Pushing Past Pessimism by Grace Langella

When going through life, humans have a tendency to be very pessimistic—seeing the negative aspect of things, believing that the worst will happen. Because it is so common for humans to think this way, society has created pessimism to be a norm, not realizing how detrimental it is to prosperity and happiness. Contrary to most, some humans have realized how destructive this way of thinking can be to one’s life; therefore, they have established opposed ways of reasoning which are more optimistic and tend to focus on the confidence and success of the future. With these two opposing views infiltrating the minds of humans, we are able to see the way of thinking one chooses to follow by looking at how they choose to present their ideas, feelings, and opinions. All of the different ways people choose to exemplify their outlook on life can be seen in the films Walkabout, Swept Away, The Gods Must be Crazy, and Wings of Desire. Accurately representing the pessimism and optimism that exist within society, the majority of the films portray a pessimistic point of view, whereas only one represents the optimistic way of thinking. In Walkabout, Swept Away, and The Gods Must be Crazy, we are able to see pessimistic thoughts through the depiction of civilized society, for it is shown as nothing but calamitous and toxic for people trying to reach true happiness. On the contrary, Wim Wenders exemplifies optimistic thoughts in Wings of Desire by giving people a reason to trust that society is exquisite and full of opportunity.

Prohibiting people from reaching great opportunity and living a happy life is something that civilized society seems to constantly do. Because this pessimistic way of thinking is so common, Nicolas Roeg, Jamie Uys, and Lina Wertmüller exemplify the many different ways it is brought to light in society. In Roeg’s Walkabout, viewers are able to get an understanding of how detrimental civilized society can be to one’s prosperity through the experience of a young girl and her little brother as they find themselves stranded in the Australian Outback with no means of survival. As The Boy and Girl venture into an unfamiliar world, they are faced with problems, such as not having water, that expose the inadequacy of intelligence that Western society granted them. 

Acting as a complete burden to the children’s survival, the civilized society that they came from did not prepare them for circumstances that would force them out of their comfort zones and expose them to the unrefined elements of indigenous society. Viewers are able to see how vulnerable the children are as they “trudge along the scorching desert in search of home,” until they eventually meet an Aboriginal boy who takes them under his wing and shows how much more beneficial his knowledge from the Outback is compared to the knowledge the children gained from civilized society (Farajollah, par.2).

Taking a similar approach to Roeg, Jamie Uys exemplifies how destructive civilized society is to one’s prosperity in his film, The Gods Must be Crazy, through the Kalahari Bushmen and their serene lifestyle. As a Coke bottle falls out of the sky, the Bushmen experience something they never have before; with the arrival of this unfamiliar object, they see a disruption of peace within their lives due to the infiltration of civilized society. This disruption of peace becomes evident once the Bushmen realize that the Coke bottle can greatly benefit their way of living, which pushes members to compete for ownership. 

Due to the competition that inevitably starts with the arrival of the Coke bottle, feelings of anger, violence, and hatred begin to form between the Bushmen that once lived in harmony. Through this drastic alteration in behavior, viewers are able to gain a clear understanding that Uys intended to show a pessimistic view of   society by showing how destructive it can be once it gains the attention of people that are unfamiliar to it.

Shining an unfamiliar light on the pessimistic views of civilization in her film Swept Away, Lina Wertmüller exemplifies how destructive the gender roles that exist within Western society are to the cooperation and happiness amongst people. Through Rafaella and Gennarino, viewers are able to see a clear refusal to cooperate due to the idea that a hierarchy exists within society, which restricts them from listening and reasoning with one another.

On the boat, Rafaella sees herself as a powerful woman who has control over Gennarino because she is married to a wealthy man that gets her through life; however, once they get stranded on an island together, there is a shift in power as Gennarino takes advantage of the opportunity to show Rafaella that she is nothing but inferior to him and all other men in society. In order to assert his dominance, Gennarino begins to order Rafaella around, making sure she understands that if she does not follow his orders, she will not receive any food or water to survive on the island. When looking at Gennarino’s disturbing actions on the island, viewers are able to gain a clear understanding of the gender roles that exist within society, causing them to see how disastrous the inequality is to people and their way of living.

