Cringing Violently: Reparative Watching, Phenomenology and Discomfort in Australian Cinema

The seminal Australian film Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971) opens with a sweeping, circular pan around a desert landscape. It begins in silence, briefly focussed on a small house next to a railway track, but the camera soon moves on, curving around to the right, taking in an unending dusty expanse of yellow earth and pale blue, cloud dappled sky in all directions. The disorienting pan of the desert, the awareness of temporality as the simple shot goes on, work to bodily involve the viewer. The stillness of the landscape, contrasted with the steady movement of the camera, creates a feeling of presence in the scene – the spectator’s gaze roves over the landscape, taking it in and experiencing the isolation and solitude as if they were standing in it. The familiarity of the ‘outback landscape’, an archetypal image of Australia, also stirs affective responses in the Australian spectator, reminding them of their ‘closeness’ to the film’s eerie locality. ‘This is who you are to the world’, the film seems to say. This closeness, combined with the camera work which positions the viewer ‘in’ the desert, renders this scene extremely bodily – the spectator is pushed against the landscape, invited to feel the heat and dry stillness of the outback, as well as the isolation, before any plot or characters are introduced. Thus, we are invited to experience the film sensorily before we engage with it cerebrally, aligning with the hopes of director Ted Kotcheff, who “wanted people to watch the film and be sweating” ¹. 

Australian spectatorship of Australian films is uniquely coloured by a phenomenon known as cultural cringe. Coined by A.A. Phillips, the term denotes an assumption often held by Australian spectators that domestic works will be worse than imported ones, a position which evokes an anxious, shame-generated recoil from Australian cultural product. The kind of Australians who succumb to this feeling, it follows, are ones who knowingly or not place some value on the history and heritage of ‘the old country’, Europe and in particular Britain. These are often people who stand to gain from forging a closeness to Britain and all its colonial power and pomp. However, cringing – as the name implies – weakens the sufferer. Could, then, an approach which addresses the spectator’s affective, sensory experience as central to an understanding of the film, act as a kind of reparative watching? I present this article as something of a thought experiment, a first step in establishing a link between phenomenological film theory, cultural cringe and reparative watching. I take as my case study the teasing out of how Wake in Fright generates an embodied spectatorial response through what I label ‘recoil moments’. Its scenes of eerie isolation, uncomfortable suspense, embarrassing loss, awkward sexuality and brutal violence illustrate how a phenomenological approach to Wake in Fright reveals that the shameful affective position can be experienced as the point of the film, rather than a pre-emptory reaction – a reparative experience rather than a paranoid or suspicious encounter with Australian cinema. I also include Jennifer Kent’s film The Nightingale (2018) in my examination of viewer recoil, illustrating a continued Australian filmic legacy of uneasy protagonist relations and highly embodied spectatorship. I ultimately seek to illustrate that a phenomenological expansion upon moments of shame, confronted as sensory and affective experiences in Australian cinema allows the spectator to experience the experience of cultural cringe. 

Where Wake in Fright’s landscape is threatening in its bare desolation, The Nightingale menaces with a dense, untamed wilderness. The protagonists of The Nightingale spend much of its runtime traversing the Tasmania wilderness. Clare, a young Irish woman possessed by a desire for revenge on a soldier who violated her and murdered her husband and child, takes to the wilds of Tasmania with Billy, and Indigenous tracker. Their journey through thick forests generates a Heart of Darkness-esque personification of the land – care is paid to capture the expansive yet oppressive presence of the trees in panning wide-shots. When the pair form their pact – that Billy will take her to the soldiers against whom Clare seeks revenge, and be paid two shillings – their relationship is deeply antagonistic. Clare sits on horseback behind Billy, aiming her shotgun at his back while they walk. She tells him he needs to move, “move boy!” The racism she aims at Billy is challenging to witness – we have been moulded into an empathetic connection with Clare by the films unflinching portrayal of her rape and the murder of child, but here she is, to a modern viewer, a tool of colonial power and violence herself. This dual relation with violence, both victim and perpetrator, creates discomfort in the spectator – how do we identify with, feel with, a racist protagonist? This is a common struggle of the Australian spectator, particularly within colonial stories – the ‘Australian’ in The Nightingale is either the oppressed Indigenous person, the at once victim and perpetrator of abuse, or the vile and violent soldiers. None of these identifications are particularly flattering. I argue that it is here that phenomenology could allow the wounded spectator a chance to avoid this cerebral struggle by engaging feelingly with each moment of the film, rather than with the film as an overarching narrative. 

