Introduction

Outside Australia, the critical literature on the road movie is largely an American story. Not only is the road movie deemed a quintessentially American genre, an off-shoot of the Hollywood western, gangster film and romantic comedy; the films listed and discussed are almost entirely American products, Hollywood and independent, with the notable exception of the films of Wim Wenders, who acknowledged that his unconscious had been colonized by Hollywood. However, two Australian titles have been incorporated into the critical discourse, if not the pantheon, of notable road movies: Mad Max and Priscilla. Mad Max II is used to mark the onset of a third phase in the historical development of the road movie – a post-apocalyptic phase, in which we come to the end of the road, a desert littered with the junk and refuse of industrial and military conflicts. In his historical account of the genre, Bennet Schaber sees this third phase as a dramatic shift from the two earlier phases - the populist communitarian pre-war road movie (with its Old Testament echoes – of the Exodus and Journey to the Promised Land, the Walls of Jericho falling down) and the individualistic libertarian postwar road movie (with its New Testament themes – of anti-authoritarianism, personal salvation, Apocalypse).^[1]  Priscilla of course fits into the revitalization of the genre through its queering. Though criticized for its racist and misogynist episodes^[2], it was celebrated for making its heroes drag queens rather than heterosexist males, and for bringing a camp aesthetic into the Australian landscape.

The three road movies I am going to examine here have not received the same critical attention – although, long after I first proposed to deliver a paper on them, for the 2004 Film and History conference in Canberra, I discovered that Felicity Collins had acknowledged their common characteristics in her finely tuned appreciation of Japanese Story in Senses of Cinema; and that, more recently, Hilary Harris discussed two of them, in her Australian Studies article on the racist elements in the Australian road movie, from a contemporary political perspective, relating them to the mind-set underpinning the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.   If Collins’s approach is informed by a post-Mabo perspective on the Australian cinema, and Harris’s by a post-7/11 one, my approach is informed by a professional interest in representations of Japan and the Japanese, as well as in the intersections of genre and gender. For these three road movies – Heaven’s Burning (Craig Lahiff, 1996), The Goddess of `67 (Clara Law, 2001) and Japanese Story (2003) – involve the romantic, sexual and star coupling of a Japanese with an Australian. This trio of films constituted a relatively new development in the Australian cinema. As Harris has pointed out, the “Other” in previous Australian road movies had more commonly been represented as an Aboriginal. However, the coupling of a Japanese with an Australian was not a totally new development; Solrun Hoaas had introduced this couple in her film, Aya, already in 1990. But Hoaas’ film was not a road movie, nor a romantic movie; it was a realistic dramatization of a Japanese war bride’s troubled experience in early postwar Australia. Based on extensive historical research and interviews with Japanese war brides, undertaken as preparation for a documentary production (Green Tea and Cherry Ripe, Hoaas, 1988), Aya displays a sensitivity to its heroine’s situation doubtless enhanced by Hoaas’ own experience as an outsider in narrow-minded communities (in Norway, Japan and Australia) who managed to retain an independence of spirit and to withstand the pressures to conform to the expectations of those who wield social power.^[3]  

In this article I want to argue that these recent films all display progress in the attitudes of Australians towards the Japanese, suggesting the possibility of a reciprocal and equal relationship, whereby we gain something from each other and modify our behaviour as a result of close and caring cultural contact. Harris reserves praise for The Goddess alone, but I find much to applaud in Heaven’s Burning and Australian Story too.

Generic issues

“The couple is a dominant configuration in road movies …” (Cohan and Hark, Introduction p 8)

It has long been noted that in the road movie there is characteristically a couple on the road together. Cohan and Hark claim that the couple is a “dominant configuration in road movies…” ^[4] In postwar road movies, the couple is often an outlaw couple, on the run, pursued by the law and/or other criminals, enjoying liberating criminal capers, and a passionate love life, but finally killed in a bloody if not fiery denouement. (Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Stephen Spielberg’s The Sugarland Express (1974) are two noted examples.) Heaven’s Burning belongs to this category. As in many other recent road movies, the couple is pursued by forces other than the law: in this case, by the woman’s crazed abandoned husband and the man’s former criminal colleagues bent on vengeance – all treated as grotesque characters and comic butts.

