a territory not on any
normal map
by Douglas Messerli
David Williamson, Peter Weir, and C.J. Koch
(screenplay, based on the book by C. J. Koch), Peter Weir (director) The
Year of Living Dangerously / 1982
If one were merely to rely on a short précis
of director Peter Weir’s 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously one
might almost think the film might be similar to Graham Greene’s The Quiet
American. As in the Greene story, the hero of Weir’s story, Guy Hamilton
(Mel Gibson), is an inexperienced and quite innocent man—in this case a news
reporter from an Australian magazine instead of being part of the American CIA—who
is posted to a dangerous location, Jakarta in the year of Indonesian President
Sukarno’s fall rather than to Saigon in the early years of the Viet Nam War.
And like Greene’s character Alden Pyle, Hamilton becomes involved with a rather
complex woman, Jill Bryant (Sigourney Weaver), unintentionally entangling her
and others in dangerous incidents of which he has little awareness, either on
an emotional or political level.
What
Greene argued might almost be applied to this work’s hero Hamilton as well:
“You can`t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is
control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity. ''
In
fact, innocence and its consequences might almost be said to be a major theme
of Weir’s films, particularly if you think of the gaggle of
precocious school girls in Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), of the young
Amish boy and the community in which he lives in Witness (1985), of
Truman Burbank in The Truman Show (1998), and others of his works.
But
The Year, based on a fiction by C.J. Koch, has also much larger issues
on its mind—the existence of which some critics argued helped to make the film
too fragmented, its various focuses too diffused in the scattergun approach to
its various subjects. I would argue, on the other hand, that the larger picture
that this movie attempts—its concerns with what the Sukarno government might
have done for its citizens and what it didn’t accomplish, the various
approaches to the radical changes threatening to overtake Indonesia and the
reactions to them by the outsiders, the growing love between Hamilton and Jill,
and, most importantly, the importance of moral behavior in the midst of an
amoral world posited by the film’s central figure, the news photographer Billy
Kwan (Linda Hunt), in his Tolstoy-like question, “What must we do?”
Throughout the first half of this film, Billy, a staunch supporter of
Sukarno, is quite sure of at least some answers to this plaguing question.
Unlike so many of the answers provided by her cohorts who argue that anything
they may attempt would be entirely insignificant given the problems the country
is facing; or, as Hamilton suggests, they are not there to become involved but
to simply report what is happening, Billy believes that anything done is better
than nothing. He has already adopted a family, mother and child, long before
Hamilton arrives. And, most importantly, he keeps files on nearly every
outsider of importance. The files are not in any manner political as Hamilton
fears when he discovers their existence, but are perhaps even more nefarious in
their purpose.
For, somewhat like James Whale’s Dr. Pretorius, Billy keeps in his
files, pictures, and other curios in his laboratory (which it properly is since
he develops his pictures in the same space) that might almost be said to
represent his own homunculi consisting of foreign agents, news reporters, and
Javanese curios that he is determined to bring to life.
It
is no accident that the freshman reporter Hamilton is sent to cover a story for
which he has no comprehension of or, just as crucial, has no connections with.
Billy has manipulated the system to bring this innocent to him so that he might
help him make over as a moral reporter who can bring the truth to Australia and
other countries. Introducing the “cub” (certainly a little man in her
assessment) to others who might help him with “learning the ropes,” so to
speak, he also arranges interviews with major Communist figures and others who
are seemingly unavailable to and/or of disinterest to most reporters.
Later, we even wonder whether Billy has had a role in assigning Kumar
and his daughter, the office assistants Hamilton has inherited from his
predecessor, particularly when Hamilton later discovers that they are secretly
members of the PKI (the Communist Party of Indonesia, Partai Komunis
Indonesia).
Billy, moreover, acclimates Hamilton to the steamy world in which
shadows are as important as human beings, a world, as he describes in his
writing. where “Most of us become children again when we enter the slums of
Asia. Last night I watched you walk back into childhood, with all its opposite
intensities. Laughter and misery, the crazy and the grim. Toy town and a city
of fear.” Billy’s lessons are apparently quickly assimilated by Hamilton who in
his first report writes, “I moved as in a dream they call famine.”
