Deb Verhoeven (ed),
Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature Films.
Melbourne: Damned publishing, 1999.
ISBN 1876310006
A$39.95
(Review copy supplied by Damned publishing)

Uploaded 30 June 2000

I’d be tempted to say that the metaphoric play of ideas of doubling, duplication, twinning or mirroring is central to Deb Verhoeven’s new anthology of writing on Australian and New Zealand feature films, if it weren’t that the work of these metaphors is ultimately one of decentring, of displacement and (interestingly for a book which is also a catalogue) disordering. At a purely functional level, the book itself is double or hybrid, being both an anthology of critical and academic writing and a comprehensive reference catalogue of feature films produced in Australia and in New Zealand. The catalogue itself is an absolute godsend to anyone working around either of these cinemas, and Claire Jackson (who is responsible for the bulk of the work of collating this information) should be thanked by harried antipodean film academics wherever she goes for making their lives simpler. It is hard not to wonder, however, if this particular hybrid is not, in part at least, a tactical response to the increasingly hostile funding environment (in Australia at least) that Verhoeven (11) alludes to for all those disparate things lumped together under the rubric of “screen culture”- the practical, factual enumeration of the catalogue muscling out a space for the more speculative ruminations of the essays that precede it.

On a more conceptual level, the play of doubles and echoes (from peak to peak?) is suggested in the book’s title, in the very twin-ness of its Twin Peeks. The duality of this metaphor appears, initially at least, to be located in the twin film industries of Australia and New Zealand. However, the two terms of this apparent couple quickly ramify and multiply beyond the capacity of any simple binary to contain, in the play of difference and identity between both the two nations/cultures/industries, and within the notion of the nation and the national itself. For instance, the “Twin peeks” of the title also obliquely alludes to the place of the non or not or un-Australian/New Zealand within their respective film industries, through a dilute reference to David Lynch (Twin Peaks), which gestures quietly towards the inextricable role of American films and American markets, and American money in the shaping of “our” film industries.

As several of the essays in this book point out in their different ways, one of the unavoidable problems facing any theorisation of an avowedly “national” film culture for a pair of nations squirming awkwardly between simultaneously colonised, colonial and post-colonial cultural positions, is precisely the question of how one founds the limits or the borders of the category of nation – where is the centre, and what are its margins? In relation to what? From whose perspective? These tensions can express themselves at the brute practical level of categorisation (what counts as one of “our” films?), as for instance in the problematic Australian habit of appropriating and “colonising” successful New Zealand films and film-makers as “their own” (Jane Campion and The Piano spring to mind). On a similar, but more ambivalent note, Tom O’Reagan and Rama Venkatasawmy discuss the difficulties of “placing” films like Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998) and George Miller’s Babe: Pig in the City (1998). Shot locally, but with all signs of the local erased; financed internationally, but shot using largely Australian crew and expertise, such films suggest how problematic the category of the national can be for an industry increasingly integrated into a transnational economy of production and distribution.

More subtly, though no less significant, is the tension between the marginal cultural and economic positions of the antipodean cinemas in relation to both popular and art cinemas from America and Europe, and the margins created by and around the self definition of Australian or New Zealand cinema as “national cinema” (ie, who gets excluded from the model?). Thus Stan Jones discusses the history of German receptions of New Zealand film from as far back as the twenties, whilst Adrian Danks looks at the tensions between local and global in “foreign” representations of Melbourne, especially the 1959 production of On the beach (which allegedly produced Ava Gardener’s comment that “I’m here to make a film about the end of the world…and this seems to be exactly the right place for it.”), offering us respectively a view of the colonised subalterns of European high and American popular culture. David Hanan, on the other hand, turns the view around to look at Australian documentary representations of Asia from the late 30’s onwards in t he light of Edward Said’s model of orientalism, marking out an Australian cinema of the coloniser, which may, perhaps, be showing signs of moving slowly into a cinema of post-colonialism.

Felicity Collins looks at some of the figures traditionally excluded from cinematic representations of Australia and Australianness, offering some of the very different ways in which notions of identity, place, relationships to both history and the landscape are figured in relation to migrant (in Clara Law’s Floating Life [1996]), indigenous (Rachel Perkins’ Radiance [1998]), and women’s (Margot Nash’s Vacant Possession [1995]) experience (The mere fact that three such diverse and distinct sets of experiences can reasonably be discussed together within the space of one short essay is indicative of the overwhelming hegemony of the white, heterosexual male experience in cinematic representations of Australianness to date).

My personal favourite, though, has to be Alan McKee’s piece on Australian gay porn, titled “Suck on that mate”. Not only does McKee neatly summarise what I’ve been trying to suggest is the main thrust of the whole anthology in his comment that “The centre of Australian culture is the margin of anywhere else”, but by positioning the debate around identity (national or otherwise) in the context of queer theory, he offers a way to understand the complex interweavings of margin and centre that thread their way through ideas of the national in both Australian and New Zealand cinemas.

McKee brings out rather nicely the, doubling, mirroring, or duplication to the point of duplicity I refer to in my introduction, and offers a neat way to conclude this review. He describes the way that much Australian gay porn successfully draws on precisely the same repertoire of imagery and vernacular to connote ‘Australianness’ as the white heterosexist male model that still dominates much of the Australian screen. It is precisely the masculinist exclusion of women, and the intense homosocial bonding underlying the traditional vocabulary of mateship which is behind such models that allow such a seamless transition from the “centre” to the “margin”. Even more interestingly, many of the films McKee discusses have been produced by non-Australians (McKee doesn’t specify where from exactly) for a world market, blurring further the centre/margin distinction at work here without ever erasing it. Like the title of Verhoven’s anthology (and in many ways like most of the essays within it), suggest a doubling, or mirroring of the dominant modes of cinematic national identity in antipodean cinemas, which both inverts the assumptions behind those models at the same time that it repeats and reinforces them. If the twin peaks of Australian and New Zealand cinema are in any sense twins, doubles or reflections, then they are duplicitous duplications, lies, rumours and half-truths of nation, national cinema, the margin at the centre and the centre in its own margin.

Allan James Thomas