The road movie couple is frequently also an odd couple, of conflicting race, class and/or temperament, thrown together accidentally, initially hostile towards each other but finally developing an affectionate bond – buddyhood, if two males, heterosexual love if a man and a woman. Japanese Story initially seems to be this kind of romantic road comedy. There is considerable comedy in the first half of the film created from the forced proximity of two individuals of opposite sex, values, culture, and temperament. However, in the latter stages of the film there is a shift of tone, when a tragic accident abruptly terminates the budding romance and the Australian heroine is left alone to face the consequences…    

The Goddess of ’67 belongs to the wilder and weirder kind of post-80s road movie – clearly indebted to Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) in its surreal atmosphere, its lurid lighting and colour, its use of flashbacks to explain the motivation of characters through earlier traumatic experiences (albeit without Lynch’s patent desire to parody psychoanalysis) and its happy ending, with the lovers surviving and love (Christian and sexual) triumphant. The mayhem is reminiscent of the outlaw couple film, but the characters are more weird, the violence more grotesque than liberating and the style more surreal than realistic. More of a pastiche than a parody of Lynch motifs, its variations are instructive, especially the use of an interracial couple to replace Lynch’s pure white ones, and a fatal father replacing Lynch’s mad mother. A synopsis of the story makes it sound quite absurd. The Japanese hero has two bizarre passions: reptiles; and the Citroen Goddess. The Australian heroine is the blind victim of two generations of incest, obsessed with vengeance on her grandfather/father/abuser. The hero buys a ’67 Citroen Goddess from an Australian couple by e-mail, but when he arrives to collect it, he finds the couple dead after a vicious and bloody quarrel. The Aussie heroine seduces the hero into driving her on her vengeance journey by playing on his passion for the car. On the way, he meets some prize examples of Australian reptiles, teaches her to dance and responds to her sexual overtures. Their journey is interspersed with flashbacks to the past, narrating the heroine’s gruesome family history. When she finally reaches her destination and confronts her nemesis, she abstains from shooting him and drives off with her grateful lover.

The film is punctuated by advertisement-like slow-motion tributes to the Goddess - the classic French automobile prized by collectors - and thus foregrounds the fetishization of the automobile (and its associations with speed, glamour, freedom and adventure) that is a feature of the road movie genre and many prior Australian movies, as noted by Meaghan Morris^[5]. But in this film it’s not an American or Australian or even a Japanese car, but a luxury-model French car that is the object of worship. The objects that attract the Japanese hero and arouse his acquisitive urges are emblems of European high culture - German romantic music (Beethoven and Wagner) as well as the exclusive European luxury car - and exotic primitive life forms (snakes and lizards).  

Representation of Nation and National Relationships

Apart from this aspect of the Japanese hero’s characterization, The Goddess, unlike the other two films under discussion, avoids national stereotyping. The Japanese hero is not a repressed businessman in a suit handing out cards and behaving with formal politeness. He is a weirdo, a computer hacker, an outsider, a delinquent with a green crown of hair. Nor is the heroine a stereotypical Australian girl - blond, brash, athletic and independent - but another weirdo, another outsider - redheaded, handicapped and needy. In the other two films, Japanese culture is essentialised and stereotyped as formal and constricted, in binary opposition to Australian culture, which is stereotyped as informal and free. The Japanese heroine of Heaven’s Burning sheds her formal dress and grooming, and her submissive demeanour, becoming a liberated and assertive woman once she’s on the Australian road. She has her hair cut and dyed blond, she dresses in shorts and singlets, she laughs out loud and gestures broadly, she becomes active, even aggressive. Australia liberates her. “I can breathe!” she shouts. In Japanese Story, the Japanese hero similarly sheds his suit and formal demeanour in the outback, assuming a more informal costume and manner, becoming more spontaneous in behaviour and apparently happier, for he too is laughing and carefree, feeling liberated from the constrictions and weighty responsibilities of his Japanese life. The Aussie heroine is stereotypically brash and independent. Australia is portrayed as a land of rough terrain, rough manners and informal dress.

