The Last Wave
(1977)
(SPOILERS) Peter Weir’s perception- and reality-bending
third feature may not hold quite the
same level of foreboding or uncanny resonance as Picnic at Hanging Rock, but it is very much kindred. The Last Wave comes at a point when Weir’s
cinematic explorations were neither bound nor fully-informed by the strictures
of the traditional Hollywood narrative, at liberty to take his tales wherever
he felt they needed to go.
In terms of premise, you might be forgiven for regarding The Last Wave as one part cautionary eco-parable
and one part white man’s guilt espoused over the treatment of Australian Aboriginals.
Certainly, Pauline Kael tore the picture apart over its perceived hand wringing.
Her case is overstated, as was often the case with her vibrant and engrossing critiques,
and she is unfairly dismissive of Weir’s main intent.
The opening finds a desert school deluged with enormous
hailstones. It sets the scene for the torrential rain underpinning much of the
picture. There is a sense throughout of the uncontrollable forces of nature
rearing up and opposing the systems of order enforced upon it.
This feeds into the plot “proper”, as lawyer David Burton
(Richard Chamberlain) takes the defence case of five Aboriginal men accused of
murder. An additional man, Chris Lee (David Gulpilil) appears in David’s dreams
prior to their meeting in the flesh. A process of awakening begins for the
lawyer. He meets tribal elder Charlie (Nandjiwarra Amagula) and is informed
that he is a Mulkurul, one of a race of spirits who “came from the rising sun, bringing sacred objects with them”. David
becomes increasingly obsessed with understanding the strange dreams, signs, and
portents he is experiencing, the possible prelude to a coming apocalypse.
Weir introduces us to a murder mystery, but this is
something of a misdirection. It’s a means to immerse David in a hitherto hidden
world, rather than an actual case
that will be resolved with a satisfying conclusion. It springs open the themes
of the picture, although only one of these forms its backbone.
It’s true that characters are given to statements of a
perhaps overly didactic nature at certain points. There is discussion of how
the accused, city dwellers, are cut off from tribal ways, and are no different to
depressed whites; David’s colleague comments how the western influence has “destroyed languages ceremonies, songs,
dances and tribal laws”. But David, who has ended up with the case for unknown
reasons (“My field is corporate taxation”)
wishes to pursue a tribal law defence. He is convinced this might get them off,
as he sees more going on than an open and shut case of a pub fight where the
victim (Billy) was knocked into a pool of water and drowned. His colleague,
experienced with defending Aboriginal cases, objects to David’s stance, maligning
him for being out of touch and making a fortune from tax dodgers. He singles
out David’s “idealistic romantic crap
about tribal people”.
Which sounds like one of Kael’s criticisms of Weir’s film. That
Weir is conscious of this suggests she didn’t look too hard below the surface.
That said, when David’s wife Annie (Olivia Hamnett) observes, “You know, I’m a fourth generation
Australian. I’ve never met an Aboriginal before” one couldn’t accuse its
director and his fellow screenwriters of subtlety.
There is also the danger of
falling into a fanciful tour of Aboriginal mysticism when David visits museum
curator Dr Whitburn (Vivean Gray, Mrs Mangel herself, who also appeared in Picnic at Hanging Rock) and receives a lesson
in the dreamtime. She informs David that Aboriginals believe in “Two forms of time, two parallel streams of
activity. One is the daily objective activity to which you and I are confined.
The other is the infinite spiritual cycle called the dreamtime”. This is “more real than reality itself”.
This scene also serves to link David’s experiences to the
strange weather activity we have seen. Dr Whitburn judges that white people are
no longer capable of exercising spiritual perception, unable to experience the
premonitory dreams that precede the end of a cycle (her language is framed as a
believer, rather than a sceptical scholar).