The Nightingale

Once Wake In Fright situates us in a landscape that bears remarkable resemblance to Patrick White’s searing portrayal of an anti-intellectual “Great Australian Emptiness”², protagonist John Grant is introduced as the Intellectual cringer of this story. He is clearly ashamed of his position: he is forced to work in a rural school to pay off his contractual bond and describes himself as a ‘bonded slave’. The spectator is shown repeatedly that John does not belong in his environment. His conversations with locals are stilted and awkward; his attempts to banter with the bartender are met with suspicious smirks, he separates himself from a group of men drunkenly singing on the train from where he teaches to the town of Bundanyabba, sardonically answers his cab driver’s questions on the way to his ‘Yabba’ hotel, and quickly assures the receptionist at the hotel that he’s only staying one night and flying to Sydney in the morning. The spectator is invited to regard John as ‘different’. He is established as an Australian protagonist with whom it is safe to identify – a civilised Australian, a good Australian. All this is delivered in a drawling, British-sounding accent, contrasting with the broad Australian accents of the other characters – the bad Australians, the embarrassing, uncultured, savage Australians. These, we are invited to cringe at, as they drink in pubs and sing off key in public spaces. As with the opening shot, the scenes of raucous drinking and wild okka behaviour are vivid, filled with camera movement and crowded mise-en-scene, providing a sensory entry into the scene. Again, we are invited into an uneasy relationship with our protagonist – he is arrogant, but he is not as unpleasant as the other characters. So how do we watch John and Clare, reparatively? 

Phenomenology scholar Vivian Sobchack describes how certain films create a feeling of having one’s “entire bodily existence is implicated in” their vision³. She evokes the experience of being inescapably aware of ourselves as we watch a film, a self-consciousness that aligns with cultural cringing. The cringe, too, is inescapably physical – it is felt as much as it is thought. Indeed, phrase-coiner A.A. Phillips uses phenomenological language in his ‘diagnosis’ of cultural cringe. He describes the cringing reader’s experience, conjuring a reader who “hedges and hesitates”⁴, who is a “pathetic victim” of shame and inferiority⁵, and, in terms of the Australian Intellectual, “sidl[es] up to the cultivated Englishman insinuating: ‘I, of course, am not like these crude Australians’”⁶.These descriptions illustrate a highly embodied reaction to an Australian text, one which inhibits other sensory engagements. The characteristic recoil, or cringe away, restricts the cringer with its presumptions. I hold that any theoretical framework used to analyse Australian film must take into account how the spectator’s encounter with a film is affected by this position, though much scholarship surrounding our films, and Wake in Fright in particular, fails to account for it. While some scholars, like Claire Henry, rightly advocate for “the notion of an Australian ‘cinema of sensation’” to “frame how viewers are touched and moved by film through its medium-specific qualities”, they oppose this against “centering critical concerns on how ‘Australians’ are mirrored or represented to the world”⁷, and often fail to account for the cringe in their work. Henry is right that more sensory filmmaking in Australia is underserved by theoretical frameworks which only examine narrative or the way in which a film serves or shapes national identity, but she stops short of confronting why Australian cinema particularly responds to a phenomenological framework. 

How, then, does an acknowledgement of this bodily closeness work to subvert or redirect cultural cringe? I suggest an experiential methodology, which can act as reparative watching – a way toward the “relaxed erectness of carriage”⁸ A.A. Phillips imagined as a panacea for the cringe. There is a shared awareness between the film and spectator of their Australian-ness; the film primarily addresses Australians and thus intends to do something to them and with the specific assumptions and baggage they carry as spectators. A framework of analysis must therefore also be aware of this local shared self-consciousness. I borrow in my quest for reparation from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s proposal for a reparative reading position, which she contrasts with the paranoid position employed by the practitioners of what Ricoeur first dubbed the “hermeneutics of suspicion” – “Marx, Nietzsche, Freud”⁹. Reparative reading and film phenomenology share an aim; to confront and subvert the “methodological centrality of suspicion to current critical practice”¹⁰. Jenny Charmarette poignantly describes film phenomenology as “an interrogation of film’s relationship to experience”¹¹. Film, Sobchack similarly argues, “makes itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience”¹². Thus, rather than undertaking a ‘reading’ in the traditional sense, a teasing out of “abstract themes or symptomatic revelations” in the wake of film viewing¹³, a phenomenological and affective approach to cinema advocates for greater attention to the way in which “the viewer’s affective experience generates meaning”¹⁴ (my emphasis). This approach does not preclude further readings of film, but rather asks scholars to centralise the experience of the film and draw conclusions from this initial position. It is this “carnal understanding of cinema”¹⁵ which I posit will free the cringer from their paranoid expectations of cultural shame and inferiority. Of course, not all Australian viewers will experience cultural cringe on viewing this film¹⁶. As Hanich elucidates, “phenomenology is not interested in particular cases, but in types of experience”¹⁷. I deal here with what is occurring if a spectator meets this film experience while experiencing cultural cringe, how the film is open to a rechannelling of paranoid feelings of shame and fear into sensory encounters with similarly strong negative affects – as expressions of experience by experience. 

