Wolf Creek: Thoughts

Bear in mind, much of what follows is based on a single viewing of a film seen almost two years ago. This isn’t to forgive my own subsequent inaccuracies as much as to stress the profound disturbances elicited by this movie that I still hold dear. Perhaps we’ll just start at the beginning. My memory is a little fuzzy, but I’m almost positive I remember an acknowledgment in the opening credits addressing some Australia Council for the Arts (or something like that), which read like an author’s acknowledgment to one of those writer colonies where writers go to complete their big books. This was no doubt to prepare the viewer for the next thirty minutes of what can only be best described as a Rough Guide documentary to a Foster’s Beer commercial (lots of desolate landscapes, intercut with the obvious drunken co-ed party where a guy—get this—JUMPS OFF THE BALCONY INTO THE POOL!! Crazy!). Give filmmaker Greg McLean credit, sadly he knows what’s naturally beautiful: vistas, desserts, craters, spunky athletic women, dirt. And he seems to be working hard to earn the grant one feels he needed to make his film. But what McLean lacks as a filmmaker is honesty. He would have you believe that Ben (played by Nathan Phillips) is our hero: a young man-teen who seems nice enough. On the trip, Ben never takes advantage of the girl who thinks he’s cute (there is a kiss), or tries to get with the other girl who seems almost willing. Nope, this bland Adonis isn’t the hero at all, and since this is a threesome, that would leave possibly Liz (Cassandra McGrath)or Kristy (Kestie Morassi), right? Nothing original there. We go to slasher flicks half expecting one of the ladies to step up, surprise themselves, and survive to tell the tale. Sadly, no. McLean has instead created the anti-anti-anti-hero and gives us one of the most disturbing misogynistic exercises in a genre full of proud offenders.

Once our crew visits the majestic crater of the (misspelled) title, it’s all down steppe from there. Naturally the car dies, but thanks to the kindness of stranger (a “quacky” bushman named Mick Taylor, played by John Jarratt) our scrumptious victims of sexual tension find themselves (after an effectively long ominous car towing) in one of the sketchiest junk yards this side of Eddie and the Cruisers. It should be noted at this point that John Jarratt (the actor--scroll down for that link and you'll see what I'm getting at) looks a lot like an older Harland Williams (another actor/comedian) ten years after realizing his last big break was Rocketman. For those like myself, weaned on the tit of the unstoppable-force-of-nature-I-must-kill-the-babysitter-slashers, and who spent our summers at Camp Crystal Lake, this is by far the scariest thing in the movie. Get out, you groan, even before the models (nay, actors!) drink the water (come on now, we all know that’s a no-no), At this point it’s only a matter of time before Rocketman starts talking about his seven minute abs!! But heed you they won’t. What can only result from this kind of predicament is that all (save one) will probably die, while the others will meet a gruesome death. You wish. And not in a good this-movie-totally-blew-my-expectations-out-of-the-water kind-of-way.

Nope. Apparently Rocketman—I’m sorry “Bushman Taylor”—likes to cut-up, torture, brutalize, simulate/and actually perform rape on women. And, given the amount of time Mr. McLean spends wallowing in these images, one has to question what issues he himself might be dealing with. It would be one thing to write the film and its maker off as the continuation of a genre and that women in peril is the métier of the slasher flick. You wouldn’t be wrong. Yet be it Janet Leigh, or her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis, or any of the hundreds of interchangeable “racks” found in such gems as I Spit on Your Grave, one thing always remained the same: Women can and eventually—after a lot of blood and pain—stop being victims (I Spit on Your Grave is actually really called Day of the Woman--so claims IMDB). Sure, more than one woman may have to die. But eventually there is justice at the end of a confiscated/stolen/found machete. In Wolf Creek, what starts as a wet and grainy romp of some aesthetic appeal, becomes an exercise most vile. McLean (leading the way in what can only be an incredibly disappointing new wave of horror flicks) has created the anti-justice film. The purpose being that, in fact, all of the acts perpetrated on the women in this movie are deserved, and we can all only watch in disgusted awe as a “master” does his work: See how good he can shoot! See how effectively he cuts and slices! McLean has somehow glamorized a type of misogyny that is gaining steam, from the anti-feminist, anti-education/independence of the evangelical movement, to the proliferation of sexualizing the adolescent celebrity and “countdown clocks”—as if the ravenous media and increasingly isolated immature male can freely, and without consequence, be unleashed when the clock hits zero—poor girls, with their good genetics and popularity and wealth! But in the movie, after forty minutes of harrowing brutality, in which one girl ends up with her “head on a stick” (movie’s quote—here read a handful, just look for Mick Taylor, you’ll see what I mean), while the other ends up shot in the street like a wounded kangaroo (one of the least subtle metaphors in the film, of which there aren’t many—metaphors, I mean), an audience has to wonder where the payoff is. What about Ben? Did McLean forget about him? Of course not. The gag is that Ben never mattered. He matters so little to Taylor (at this point the clear “hero”), that he’s left for dog food (literally), and gets off with a minor nailing and a barefoot walk through the desert. Trust me, in comparison to the girls, it’s nothing. Nothing.

It’s a lot to put these kinds of accusations on a filmmaker. But you are what you make in the art world. What McLean, and other isolated and clearly frustrated white-men like him have to realize, is that a film like this is your legacy. Make Jane Austen if you want Mr. McLean, if you think it will clean your conscious. But those of us out there who’ve marked your name in our brain the same way we’ve marked sharecropping produce companies, or former oil company CEO’s who are now vice-presidents, or cars that blow up when rear-ended, will know that, beneath all the pomp and circumstance of art house respectability, you can’t help but think, “How would Emma do on a date with Bushman Taylor? Let’s see her British wit help her now!” Any doubters need only look to the last scene featuring the despicable Rocketman—I’m sorry, Mick Taylor: After dispatching Kristy from a distance with his rifle (trust me, she doesn’t get of easy in the slightest), a sense of melancholy invades his face—surely not from the fact that this was an innocent woman he simulated sex with a large cutting instrument—but that the fun ended earlier than he would have liked (he had so many more toys!). And we’re left to helplessly watch Taylor return to the Outback with a few bumps and scrapes, rifle resting confidently lazy on his shoulder, his dwindling shape a shimmering shadow or trick of the light, vanishing into the blazing sun. It’s almost as if McLean would have us believe he were one of those great old gunslingers, like John Wayne, or the hero Shane. Unfortunately for us, Shane was dead on his feet, and Taylor seems to be doing just fine