A rapidly expanding array of iconic characters from Australian cinema are returning to the screen, jazzed up for the new millennium.
The mysterious girls who went for a picnic at Hanging Rock. The la-di-da school teacher who drank too much in Wake in Fright. The pelican who befriended a small child in Stormboy.
To borrow the title of a yet-to-be-revisited classic from the 60s: they’re a weird mob. And that’s before you start adding the offspring of blue-collar neo-Nazis to the mix.
On Monday Stan announced a new six-part Romper Stomper spinoff is in the works, beginning production in Melbourne on Friday. It will feature the return of several characters – as well as the actors who played them, including Cackles (Dan Wyllie), Magoo (John Brumpton) and Gabe (Jacqueline McKenzie) – with themes that are “more relevant than ever now, 25 years later, as the world confronts the politics of hate and hard-right populism”.
Hando – the skinhead, trenchcoat-wearing, Mein Kampf-reading, infernal scumbag protagonist of Romper Stomper, memorably played by Russell Crowe in one of his first major roles – will not be returning, of course; he was killed in the final scene of director Geoffrey Wright’s controversial 1992 classic.
Wright, returning as writer-director of two episodes, said “the old characters are in positions of personal power now, involved in intriguing little suburban subterfuges or high-flying corporate gambits. It might surprise people to learn that some of them really did land on their feet”.
So one of them, perhaps, is a lunch-is-for-wimps-type stockbroker and another is a – hang on, what even is suburban subterfuge? Is that a spy thing or something a bit more mundane, like filling up a neighbour’s bin on garbage night? What happened to Clockwork Orange-style visits to Footscray station, and that ugly, abominable anthem about skinheads looking for a fight?
The official press release announced that the Romper Stomper redux will follow “a new generation of the activist right”. Bigotry, it seems, is hereditary. Thus Toby Wallace (recently the star of young adult drama Boys in the Trees) will play Gabe’s son, who joins a far-right group called Patriot Blue. David Wenham will play a rightwing, possibly Alan Jones-inspired shock jock.
At the launch event on Monday, the crew explained that while Asian immigrants were the target of the fascists in the original, the perceived enemy has been updated for the modern era: now it’s Muslim Australia.
Romper Stomper is a notoriously confrontational film, rough as guts and with a queasy moral aspect that never sits right, despite attempts to frame it as a crime-doesn’t-pay narrative. In the hard-hitting but dumbfounding final sequence, when Hando is literally knifed in the back on the beach by old mate Davey (Daniel Pollock), Wright introduces a busload of Japanese tourists who arrive on the scene, apropos of nothing. They unload from a bus and watch (one filming on a camcorder) as the Asian-hating Hando slugs it out with Davey. It’s as if the director is saying, how ironic!
Except, that’s not irony. Did Wright introduce those ogling tourists at the eleventh hour purely to throw extra salt in Hando’s wounds; to give the bastard one more thing to get miffed about before he dies? Is the director sadistic, like his protagonist? I’ve heard and read some theories, but none convince me this isn’t simply one final act of depravity – and nothing in Wright’s oeuvre before or since suggests he is a purveyor of moral nuance.
Fleshing out the Romper Stomper universe with modern Islamophobia is an obviously risky prospect. The original film has chilling real-life connections, cited as an inspiration for a British prisoner found guilty of racially motivated murder, and white supremacist Dylann Roof, who committed the Charleston massacre. Depicting racially motivated violence in a realistic way is an inherently dangerous exercise.
But if the new series does not sufficiently ruffle feathers in one way or another, it will be considered a weak-kneed, yellow-bellied exercise in brand flogging. And if it is controversial, it’ll have to wear the baggage that comes with that. Time will see how they go; I suspect Stan will blunt the original’s pointy edges but use its notoriety as a selling point.
Yesterday’s announcement comes at an interesting time for Australian television. A wave of new shows retooling popular pre-existing properties is about to hit. Picnic at Hanging Rock and Wake in Fright, which will be re-adaptations rather than remakes (likewise for They’re a Weird Mob, if that ever happens), have source materials that offer plenty of room for expansion – though they will invariably be compared with the films of the same name, which are masterpieces.
More properties conducive to fleshed-out storylines are in the mail, including another serving of Blue Murder (airing this weekend on Seven), a six-part Mystery Road outing for ABC TV and – also announced yesterday by Stan – a second Wolf Creek TV series. And the possibilities. Oh, the possibilities.
Imagine a Gillian Armstrong-led television production of My Brilliant Career. Or TV versions of Priscilla and Strictly Ballroom, produced by Stephan Elliott and Baz Luhrmann. Maybe an 80s-homaging teen adventure taking its cues from BMX Bandits – but with, I don’t know, fidget spinners and hoverboards. Perhaps with time these will come, and the weird mob will keep getting weirder.