Terry Lane and I agree on Australian cinema?

Sunny Steve cut through the dismals - Opinion - theage.com.au

Most of time, I read Terry Lane because there is an excellent chance that he will say something I strongly disagree with, and the flaws in his arguments are sometimes easily picked. (Especially when he writes an entire column based on a made up story.)

This week his Age column is a kind of defence of Steve Irwin, but is most notable because of his take on the state of Australian cinema:

All this is by way of putting it on record that the Lanes will not be parting with any more of their hard-earned to watch dismal Australian films. We endured the grim masterpiece Somersault. We were depressed by Look Both Ways and were shocked by the parched, unrelieved violence of The Proposition. We left half-way through the incredibly ugly Jindabyne. We didn't find a lot to laugh at in Kenny with its relentless portrayal of human nature. And we had to tie ourselves to the seat to see Last Train to Freo to the end.

We passed on the several celluloid entertainments to do with drug addiction and teenage suicide. It is all enough to make you leave the cinema desperate for the sunny optimism of Steve Irwin.

Barry Jones once observed that the characters in Australian films are typically regressive - they never make things happen, things happen to them. When was the last time that you saw a local film in which the principal characters seized control of their lives and made some good things happen and finished the film ahead of where they started? Is this how our creative elites who control the disbursement of production money see us? Is a happy ending anathema to the funding wallahs?

Gosh, even lefty atheists can dislike Australian film on the same grounds as I do. This is indeed surprising, because, I have tended to blame lefty atheists as they seem to be the only people making Australian cinema.

It has long seemed to me that modern Australia movies (since its 1970's revival) have always reflected the strong secular materialist view of the world of the arts community in this country, with any religious aspect of life either treated with disdain (such as showing clerics as being hypocrites) or, more commonly, being ignored entirely.

Of course, Phillip Adams takes great pride in his role in establishing the modern Australian cinema, and indeed it seems like everyone in the cinema community shares his (and Lane's) strident atheism, or at least a high degree of cynicism towards religion.

For me, this has always meant that an air of shallowness pervades the whole body of Australian cinema. The only supernaturalism that occasionally gets a look in might be of the aboriginal variety. For me (and, I expect, most Australians), this does not have much resonance.

It's not that many Hollywood movies have ever been overtly religious in theme. However, they are still capable of having characters who take religion seriously, and are not held up for ridicule or written as dislikeable because of it. Ghost stories or supernatural comedies can be made there; never here. What's worse, gruesome nihilistic earth-bound horror is the new genre some young Australian fim makers are getting into.

Hollywood today is not exactly a hot bed for conservative religion, but there is a sense in which I think that Hollywood cinema still treats the "big themes" of life, death and meaning in much greater depth. (Even an agnostic like Woody Allen dealt with it well in a small scale film like "Crimes and Misdemeanors") I expect that this is probably to do with the predominantly Jewish background of the American industry, even if most are now either non religious Jews, or follow the most liberal parts of Judaism.

Of course, as a nation the United States is so much more religious than Australia, so one might argue that naturally there will be writers and movie makers there who are interested in such material. None the less, it still surprises me how consistently Australian films have had this dogged lack of interest in whether there is something beyond the materialist world.

I don't have time to set out the many examples from Australian cinema that could illustrate this, but I assume that someone else has noticed this too.