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About what Jetta jettisoned…

I’m not a big fan of sports. I did audient at a game once when I was young, but I found the plot far too predictable and the characters quite superficial. It has always seemed to me that if you’ve seen one game, you’ve seen them all. I am generally in the habit of going straight to the sports pages in a newspaper when I need to clean the windows or if I have to deal with a puppy’s nuggets of joy. Instead of sport, for most of my life I’ve turned my attention to production styles with more drama, intrigue and three dimensional characters, but just this week, I’ve found it very interesting to note the strange audience responses to a mime act by an Aboriginal footsport player, especially given the controversy sparked by his performance.

picture of Lewis Jetta miming the throwing of a spear

Lewis Jetta’s enthusiastic mime, a subtle inspiration for so much Bogan ire.

For those living in the rest of the world, or for Australians who live in their own little bubble, what happened was essentially this: last Sunday, during a game of sportsball staged by Australia’s largest sportsball producer, the AFL, a group of Bogans in the auditorium were taunting one of the Aboriginal performers: Adam Goodes of the Adnyamathanha and Narungga peoples in South Australia. Following a plot crescendo during which one of the protagonists, an Aboriginal performer by the name of Lewis Jetta, had apparently sportsed very well, he stopped sportsing for an improvised aside in which he mimed the throwing of a spear. It was a gesture of excitement following a small victory that took its inspiration from the performer’s heritage. The mime, it seems, was very convincing: the Bogans in the auditorium were so terrified of the mimed spear that they booed ever louder, and they’ve been booing all week.

The performance, luckily, was recorded and plastered everywhere, so I have had the opportunity of viewing it on television and the interwebs approximately seven hundred and eighty four thousand, six hundred and fifty times. My considered opinion is that the mime, though solid, was not of Marcel Marceau’s calibre (though his blackface was certainly convincing). Don’t get me wrong: it was a fine mime, but so brief, and with so little development of plot or establishment of environment, that it really doesn’t appear sufficient to warrant such fear. I would have thought a prop spear may well have had such an effect, but the mime? I’m not so sure there was much to be afraid of. But the Bogans were very afraid, and the official spokesperson of Boganhood has been making it known just how frightened they were by it.

Ever since the event, the entire country has been discussing whether the mime was appropriate for this performance space. Apparently, sportsfoot games are usually a very vocal environment: performers and audiences are both encouraged to be very vocal about their feelings, so a mime is quite an unusual piece of performance art in this environment. I suspect a part of the Bogan response is the unfamiliarity of the audience with the subtlety of the protagonist’s choice of mime.

The conflict has been heated. Many Australians feel that miming an aggressive action such as throwing a spear is not appropriate, though apparently punching the air is acceptable, as is dressing in ancient Polynesian armory and screaming threatening words in a language even more frightening than German. Heck, even punching other people is apparently okay! But according to the Bogan Lord, miming the throwing of a spear is never acceptable. A good number of other middle aged white men of European heritage have also expressed their disappointment that an Aboriginal man would do Aboriginal things in Australia, and have railed at the suggestion that their response is racist. They’re even saying that pointing at racism and calling it racism is not in the spirit of the game. No wonder I don’t have an affinity with sport. According to these commentators, the Australian race who have suffered the greatest degree of racial vilification over the last 227½ years just aren’t qualified to identify racism when they see it.

Now, it is clear that Australians are more conservative about violence than most cultures, and we don’t get terribly emotional about sports. British fans of boring sports, for instance, have been known to go to more extreme lengths than Jetta, and rather than miming the throwing of a spear, the British Bogan is more inclined to kill children when he gets bored of watching a game. Brazilians also tend to throw actual things, rather than miming things to throw when they play sportsball. Thank goodness Australian players draw the line at gang rape and only mime violent acts.

As a very astute friend of mine remarked on the Book of Face, in most theatres, an audient behaving in a disruptive manner like the Bogans at Subiaco Oval would be asked to leave by one of the ushers to allow the rest of the audience to enjoy the performance. It seems to me that the failure of the venue to expel the disruptive audients is the most egregious error here. But perhaps Western Australian theatres are just more tolerant of poor behaviour in auditoria. I hear there were even people using a mobile phone during the performance! I certainly hope that custom doesn’t migrate to the eastern states; I can’t think of anything more disrespectful.

Now, I’m no expert on performances in this kind of context: I don’t usually find the plot in footsport games interesting enough to warrant any analysis on my theatre blog. But with so many people speculating about whether booing an individual for expressing their excitement in a manner appropriate for their race is racist, and since quite a few of my friends who I didn’t think were racist have been saying racist or at best just plain ignorant things this week, I felt it might be useful to describe the controversy from a different perspective. And as a dramatist, I can confirm that this is certainly the most interesting thing to happen on a sportsing paddock since the fitba riots in Europe in the 1980s led to the development of crowd control as a field of academic inquiry.

