Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
Director: John Hillcoat
Director: John Hillcoat
Stars: David Field, Mike Bishop, Chris DeRose, Kevin Mackey, Dave
Mason, Nick Cave, Bogdan Koca, Freddo Dierck, Vincent Gil, Tony Clark
Ghosts … of the Civil Dead is a prison drama set in Australia’s
Central Industrial Prison. A flagship of Australia’s “New Generation Prisons”
based on existing American prison models, Central Industrial Prison is,
according to the film’s title card, a “maximum security facility designed to
house the prison system’s most violent, unmanageable and predatory inmates”. At
film’s start, the facility has just initiated 37 months of lockdown after a
long string of violent incidents. The film backtracks to chronicle the lead-up
to this event, following the paths of various prisoners as they are systematically
abused and dehumanized by each other and the system. For this tag team review,
I’ll be joined by music critic and commentator Cristian Stromblad, whose work
can be found at the website Ugly ‘n’ Weird.
Ben: Australia has provided many filmmakers with fertile soil
for growing a film career, as evidenced by the likes of Bruce Beresford, Baz
Luhrmann, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, Rachel Perkins, and others. But in
many cases it’s provided arid ground, and some directors have only managed to
wrestle one or two films onto the screen. Joel Anderson, director of 2008’s
faux-documentary chiller Lake
Mungo, once told an interviewer that “the Australian film industry
is stop start at best. It’s impossible to know whether your working life is
over or just in remission”. Anderson hasn’t made another film since. Scott
Roberts’ 2002 flick The Hard
Word is a witty, grimy good time and one of the best of last
decade’s comedic crime thrillers. Roberts hasn’t helmed another feature since.
We’ve looked at several other instances of this on Down Under Flix: see, for
example, Rachael Lucas and Bondi Tsunami and Nick Parsons and Dead Heart. In other cases, the wind
does return to the sails, but just takes a while: a case in point is Ray
Lawrence, for whom sixteen years elapsed between the release of his debut
feature, 1985’s Bliss,
and his follow-up Lantana.
For
a period, John Hillcoat looked like another of those endangered filmmakers.
After making Ghosts … of the
Civil Dead, it was another eight years before his sophomore feature,
1996’s little-known To Have
and To Hold, and another nine before 2005’s The Proposition. He’s been more
active since then, carving out an international career with The Road, Lawless, and Triple 9. But these later
films, gritty as they purport to be, have a layer of Hollywood sheen that
separates them from the raw, electric power of Ghosts and The Proposition, and it’s a shame a director in
possession of such talent was effectively benched for so many years.
Ghosts debuted at the Venice Film
Festival in August 1988, and was released locally in June 1989. If the film
seems somewhat anomalous in today’s local film culture, it was even more
anomalous then. Australia had produced another prison-based film earlier in the
decade, 1980’s Stir,
which was directed by Stephan Wallace, starred Bryan Brown, and dramatized a
riot in Bathurst Prison in the 1970s. But at the time of Ghosts’ release, Crocodile Dundee II was
the commercial victor of 1988-89 by a long margin, with Young Einstein and The Man from Snowy River II also
performing well. The
Navigator, Evil
Angels, and Dead
Calm reaped in the gongs on the awards front, Kylie made the
jump from soap songstress to film star with The Delinquents, and those craving artier fare got
their fix via Sweetie, Island, and Incident at Raven’s Gate.
That’s not a shabby line-up, but Ghosts is
an altogether different animal: ugly, intense, at times repellent, and
thoroughly disinterested in commercial aesthetics.
Cristian: Ghosts … of
the Civil Dead is certainly stark and uncompromising (and that
ellipsis in the title really … irks me). But while it might be one of the worst
date movies of all time, it’s a singular entry in Australian film history, and
one of the most exciting feature debuts from an Australian director I can think
of. Raw, electric and elemental are good words for it.