Weir has a flair for the elements, and affinity with, and
disconnection from, the natural world is a theme running through Witness, Master and Commander and right up to The Way Back. The Last Wave
offers up (or rather, down) frogs, suggestive of the biblical plagues of Egypt,
thunder in a cloudless sky, earthquakes, and the vision of a submerged city
with a bodies floating by David’s windscreen.
Kael was all for the garish, hyper-stylised flourish of
Brian de Palma, which may point towards the reasons for her resentment of
credulous acceptance of the unknown and mysterious found in the work of Weir
and Nicolas Roeg. It reads that she just simply didn’t respond to their
fascinations, pronouncedly rejecting the idea that western culture has lost
something important. As a result, she appears to work backwards in finding
fault in the design of the films themselves; they are calculated or hokey. She rejects Roeg’s distinctive filmic
language and the palpable sense of a universe limited by the established
western paradigms; “maudlin hysteria”
she scoff at The Last Wave.
However, the film most certainly does not “romanticise the victims”. Kael high-mindedly
suggests “simple equality” as
necessary, ignoring Weir’s intent. White man’s guilt is only a stepping-stone for
the picture, not the focus. Weir is not simply venerating the Aboriginal
experience as superior, he is exploring the idea that a way of seeing has been
lost to the western consciousness. If Weir were merely romanticising, he would
surely not have positioned the murder of a man by a noble and beautiful culture
as his starting point. Weir commented in interviews of the period that his
motivating force was the loss of a past, a culture, an identity. As he said “The loss of dreamtime on our side is much
more interesting” a subject than that of white guilt.
David: We've lost our dreams. Then they come back and we don't know what they mean.
Kael is correct that the picture is about alienation, although
she references the subject as if it is a dirty word. Moments she suggests are
dreary are among its most enticing; David’s inability to perceive his own
repressed abilities, that “Dream is a
shadow of something real” reflect something greater on Weir’s mind than a
simple (convenient?) use of Aboriginal insights as the key. His is a not dissimilar
device to Roeg’s use of the blind psychic in Don’t Look Now.
Like Sutherland’s protagonist in that film, David has lost
his sense of a fuller identity. His clergyman stepfather (Frederick Parslow)
tells him of forgotten childhood incidents, how he was afraid to go to sleep at
night ‘because when you go to sleep bad
people come and steal your body” and how, when his father died, “for a whole month before you dreamt of it,
and what you dreamt happened”. Weir is interested in the idea that our innate
abilities are indoctrinated out of us by a society with but a single, rigid
reality.
There’s certainly no room for anything as mutable as
Aboriginal perception. David’s formative years were informed by fear of “witches, ghosts, the wind”, and Weir pays
attention to David’s children playing, in a creative, as yet unconditioned, state.
It can be no coincidence that, when one of his daughters sees Charlie outside,
she refers to him as a “witch”. (Weir
took on board the advice of Nanji, an actual clan leader, that Charlie could
not be human. Rather, he is a spirit
that who on human form; we see this most clearly during the trial scene, in
which Chris sees Charlie sitting in public gallery. The fascinating interview with Weir gives some insight into what it was “to
delve into the system of perception”.)
David: But surely men are more important than laws?
Chris: No. The law is more important than just men.
While David is ultimately undone (by intent or as a
consequence of essential confusion is unclear) through breaking tribal law,
Weir allows for an unresolved conflict between two realities. Billy dies, it
seems, through Charlie’s curse, and Weir is content to leave a fundamental
difference in ideology between David and Charlie (“For Christ’s sake, you killed a man”). The specifics of Charlie’s law
and his justification for his actions are neither explicitly endorsed nor
condemned.
David: Why did Billy die?
Chris: He saw things, took things, things he
shouldn’t took.
David: Could I see them?
Chris: No.
David: Why not?
Chris: Then you must die too.
What is evident is
that David’s inability to process his sight (rather than insight) leads to his
undoing. Whether that last shot is literal or another vision isn’t too
important; David is now overwhelmed by a state of spiritual and mental
disarray. It’s a common theme in ‘70s pictures, such as The Wicker Man and Don’t Look
Now, to depict a staunchly grounded protagonist who finds himself undone by
old ways and systems he cannot process or countenance. It's an effective counterpoint to the more common hero's journey of becoming important, significant, special or chosen. David fails to pass the test.