Most importantly, Billy introduces his
Frankenstein to the woman she describes as “her Jilley,” Bryant, who appears
throughout the film, along with Hamilton, to be waterlogged from her time in
the swimming pool and the daily Indonesia downpours—just as Petronius’ Bride of
Frankenstein was created on a stormy night and Frankenstein pulls himself out
of the mill water to survive—which rarely allow her true beauty to surface.
If this “Bride” doesn’t
immediately scream and reject her monster, she does keep away from him as she
makes her plans to escape her job as an interpreter of secret messages at the
British Embassy and move on in the next two weeks to Saigon, which strangely
enough seems to be the desire of many of the reporters Hamilton meets, as if
they can’t wait to exchange one dangerous world for another far more horrifying
one.
Most of these reporters
are, in fact, ghouls of sorts, particularly the American journalist Pete Curtis
(Michael Murphy) and another heavy-set reporter, who, in an impassioned
statement of disgust for their kind, Billy accuses of fucking little boys and
girls.
Jill, however, does
eventually fall very much in love with Hamilton, the two even driving away
after a party by dangerously breaking the curfew. Jill becomes so completely
committed to her relationship, in fact, that she is willing to betray her own
country by revealing a secret message that she has decoded that the Chinese
Communists are sending a shipment of arms to the PKI, hoping by telling him
that he will leave the country in order to save his life.
A bit like Whale’s
Frankenstein, Hamilton seems also to believe he belongs to the dead, intending
to stay and report about the shipment, thus endangering Jill’s own position at
the Embassy as well as her and his own lives.
Furious over his betrayal,
Billy certainly does sound like a version of Dr. Pretorius—"I believed in
you. I thought you were a man of light. That's why I gave you those stories you
think are so important. I made you see things. I made you feel something about
what is right. I gave you my trust. So did Jill. I created you.”—those last
three words alone intoning this tale’s connection to the Frankenstein myth and
suggesting that for Weir's writers there is no distinction between Pretorius
and Frankenstein the doctor who created the monster.
Weir’s version, however,
ultimately is a story of redemption. Billy, after seeing the child she has
loved and supported die of a fever and starvation, turns against his “monstrous
god,” hurling out a large banner stating “Sukarno, feed your people,” before
being thrown out the same window by the dictator’s secret service men. Like
Whale’s Pretorius, Billy determines the only way he can save the world is to
give up his and his creations’ lives.
Having stayed behind,
while demanding his “bride” fly off, Hamilton hears the news that Sukarno has
been deposed by the military and rushes off to the governmental palace, there
almost to be killed as a soldier slams him in the eye with his rifle butt. In
order to survive, he is told, he must allow both eyes to be bandaged—he must go
blind in order to be killed, a common demand for those about to be shot to
death.
But hearing the siren song that Billy has used to calm his Frankenstein
(in this case Kiri Te Kanawa singing from Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs)
he suddenly rises up asking Kumar, who is now certain that he himself will be
killed, to drive to the airport, where in a deus ex machina ending,
Hamilton catches the same plane where his “bride” is awaiting him. Whether
they’ll find a paradise in Saigon is highly doubtful, but they have at least
escaped their previous hell.
When I began this essay,
having been intensely at work on My Queer Cinema volume and blog, I
thought I was now surely writing on a thoroughly heterosexual movie. Even
though I knew that Billy, the dwarf-like figure of Weir’s film, was brilliantly
performed by a woman, I simply chalked up the director’s choice to the fact
that she was perfect for the part, the best possible person to fill the role,
which the American Academy apparently agreed in awarding her that year’s Best
Supporting Actress Award. I still believe that to be true.
But even Hunt herself
described her character as being some more than what he seems. Billy, commented
Hunt, who is herself lesbian, "is supra-personal [with] layers of sexual
ambiguity.”
And once I began to see the
several connections of Weir’s film with Whale’s, I begun to perceive that it
wasn’t just a matter of lucky casting, that Hunt was what this movie needed to
suggest the sexual complexity of Billy as an almost monstrously proud figure
like Pretorius determined to create a superior world to one in which he lived
so filled with hatred and neglect. If the survivors to not exactly become gods,
they might at least become possible angels to save us all from living so very
dangerously. And suddenly I realized I was back in a queer territory not on any
normal map.
Los Angeles, September 24, 2020
Reprinted from World Cinema Review and My Queer Cinema blog
(September 2020).
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