A part of this view­ing list: Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion Spine #10: Nicholas Roeg’s Walk­a­bout.

It is prob­a­bly just me, but it seems like the 1970s were filled with films fea­tur­ing nubile and naked young Aus­tralian women in Edenic set­tings. Walk­a­bout is one of those films. I could put a full frontal pic­ture of Jenny Agutter’s char­ac­ter here, but instead here is a pic­ture of her father com­mit­ting suicide.

While the nudity is inter­est­ing from a cer­tain point of view [and we’ll get back to that, oh yes we will] the film isn’t really as shal­low as it has some­times been billed. [Check out the exploita­tive play­bills which use black-​man-​fucking-​a-​white-​girl-​jungle-​primitivism to tit­il­late, as an example.]

Essen­tially, the ten­sion of the movie revolves around growth into a soci­ety, learn­ing to adopt the roles and rules par­tic­u­lar to each one. Although the young Abo­rig­ine man and the young Aussie girl are as far apart socially as they can be, they are both pro­gress­ing through their own culture-​specific lim­i­nal phase. Suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion indi­cates adult­hood. We’ll get back to that as well.

The plot: Daddy takes his kids out on Hol­i­day to the desert, tries to kill them, and then kills him­self. The Nubile Young Middle-​class White Woman in her Short-​skirted School­girl out­fit takes her Lit­tle Brother into the Desert. They almost die from Expo­sure until they meet the Nearly-​Naked Young Black Man [an inter­est­ing paper could be writ­ten about the sig­nif­i­cance of the order of adjec­tives used to mod­ify human-​referent nouns] who is Wise in the Ways of Nature and agrees to Take Them Home. Essen­tially it is merely a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the basic nar­ra­tive struc­ture: Two men set across a val­ley, have many adven­tures, and return home safely.

There are two main things that I should write about. The first is the cul­ture gap between the Abo­rig­ine and the girl. To do this, I will start with the lit­tle boy, who makes a rel­a­tively effec­tive bridge between the two, he can com­mu­ni­cate with either of them and also serves to indi­cate that the lim­i­nal phase is some­thing that is only entered at a cer­tain age and under cer­tain con­di­tions. The girl is by turns admirable and annoy­ing. Despite her igno­rance of the out­back, she is deter­mined to save her brother and her­self, and is well pre­pared to keep them moti­vated. Once the black boy shows up, she becomes com­pletely use­less, expect­ing him to do all the work. This prob­a­bly stems both from a racial dis­dain and a cul­tur­ally instilled depen­dence on a strong male fig­ure. She is con­stantly wash­ing her clothes and try­ing to make her­self remain as pretty as pos­si­ble, as if she weren’t in the mid­dle of the feck­ing wilder­ness. This prob­a­bly helps keep her spir­its up, but it def­i­nitely shows how alien she is in her surroundings.

The Abo­rig­ine, on the other hand, is on walk­a­bout: his six month jour­ney to man­hood, where he must use his skill to sur­vive. He is extremely well-​suited to his envi­ron­ment, so well-​prepared in fact, that he can sup­port two free-​loading white folks and not even slow down. He would be a man already, if only he would acknowl­edge it.

The sec­ond issue con­cerns the rite of pas­sage itself. The Abo­rig­ine feels that he needs to have sex in order to truly be a man and com­plete his lim­i­nal phase. The girl sorta wants to pork him, but doesn’t because she’s a Proper White Girl and he’s a Prim­i­tive Black Man. Her repres­sion and pas­siv­ity seem to be part-​and-​parcel with the West­ern rite of pas­sage. What rite of pas­sage, you say? Exactly. For us it is such a drawn out affair and vir­tu­ally stripped of rit­ual sig­nif­i­cance. When are you an adult? Oh, when you get your license, or when you can vote, or when you can drink. There is no defined time and affir­ma­tion of adulthood.

This is where the film flexes its mus­cles. The father com­mit­ted sui­cide and attempted to kill his own chil­dren because he was adult by age, but not matu­rity. His soci­ety did not ade­quately pre­pare him for its demands or affirm his posi­tion within it. Bereft of mean­ing and lack­ing vested man­hood, sui­cide is his escape. The Abo­rig­ine boy com­mitts sui­cide because, after weeks of prov­ing his skill at pro­vid­ing a liv­ing for the girl and her brother, abil­i­ties that would have earned him the respect and love of just about any Abo­rig­ine girl, his last, beau­ti­ful and overt sex­ual advances are cal­lously rejected by the girl. His sui­cide is both the result of heart­break and a com­plete and final dis­dain of every­thing he [and his cul­ture] holds dear.

The girl, years later, liv­ing in the same apart­ment she grew up in and fully a part of the cul­ture she yearned for while lost in the out­back, now wishes she had remained with the Abo­rig­ine boy.

So the movie seems to be a pretty scathing cri­tique of West­ern cul­tural cal­lous­ness. [And I haven’t even men­tioned a few rather strange inter­ludes involv­ing weather bal­loons, plas­ter kan­ga­roos, and “big game” hunt­ing] It doesn’t offer the Abo­rig­ine lifestyle as a bet­ter choice, but it does seem to insin­u­ate that even a life where the next meal is a thing of uncer­tainty is bet­ter than the rage or hope­less­ness engen­dered by a life with­out know­ing one’s place in the world.

• Cri­te­rion Essay by Roger Ebert
• The Cri­te­rion Contraption’s review.