian horror is often dangerous, not only in the sense that it opens a Pandora’s box of natural experience (such as experienced by Miranda and her cohorts in Picnic at Hanging Rock), but more literally for the Villainous Ocker, represented by Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek and Razorback’s Baker Brothers.
These murderously resourceful characters replicate familiar Bush Tucker Man mythology, but unlike other representations of this archetype, in horror these skills are rendered immediately violent and threatening. These white men are killers, potential rapists: they may be Masters of their individual domains who have conquered a natural environment their victims cannot, but their moral legibility is perfectly clear. Dominance of the land is pitched at odds against City Slicker social knowledge, driven by a fascination with the moral universe that is frequently stretched to a life-and-death degree of bodily threat. It is within the nuances of this moral spectrum that horror often finds its ability to address and even subvert dominant melodramatic norms.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the battle waged against the giant killer crocodile in Greg McLean’s Rogue. The assumption that the ‘rogue’ of the title is the croc itself is undermined by the final shot: the camera zooms in on the increasingly pixilated newspaper photo of the central protagonist, American travel writer Pete McKell (Michael Vartan). The image of ‘hero Pete’ (he saved the girl and thus the day) blurs in these final moments, drawing striking parallels to the fade-to-nothing departure of Mick Taylor in Mclean’s earlier Wolf Creek. Rogue is as complex as it is daringly simple: while dependant upon a simple melodramatic framework where good versus evil (good people, evil croc), it strives to question that definition, rendering many of its key characters frequently arrogant, often loud, selfish and completely unaware of the hubris entailed with being strangers in a strange land.
Horror’s visceral hypertheatricality allows McLean to work within a framework most suited to imparting the scope and impact of the threat of this ambiguous figure of the ‘rogue’. This need not only be visual: arguably one of the most powerful elements of both Wolf Creek and Rogue is the use of non-verbal sound. This again allows parallels with melodrama, this time in relation to Brooks’ delineation of it as a ‘text of muteness’. The retro-horror sound of the onamatapia-heavy title Wolf Creek (Woof! Creak!) denotes a key fascination with non-verbal sound that permeates Rogue. In horror, melodrama’s traditional focus on action and pathos is predominantly exhibited through physical movement, performative aspects of gender and a well-documented postmodern familiarity with the intertextual referencing—things other than verbal communication. In Slasher film in particular, dialogue is often impotent—it may fill narrative gaps, but it is spectacle that predominantly propels horror. The most remarkable Australian instance of muteness in the horror film is of course Terry Bourke’s Night of Fear, taking it to its logical extreme: a graphically violent horror film that, although filled with sound (screams, groans, music, grunts), has no dialogue as such (think of an Australian gore Rhubarb, Rhubarb. Picnic at Hanging Rock gleans its defining air of ethereal supernature through pan-flutes and an absence of chatter. Aside from some stiffly delivered but necessary basic exposition, conversation in Rogue is word-shaped ambiance: it is the texture and sound of language rather than its literal meaning that signifies its value.
Accents communicate as much as words in Rogue , and they highlight the brazen, pantomime-like simplicity that construct the 2-dimensional racial stereotypes that structure the film’s deliberately crude characterisations. This further emphasies their foreignness: the bumbling and aggressively protective Allen (Geoff Morrell), a Kenneth Williams-esque picture of British stuffiness; the slow-drawling American Everett (Robert Taylor) and his shrill, hysterical wife, Mary Ellen (Caroline Brazier); the too-easygoing Guinness-and-potato-plumped Irish backpacker, Gwen (Celia Ireland). It is the sound of words that carries greater effect than their meaning—the frequent slurred holler of ‘fyuk-in heyl’ by ockers Neil (Sam Worthington) and Collin (Damien Richardson) contrasts in tone, volume and intent with soft-spoken American journalist Pete: it is the quality of their voices as much as what they say that contains the melodramatic punch. While different nations are represented, the sound of chatter from the occupants of the boat reduced to an indistinguishable hum of Whiteness.
