A Film Canon

There's a studied banality, blankness and even ugliness to a great deal of Australian cinema that makes it a peculiarly appropriate vehicle for true crime narratives - and, in Snowtown, that aesthetic isn't so much taken to its logical conclusion as examined as the very reason for crime in the first place. At first glance, Shaun Grant's script might play like a pedophile-exploitation film, in which John Bunting (Daniel Henshall) and Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway) compensate for the pedophile that got away by embarking upon a mission of extermination that gradually expands from local suspected pedophiles and homosexuals to Chinese, Aboriginals, the intellectually disabled and, finally, anybody who - supposedly - won't be missed too much. While pedexploitation is certainly preferable, as a genre, to more bleeding-heart attempts to 'understand' the pedophile - at least by this point in its cinematic treatment - Justin Kurzel's direction hollows out the visceral kernel that might be expected of an exploitation-film, replacing it with a series of blank gazes and horizons that all stem from Vlassakis' pedophile encounter itself, reduced to a series of elliptical, deadpan photographic poses. As a result, Bunting and Vlassakis' spree becomes a kind of attempt to restore the visceral engagement with the world that the exploitation-film affords - or, alternatively, to restore Vlassakis with the affect that his pedophile encounter seems to have denuded - and, in doing so, clarifies the exploitation-film as a reminder that moral panic and outrage is deeply enjoyable. In fact, positioned in a late 90s media ecology, between two exploitative entertainment modes, both of which are referenced and rehearsed in the killings themselves - the waning exploitative action film and the incipient exploitative torture film - Bunting and Vlassakis are simultaneously positioned on the verge of a new kind of moral panic, or at least of an intersection between intensifying moral panic and decreasing cinematic centrality that has finally allowed moral panic to break away from generic, cinematic constrictions to become a kind of autonomous, quasi-cinematic source of entertainment in itself. In this way, the discussions of what Bunting and his friends would do to suspected pedophiles, as well as Bunting's injunctions to Vlassakis to examine his tortured victims, become a kind of surrogate for going to the movies, watching television or playing video games. Nevertheless, Kurzel's refusal to come down on the side of either pedophile or moral panic - instead focusing on their intertwining, and how that intertwining comes to constitute entertainment - means that the film never feels like a straightforward or hysterical attribution of violence to violent media, nor provides the characters with too much psychological depth, distinguishing psychological from mediatised explanation. It's this nuanced attention to the extravagant logic of exploitation that might make the film seem more exploitative than it really is - but what's extraordinary is that Kurzel's willingness to implicate his very blankness in the atrocities it describes means that he's not completely enslaved to that blankness either, producing moments of extraordinary lyrical beauty, most notably in the astonishing final sequence, as well as an an extremely nuanced, largely indirect depiction of the relationship between the killers. It also informs the exquisite tact with which the killings are described - only one is shown, the rest condensed to the phone messages that Bunting and Vlassakis forced their victims to leave - as well as the complete lack of any voyeuristic-logistic interest in the barrels in which the bodies were stored, and which preoccupied so much true crime, forensic and journalistic representation. In the end, it's not so much a critique of how moral panic breeds serial killing, but of how it constricts people with a spectatorship that's as titillating as it is deadening, numbing and exhausting, poised somewhere between Bunting's laconic, reassuring immediacy, and the evil incarnation of Priscilla who helps organise the murders.