However, all three films posit a positive breakthrough in the encounter between Japanese and Australians and it is a two-way process. The formal Japanese are liberated and the tough brash Australians have their hard edges softened, acquiring the ability to express tenderness and respect, and to appreciate the value of formality.  The breakthrough in relations is figured in bodily contact, not just genital sex but in touching, caressing by hand of cheek, face and torso, and finally in a two-way modification of behaviour. Towards the end of Heaven’s Burning, the couple engage in a slow old-fashioned romantic dance, dancing cheek to cheek on a make-shift  ballroom floor, dressed in the formal evening attire that Midori has previously bought for them, gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes. And on their final journey to their deaths, they are accompanied by Isolde’s aria from Wagner’s opera, Tristan and Isolde on the soundtrack. (It is interesting that European classical/romantic music, Beethoven and Wagner, figures prominently in the denouement of two of these films, since their protagonists are geographically and culturally so remote from Europe. It is almost as if they can be brought together only through the excess of opera and their love signified by music of a culture foreign to both protagonists.) At the end of Japanese Story too, the heroine adopts a more restrained and formal style of dress and manner, expressing tenderness and respect for her lover and his family (and incidentally apologizing for her failure to prevent the tragedy, though reprimanded by her boss who, like our former Prime Minister, believes that saying sorry means assuming financial responsibility - and would cost too much.) In The Goddess, the Aussie heroine also has her edges softened, ultimately coming to understand that love is preferable to vengeance, with music and dance (as in Heaven’s Burning) figuring in the learning process.    

In all three films, the women - whether Japanese or Australian - are active protagonists - and sexual initiators. In Japanese Story the heroine literally dons the man’s pants as an overture to sex; but in all three cases the first sexual encounter involves the woman sitting on top of the man, astride him…

In Japanese Story and Heaven’s Burning, Australian waters are not just liberating for the Japanese characters – they are also dangerous, potentially fatal. Hiromitsu, the Japanese hero of Japanese Story, fails to comprehend the potential dangers of the outback – the huge distances, the isolation, the rugged terrain, the lack of water, the exposure to extremes of temperature, the communication problems – to the dismay of the more knowing Aussie heroine; after surviving one crisis through industrious team work, he becomes carefree and relaxed and fails to foresee danger in the outback waters, thus losing his life. Midori, her husband and her lover all die on the beach at the end of Heaven’s Burning. The outback in The Goddess is also a dangerous place – a breeding ground of hatred and madness, incest and death for its white settlers.  

One is tempted (even invited) to read the incest theme in The Goddess of ’67 as a comment on white Australian society. The white patriarch is not just an exploiter of the land but also an abuser of the women in his family. The heroine’s blindness is clearly the result of in-breeding - for in-breeding causes disabilities and deformities; but if we are interested in national allegory (like Jameson, many of us tend to read Third World cinema, if not all non-European films, as national allegories), the incestuous family in The Goddess could well represent the old mono-cultural and mono-racial white Australia which generated its own blindness towards the existence and needs of others.

The road movie would seem to fit Australia even more than the US. Of similar size but much more sparsely populated, with vast areas of desert, the motorized vehicle is essential means of transportation not just for suburban commuters and family shopping but also for leisure activities and for vacations. If you want to escape from the big cities on the coastal fringes, and discover the bush, the interior, you need a car. Car ownership rates are exceptionally high, virtually every Australian over 18 has one. It is an extension of the personal body – providing mobility and privacy. The high tech fittings – radio and tape decks – provide information of the wider world and entertainment, while the mobile phone allows for communication when wanted. Australians use cars much more than Europeans, Asians and even Americans – because car travel is the major means of transport and movement. The relatively small population dispersed over a huge area cannot be completely serviced by rail, bus and air transport, as in other countries; even when planes and trains are used, their use must be supplemented by car travel. All airports are equipped with large car rental facilities and car parks, as the trip has only just begun on arrival at the airport.

The desert in road movies: takes on biblical connotations. It is a place like Sinai where people undergo trials, experience revelation, are in limbo before reaching the Promised Land (Canaan, California).

