You need a champion!

Lately, I’ve found myself getting into heated online discussions about things I have no control over! It could be that I turned fifty last year, and so it’s par for the course!

One of the rage baits was an Instagram post about the Australian film industry, and how bad it is when it comes to funding bodies. Even though I’m not a proper filmmaker, I’ve always had strong feelings in this area, probably because I wanted to be a filmmaker as a teenager. This Instagram post seemed to coincide with a report released the following week from Screen Australia, that said that although Australian audiences support Australian films in principle, they don’t actually watch them, preferring content from overseas.

Some of the people commenting on this blamed crap movies, a preference for elitist stories, etc, and most people fell short of blaming the Australian public. I’m not surprised. Every time I’ve seen someone blame audiences for a lack of support in sound mixing forums, the commenter usually gets slammed by other group members, usually the younger ones, of having an elitist outlook.

But there is something that I was first taught about in my Society & Culture class back at high school, and it is the dreaded ‘cultural cringe’, a phenomenon, inherent to Australia, of feeling inferior compared to the rest of the world. Some of it stems from the fact, that modern Australia started its life as a penal colony; and there was a feeling that all the people sent here, were the rejects of England. And anyone in an official capacity were also not good enough, taking up the roles and opportunities that nobody wanted back home.

This feeling of inferiority transferred across to creative things that we made; in the writing and publishing industry, the visual arts and then film last century. Australian audiences generally did not want to see something that represented their own country, cringing at the idea, and with the general bias that it would be a poorer product, compared to what we might get from Europe or the US. This century, we could add Asia into that mix as well.

But I don’t hear 21st century people mentioning cultural cringe much, but I would say, as someone who has been alive for fifty years, it still afflicts us, when it comes to the creative sphere. And so I think it is fair to pin this on Australian audiences, including myself.

For example, when Australian director, Jennifer Kent’s horror film, The Babadook (2014) was first released in Australia, I remember walking down Parramatta Road and seeing the poster for it, and wondering what it was. I’d heard nobody talking about it in the media, and in the following months, I heard nothing more. I didn’t go and see it.

But then I started to hear about it from Americans, many of the horror film websites that I follow. And as this grew, so too did the interest in The Babadook from Australians. It had been successful over there; and as a result, it became successful in Australia.

The same thing with Talk to Me (2002) made in South Australia; it was American websites that were championing it, and the fact that it was picked up and distributed by A24, helped give it some clout with horror fans here.

This is a pattern and a trend going back to the 1930s and 40s, with the rise of Hollywood, and Australia’s relationship with the US. We have tried to compete, and also imitate, these great American films; but often, Australian audiences have felt these homemade efforts were not good enough, unless, unless — Americans first gave them a pat on the back! And then Aussie audiences would become interested.

Often we become interested in something, when it reaches a kind of ‘critical mass’ of public interest. You can see that recently with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, hearing about IMAXs being booked out around the country for months; it draws our attention and a sense that we might be missing out on something.

But then the issue becomes, how do we really know if something is actually good or not?

If you think about Vincent Van Gogh, the vast majority of us only know that he is a good artist, because an art teacher told us at school, and as kids, we may have already seen some of his pictures in magazines, and on the walls of doctors waiting rooms, and so, it seemed to us that most adults thought he was alright.

But how do we really know that he’s a top artist? If we were to see his artworks, without any of this initial knowledge, would we be duly impressed by them?

Maybe we would. Maybe something in our spirit would tell us that there is something magical about his work.

But most of what we know about him has come to us as ‘received wisdom’; we’ve not had much of a say in it!

However, someone, somewhere, at some point, had to have looked at his work, and thought, wow, he really is far ahead of every other artist out there!. Part of the mythology of Vincent Van Gogh is that he only ever sold one artwork in his life. So that tells us, his peers, or the art-loving audience of the time, were not fans. But we also know that he had an art-dealing brother who championed his work and made sure that his work didn’t just disappear. Also, reading Van Gogh’s own diary entries, we can begin to realise that he was a genius in his understanding and appreciation of how light shifts throughout the day, and changes the colour of his subjects in subtle ways.

That person who realised he was ahead of everyone else then had to convince other people that this was the case. Which is not an easy thing to do.

Another case in point is a writer called Charles Beaumont. Not many people would really know his name now, but some might recognise him as one of the original writers of The Twilight Zone TV series. Writer Robert Bloch blamed his lack of enduring popularity on the fact that he had not been championed by any leading critic or public figures of the day, in the way that other genre writers had. And because Beaumont died so young (38) he had not yet maybe hit his stride with fantastic literature, like his brilliant short stories (Perchance to Dream and Free Dirt) and his great novel on racism and public manipulation (The Intruder) that presaged people like Donald Trump.

So, how do we know someone is good? Do we trust our own judgement? Or do we depend on other people?

Many people would take offense that I suggest we depend on others, to reinforce our own views and feelings. But we often discredit the fact we are inherently social creatures. There is a great paradox with human beings that we like to think of ourselves as unique, and not being ‘sheep’ — but at the same time, we don’t want to be so much different that that we become outsiders to the group. We want to be accepted, at least by someone, our family, work colleagues, or a few friends.

So this is sometimes why we don’t back our own horse, even when all our spirit and brainpower tells us that the horse in front of us is the best horse we’ve ever seen — we don’t want to stick our neck out, and be found to be wrong, by the important people in our society, and therefore feel foolish. It’s often our own good judgment that we reject first!

So, many Australian films languish in that dark space of cultural cringe, unseen by Australian audiences, unless our older, bigger buddies from the land of the rising Big Mac approve of them first. And for the same reason, our funding bodies are only looking for winners, a veritable Phar Lap, rather than the grey horses that possess a certain kind of magic; but who do not seem that powerful, or liked by other members of the race track.

I’ll try to stop fighting with people online.

REFERENCES:

Magro, Karen. Artistic Literacies: Creative and Imaginative Learning in the Global Era. Campus Manitoba, c2024

Prosser, Lee. Running from the Hunter: The Life and Works of Charles Beaumont. San Bernardino, Calif: Borgo Press, 1996