For the angels in Wenders’ Wings of Desire, their way of living seems to be very monotonous. Spending their time looking down on humanity, the angels are able to see everything that happens in the real world—including both the good and the bad. Exemplifying the bad that happens in the world, Wenders has most of the film revolve around the Berlin Wall, showing viewers “the desolation of WWⅡ” (Orellana, par.3). In order to contrast the dismal and dull images from such a terrible time in history and shed an optimistic light on society, Wenders includes a very unique angel, Damiel, who “has the great luxury of living out of time, out of pain, and consequently, out of suffering” (Orellana, par.3). 

Although Damiel is gifted with such uncommon privileges and sees “so much human suffering, [he] still [chooses] to join” humanity in order to experience what it is like to be part of the bigger picture (Hannanian, par.8). Through his actions, viewers are able to see how “Damiel minimizes...concerns, looking beyond them to discover a world swelling with affection, beauty, and gratitude” (Farajollah, par.8). Once Damiel is able to fulfill his dream and become mortal, he falls in love and solidifies his reasoning for wanting to end his time as an angel; once in love, Damiel gets “filled with an enormous longing for the small things in life,” and comes to realize “that the ability to love is the greatest gift of mankind, and that as long as there is love, there is nothing better than being alive” (Orellana, par.3).

By having Damiel come to such a great understanding of love and society, Wenders is exemplifying that there is more to the world than the negative and destructive things that are briefly shown in his film, and the three previously mentioned. Yes, Wenders understands that there are societal standards and traditions that leave people feeling lost, unhappy, and dissatisfied, but he also is able to be optimistic and exemplify how exquisite and inspiring life can be.

Being able to realize and understand the beauty in life is something that is not easy; naturally, as humans, we are more inclined to think and talk about our negative experiences rather than enjoy the positive things that we go through. This common approach to life can be seen in the films Walkabout, The Gods Must be Crazy, Swept Away, and Wings of Desire because the majority of the directors choose to show only the negative things in life, whereas, there is only one director that chooses to bring out the brighter points that exist within darkness. The lone director that is able to do so is Wim Wenders, for he “assures viewers that the concerns raised by the former three films are minor compared to life’s inherent beauty” (Farajollah, par.7). Although Wenders’ film may seem unrealistic as an angel becomes a mortal being, it is that angel who is able to “break the social and emotional barriers we create for ourselves, and guide us toward a fuller, deeper, richer existence” (Hannanian, par.8). Through Damiel’s ability to realize the beauty in even the most mundane things in life, viewers, including myself, are able to take a step back, realize the importance of appreciating the little things, and understand that we are our own agent of change. Like Damiel, if we are dissatisfied with the way we are living or the things that are going on around us, we have the power to step up and live a life that shines a positive light on everything—no matter how simple or complex it may be.

Works Cited

Farajollah, Ariana. “It Is the Little Things That Make Life Big.” Taking Giant Steps, 2017, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2017/09/it-is-little-things-that-make-life-big.html

Hannanian, Ariel. “Awakenings Into Adulthood via Wim Wenders.” Taking Giant Steps, 2017, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2017/04/awakenings-into-adulthood-viawim.html

Orellana, Roger. “Why Not Suicide? Reflections on Wenders’ Wings of Desire.” Taking Giant Steps, 2019, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2019/01/why-not-suicide-reflections-on-wenders.html

Roeg, Nicolas. Walkabout. Perf. Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, and Luc Roeg. Twentieth Century Fox, 1971. Film.

Uys, Jamie, Director, writer and director. The Gods Must be Crazy.