I
eventually came to Ghosts, as
I’m sure many people did, through an interest in the music of Nick Cave. I was
too busy listening to the Young
Einstein soundtrack and drawing pictures of Yahoo Serious to
know anything about it at the time, which is probably for the best as I was
eight or nine. I probably first read about the film in Australia’s Rolling Stone magazine as a
teenager, and then rented it from my local video store, which had a pretty
interesting and eclectic selection for its location in south-west suburban
Brisbane. I re-watched it again recently when you suggested collaborating on
this piece, and it was a much richer experience this time around.
While
there’s much to recommend Ghosts beyond
Cave’s involvement, his mitts are all over this thing, from the script to the
soundtrack and of course his performance as Maynard: a character who embodies
all the violence and chaos that is not just allowed but actively encouraged in
the so-called “new generation” prison in which Ghosts is set. Not a great actor by any
stretch, Cave nevertheless brings a psychotic, savage energy to the film that
recalls his combative presence in The Birthday Party – it’s more “Nick the Stripper” than “The Ship Song”. Bad Seeds/Birthday Party alumni Mick Harvey, Blixa Bargeld and
Anita Lane were also involved in the soundtrack, so the film has firm connections
with the whole indie/alternative-rock underground. Coming at it from this
angle, the film’s raw aesthetic, not to mention its darkness and toughness, resonated
with me. Still, I remember being left with a slightly uncomfortable, almost
traumatized feeling after watching it the first time. I liked it, but hadn’t
developed the critical faculties to really understand why.
Re-watching Ghosts, I’m struck by just how
ambitious the film is. It’s certainly unconventional, and its low budget and
the inexperience of those involved shows through. But Hillcoat and company
don’t let those restrictions get in the way of pursuing something artistically challenging
and meaningful – in some ways, the low budget probably helped in this regard.
What I had just accepted as being symptomatic of indie filmmaking the first
time around, I now see as also being the result of quite deliberate and
effective aesthetic choices. The raw, stripped-back feeling is one of its great
strengths. But there’s a degree of sophistication and nuance there, too, and
it’s perhaps more thematically rich and politically charged than Australian
films are generally known for. Is that a fair statement?
Ben: Yeah, I’d agree with that. Though there are exceptions to
this – and certainly Ghosts was
pivotal in creating a space for those exceptions – Australian films do by
default tend to gravitate towards the liberal humanist, and do so in a way that
doesn’t offend liberal humanist sensibilities. Adrian Martin once noted
in The Monthly that
Australian films specialize in “chronic understatement”. But Ghosts, which David Stratton
called “one of the most powerful and disturbing of the socio-political feature
films made in Australia during the 80s” (The
Avocado Plantation, p. 230), doesn’t have time for such niceties.
It’s a young man’s movie ala Taxi
Driver, made with a young man’s indignation and rage against the
machine, and a young man’s compulsion to shock and provoke, without the
modulation or moderation of age. Compare the film to, say, the Sylvester
Stallone prison vehicle Lock
Up, which was released the same year, or the universally
beloved The Shawshank
Redemption, released a few years later, where (relatively) innocent
prisoners triumph over a (somewhat) corrosive prison system. Nobody triumphs
in Ghosts.
Wenzil (David Field), who isn’t quite our protagonist but serves as our entry
and exit points for the film, is dehumanized from the outset: he’s introduced
naked in a harsh white room on arrival at the prison; he’s assaulted over the
course of the film, including forcibly getting the word ‘C**t’ tattooed on his
forehead; and he’s as damaged, if not more so, on release at film’s end as he
was on arrival. Prisoners anesthetize themselves with drugs, pornography,
television sets glaring and blaring, all constant distractions from the
hopelessness of their situations, and tensions only escalate when those
distractions are confiscated. Others, like those in solitary confinement, never
even have the luxury of distraction, and are trapped in the dark only with
their own eroding thoughts. Nobody is reformed or rehabilitated: the system
only numbs and then inflames their propensity to violence, all under a
corporate branding – complete with Robocop-style
corporate video propaganda – that reinforces the absence of humanity. Watching
the film unfold, it plays out like a boiling kettle left to whistle incessantly
on the stove for ninety minutes before the lid finally flies off.