Representation of the Australian Landscape

Alone of the three films, Japanese Story, at least in its first half, could be said to offer a promotional view of the Australian outback. With its stunning wide-screen cinematography displaying panoramic views of the mineral-rich red sands of the Pilbara and majestic views of mining machinery and mining activity, detailed in high-angled and low-angled shots, in long shot and close-up, it appears to cater to the desires of the tourist and mining industries. In contrast, The Goddess and Heaven’s Burning do not represent the Australian landscape as awesome or even picturesque. But they do include shots of the weird Australian fauna, marsupials and reptiles that are fascinating to tourists, and overseas audiences. (The British photographer and filmmaker, Nicholas Roeg, evinced this fascination in his masterful first film, Walkabout [1971].) Both films, however, knowingly use humour to pinpoint the gap between the tourist’s view and the local resident’s view of the indigenous fauna. The Japanese passion for reptiles is sent up in the hero’s passion for them (he already keeps a collection of reptiles in his Japanese apartment) – passion for nature, for the primitive, in contrast to the artificial, the ultramodern urban society. He is literally crazy about snakes and lizards and his craze is laughable, but also pathetic – this attachment to archaic primitive life forms in a resident of the most over-developed ultra-modern metropolis. To the Aussie heroine, born and raised in the outback, they are quite ordinary and familiar, not exotic at all. Likewise, in Heaven’s Burning, the kangaroo is an exotic and attractive animal to Midori, the Japanese visitor, while to the white farmer/settler (played in a cameo role by the iconic Ocker actor, Ray Barrett) it is a destructive pest.        

Conclusion

These films were made half a century after the end of WW11. The hostile and unforgiving attitudes of Australian people of the 1940s towards Japan and the Japanese people, generated by wartime propaganda and the widely aired tales of atrocities experienced by surviving Australian POWs at the hands of the Japanese, soon gave way to a more complicated if still troubling mix of fear and desire, attraction and repulsion, so well documented by Solrun Hoaas in her films about the experience of Japanese war brides in postwar Australia. Well before the end of the 20^th century, the Australian economy welcomed Japanese tourists and Japanese investment; Japanese cars, TV sets, cameras and watches became more popular than American and European ones; and Japanese arts and crafts (origami, ikebana, haiku, netsuke, garden design) became faddish among middle class and professional Australians. But the vestiges of hostility lingered. The fear of Japanese military power shifted to a fear of Japanese economic power. Japanese businessmen were caricatured as ruthless economic warriors, displaying the same fierce loyalty to company and nation that the Japanese soldier had previously displayed towards the Emperor. Japanese tourists were seen as little armies of invaders, armed with cameras, following the flags of their Japanese tour guides, isolated from the local population in tourist buses and luxury hotels, speeding from one tourist site to the next, one gift shop to the next. (See Robbins and Morley) Japanese women were generally exempted from the responsibility for military and economic aggression, and therefore could remain attractive as aesthetic objects and sexual prey. As Hoaas showed in Aya, the loyal devotion of a kimono-clad Madam Butterfly appealed to Australian, as well as to American male fantasy. The progressive bureaucrats within the American Occupation forces in early postwar Japan deplored the submission of Japanese women and instituted policies designed to promote women’s rights and increase their participation in the political process, but conservatives in Japan could represent these policies as un-Japanese and hindered suppressed aesthetics is good; Japanese politics is bad.                                   

^[1] Schaber’s essay appears as Chapter 1, in Part 1 of The Road Movie Book. For biblical references, see especially p 39. As foreshadowed by ‘ “Hitler Can’t Keep ‘Em That Long” : The road, the people’, the title of his essay, Schaber’s understanding of the political is rather old-fashioned. One could add that the masculinist and technophiliac elements in the postwar road movie have been taken to a further extreme in Mad Max II, with its insistent macho male posturing, its excitement generated from crashes and smashes, from close encounters with the possibility of one’s own extinction rather than relationships with other human beings. It is a Boy’s Own manual for survival in a Hobbsian universe, one that has little time for the feminine.    

^[2] See especially Hilary Harris and Audrey Yue.

^[3] For more about Aya, see Blonski and Freiberg, ‘Suburban Fever; Aya: Love and mixed marriage in post-war Australia’, Filmnews vol 21 no 9, Oct 1991, pp 6-7.

^[4] Introduction, The Road Movie Book, p 8.

^[5] “Fate and the Family Sedan”, East-West Film Journal, December 1989, pp 113-134