I finally saw ‘Red Dog’ at the Theatre Royal in Castlemaine with a group of women: dog lovers all. I confess that my money was on Red Cat in the fight scenes. I stay away from cute dog movies, partly because – being a farm girl – I see dogs as farm workers not as human emotion absorption devices. Farm workers don’t sleep on/in your bed (well, maybe if you’re in a story by William Faulkner or one of those other Southern U.S. writers). OK, and DH Lawrence. Farm workers stay outside and you don’t fuss over them: except for shearers, who you have to mollycoddle if you want them to turn up on time.
So, I was sitting there with my arms crossed and frowning right from the start. But, damnit, the movie worked! I wasn’t quietly sobbing like some of my cohort, but I did get a little lump in the throat. The story wasn’t making a lot of sense. A bloke turns up in an old Bedford truck at an outback pub in the opening sequence. He’s been rocking along to 70s music on his truck radio to help us establish a time reference. The only radio station in the outback I recall in The Day was ABC Regional, and each transmitter had a footprint of about 20 miles. They didn’t play rock. At night you could pull in shortwave and listen to Willis Conover’s jazz programs even out at The Granites. But you had to chase the signal around the dial. I was doing a diamond drill core pickup run at that time. Daytime we listened to static or sang to ourselves.
But, it’s a movie, and you have to take some liberties to help the audience along.
He turns up at the pub just as Red Dog is about to be put down. Various characters come out and tell him the Red Dog story in flashback. What I immediately liked and resonated with was that these blokes were from all over: Poles, Italians, Balts, &c. The real Aussie outback workforce. I recalled the Single Men’s Quarters at Peko Mines where I worked, out from Tennant Creek. Someone had neatly stenciled ‘Australian Embassy’ on one of the toilet blocks. I remember an ex English merchant seaman discovering that his German mate had served on the ‘Scharnhorst’ and sunk the Englishman’s defenseless ship in the North Atlantic.
These stories have yet to be properly told. I recommend Raimond Gaitia’s, ‘Romulus, My Father’ as a starter.
Essentially, it’s an Ensemble Movie: a form Australian directors from Bruce Beresford to Dee McLachlan have handled very well. It’s not a form the US market particularly likes. They need a hero and a ‘ character arc’ and so forth. Assuming that ‘John’ ,The American who arrives on a motorcycle at the start of Act Two, is the hero we then have him out of the picture at the end of that act. The real character arc, of course, is Red Dog’s.
So, the truck driver is listening to (and watching) these various stories from some years earlier, being acted out. And then, in Act Three, he’s become the lead! ‘Nancy’ (Rachael Taylor cast and told to act like Nicole) doesn’t exactly fall into his arms, but she is repainting her new cottage and she does take the Red Dog pup in her arms. (Dog Lovers all understand this.) We had seen her dancing with him and one of my cohort pointed out she was wearing a smock which could imply that she was pregnant: she felt there was a romantic vibe happening. I missed the moment (if it exists) where truck driver steps into the movie – as Woody Allen steps in and out of Zelig. I was just happy that Red Cat and Red Dog became mates.
The Wedding Guest does NOT rescue the Ancient Mariner from drowning at the end of that poem. Mehitabel the cat does NOT marry Archie the narrator cockroach in Don Marquis’s poem sequence.
The movie works despite the logic of the script being somewhat convoluted. Why? Because the logic of a movie script is an emotional logic, not a story logic. The story is there as a carrier wave to transmit those emotional charges. The logical story has to be just believable enough not to take us out of our spell of wanting it to unfurl and serve us those delicious emotional charges. The trap for writers is to avoid ‘telling it like it was’ in this sort of movie. No. You tell it like the audience wants to believe it was and hopes that it will be. You tell it so that the audience feels the story in their belly, not dissects it in their brain. Don’t serve them up ‘Wake In Fright’ revisited. Don’t option Barbara Baynton’s works.
So, Good On Ya, Red Dog. You’ve brought audiences back to Aussie movies. And I will hang around and wait for Red Dog: the musical. It could well out-sell, ‘Cats’!
Josephine Emery 