The film’s first invitation into a corporeal experience of shame, a ‘recoil moment’, occurs as John is introduced to the game of Two-Up and the gambling around it. Having met a policeman, Jock, at the previous pub, the two men go to a restaurant, where a crowd of people in a back room are taking part in betting on the outcome of two flipping coins. The Two-Up room is chaotic – men shout over one another, slap wads of cash on the floor, and run across the room to secure bets. The soundscape is disorienting – when the coin flip is immanent, the men fall quiet, and when the outcome is called, they erupt once again into yells, grunts and chatter. When John is invited to toss the coins himself, his second flip is marked by an overhead shot of John surrounded by the circle of betting men. As he tosses, John looks up into the bright overhead light, and repetitive rapid notes of music give a sense of confusion. Several quick cuts from John’s squinting face to the bright white light taking up the entire screen occur. The bright light is almost painful – the spectator wants to cringe away from the unpleasant visual experience and is already adopting this position when the result of the bet is called. The official calls the result – “tails… two tails” – John has lost his money, and the spectator is cringing for both physical and empathetic reasons. But John is not finished – he cashes his last check and returns to put two hundred and ninety dollars on heads. He is met with uproarious laughter from the betters – shots of groups laughing and slapping their legs. This time, the coins spin in blackness and silence, intercut with shots of John in close up, watching them fall. These shots generate suspense, which Madrigal et al. suggest “represents a paradox for purposes of enjoyment because it is experienced as an unpleasant state” of “acute, fearful apprehension”¹⁸. Suspense creates bodily reactions too – tension, and the sweating Kotcheff desired in his spectators. The shot lingers on John’s face, in subtle devastation. We never see the coins, but we know he has lost. The aesthetic attention paid to the generation of suspense means John’s foolishness is felt palpably by the spectator, indeed, shared in by them, bodily and mentally. 

Wake In Fright

John’s aborted sexual encounter with Janette builds on this embodiment, generating disgust in the spectator. John, forced to stay in the Yabba after losing all his money, begins spending time with a crew of bawdy, drunken local men. At one such man’s home, he meets Janette, a stoic and pretty women with whom John tries to bond. Outside the house, the pair converse, and John takes a spring of peppercorn from a tree, crushing it and offering it to Janette to smell. This invocation of scent foreshadows the bodily encounter to come. Janette tells her “daddy” that she and John are going for a walk. When they arrive at a patch of dirt lit as if by a floodlight, Janette lies down on the ground, her arms by her head. Her breathing is loud. The scene is already at odds with the expectations of a ‘love scene’ – the ‘lovers’ are extremely out of sync. Neither the spectator nor John seem to be able to predict what Janette will do at any moment. John lies beside her but doesn’t touch her. His stilted movements are awkward – certainly a spectator would be forgiven for cringing away in second-hand embarrassment at the strangeness of the sexual encounter. They finally kiss, but only for a moment – John rips himself away to be sick in the shrubs. His retching is prolonged and sonically unpleasant, but the primary cause of unease in the spectator is a sense of frustration. The scene generates an expectation of a sexual encounter, perhaps an ongoing love story between John and Janette, but the film harshly and abruptly foils this assumption. Instead, the spectator is forced to confront and experience the body as uncontrollable – John is at the mercy of his biology, unable to stop himself committing this embarrassing act. The spectator experiences a dual disgust in this scene – the sexual encounter is uncomfortable, but what puts it to an end is worse. Disgust, Laine suggests, “threatens the spectator’s sense of emotional agency” inhibiting the transformation of the emotion into a pleasurable viewing experience¹⁹; it “takes over the spectators by exercising its affective influence – repellent, malevolent– upon them”²⁰. For an Australian spectator, this affective influence is not unfamiliar – the cringe similarly ‘takes over’ them, inhibiting their ability to engage with a full range of affects. The difference between an embodied experience of disgust and cultural cringe is represented by this scene: experiential, bodily disgust discourages paranoid reading, which “requires that the bad news be always already known”²¹. By generating an unexpected, unpredictable experience of disgust within the film, rather than premonitorily at it, the spectator is invited to experience their loss of emotional agency momentarily, pausing their ability to “think disgust” or cringe; instead, they feel it²².