The significance of Brooks’ notion of muteness can be seen most effectively in the film’s final thirty minutes in the showdown between Pete and the croc. Aside from brief cries, Pete is relatively wordless. The croc-killing climax is executed with a distinct absence of verbal utterance: Pete and the croc don’t have much to discuss outside of the odd exclamation from the American journalist: their battle takes place in a realm outside of language. While dependent upon visual action, Mclean opts for a clear gestural palette during this climax: pietistic imagery is utilized on no less than three occasions, rendering an awareness of the heroine Kate’s (Radha Mitchell) Christ-like sacrifice inescapable. The oversized tree stump Pete uses to finally slaughter the croc attains a Carry On! level of outrageousness with its crotch placement reaching a virile 45-degree angle. The melodramatic aspects in both story and image are excessive to a point of comical silliness: notably, this contrasts starkly with the use of sound.
Whole subplots wordlessly open and close in Rogue. Taken on dialogue alone, the only indication of that Russell (John Jarrett) is a widow is cruise-leader Kate’s observation that he has two tickets. In a moment of pure melodramatic excess, the pathos-dripping image as he empties ashes into the river garners an even stronger heartstring tug when Cherry (Mia Wasikowska), whose pale and thin mother Elizabeth (Heather Mitchell) was previously shown mechanically downing pills, catches his eye. Instantly, she understands his loss. He knows that she knows. And we know that they both know. After Alan dies (almost immediate punishment for his fit of excessive and hysterical selfishness to save himself and his daughter at the expense of the rest of the groups safety) a brief shot shows Russell huddled with Elizabeth and Cherry. In this fleeting image, the restoration of the moral universe is suddenly, silently but vividly possible. It need not be maintained throughout the rest of the film, but that one moment consists of the melodramatic promise that order—just maybe—might be restored.
The croc himself is wordless, but not silent. The attention paid to the minutest detail of sound in Rogue takes pains to highlight similarities between its monstrous, bass-like groan. While the swag of differing English-speaking accents suggest an Anglo centre, the rest of the soundtrack emphasizes their difference but refuses to privilege that sound—White Voices become another surface atmosphere. Registered deeper down the scale are the groans of the croc itself, the bass-like roar of motors, and a diverse musical score utilizing everything from musical saws to knitting needles, laden with Indian Classical violin, sound sculptures by Rod Cooper, and most strikingly, Jida Gulpilil’s renditions of the songs of Bobby Bunanggurr. These sounds combine to effectively expel the conglomerate of internally fractured Whiteness (in terms of the cast themselves and the moral hyperactivity that dominates the melodramatic structure) from within the depths of the film itself. There are two worlds in Rogue —the surface buzz of high-pitched, ineffectual chatter of the tourists, and the non-verbal depths of the world they invade. That world is not specifically Indigenous—notably, it is simply un-white. They are outcasts in sound. Pete straddles the two spheres, Rogue -like: but rather than endowing him with the status of the melodramatic hero, he joins Mick Taylor as he fades into a mythic Never Never of mute ambivalence.
Rogue engages melodrama’s penchant for muteness to expose and undermine the very structures upon which the narrative is constructed. It racialises melodrama itself—melodrama is white, and its stories of strong heroes, virtuous heroines and evil villains are rendered as out of place in the Australian outback as much as the awkward tourists themselves. The pretence of a melodramatic framework is offered with the sole intent of collapsing it, rendering the defeat of the killer crocodile both strangely hollow and infinitely satisfying. The hero saved the day, the girl and conquered the villain, but instead of victory, we are left with a faded stare, a glimpse of a victory that should be tangible but, in this environment, is reduced to something far less substantial. It is through its melodramatic excess that Rogue at its core explores the complexities that govern Australia’s unique relationship with the moral universe that governs the melodramatic imagination. It is the place of horror within this imagination that makes it the ideal forum to explore notions surrounding the deeply subjective nature of ‘the Other’ in Australian film.