Adam Goodes

Goodes summoning the sportsing gods, or maybe just walking along with an arm outstretched, I’m not sure.

A mime in a shouty context doesn’t necessarily play well, but neither does it warrant this kind of response. I think begrudging an Aboriginal man his Aboriginality and asking him to act like a Gubba instead is definitely more than just a little bit racist. Getting upset about the miming of a violent act in an environment characterised by actual violence is, I think, equally ridiculous.

If you read nothing else about this sorry affair, give Stan Grant’s remarkable piece a go.

And if you’re not a reader, Waleed Aly debunks the two most profound myths surrounding the ever-so-apty-named Mister Goodes in this video.

 
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Posted by on Saturday, 1 August 2015 in Improvisation, Mime

 

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Django Unchained

Django UnchainedI’ve never been a big fan of Quentin Tarantino‘s films. Most offend on my most cherished traditions of storytelling — character and plot — so I pay them less heed than I might otherwise do, but Django Unchained is a true exception. Sure, I liked True Romance, and Pulp Fiction isn’t without its charms. Inglorious Basterds is a fine piece of cinema too, but Django Unchained is a refined, glorious masterpiece. A film worthy of the attention Tarantino usually gets for the more flimsy of his work. I will give three reasons why I think this film alone is worthy of all the praise that has been lavished on Tarantino for all of his lesser films put together.

First, it has a plot. And not just an “I need an excuse to shoot so many scenes of blood and gore” kind of plot. It has a narrative. As in its central characters have a context in which to be, and not a flimsy one, but a solid, relatable, engaging one. A slave — Django — is bought in Texas by an anti-slavery German bounty hunter for the knowledge he has of the bounty hunter’s target. In exchange for Django’s help, he agrees to free him and share his earnings. The two become friends and colleagues and the German learns the story of Django’s wife, and they set out to free her from slavery also.

Second, it has characters that speak like real people. Not all of them, mind you, but a whopping majority, which is more than can be said for most of Tarantino’s characters (it’s also more than can be said for half of the movies made in the United States in the last 50 years). Most of them tend instead to opt for trite one-liners or metaphors or abbreviations of concepts that are supposed to make us think they’re really cool, but these characters are so damn cool they don’t need the pretence and can speak in full sentences like human beings. I like that. It gives them depth and develops relationships and shows me people I can relate to.

Third and best of all, Django Unchained has that wonderful quirk of Tarantino’s; the ability to draw us into the violence as if it is the realisation of our deepest, darkest instincts. It’s the karma we westerners of the 21st century wish we could exact upon the evil of the past. The wish that we could punish slave-owners for their sins, or take revenge on Hitler or upon that bully who just wouldn’t let up. I think this is what has sold so many of Tarantino’s films (that and truly beautiful cinematography that doesn’t just glorify, but truly beautifies, violence), and why I’ve often been willing to forgive the lack of plot or the superficiality of the characters or the ridiculous illogicality of the combat. Someone who deserves to suffer the full force of their victim’s fury is getting even more than the full force of it. Payback’s not just a bitch, she’s a tsunami of violence, desolating everything in her path.

And while this has always been the element I’ve liked in Tarantino’s films, in this instance, he doesn’t sacrifice character and plot to deliver it. And that is why Django Unchained is the film that redeems his ouvre.

 

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Harry Brown

Harry Brown begins with one of the most guesome scenes of urban violence imaginable. The purpose of this scene, almost unrelated to the rest of the film, is perhaps to numb us a little for what is to follow. The violence of Harry Brown is, perhaps, of the same calibre as Quentin Tarantino‘s films, but Daniel Barber’s use of violence is otherwise entirely incomparable. It is targeted, purposeful and meaningful to the same extent that Tarantino’s is aimless and vague.

Michael Caine is at his best in this film. In case you were wondering, no, he’s not funny; he strikes with absolute perfection that degree of pathos that could so easily turn into melodrama, without even a hint of going too far. He is supported by an impeccable script and visionary cinematography.

I have long been a devotee of those films that can take the most grotesque aspects of the human condition and appeal, even in that context, to our capacity for hope. Trainspotting was one of the first I encountered, and remains one of the best examples of the transcendental in film. Harry Brown certainly stands well beside it.

And in case you read my previous post about seeing Robin Hoodat Perth’s Picadilly cinema, you may be interested to know that Leederville’s art deco Luna cinema was the perfect venue for a film of this calibre!

 

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