The Nightingale is of use here, too, though its discomforting bodily interactions are far more brutal than its 1970’s counterpart. The film’s notoriously graphic depiction of the murder of an infant child and the rape of protagonist Clare extends the experience of disgust to its limit, forcing the audience into an ethical conundrum. Lübecker describes a manipulation of the spectator into an “ethical relation to the events on screen” in Von Trier’s film Dogville²³, a quandary similarly created by Kent’s film. The Nightingale’s sustained focus on Clare’s rape refuses the audience an escape – by watching they are complicit, but by looking away, they are permissive. The prolonged scene requires viewers to decide to watch, challenging our endurance for suffering. However, the “unbearable intimacy”²⁴ generated by the close-up shots of Clare’s anguished face as she endures her attack arguably illustrates the limits of a phenomenological approach to Australian cinematic spectatorship, pushing its viewer into such a challenging bodily relation with what they see that they remove themselves from the experience. A viewer at the film’s Sydney Film Festival premier decried “I’m not watching this. She’s already been raped twice,” before leaving the screening²⁵, illustrating this kind of refusal to engage with extreme discomfort. This raises the question – is leaving the cinema and ending the viewing experience the ‘proper’ response to highly provocative scenes of violence? It’s certainly an embodied one, requiring a change of posture, and, perhaps, a reclamation of power. The cringer is familiar with this choice; shall I push away that which makes me uncomfortable, which implicates me in a structure with which I am deeply unhappy? Or do I confront my discomfort and move into a more complex relationship with my own involvement in these structures? Colonial violence is, after all, our history. 

The scene which causes the greatest recoil in the spectator in Wake in Fright, the famed kangaroo hunt, provides a further provocation to disengage, through its prolonged and unsimulated experience of death, gore and violence. John and the local men go out at night to hunt kangaroo, using shotguns and a large spotlight mounted to the roof of a ute. The spotlight illuminates twisting tree branches against the pitch-black sky as they drive. Several shots of kangaroos caught in the light are underscored by slightly ominous music, and then, as the men aim their weapons at them silence. Then, they fire; shots of kangaroos being hit by bullets and flung into the air are intercut with shots of the men scrambling over each other to shoot them. Godfrey aptly describes the scene as “a quick-cut orgy of destruction with the intensity of a horror movie”²⁶; the only sound is gunfire, loud and repetitive, as kangaroos bleed and fall heavily to the ground. When a large male roo “won’t go down”, the men drive closer, and the descending, slurring music starts again. One of the men physically fights the kangaroo. The scene is visually overwhelming – the camera cuts from close ups to shaky wider shots of the fight. Eventually, he slits the kangaroo’s neck. The experience of watching these scenes of senseless killing of animals, particularly the symbolically Australian kangaroo, generates what Lübecker calls an “antagonistic relation” between director and spectator²⁷. This almost parodies the antagonistic relation the cringer has with Australian film – they recoil in anticipation of a negative experience, blaming the content for their pain. Part of the experience of the scene is looking away, looking through fingers, forcing oneself to keep watching, just as part of the experience of cultural cringe is an obscured, coloured view of the content one views. 

This parallel embodied recoil is heightened further if the spectator is aware of the method of the scenes’ creation. The film uses unsimilated, documentary footage from a real kangaroo hunt will also affect how they experience them. As van Ooijen writes, a psychological experiment on disgust revealed “that the documentary nature of the images apparently makes them less attractive than their purely fictional counterparts”²⁸. Van Ooijen also calls violence against animals a “particularly sensitive topic in the history of cinema”²⁹. Discussing similar unsimilated acts of violence in the film Cannibal Holocaust (1980), he suggests that the choice to not simulate violence against animals the way films simulated violence against people reveals the importance of “indexical presence”³⁰. The death is real, and the audience is made witness, and perhaps, co-perpetrator; Sobchack remarks that the “responsibility for the representation of death by means of the inscribed vision of cinema lies with both filmmaker and spectator and in the ethical relationship constituted between the vision of each”³¹. Thus, the spectator attempts to shield themselves from seeing, hiding their eyes or recoiling away, so as not to be ethically implicated in what they see. The Australian spectators experience of this is uniquely reparative – here, they are allowed to recoil from the Australian film, they should want to cease watching. The unsimulated violence invites a cringe away from a shocking scene, and in doing so, eradicates a cringe away predicated only on shame at Australia’s inferiority. The spectator’s paranoia, their cringing position, is affirmed by the film, making their bodily reaction valid. Paranoia, Sedgwick provides, is an attempt at “forestalling pain”³²; the brutality of this scene makes this impossible. The spectator is now experiencing the film rather than recoiling from it, or rather, the recoiling becomes the experience. 

