Wake in Fright

Donald Pleasance in Wake in Fright

There is a moment in Ted Kotcheff's 'Ozploitation' film 'Wake in Fright' (1971) when the melancholic and despairing protagonist John Grant (Gary Bond)  falls into a delirium brought on by a drink-fuelled binge in the wastelands of the Australian outback. In it, he sees Donald Pleasance as Doc Tydon, the embodiment of Grant's death-drive towards oblivion, appear as a manic Bacchanalian figure who seems to be revelling in the despair into which Grant has fallen. With two Australian dollars pressed into his eye-sockets, Tydon becomes a death-in-life figure, the coins his meagre payment for the ferryman who will eventually carry him across the Styx. The image is important in that it suggests that Tydon is playing the role of the psychopompos who is guiding Grant through the underworld that is Yabba, the desolate, hyper-masculinised outback town in which Grant becomes trapped on his way to Sydney to spend his Christmas vacation. Indeed, Tydon's first line in the film is to tell Grant that "all the little devils are proud of hell" as he checks off the occurrences of 'heads/tails' in the coin-flip game that has become, for the men at least, the town's favourite pastime.

In Yabba, Grant becomes caught within the macho world of endless drinking, kangaroo hunting and fist-fighting that turns the outback into a nightmarish doubling of the wild west. Beginning the film as a schoolteacher trapped in the non-space that is Tiboonda, he escapes for Christmas and on his train out of the village he dreams of returning to the city, Sydney, fantasising about his girlfriend who appears to him like Aphrodite from the ocean. The character of Tydon, a doctor of medicine who lives au naturelle from the freebies he gets from the locals in exchange for his medical expertise, becomes a mentor for Grant, teaching him the ways of the outback and watching as Grant spirals out of control. Ultimately, Grant tries to escape but finds himself unable to do so: even hitching a ride to Sydney in the back of a lorry ends up with him returning to Yabba. In the end, a botched suicide attempt enables him finally to get back to his life: but it is not life in Sydney, only a return to Tiboonda where he is fated to work through his bond to the Australian Education system.

Although Tydon as psychopomp is a persuasive reading, there is another way of seeing the image of the benighted doctor. In his blindness, it is tempting to see Tydon as a Tiresias figure, the oracular asexual who haunts Eliot's Waste Land (1922). "Old man with wrinkled dugs", Tiresias is blind and yet sees everything. In Eliot's poem, Tiresias as "awaited the expected guest ... the young man carbuncular" upon "whom assurance sits/As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire". The mythical figure of Tiresias has crossed between the world of men and women, a figure of transgression and liminality, as Tydon is in the film. Tydon's wisdom is emphasised throughout the film, even if it is relative to the boorish, feral nature of the company he keeps. He talk of Socrates, plays opera, discusses the functions of the digestive system whilst standing on his head and drinking beer. His approach to sex is casual: he takes Janette (the daughter of a drinking friend) - and she takes him -  as and when the need arises, pithily echoing the sixties hippy communes from which the world has just emerged. Yet it is also clear that he finds solace in the company of men and in a later scene there is more than the suggestion that he has had sex with Grant. Tydon removes the testacles from a kangaroo, asking a bartender to put them in the fridge. The bartender jokes with Tydon and asks him if they are his. It is easy to see Tydon, at the centre of Grant's journey into the heart of darkness, as a Kurtz-like figure: in the end, Tydon serves as a warning to Grant, perhaps even foreshadowing his own fall from grace. In the same nightmare scene discussed above, Grant sees his girlfriend naked in the arms of Tydon: the father figure has become his replacement, a doppelgänger. In this Freudian sub-text, Tiresias as 'father' stands for Grant's own insecurities (in a drunken state, he fails to 'perform' for Janette).

It would be interesting to read the film alongside Eliot's poem: from the parched mise-en-scene of the outback ("a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter"), to the unflattering presentation of working class culture and the sense of alienation that ultimately pervades the film. The absolute claustrophobia which fills the screen, despite the prevalence of wide-open spaces, offers little hope to the protagonists.

An Inbetweener

I am a child of the edgelands. The Black Country where I grew up, and where I still live, occupies a space between the city-sprawl of Birmingham and the woodlands that border the Severn and the Stour rivers which wind their way through its scarred landscape. The districts of Netherton and the Wrens Nest formed my understanding of the world, labyrinths of winding streets with pebble-dashed council houses piled up on one another, claustrophobic semis with paper thin walls. And yet within a few yards, a few moments walking, you could find yourself amidst unkempt scrubland, on the edge of motionless canals forming silent ribbons of rust, or scraping new trainers in the dust of dirt-tracks that opened onto industrial estates and scrap-yards like a new book.