Wertmüller, Lina (Dir.). Swept Away. Perf. Giancarlo Giannini and Mariangela Melato. Romano Cardarelli, 1974.

Wings of Desire. Dir. Wim Wenders. Perf. Bruno Ganz, Otto Sander. MGM, 1987. Film.

The Ortolan Bird: Looking for Light in an Unknown World by Haley Ecker

When I left California, my English teacher asked our class what we would take in our “metaphorical briefcase” (Kanda) when we leave for college, harking back to the three months we spent reading The Invisible Man. Classmate after classmate discussed taking their memories, friendships, and lessons learned from high school with them. When it came my turn to respond, my answer was straightforward and simple.

Nothing.

I wanted nothing more than to begin my new life and get as far away as possible from the toxic, Silicon Valley culture that had come to haunt me over the first 17 years of my life. As soon as my feet touched the ground at JFK International Airport, a bizarre new world enveloped me, filled with freedom, choice, and the opportunity to finally experience life on my own terms.

This breakthrough was my own personal journey, my walkabout. The trials and tribulations I have gone through are very reminiscent of those of The Girl in Nicholas Roeg’s cult-classic Walkabout film. My New York was her Outback. My analytical process of life was her need to obey rules and maintain a proper disposition. For both of us, this drastic change in environment, although harrowing and lonely, was necessary to help us learn how to experience life without worrying about the boundaries we were confined to back home.

Both journeys began with the trading of the known for the unknown. Early in the film, there is a narration of an Ortolan bird pecking for food in a box. The bird continues to peck “at the grain in the hope of penetrating through to the light, which he mistakes for the sun” (Roeg, 00:04:22) until it is trapped in the box for so long that the bird drowns. The bird’s continuous search for light is similar to The Girl’s search for freedom. Her brother asks her what she is looking for on the first night they are lost. As the sun sets on their first day alone, she gazed towards the mountains and replied, “I’m looking for light” (Roeg, 00:14:11 ). Although she is literally looking for city lights beyond the mountains to determine which way to go, she is also searching for the possibility of freedom in life. The bird poking through was looking for a light as a way to continue living and find something it needs to live, and The Girl is also looking for a way to survive alone in the Outback. Back home, she was forced to live a life of rules and order with a father who clearly showed no interest in caring for his own children. This journey into the Outback, although not by choice, brings about an opportunity to finally experience the light that she never got to experience back home. Without the supervision of her parent and rules of civilization holding her back, The Girl enters a period of freedom and choice, something she never had growing up.

I began my search for the light when I started to live on my own in New York. I had never been so far from home before and knew virtually nothing about the east coast. If I were asked to name and locate all the states in the northeast, I would not get very far. I had a goal, like The Girl did, but mine was less about life and death and more about creating a new life and a future for myself. This was a necessary journey since there was nothing for me back home. My life back in California revolved around the competitive academic environment of the Silicon Valley and, like The Girl, I was all alone, left to wallow in my self-pity about how much I wanted to be free.

After being abandoned by their father, The Girl has no choice but to act as a mother figure to her little brother. She takes on a role of responsibility to make sure her brother does not have to worry about being lost in the Outback. It is likely that she was already close to her brother as a result of their father’s lack of parenting, but she now has to act as his parent and enforce rules upon the two of them that will help them survive, such as conserving water and radio usage. Having to assume this much responsibility at such a young age is a lot for a teenager. This resonates with Chelsea Miller’s story of her family life in “An Eye to Walkabout: Little Mother” in that the author, like The Girl, had to assume adult-like responsibility to care for the wellbeing of her own sibling. The Girl did not want her little brother to have to worry about whether or not they would make it out alive, similar to how Miller “did not want [her] siblings to think that [their] parents might get divorced like [she] feared” (Miller, par. 5). The Girl has no one to vent to since her little brother will not understand the gravity of what she is going through to keep the two of them alive. She was unable to do as she necessarily pleased, since she had to stay strong for her brother. She had not found the light, yet.