Wake In Fright

After the hunt, John is subjected to an implied sexual domination by Doc after they arrive back Doc’s home, drunk and high on their violence. In the scene, shots of John beneath Doc are intercut with shots of the light above, swinging like a pendulum, underscored by the men’s heavy breathing. The scene itself is disorienting; no act of rape of sexual contact is shown, but John’s reaction of confusion, fear and disgust upon waking reveals it as a possibility. After attempting to leave the Yabba and failing, John returns to Doc’s house with a gun, and, finding the house empty, sits in the corner with his gun aimed at the door. He breaks down in tears, hugging his knees to his chest, the camera framing him in a high-angle shot, heightening his vulnerability. After a moment, he points the gun at his mouth, then flinches away from it. He steels himself and points it at his forehead, and as Doc finally returns, he pulls the trigger, and the screen cuts to black as the loud shot rings out. Shilina-Conte highlights how a cut to black operates as “a frame-breaking occurrence that disrupts the cinematic flow, evoking a negative experience that descends upon the theatregoer”³³. Devoid of visual information, she states, the spectator “relies more prominently on the acoustic and the haptic” leading to “a heightened awareness of his/her own body as a receiving medium”³⁴. The spectator is thus primed to experience this momentary darkness as an embodied unknowing– they enter a liminal space. This discomforting experience is yet another confrontation with a negative affect that paradoxically allows a positive experience of an Australian film – despite the darkness, the spectator is feeling and experiencing, rather than cringing and avoiding. 

The Nightingale’s final scene is like a deep breath after an onslaught of misery. Clare and Billy ride on the same horse to a beach – the wide expanse of sand and water a calm, clean contrast to the harsh wilderness and subtly menacing townships of the film’s majority. Billy has been hurt in a skirmish with Clare’s attackers, but this scene is still a relief. The pair drop from the horse onto the sand. Billy stands, turns back toward the treeline, and screams “I’m still here! I’m still here you white bastards!” He sings in Palawa Kani, while Clare sobs in a brief close up. He dances, like a bird, imitating its call. He drops to the sand. The final wide shot of Clare and Billy silhouetted against a pink and blue cloudy sunset and rolling waves is almost meditative. The film cuts from shots of the idyllic ocean view to close ups of Billy and Clare’s faces. Clare sings now, in Irish. This cathartic declaration of shared survival is something a reward for the spectator – emerging from the difficult terrain of the film’s 130 minutes. It is a beautiful sequence sonically and visual, a moment pleasing to be in. Of course I will use this dénouement to restate my assertion that enduring the challenge of embodied spectating, feeling films like The Nightingale and Wake in Fright, rather than cringing away from their emotional might, yields relief and reward. 

Cultural cringe speaks to our profound desire to be held in high esteem by the motherland. It is rooted in a colonial mindset which sees England as the conquering, enlightened power, and its colonies as slower, more parochial copycats. Wake in Fright and The Nightingale stir up several negative affective responses in its spectator, and their sensory qualities make these emotions particularly bodily experiences. This makes them useful first subjects upon which to assert the efficacy of phenomenology as reparative watching – it does not require the spectator to ignore their negative feelings toward Australian content, instead it challenges them to experience them as filmic experiences. By analysing the moments in films from which the spectator might wish to recoil – John’s embarrassing lost bet and sexual fumble, Clare’s rape, the brutal hunt, the strange sexual encounter and John’s suicide, I addressed the bodily experience of watching moments of strong negative affect. Confronting cultural cringe requires a specific methodology, one which accounts for the unique position of the Australian spectator while simultaneously exploring how this position could be guided into a corrective posture. I have offered film phenomenology as a reparative mode, and while further case studies and extrapolation will solidify its utility, the work here begins the difficult process of unfurling from our cringing posture.

Endnotes