Some people have recurring dreams about missing the bus, or taking a test they haven’t studied for, or showing up in public completely naked. My stress dreams tend to be frustratingly anticipatory. I’m about to start a new job, or travel somewhere, or have sex with someone, but it never happens; I wake up with no somnolent accomplishments. “Nightmare” might be too strong a word for a dream whose primary animating force is frustration, but if such an equivalence can be accurate, it certainly is in Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971). The thriller, a paradigmatic entry in the Ozploitation genre, despite its Canadian director and English leads, follows an indebted schoolteacher’s infuriating waylay in the fictional Outback town of Bundanyabba.
John (Gary Bond) works at a one-room schoolhouse in another fictional town, Tiboonda, where he’s been placed to pay off his school debts. In his own words, he’s a “bonded slave of the education department.” At the start of Christmas vacation, he takes a train to nearby Bundanyabba, where he intends to catch a plane to Sydney the next day to spend the holidays with his girlfriend. His plans are soon derailed, however, when he loses his travel money in a round of the Australian coin-flip gambling game Two-up.
The Yabba, as locals affectionately call the town, is dusty and sun-baked, its quaint main street resembling a frontier town in the American West. It proves a nightmarish realm for John, a white-collar (though broke) professional who loathes his rural surroundings and the rowdy bogans sparsely populating them. Throughout his sojourn in the town, he’s plied constantly with beer. The drink offers are a sign of hospitality, but the insistence and constancy with which the townspeople levy them grows menacing.
"The drink offers are a sign of hospitality, but the insistence and constancy with which the townspeople levy them grows menacing."
Alongside the pervasive drunkenness is a culture of masculinity that takes shape in homosocial misogyny and physical aggression. The men with whom John socializes bond with one another by harassing and objectifying Janette (Sylvia Kay), a young woman whose father invites John home upon learning of his financial predicament. Constantly soused, the men weave violent altercations carelessly into their social lives. In the film’s most notoriously brutal scene, they bring John along on a kangaroo hunt, in which he participates after some hesitation. In what he justified as an animal-rights-minded indictment of the practice, Kotcheff used footage from a real kangaroo hunt. The men’s gleeful apathy is revolting, and John’s ultimate complicity maddening.
Doc (Donald Pleasance), an alcoholic doctor who moved to the Yabba to live without money and let his affliction go unnoticed, is initially John’s compatriot in alienation. When the two first meet at a pub, Doc expresses his disdain for the locals. “All the little devils are proud of hell,” he smirks as a crowd of men clamor for cash in the game of Two-up taking place in the next room. But, living in squalor and expressing libertine views on sexuality, he still offends John’s sensibilities. The night of the kangaroo hunt, an implicit sexual encounter takes place between the two men; in the morning, John rushes out of town, loath to be confronted with the fact. Earlier in the film, John and Janette begin to have sex but John, unable to hold his liquor, pulls away and vomits.
The two encounters, one abortive and the other repressed, are sources of deep shame and, indeed, frustration. John’s initial objective in leaving the Yabba is in large part sexual–he has a girl waiting for him in Sydney. The pressures on his sexuality–both sex with a man and the inability to perform with a woman–reflect the restriction of his movement: where Sydney is the El Dorado of heterosexual bliss, the Yabba is a den of masculine depravity. Sexual frustration and the frustration of being stuck in place become inextricable.
After hitchhiking out of town and wandering through the bush, John manages to snag a ride on a truck he believes to be traveling to Sydney. He’s misunderstood the driver, however, and he ends up back in the Yabba. This kind of circularity is pure nightmare logic–in a realm defined by fear, escape from doom is impossible. As the oppressive heat and senseless violence of John’s surroundings have intensified, one wishes for some catastrophic event to break the narrative and send it in a new direction. We almost get one: when the trucker drops John in the Yabba, he resolves to kill Doc, stationing himself in the corner of his one-time paramour’s filthy shack with a rifle. Instead, he turns the gun on himself. Earlier, John has alluded to suicide–endemic in the Yabba, according to a local sheriff–as the only way to guarantee an escape from the oppressive heat. By now, it seems an appealing prospect to us in the audience: once John is dead, we can all wake up. But when John pulls the trigger, the bullet merely grazes his temple, and he wakes up in the hospital. At the film’s end, he’s returned to the shabby Tiboonda inn from which he departed at the outset, in less a triumphant return than a bit of déjà vu.