This struggle changed when she met the Aborigine. While she was cautious upon first meeting him, the Aborigine becomes an asset for The Girl and her brother. They finally have someone who is able to guide them through the harsh terrain and provide them with actual nourishment. Despite the language barrier, The Girl and the Aborigine become friends, and he is able to lessen her stress by helping her care for her little brother. She is finally able to be at ease with herself and partake in more fun, personal activities. While the Aborigine goes hunting with her brother, The Girl is able to swim freely, by herself, in a lagoon (Roeg, 1:00:43). This moment is something that she never would have been able to do had she been caring for her brother alone. The new life she finds with the Aborigine is completely different from what she was accustomed to, but this deeply contrasts the restricted, responsibility-focused life she was used to. She is seen smiling far more after she meets the Aborigine and is actually able to have more fun even though her and her brother are stranded. This new freedom she gains after meeting the Aborigine is like the Ortolan bird pecking through to the light – she finally begins to find her light because of him.

It is this new environment, able to be understood with the Aborigine’s help, that allows The Girl to flourish and begin to experience freedom and choice in her daily life. I went through a similar period of freedom and joy after I joined my sorority on campus. I was instantly given a new, less lonely perspective on New York and found myself way more involved in my undergraduate community. I felt uneasy when I first joined, like The Girl was after meeting the Aborigine for the first time, but as I got to know the sorority sisters and join them in their activities, I realized that this lonely place was not as empty as I thought it was. No longer confined to my dorm room and my chemistry lab, Hofstra became the brightest place in the world. I found lifelong friends and the thought of having to leave New York never crossed my mind.

I did not realize I had found my light, however, until I was forced back into darkness when I returned home. My first summer after freshman year ended brought me back to a dark place that I thought I had escaped in New York. I found myself all alone, with all my friends back on the east coast, and trapped in the house where I spent nights crying myself to sleep. As happy as I was to see my parents, I dreamed of going back to my new home. My mental health worsened and without the ability to freely move and do what I wanted, I was sent into a depressive spiral that just deepened more and more with each passing day. My time in New York felt like a fever dream. The joyful life that I had yearned for was suddenly snatched away from me.

The Girl’s flashback as an adult eerily mirrored the feelings I had when I was sent back home. She found herself back in a life she had escaped from. It is clear based on her expressionless face when her husband is talking about work that she is not as happy as she was when her, the Aborigine, and her brother were in the Outback (Roeg, 1:37:48). The fact that she ends up in the same house she grew up in with her distant, murderous father further supports the point that she returned to a life she wanted to get away from. She recalled her time with the Aborigine while in a hug with her husband because she had not realized just how good she had it when she was on her own. Now that she is a grown woman forced into a simple housewife’s role, she is aware of how much freedom she had when with the Aborigine.

The Girl and I found ourselves in the same situation as the Ortolan bird. We thought we had found the sun during our brief time on our own and thought we were free to reap the rewards. Instead, we ended up still trapped in the boxes we had escaped, left to drown in memories of what freedom and choice used to taste like. Returning home is now even more difficult than it used to be. My light is here in New York, amongst my sorority sisters and new friends. The Girl and I were able to experience what it is like to have a sip of freedom during our walkabouts and unfortunately, we can no longer settle for anything less without wondering about the good times we used to have.

Works Cited

Kanda, Michael. May 2017. Lecture.

Miller, Chelsea. “An Eye to WALKABOUT: Little Mother.” Blogspot. N.p., 9 Feb. 2018, http://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/02/an-eye-to-walkabout-little-mother-by.html.

Roeg, Nicolas (Dir.). Walkabout. Perf. Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, and Luc Roeg. Twentieth Century Fox. 1971. Film.