As
you note, the film milks every penny of its low budget, exemplified in the
production design of Chris Kennedy. Kennedy would deservedly win an Australian
Film Institute Award for Best Production Design for Ghosts, and while he’d do great
work in later films like Death
in Brunswick, Dirty
Deeds, The Water
Diviner, and all of Hillcoat’s subsequent films, his work here
remains impressive. Our first glimpse of Central Industrial Prison is an
unassuming exterior: a concrete speck surrounded by hills and scrub in a remote
outback location. But its interior is modern, spartan, severe, gaudy, and built
around three levels representing a class system. The first, the general inmate
level, is inhabited by prisoners like Wenzil who are free to fraternize and are
afforded possessions and comforts, while on the second level, the high rise,
prisoners like Cave’s Maynard are segregated but can retain possessions. These
levels are permanently lit in harsh fluorescent light, ensuring that daily
injustices and instances of abjection are not obscured from the audience;
indeed, Hillcoat rubs our faces in each and every one. In contrast, the third
level is solitary confinement where prisoners are permanently locked in cells
without furnishings or comforts, only darkness and silence and their own filth.
Whilst it’s tempting to read these three levels as mirroring Heaven, Hell, and
Purgatory, in reality all three are simply variations on Hell, without even the
hope of rehabilitation and expiation for their crimes inherent in Purgatory.
Cristian: The Dante allusion is an interesting one. But as you
suggested, Ghosts is
all inferno – very little comedy here, divine or otherwise. You mention more
palatable prison films like The Shawshank Redemption, where
we’re meant to identify with the inmates and want them to escape. Ghosts is not that movie.
And
yet, as bleak as the film is, and as potentially unsympathetic the inmates are,
there’s a certain humanity that shows through. As reprehensible as some of the
prisoners might be, we still feel for them. At the beginning, we get a glimpse
into their everyday lives, and the slow pace lets us linger in their world and
soak up the feel of it. There are little moments that humanize the inmates,
like when two of them are playing cards and share a joke about how the muscly
one’s tits are getting bigger, or when the tattoo artist takes Wenzil under his
wing. Of course, this sort of vulnerability can’t last – the tattoo artist
doesn’t offer any protest or assistance when Wenzil is assaulted, just leaves
them to it – but you get the sense that these people are at least trying to
form bonds and create a community. It’s not a nice place by any stretch of the
imagination, but in contrast to what happens later with the lockdown and riot,
you can see people building a sort of life for themselves. One of the inmates
in solitary confinement, Glover (Kevin Mackey), sums up this shift with a piece
of voiceover:
We
were united once, even if it was only in our misery. But then we were divided.
And then there was nothing. Nothing except fear. Fear of each other. Always
watching your back. Paralysed by fear.
We
also witness this shift through Wenzil’s arc. You’re right in saying that there
are no real protagonists thanks to the always shifting perspective, but Wenzil
almost acts as a surrogate. We enter the prison with him, and we’re invited to
see events through his eyes, at least to begin with. From green inmate in
general population to victim of abuse and eventual murderer, his journey spells
out the film’s theme of the dehumanization wrought by the privatization of the
prison system. Field puts in a great performance in this, his feature film
debut. He’s suitably laconic, a little crazy looking, but more immediately
relatable than, say, Cave or Vincent Gill’s character: the psychotic yet
philosophical Ruben. Field is so good in this type of role that he’s become
somewhat typecast as the prisoner/criminal-type in films such as Everynight … Everynight (1994)
and as Keithy George in Chopper (2000)
– films that incidentally owe a debt to Ghosts (down
to the former’s irksome ellipsis).
Yet
Field is one of the few trained actors in the film, and the cast is made up of
a motley bunch including ex-prisoners, ex-security and police, homeless people,
artists, and, of course, cult rock stars. These hard-bitten, worn-down
individuals bring a gritty authenticity to the film. The prison feels lived in,
the relationships genuine, even though there’s a lot of quite understandable
paranoia and mistrust. I watched some of the extras in the Umbrella DVD release
of this and remember Cave saying that between takes, the cast naturally
separated into groups – prisoners at one catering table and wardens at the
other. Cave himself was thrown into this natural order to create chaos, and
there was a blank area in the script where he was given room to improvise,
riling people up and causing trouble. Hillcoat described him as the film’s
‘secret weapon’.
