Roger Ebert is an idiot
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Bree_33 — 12 years ago(June 24, 2013 12:45 PM)
I liked this comment:
The cultured and the barbaric can't communicate. It's this lack of communication, an inability to converse on the same wavelength with the female, that dooms the man.- __@
`<, - ()/ ()- -__@
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nec spe, nec metu :*.. ..` - __@
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thomasdosborneii — 12 years ago(February 23, 2014 11:59 PM)
Ebert (when he was still alive) often missed or misunderstood crucial details of the films he was reviewing. I chalked this up to him professionally having to watch so many. He perhaps would confuse different films, or would miss details due to taking notes (if he did), or he would let his mind drift while having to sit through so many movies. But other than that, he was quite a perceptive genius and generally, his reviews were awesome. I really miss him.
That sentence of his makes no sense, really. They found a way to communicate, just not verbally, or via verbal "substitutes" (such as sign language would be). If you have a pet dog, the two of you certainly have found a way to communicate, but perhaps not in a way that would satisfy Roger Ebert. There are other ways to communicate without having to share a vocabulary of words.
However, as far as I remember, the only one to attempt to learn and use one of the other's words was the Aborigine boy who did reply that he understood the word "water" to the girl when they were at the abandoned farm (as the original poster correctly said).
An Australian school girl complete with proper school uniform back in the 1970s is highly unlikely to consider even for a moment having sex with an Aborigine boyor any boy, at that matter, but in this case, their cultures were so alien to each other that there would be no way for her to bridge that gap. And certainly his painted-up sex dance would, if anything, seal the impossibility of the deal. It just completely underscored for her that he was an uncivilized savage. Just his teenage male flesh is not enough to woo her any more than she would have been wooed by one of the kangaroos that were hopping around. So maybe what Ebert really meant to say (or imply) by his word "communicate" was that they were never able to find a common ground or bridge the gap between them. It wasn't until she was now stuck in the same boring, humdrum, materialistic life (all her husband is talking about is promotions and increased salary in some hell hole of an office), the kind of thing that probably had led to her father's suicide, that she suddenly feels a visceral yearning for all that the Aborigine boy representednot "savagery", but life in an edenic paradise. -
don-lockwood — 12 years ago(March 22, 2014 02:16 AM)
That's a really good summary. Ebert would miss details, but I think his assessment of Walkabout is spot-on. It works brilliantly on at least three different levels. The first is as a simple survival story. The second is as a contrast between nature and urbanization, the monotony of a structured civilization versus the fantasy-paradise of the uninterrupted outback. As Ebert states, it would be easy to read the film as a condemnation of civilized life, but Roeg's direction is more complex than that. This leads to the third level on which the film works: as a study of communication in all its forms. There's the lack of communication between the father and his wife and children that contributes to his suicide. There's the lack of open communication between the girl (and boy) and the white man at the end of the film who works in the abandoned mining town and does not seem to comprehend or care about the children's unimaginable plight.
And finally, there's the difficulty the girl in particular has in communicating with the Aborigine and reciprocating his advances. I think Ebert understood that they were capable of same basic communication over water, but his broader point is that their failure to communicate adequately led to his suicide, just as happened with the father. It's fairly obvious that the girl is afraid of the Aborigine raping her - that she's bright enough to be aware of this possibility and afraid of it - but her suspicions don't change the fact that there's a fundamental lack of adequate communication between the two teenagers that dooms their relationship (sexual or otherwise) and even contributes to her future dissatisfaction with a humdrum civilized life.
Speaking of a lack of communication as a barrier to sex (or perhaps sex as a barrier to communication), I actually like the interpretation proposed earlier in this thread, that the father might have been sexually abusing the girl. Roeg definitely implied something off-color, what with the father's lingering gaze and all those prolonged shots of her in the nude and putting on her underwear. It's as if the camera has sex on its mind before even the Aborigine does. Certainly, the sexualization of the girl - the male gaze of the camera - contributed to a sense of foreboding and served as a constant reminder to the viewer that the girl was not physically safe so long as she was abandoned in the outback.
So I think Ebert was spot-on in his assessment of the film, which speaks to something deeper than an inspirational survival story or a parable about the noble savage. Certainly those are accurate surface interpretations, but plunging deeper, the target of Roeg's criticism is not so much industrialization but the failure to communicate, especially when sexual/romantic motives are at play.