Some people have recurring dreams about missing the bus, or taking a test they haven’t studied for, or showing up in public completely naked. My stress dreams tend to be frustratingly anticipatory. I’m about to start a new job, or travel somewhere, or have sex with someone, but it never happens; I wake up with no somnolent accomplishments. “Nightmare” might be too strong a word for a dream whose primary animating force is frustration, but if such an equivalence can be accurate, it certainly is in Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971). The thriller, a paradigmatic entry in the Ozploitation genre, despite its Canadian director and English leads, follows an indebted schoolteacher’s infuriating waylay in the fictional Outback town of Bundanyabba.
John (Gary Bond) works at a one-room schoolhouse in another fictional town, Tiboonda, where he’s been placed to pay off his school debts. In his own words, he’s a “bonded slave of the education department.” At the start of Christmas vacation, he takes a train to nearby Bundanyabba, where he intends to catch a plane to Sydney the next day to spend the holidays with his girlfriend. His plans are soon derailed, however, when he loses his travel money in a round of the Australian coin-flip gambling game Two-up.
The Yabba, as locals affectionately call the town, is dusty and sun-baked, its quaint main street resembling a frontier town in the American West. It proves a nightmarish realm for John, a white-collar (though broke) professional who loathes his rural surroundings and the rowdy bogans sparsely populating them. Throughout his sojourn in the town, he’s plied constantly with beer. The drink offers are a sign of hospitality, but the insistence and constancy with which the townspeople levy them grows menacing.
"The drink offers are a sign of hospitality, but the insistence and constancy with which the townspeople levy them grows menacing."
Alongside the pervasive drunkenness is a culture of masculinity that takes shape in homosocial misogyny and physical aggression. The men with whom John socializes bond with one another by harassing and objectifying Janette (Sylvia Kay), a young woman whose father invites John home upon learning of his financial predicament. Constantly soused, the men weave violent altercations carelessly into their social lives. In the film’s most notoriously brutal scene, they bring John along on a kangaroo hunt, in which he participates after some hesitation. In what he justified as an animal-rights-minded indictment of the practice, Kotcheff used footage from a real kangaroo hunt. The men’s gleeful apathy is revolting, and John’s ultimate complicity maddening.
Doc (Donald Pleasance), an alcoholic doctor who moved to the Yabba to live without money and let his affliction go unnoticed, is initially John’s compatriot in alienation. When the two first meet at a pub, Doc expresses his disdain for the locals. “All the little devils are proud of hell,” he smirks as a crowd of men clamor for cash in the game of Two-up taking place in the next room. But, living in squalor and expressing libertine views on sexuality, he still offends John’s sensibilities. The night of the kangaroo hunt, an implicit sexual encounter takes place between the two men; in the morning, John rushes out of town, loath to be confronted with the fact. Earlier in the film, John and Janette begin to have sex but John, unable to hold his liquor, pulls away and vomits.
The two encounters, one abortive and the other repressed, are sources of deep shame and, indeed, frustration. John’s initial objective in leaving the Yabba is in large part sexual–he has a girl waiting for him in Sydney. The pressures on his sexuality–both sex with a man and the inability to perform with a woman–reflect the restriction of his movement: where Sydney is the El Dorado of heterosexual bliss, the Yabba is a den of masculine depravity. Sexual frustration and the frustration of being stuck in place become inextricable.
After hitchhiking out of town and wandering through the bush, John manages to snag a ride on a truck he believes to be traveling to Sydney. He’s misunderstood the driver, however, and he ends up back in the Yabba. This kind of circularity is pure nightmare logic–in a realm defined by fear, escape from doom is impossible. As the oppressive heat and senseless violence of John’s surroundings have intensified, one wishes for some catastrophic event to break the narrative and send it in a new direction. We almost get one: when the trucker drops John in the Yabba, he resolves to kill Doc, stationing himself in the corner of his one-time paramour’s filthy shack with a rifle. Instead, he turns the gun on himself. Earlier, John has alluded to suicide–endemic in the Yabba, according to a local sheriff–as the only way to guarantee an escape from the oppressive heat. By now, it seems an appealing prospect to us in the audience: once John is dead, we can all wake up. But when John pulls the trigger, the bullet merely grazes his temple, and he wakes up in the hospital. At the film’s end, he’s returned to the shabby Tiboonda inn from which he departed at the outset, in less a triumphant return than a bit of déjà vu.