Ben: Agreed on David Field: he’s a national treasure and does
great work in Ghosts.
It’s funny you should mention drawing pictures of Yahoo Serious earlier: my
first exposure to David Field was the double whammy of Serious’s third and
final (alas) film Mr
Accident, in which he played a bonkers egg magnate and rival for
the object of Yahoo’s affections, and Two
Hands, in which he played one of Bryan Brown’s criminal offsiders
menacing Heath Ledger. He’s one of Australia’s foremost “that guy” character
actors, and it’s always fun seeing him pop up, whether playing to type
like this commercial for OAK flavoured milk or doing more nuanced work in a film like One Night the Moon (review here)
or Oyster Farmer.
Cave is great too as the ferocious, feral, seemingly extra-terrestrial animal
Maynard, whose appearance in the drama’s last stretch unsettles the film’s
gravitational core.
Earlier
you mentioned coming to Ghosts via
Cave’s involvement. I quite like Cave’s work, but I’m fairly agnostic
musically, so I came to the film via Hillcoat after being wowed by The Proposition back in
2005. That film didn’t quite prepare me for Ghosts though. I mentioned earlier that Hillcoat’s
later work is more accessible, and even The
Proposition, severe as it is, has a certain reassuring “movie-ness”
to it, in part due to its period setting. Ghosts is at times almost documentary-like, a
feeling accentuated by its use of voiceover, frequent use of security video
footage, and fly-on-the-wall detachment. But there’s also a strong element of
the music video vocabulary to the film, unsurprising given that the medium was
producer Evan English’s bread and butter at the time (including some music
video work with Cave), and would serve as Hillcoat’s bread and butter in
subsequent years between film projects. There’s a primacy and urgency to the
images onscreen – especially those of abject or sticky or sickly bodies,
whether under harsh fluoro light or in stifling dark – that’s symptomatic of
music videos. One critic, Marcus Breen, wrote that Hillcoat “maintains the
intensity of a three minute pop song for more than 90 minutes, using the
ruthlessly fast editing that is a signature of film clips” (Oxford Australian Film 1978-1994,
p. 277). I sort of agree with that sentiment, but take a different angle: for
me, there’s a discordance to the editing, sound, compositions, and so on that
creates jarring breaks between vignettes, making the film closer to a series of
intense music videos or short films, rather than one long one.
Actually,
I think Ghosts could
be one of the ultimate approximations of the music video form on film. When
people think of commercial or music video directors working in movies, they
tend to think of guys like Ridley and Tony Scott, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, and
Australia’s own Russell Mulcahy. Indeed, when you look at flicks like Legend, The Hunger, 9 ½ Weeks, Angel Heart, Highlander, and so on, they all
use music video/commercial stylings in terms of lighting, texture, composition,
and editing, with specific set pieces exemplifying that lineage. But they also
usually spread their narrative incidence thin across the duration of the film,
resulting in films that are inert at times, albeit beautifully inert. But Ghosts – partly because of
the various character and narrative threads coalescing, how individually compelling
those threads are, and the simultaneous discordance between them – feels like
the closest approximation of the absolute hypnotic absorption one experiences
watching a music video. Scenes and passages of film work as self-contained,
thematically enclosed vignettes with setups and crescendos and payoffs, much
like a music video, and in that sense, even sans the dry ice and mood lighting
and … well… the music, Ghosts feels
like a succession of music video clips and one of the best approximations of
that vocabulary, with its ebbs and its rhythms, in a narrative film.
Cristian: I hadn’t really thought of Ghosts in the music video context, but that’s
an interesting observation. The quick editing, the expressionistic use of
lighting, the fragmented/vignette approach and focus on emotional impact over
narrative all point to that style. I wasn’t really aware of English’s or Hillcoat’s
music video work until you mentioned it. Now that you’ve brought it up, I just
realised it was Hillcoat who made one of my favourite videos: a clip for the
song “Sabrina” by Einstürzende Neubauten. It’s more in line with his
later, more polished film work, yet explores some similar thematic territory
to Ghosts,
particularly by finding some tenderness and humanity in places where you’d
least expect to find it, this time in a public toilet with a literal beast of a
character. I also can’t help but wonder if Chris Cunningham was influenced by
Hillcoat’s work on Ghosts.