I was savaged by dogs in Blackbrook Road in the early seventies. The animals had escaped from a compound: they were security dogs and like me they were displaced, the edgelands as a dead zone, the liminal space between. I had no place there and neither did they. They won. My four-year old self was no match for their street-wise ferocity.

The wastelands that surrounded the old Gibbons factory and the old Burton Road Hospital was a refuge for children aching for space and freedom from the confines of the Wrens Nest council estate. These swathes of nettles and grass bordered the main Dudley to Sedgley road and swept back onto the old coal heaps that loomed like great mole-hills on Dibdale Road. We often stood on the wall that formed the boundary of the hospital grounds, the ‘loony-bin’ as we so unkindly christened it, and from this vantage point you could cast your gaze across to the Black Hills and the Malverns, great curves on the horizon that might as well have been landscapes on the moon. Or else you could see high over the estate (if you wanted to) and then beyond to the Wrens Nest caverns. The estate where I grew up was trapped between these two areas of beauty, for there was beauty in the edgelands of ‘the top fields’ as we called them. Disappearing from home for long stretches of the summer, armed with a bottle of warm dandelion and burdock and a bag of Walkers, we would exhaust ourselves with endless games of football or cricket depending on the time of year. The old factory that squatted in the weeds and dust of the ‘bottom fields’ as we called it had always been abandoned, the ghost of a ghost of some past that we heard only our grandparents talk about. It was a magnet to boys eager for adventure and claimed the life of at least one poor soul who strayed too high, too far. The top fields have long gone, buried beneath red-brick houses, taking with it the memories of a thousand children.

As a child I found a strange beauty in the Shaver’s End waterworks. Its sloping walls could have been the walls of a castle: so incongruous, this edifice that stood proudly between the main roads of Burton Road and The Broadway. I was told it was a reservoir, and I imagined an immense sea lapping at the edges of its green walls. It is still there, a relic of my past, and my story ‘An Inland Sea’ is based on this fascination.

And when I left home and moved into my first house, that too was an edgeland place. I remember the estate agent calling it a ‘semi-rural property’: an end of terrace that would have belonged to a mining family perhaps. It lay back from a dog-legged lane that led out to the main road out of Gornal to Kingswinford. There was no back garden: only a disputed track that backed on to open fields that had long withstood the developer’s advances and was home to a few sorry horses that my neighbour, the scrap merchant, kept for business. The view from my front window was of an electricity pylon that crackled with bitter scorn whenever the rains came to form muddy red rivers that ran outside my back door. Lorries swept along the lane, shaking the foundations of my house. The road was a short cut to the breaker’s yard that skulked at the end of the road. We had a coal fire that didn’t quite work because the draw on the chimney was shot, and when the winds came, they caused smoke to belch back into the living room. We carted coal in an old wheelbarrow the hundred yards from the coal merchants. 

It was the mid-1990s but it could have been the fifties.

“Musing on primitiveness”: eerie presences within the British edgelands

“The edgelands are the debatable space where city and countryside fray into one another. They comprise jittery, jumbled, broken ground: brownfield sites and utilities infrastructure, crackling substations and pallet depots, transit hubs and sewage farms, scrub forests and sluggish canals, allotments and retail parks, slackened regulatory frameworks and guerilla ecologies.” (Robert McFarlane).

Edgelands were a prominent feature of 1970s public information films that appeared regularly on television. In ‘Dark and Lonely Water’, the spectre of a Grim Reaper voiced by Donald Pleasance warns unsuspecting children of the dangers of finding pleasure amongst the canals and rubbish dumps of a Britain still being rebuilt after the ravages of the second world war. Or else there is the threat of electricity pylons and sub-stations which loom on the borders of council estates and draw children towards them like skeletal sirens. Train lines in the ‘Finishing Line’, farmland in ‘Apache’ all spell out the dangers of the uninitiated and the innocent exploring the edges of their community. Children’s literature of the Cold War period was also drawn towards such liminal spaces: from Robert Swindells’ Z for Zachariah or Daz 4 Zoe to Stig of the Dump and the folk horror of Alan Garner, In literature, suburban concrete dystopias of J.G. Ballard inscribed a degree of eroticism onto the high rise flat, the underpass, the airport car park, a compulsion to both desire and repel these images of non-spaces. And of course, the fascination with other spaces continued throughout the late seventies and early eighties with the music of new-wave/post-punk bands such as Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire and Human League who all name-checked Ballardian dystopias in their songs, celebrating the ‘underpass’ (John Foxx) and urban wastelands. It seemed as if writers and film-makers engaged in a counter-response to the zeitgeist of annihilation and immersed us in both a nostalgia for a pagan past as well as preempting the anonymity of destruction by imagining narratives that resided within landscapes that effaced modernity.

