Philip Brophy,
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Australian Screen Classics Series).
Sydney: Currency Press and the Australian Film Commission, 2008.
ISBN: 978-0-86819-821-7
Au$16.94 (pb)
88pp
(Review copy supplied by Currency Press)

Philip Brophy’s The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a most welcome tour de-force addition to Currency Press’s Australian Screen Classics, which is edited by the indefatigable film scholar-activist Jane Mills. The series’ editorial charter is to commission distinguished authors and thinkers from the diverse worlds of art, culture, criticism and politics to write on Australian cinema. Such a series of monographs on Australian film culture has been devised to produce polemical, provocative essays that will – hopefully – make us discursively reflect on who were are as a nation, on our culture, history, and our past and present films.

I say ‘hopefully’ because seldom do we encounter these days insightful, boundary-expanding film criticism and scholarship that is as inventive as cinema can be. In this critical context, Philip Brophy, artist, film director, lecturer, composer and animator, amongst other things, has written an extraordinary multifaceted critique of Stephan Elliot’s classic 1994 The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Philip Brophy, a prolific hybrid, a-categorical artist-thinker-filmmaker, has penned a brilliant, scorching, bravura polemic – one of the best that I have read in recent years on Australian film culture – on a key 1990s film and an iconic phenomenon that is so (alas) predictably categorical, formulaic and indicative of our cultural demons, obsessions and limitations as a national film culture.

Brophy’s monograph is a warts-and-all ‘love letter’ to all of us who reside in this country. His telling dedication is ‘for Australia’ and, make no mistake about it, he sincerely means it. It is a ‘love letter’ in the surreal (risk-taking) sense, as meant by David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (USA 1986). A ‘love letter’ that asks us, as his readers, nothing less than to check out our own aesthetic and cultural baggage, as individuals and as a nation. The question is, do we have the hermeneutic and existential courage to do so?

We are informed, in Brophy’s acknowledgments, that it is also dedicated to the late Paul Taylor, the art and cultural critic, whose ‘spirit’ Brophy felt as he wrote this necessary iconoclastic, scathing and playfully poetic reading of a particular map (viz. Priscilla). But here we have the basic paradox that animates this book – Brophy is a cartographer, a paratactical writer, a tracker who puts his ear to the ground beneath him and hears the seismic fault-lines and tremors of our national consciousness as it is represented in the film’s audiovisual atmospherics, concerns and signifiers that speak of ‘Australiania’. It is that creative, cultural and semantic fog that has been constantly seeping throughout our films, and our audiovisual culture, since the start of the last century, crippling our cultural art forms of representation-production. It is that deadly compulsion of ours to create in that tiresomely unimaginative and stereotypical formula of Australian identity, Australian culture and Australian cinema. When will things change? It is in this critical sense that Brophy’s book is resolutely ‘un-Australian’. And we are thankful that it is so. If this was America in the 1950s, Brophy would be pleading the first amendment to Senator Paul McCarthy!

But let me be clear here. Brophy is not engaging in ‘Aussie-bashing’, for what motivates his spirited diagnostic and intertextual polemic is his fiercely independent spirit of poly-generic critique, scepticism and passion, acting like a ‘go-between’ (Serge Daney) between art, cinema, culture, music, and theory. For Brophy’s most important agenda is to ‘drag’ Priscilla out of its engorged audiovisual miasma of cultural, gender and performative stereotypes, logo–brand concerns, nationalistic myths and our persistent non-cinephilic obsession to forge ‘quirky’ films that mindlessly celebrate being Australian. Whatever that may have meant back in the last century and whatever it might mean now.

So, Brophy’s motivation as a commentator on Priscilla, and Australia cinema, in general, is it to take the film beyond the ‘fatal shores’ of our island-continent into the broader global context of international and transnational concerns. Brophy’s witty and pun-encrusted project is to transcend the film’s national concerns and open it up to a more dynamic poly-cultural and intertextual reading of the signs that are characterising the film’s aesthetic, cultural and conceptual architecture.