His videos for “Come on My Selector” by Squarepusher and
Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy” spring to mind (they both feature dogs, Ben, so you should
like them).
One
of the strengths of the form is its capacity to portray emotion. We may not
always know exactly what’s going on in Ghosts,
but we know what we’re meant to feel, which I think makes it incredibly
immersive and powerful. The overall pacing of the film is too slow to exactly
match the hurtling momentum of the typical music video, but you’re right in
saying that the individual parts have that sort of energy. And while there are
no traditional songs, music naturally plays a big part in the film. The visual
style is intensified by the score, which is credited to Cave, Harvey and
Bargeld of the Bad Seeds. Cave talks about wanting to avoid heavy sounds for
the score, and using sounds contradictory to their corresponding actions. For
instance, Anita Lane’s voice is used over the murder scene towards the end,
singing a sort of wordless lullaby. Her voice sounds both naïve and sensual,
which makes for a haunting combination with the brutal action on screen. This
vocal theme is picked up again when Wenzil is released back into society, and
it’s subtly menacing, hinting at the violence of before without being
overbearing. This kind of contrasting approach has been used by plenty of
directors since, from Quentin Tarantino to Rob Zombie, and I might be drawing a
long bow here, but in some ways the film feels a bit like a precursor to their
more kinetic music video aesthetic.
I
think Bargeld’s contribution to the score deserves special mention. A pioneer
of industrial music, the guy is no stranger to architecture as instrument. His
other group, Einstürzende Neubauten (which translates as ‘collapsing new
buildings’), were great at experimenting with non-musical sounds, beating on
air conditioning ducts and recording inside overpasses on their earliest
material, which is more on the avant-garde side of things. That stuff is amazing, but the score to Ghosts relies less on
bashing metal and more on subtle, atmospheric instrumentation. Like something
from a Morricone movie, there’s an eerie, grating tin whistle that plays
throughout as a sort of main theme. There’s also plucked piano strings and a
little bit of guitar strumming, among other instruments. Perhaps most
interestingly, a recording of a womb was used during the solitary confinement
scenes, which adds an ironically comforting sort of purring, humming sound. The
various themes are assigned to areas of the prison rather than to characters,
as is usually the case with film scores, and contribute to the pervading sense
of unease and dread within the space. Bargeld talks about the film being about
architecture, and that the villain is the architect being led through the
prison, which is a very Blixa thing to say. It’s almost cliché to say that the
prison is another character in the film, but it’s the one constant throughout,
and certainly has a presence.
Ben: A lot of really talented folks worked on Ghosts. As someone romantically
inclined towards auteurism, I have a bad habit of speaking about films
primarily as products of their directors, and have done that here too to a
degree. But films are communal creations, some moreso than others, and
Hillcoat’s work as director on Ghosts is
bolstered immeasurably by Cave, Harvey, and Bargeld’s score; by his fellow
scripters Cave, English, Gene Conkie, and former Bad Seed Hugo Race, adapting a
source book by Jack Henry Abbot; by David Hale, a former US prison guard who
consulted on the project; by the aforementioned design work of Chris Kennedy
and the photography by Graham Wood and Paul Goldman, who later directed several
films including Australian
Rules and Suburban
Mayhem; by the fifty ex-convicts in the cast, who bring to the film
an authenticity and vibe that cannot be manufactured. It’s a tremendous roster
of talent and ingredients in service of difficult material, and the end result
is a film that’s not easy to like, but commands admiration. The film’s
conclusion is particularly troubling: Central Industrial Prison is closed, but
a new and better prison model is commissioned in its place, and the film’s
final shot sees a paroled Wenzil at a train station riding up an escalator
behind a woman, who may or may not become his victim once the credits roll. The
legacy of Central Industrial Prison is squat: its prisoners have been released
back into the world unreformed, and will most likely end up back in Central
Industrial Prison 2.0.
