One of the greatest mysteries of human life is navigating the foggy mental, emotional, and physical terrain between youth and adulthood. The parameters of our world and our selves bend and blur; we do and become things we never thought possible, both for better and worse. Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) brings this no-man’s-land to feverish life (figuratively and literally) in a joyous, tragic spectacle that burns on the brain long after the credits have rolled.
A father takes his two children on a picnic in the Australian outback. The daughter, a teenager, and the son, considerably younger, scamper and occupy themselves in the landscape. From behind a rock pile, the little boy plays with his soldiers and toy guns; in front of it, the daughter spreads out the meal. And then, a gun shot sounds, ricocheting off the rocks, inches from the boy. It has been fired by the father. The son, in gleeful, retaliatory play, holds up his green toy gun and calls out,”Bang! Bang!” His sister pulls him behind the protection of the rock pile and they crawl to safety. Father ignites the car and kills himself; the children are cast in a disturbing production of man versus nature.
After days of wandering, they meet an adolescent Aboriginal boy on his walkabout, a culturally traditional rite of passage that includes going into the wilderness alone once you reach a certain age to live off the land and connect with one’s ancestral heritage. So, as it turns out, the young girl also is on a walkabout, cast by her society out into the wilderness to test herself. This young man, in turn, saves their lives with his resourcefulness but pays a large price for his altruism.
From the point at which we understand the father to be the source of the gun shot, the audience is acutely aware that nothing is as it seems. The horror in this film comes to us from a negation of most of the fundamental beliefs we hold about differences between the natural and civilized worlds, and the resulting fear produced by this story reaches us through a series of undulations, lulling and entrancing us like a stunning nightmare where waking up does little to erase the effect.
Once we understand that these appearances are deceptive, we understand, too, that there are consequences. If we can’t classify or categorize or understand the ever-shifting world around is (including our fellow inhabitants of said world), we struggle to connect with that world. If we fail to connect with anything outside of ourselves, we face larger questions of purpose and the nature of existence, all while attempting to heave the very heavy weight of loneliness. These broken connections are what fuel the film and grant its subsequent power and glory.
For example, the father stares from a lofty condominium balcony down onto his children; they look like barely more than raisins floating in a pool. A disconnect. He is short with them in the car, and even when they escape his death plan, he is unable to coax them back to him and does not attempt to retrieve them. Disconnect. And when brother and sister meet the Aboriginal young man in the desert--the girl, the authority of the pair, cannot communicate her basic need for water. Her brother, far younger and less conditioned by civilized standards, uses a guttural sound and gestures to his throat; they are immediately gratified with a strategy to draw water from beneath the Earth’s surface with the aid of their desert guide. Again, the trickery of the natural world not being as it appears and again a communicative disconnect.
The most jarring disconnects in the film center on the young girl’s sexuality, an as yet undiscovered but very present force in this character teetering on the edge of womanhood. The girl is disconnected from her own sexuality. She visually appraises the exposed body of the Aborigine, but she does not seem to understand why she does so. In a scene where the youths swim nude, only juxtaposed shots of the smooth, forked tree trunks reveal (rather startlingly and brilliantly) what percolates deep in their minds, as they seem unable to consciously access these desires. When the trio reaches an abandoned house on the edge of civilization, the Aborigine offers an elaborate dance in which he peacocks for this female he has protected and delivered to relative safety. She in no way understands the symbolism of his act, and she shuts herself deep within the house, cutting off all contact and rejecting him. The result? A suicide, just like her father. Of all the obstacles presented in the film, human isolation seems the lone insurmountable handicap.
Just as the horror in the film is subdued, so is the tragedy of its closing. We find the young girl in a house dress in a condominium working in the kitchen. A man returns home from work, presumably her spouse. He spins her around to kiss her; he asks her what’s wrong. She can’t provide him a substantial answer with her eyebrows heavily shadowed in blue. These two people, bonded together in a societal unit, are unable to form really meaningful connections. After all she’s been through, this young woman has fallen right back in the pre-fabricated patterns of civilized life, even after having lived through its darkest lies. And what’s worse is does she have any other option? What else would she do? What should she do? As her quasi-blank, quietly unhappy face fades from view, we, too, must go back into the patterns of civilized life, working each second to forge tenuous connections with a vast, ever-evolving world.
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