David does exactly what he was told not to do when he
descends to the ruins beneath Sydney; he attempts to leave with artefacts
(including a face mask that implies he is indeed the reincarnation of the
Mulkurul). Chris, who showed him there, explicitly says he broke his people’s
law in revealing the place to David. Charlie materialises to stop David and, following
an unseen affray, the latter emerges into a sewage outlet system, promptly
losing his precious items.
He eventually emerges onto a beach, where he is, it seems,
engulfed by a huge wave. If David’s motives are unclear (did he take the pieces
as evidence of his story, simply because he felt the attachment to his prior
existence, or perhaps because he thought he could use them to impede the
oncoming apocalypse), it’s obvious his prompting has failed to elicit a full
awakening. Whether the wave is death resulting from Charlie’s curse (Billy was
drowned in a puddle, will David be drowned in a foot of sea water?) or the big
event, presaged by environmental aberrations, has arrived is open to the viewer
to interpret.
David: Who are you?
Charlie: Who are you?
It’s unclear where the rising sun referenced by Charlie
lies; we assume it is earthbound, but Weir’s obliqueness and use of symbols
allows for a variety of interpretations. Charlie is able to transform into an
owl, which is frequently seen outside David’s window. Owls crop up in a variety
of occult contexts, from masonic symbols to accounts of alien abductions, and
it’s certainly curious that the books David flicks through relating to the sun
god show images resembling popularised grey aliens.
Then there’s the suggestion of childhood abduction
experiences, even if taxi drivers are
to blame. Whether Weir was conscious of this or not is also unclear but, since
this came at the zenith of Chariots of
the Gods in the popular consciousness, it’s quite possible. Certainly, one line
of interpretation of the alien phenomenon revolves around whether it is
actually inter-dimensional (relating to perceptions of reality again) or indeed
extra-terrestrial.
There are a couple of areas where I’d give Kael’s complaints
a pass. One is the aforementioned dialogue, which is at times perfunctory. The
other is the conclusion among the temple ruins. David’s descent underground is
rather literal and overly grounding, coming as it does after a pervasive
undermining of reality. Suddenly we’re in an Indiana Jones (or Allan
Quatermain) set, as Weir addresses his lost spiritual life “with some logic, some realistic elements”.
It’s clear what he was aiming for, but he can’t quite pull it off.
I wouldn’t go out of my way to praise Chamberlain here, but
he’s effectively cast as a man at a loss. He’s a long way from Dr Kildare, and
Weir is able to emphasise the alien-ness he saw in his face (significantly less
so than the alien quality Roeg saw in Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, it must be said). Gulpilil and Amagula are
tremendous presences.
The picture is as striking as one would expect, from regular
Weir collaborator Russell Boyd, and Charles Wain’s synth score (his only
credited feature work) is memorably atmospheric and unsettling. Which describes
the picture as a whole. It’s been suggested The
Last Wave’s is a horror film (not least by some of the more lurid
advertising blurbs at the time) but, aside from the occasional shock moment dream
sequence, it has different DNA. It’s only a horror movie to the extent that any
movie pitching into the uncanny could be labelled one.
Weir’s starting point was “What if someone with a very pragmatic approach to life experienced a
premonition?” The inquiry into perception and reality will continue into
his Hollywood films, from Allie Fox’s madness in The Mosquito Coast, to Max Klein’s perceived imperviousness in Fearless, to the blissful ignorance of Truman
Burbank in The Truman Show. If Weir
has departed from an overt affinity for the “occult and mysterious” it should be noted he didn’t see it that way
even then, viewing such elements as “merely
natural”, a result of choosing to see the world a certain way. This awareness
has remained with him throughout his subsequent career.