And
what of Ghosts’
legacy? Measuring a film’s impact is an inexact science involving a healthy
dose of both conjecture and sweeping generalization, especially in the case of
a film like Ghosts which
wasn’t really a commercial force. But I do think it opened up a space at the
cinematic table for some of the bolder local fare of the 1990s – flicks
like Romper Stomper and Metal Skin (reviewed here) and Bad Boy Bubby which
illuminated the darker, grubbier, nastier recesses of modern society – as well
as a whole slew of smaller, underground films since that dwell in similarly
dark terrain. And while there haven’t been too many Australian prison films
since Ghosts –
the Field-starring Everynight
… Everynight and Field-co-directed Convict notwithstanding, as well
as Stuart Gordon’s Australian-made Fortress, though that’s really another animal –
look at the number of local dramas, thrillers, comedies, and true crime
miniseries about criminals and convicts that followed in the 25+ years since
its release, many starring Ghostsalumni: Blue Murder, Underbelly, The Boys, Chopper, Two Hands, The Hard Word, Gettin’ Square, to name a
handful. You could make a case that Ghostshelped
create a space for films set in that milieu about those sorts of characters. At
the very least, I imagine a lot of those characters would end up in Central
Industrial Prison 2.0.
Cristian: Yes, Ghosts is
certainly a rich melting pot of talent and ideas. While many individuals
deserve credit for the final product, I think it’s still a testament to
Hillcoat as director that it turned out as coherent and powerful as it did.
This could’ve been a mess, but it’s raw and fragmented in a way that serves the
material well.
I
agree that the film’s influence is a hard one to track given its relative
obscurity, but almost anything on the grittier side of Australian film that has
come along since could be seen as owing it a debt. In the Australian context,
the film contributes to our cultural obsession with criminality. Australia is
certainly not alone in this, but I see a film like Ghosts as something that
allows us to dig into the myth of our convict origins indirectly. Ghosts doesn’t give us the
whitewashed version of criminality that feeds into our national mythology, and
yet it finds a humanity in people who most of society would deem irredeemable.
It’s also contributed something pretty unique to wider cultural conversations
about crime, punishment and rehabilitation and how to depict that material
on-screen. For me it brings to mind the HBO TV series Oz, which doesn’t shy away from
the unpleasant truths of prison life either, and employs some similarly
idiosyncratic stylistic touches. Not to overstate its importance and reach, and
yes I’m just conjecturing here, but I think echoes of Ghostscan be detected in
everything from Oz to Law & Order and
even Orange is the New Black,
and this stems from the fact that, as far as I know, Ghosts of the Civil Dead was
the first film to deal with the subject of new generation prisons. That’s quite
an achievement for an Australian indie film.
Modern
prisons like Central Industrial were a relatively new phenomenon when Ghosts… of the Civil Dead was
made. But despite the warning at its heart, they continue to proliferate. You
mentioned Jack Henry Abbot’s book In
the Belly of the Beast, which was a major inspiration for the
film. Ghostswas
originally intended as an adaptation of Abbot’s book, but Hillcoat was unable
to secure the rights, and while the film mutated quite a bit from this initial
idea, Abbot is still very much a part of it thanks to characters like Vince
Gill’s Ruben and Kevin Mackey’s Glover. These guys act as mouthpieces for
Abbott’s philosophical musings on the societal effects of the prison system,
which help give the film its political power, and so I think I’ll end with
another quote from Glover. Please excuse the ellipses:
I
was free once…. I didn’t want to be released, but they released me anyway.
Prison was the only world I knew. When I was free I was so angry I could hardly
speak. I killed someone; I didn’t even know why. I’ve thought about it ever
since, and I finally realised, they wanted it to happen…. I was trained to do
what I did…. ‘Convicted murderer kills again’, screaming in the headlines. And
I remember this advertisement for home security alarms, and this article:
‘police demand more power’. They’d bred me to create fear, and I just did was I
was supposed to do. People are scared. They’re scared of each other because of
people like me. That’s the way they want it, ‘cause then it always stays the
same. They keep control that way…. I was never free. Nobody’s ever free. One
man released so they can imprison the rest of the world.