And now the edgelands have become a focus for cultural interest once more. A plethora of web-sites that celebrate these heterotopias can be found in a quick search: www.derelictplaces.co.uk and www.abandoned-britain.com both offer images of run-down and neglected spaces, monuments, buildings that are decaying spectres of the past; elsewhere, gerryco23.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/the-edgelands-a-zone-of-wild-mysterious-beauty/ offers the juxtaposition of objects such as iconic red telephone boxes set against a backdrop of urban desolation offering what Farley and Roberts call the ‘overlooked ordinary’. A recent London Short Film Festival offered within its programme a body of short films that engaged with Britain’s liminal spaces; and Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ book Edgelands appropriated Marion Shoard’s term and embarked on an exploration of Britain’s wastelands, abandoned buildings and non-spaces. Films such as Gallivant, The Selfish Giant, Byzantium and Eden Lake[1] engage with modern edgelands in ways that recall the desolate landscapes of Loach and Antonioni.

What is it about these liminal spaces that fascinates and lends itself to cultural investigation? Perhaps within the notion of psychogeography[2] we might be able to find some way of understanding our on-going discourse with these derelict spaces and unclaimed edgelands. As Alastair Bonnett writes:

“British psychogeography should be understood as a site of

struggle over the politics of loss within the radical imagination. …[It]

is an arena of conflict between two important strands within British radicalism: the use of the past to critique industrial modernity and the suppression of nostalgia.”[3]

Squeezed as we are for space in ‘this worryingly crowded isle’[4], the danger of Britain’s edgelands becoming subsumed beneath a narrative of progress and modernity has given way to an outpouring of nostalgia.

Folk horror and demonic presences

Folk horror encompasses a trend of films, television programmes and novels that appeared from the late sixties throughout the seventies that explored the demonic presences within Britain’s landscapes. Often rural, sometimes urban, they dealt with the unearthing of medieval relics or artefacts or the discovery of hidden sects, the landscape itself becoming a palimpsest of the uncanny. Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, the BBC’s adaptations of M.R. James’ ghost stories all explored the hidden demons that lay beneath the British countryside. Peter Sasdy’s The Stone Tapes explored supernatural narratives captured within the very fabric of an abandoned building. 

There has been over the last few years a revival of the folk horror genre. In September 2014, Queen’s University Belfast is holding a symposium on the topic entitled A Fiend in the Furrows that according to one blogger “looks set to be an important milestone on the journey to establish Folk Horror as a defined genre”. Ben Wheatley’s ‘A Field in England’ (2013) is an exercise in psychogeography that examines the impact of the landscape on soldiers escaping the English Civil War whilst recent revivals of M.R. James by folk horror enthusiasts such as Mark Gatiss have brought the genre to the front of cultural consciousness.

“Primal images … are but so many invitations to start imagining again.”[5]

Britain is crumbling into the sea – literally. With recent floods, the harbingers of doom claim that this sceptered isle is being eroded by the elements. Yet it is not merely Nature itself that is laying waste to the landscape of modern Britain: the threat of immigration, a nation opening its borders to the ‘poor’ of Romania, Bulgaria and other former eastern Bloc countries brings with it the rhetoric of decay, and with it a retreat into itself. Demonic presences reside within the British landscape once more.

Perhaps the reason we are fascinated (obsessed?) with our edgelands and with our derelict symbols of a ruined modernity is precisely because the landscape echoes our uncertainty with our own identity. There is no such thing as a folk horror revival or a new psychogeography. Truth is, it was there all along.

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[1] In Eden Lake, the encroachment of new ‘yuppie’ property onto a rural area bordered by a housing estate emphasizes the presence of opposing cultural forces within the landscape.

[2] PsychoGeography: “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”

[3] http://www.academia.edu/968812/The_dilemmas_of_radical_nostalgia_in_British_psychogeography

[4] Headline in the Daily Mail, 27^th December (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2530125/This-worryingly-crowded-isle-England-officially-Europes-densely-packed-country.html)

[5] Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space p.33