This means criticising our destructive obsession in trying to get a ‘correct fit’ between the dramaturgical, formal and stylistic concerns of a movie and our nation-building desire to project ourselves to ourselves, and to others, as celebratory ‘happy-go’ lucky laconic people in a country that is riddled with nationalistic ‘terra-nullius’ neuroses and myths.[1]

Brophy reads the film against its self-congratulatory, comedy-drama camp sensibility and related ‘beautiful landscape cinematography’, to reveal its stereotypical, audiovisual signage as being grounded in an all-encompassing self-annihilation, self-hatred and self-immolation.

As we traverse the film’s one-dimensional life-world of screaming queens, chrome-plated buses and chrome-plated logos, silenced ugly hags, machismo pub culture, gay and wog boys, Isadora Duncan’s flowing scarf, rotating mirror balls, the Snowy Mountains Scheme, post-synching ABBA and Kylie, 2000 Sydney Olympics, inflatable sex dolls, drag performance, beer, urine, David Bowie, Asian bitches, bad film music, etc., we encounter – time and again – our appalling inability to portray ourselves (self-reflexively) on the screen beyond the usual reductive symbolic ‘dumb semiotics’ of gross caricature, subcultures, monstrous drag, and distorted gender, national, and political myths.

So many of our ‘BBC talking-heads’ and tourist bureau inflected movies set out across our seven seas as if they are bland televisual advertisements, or official white paper policy statements, in grossly distorted national self-portraiture. It is cinema that is so tragically bereft of any sense of its own ‘mongrel ‘ origins, concerns and history. It is cinema as cinema in terms of its own fleeting fragility, materiality and suggestive poetry and not as an Orwellian billboard about our own insecurities concerning Australia, its history, image and status in the world. Brophy’s claim that our cinema is substantially warped by its own ‘Siamese twin’ viral preoccupation with television advertising is tellingly right on the money. So many of our movies are bloated in their own precious self-importance and banalities. To put it in the terms of the late American film critic-painter Manny Farber, many of our contemporary movies belong to his “white elephant art” and not, lamentably, “termite art”.[2]

Brophy’s dazzling self-reflexive map-reading of Priscilla is geared to delineating a much larger cultural terrain than what is represented in the film’s exhausted symbolic deployment of national aspirations and local concerns that is grounded in its affirmation of Australian identity. It is a cultural terrain that does not honour Australia as such but denotes a critical, transgressive, playful overhaul of the film’s nationalistic atmospheric conditions and iconic stratification.

Brophy’s book is a joy to read. Here is a critic who writes caringly for the cadence of a word and, in doing so, remains at the same time faithful to the dancing transitory and multi-suggestive textures of the movie image. He is, undoubtedly, one of our finest sentence stylists and perceptive critics writing on cinema (amongst many other subjects) in this country. We can all profit from reading this most needed and provocative ‘bitter brew’ of a book that sings with many essayistic insights concerning Elliot’s popular successful film and its related cultural effects in the 1990s and beyond. I sincerely hope that Brophy’s book is in all of our municipal, school and university libraries; especially the library at the Australian Film, Radio and Television School.

It is an invaluable rubik’s cube of a book that speaks to us of many wise and dynamic things that are salient to our lives as artists, authors, filmmakers, educators, spectators and citizens who care about cinema and its ongoing aesthetic, cultural and existential potential to help us make sense of our one shared world.

John Conomos,
University of Sydney, Australia.

Endnotes
[1] For a very recent lively discussion of the role of luck in our Anzac national–building narrative of Australian character see Ann Summers, On Luck, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2008.
[2] Manny Farber, Negative Space. New York, De Capo Press, 1998. See Farber’s essay “White Elephant Art Vs Termite Art”, pp. 134-144.

Created on: Sunday, 23 November 2008