Watched a recent Australian horror movie last night called Relic. It was interesting and well-shot, but like many somewhat intellectual horror films you are left wondering about the meaning of what you just watched.
“Death can be beautiful,” one of my grad student colleagues said in his one-sentence analysis of E.A. Poe’s short-fiction obsession with women dying. I guess this film may be saying something similar. The horror may be the very real fact that many of us lose our minds before physically dying. And it raises the question what should be done with us before we do physically die. Interestingly, the film also introduces a much younger character who is mentally disabled. How should his life be treated by others who are more capable? Does life have intrinsic value? Yes.
I think Australians have been very innovative in art. I haven’t really read their novelists, though I tried to read a long novel called Seven Types of Ambiguity, the title of which was derived from a famous English literary theorist’s work. It was taken from work by the British critic William Empson from the early 20th century. I really only know Australian art from movies. To me their films are bracing but very honest. I think of Mad Max, The Road Warrior, and Baz Lurhmann’s films.
Update: More thoughts on Australia. I haven’t been to the country but worked with some people there when I was a copy editor and met a few casually when travelling. Charles Krauthammer, the U.S. columnist I quoted a few blogs back, married an Australian and has an entirely unbiased (haha) opinion piece called “Why I Love Australia.”
Seriously, his point seems to be that Australians are blunt, bold, and loyal. “For Americans, Australia engenders nostalgia for our own past, which we gauzily remember as infused with John Wayne plain-spokenness and vigor,” Krauthammer says in this column initially published in 2006. Having supported the British empire when it was “principal underwriter of the international system,” Australia knows that if the U.S.–current primary underwriter in that regard–goes into “retreat or defeat,” it would severely damage Australia and many other countries, he says.
Hence, the land down under has been one of the few consistent allies for sometimes controversial U.S. foreign policy interventions.