The Uplifting Effects of Unfamiliarity in Walkabout & The Gods Must Be Crazy by Grace Langella

When the act of change is thought about by humans, it tends to be linked to many negative emotions and actions. This tendency for humans to directly correlate change with negativity results from all of the stress and anxiety that overcomes them once put into situations of unfamiliarity. Because of the disoriented feelings we get once exposed to something new, humans keep themselves tied to a monotonous lifestyle that holds them back from experiencing a new way of living. Although being fixed on a rigid way of life brings feelings of comfort and safety for humans, there is an importance that needs to be shed on breaking away from a repetitive lifestyle in order to understand the valuable disparateness that exists in the world. When exposed to differences that break them out of their comfort zone, humans tend to experience culture shock, for they have no idea how to behave in situations that are new and uncommon to them. Because of how easily people crack under the pressures of unfamiliarity, we are able to see how fragile homeostasis really is and how much one’s energy can drop as a result. In both Jamie Uy’s The Gods Must be Crazy and Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, we are able to see the fragility of homeostasis and the drastic impact it can have on one’s life; whether one comes from an isolated, indigenous community or Western society, an abrupt change can be traumatic to survival and cooperation between members of a society.

For the Kalahari Bushmen, cooperating with one another is never an issue; living in apartheid South Africa, everyone goes about their day as they please, making sure to maintain a sense of peace and community. Contrary to Western civilization, the Kalahari Bushmen aim to keep their society simple by refraining from focusing on technological advancements and things that can disrupt the serenity in which they live. In order to show the great contrast between societies and draw a satirical depiction of Western civilization, Jamie Uys incorporates a voiceover in the beginning of the film, which comments on the need for people living in Western society to reinvent themselves every fifteen minutes (Uys, 10:03). By commenting on this ridiculous way of life, Uys makes it clear that Western society follows a structure that is needlessly strict, restraining humans from reaching a point in their life that is well balanced and valuable.

In The Gods Must be Crazy, Jamie Uys paints a picture of a civilization that is perfectly balanced and valuable for everyone that is part of it. Although the Bushmen’s prestigious society seems to be indestructible, their ideal lifestyle gets turned upside down and ruined once an unfamiliar object arrives and dominates the way that people behave. As a Coke bottle falls from the sky, it is seen as an “ubiquitous byproduct of the civilized world [that] becomes both a tool and an object of jealousy when a Xhosa-speaking Bushman, Xi, discovers it and brings it to his tribe” (Gottwald, par. 2). Once Xi brings the Coke bottle into his society, an immediate outbreak occurs and people that once lived “collectively, enjoying and praising nature,” begin to turn on each other and create disharmony in their once tranquil society (Eshetu, par. 3). At first, the Bushmen look at the Coke bottle in confusion, unsure of what to do with such an unfamiliar object; however, they eventually realize how great of an impact it can have on their everyday lifestyle, which causes their behavior to change and the fragility of homeostasis to be exemplified. The people within Xi’s society become filled with jealousy, anger, and violence because “for the first time in their lives, here was a thing that could not be shared because there was only one of it [...] a thing they never needed before became a necessity” (Uys, 10:28). Using the Coke bottle to “represent something so vast and unique as civilized society,” Uys makes it evident that anything that comes from Western civilization, even something as insignificant as a Coke bottle, has the ability to poison any balance and social dynamic that once existed in the Bushman’s society (Antoine, par. 4).

Another situation that Uys includes in his film to exemplify the negativity of Western civilization when compared to indigenous life is Kate’s experience as she moves from a civilized lifestyle to a more natural one. While living in Western society, Kate spends her time as a writer for a city newspaper; in doing so, she finds herself “letting social norms control her and what she writes about” because “instead of writing about something that peaks her curiosity, she is limited by convention to write about topics that are ‘sweet and light’” (Spellman, par. 5). After realizing that she is bigger than the bounds that limit her in Western society, Kate moves to South Africa where she finds her unique intelligence to be a factor of progression rather than regression in society. Upon her arrival into the Bushman civilization, Kate is taken in with open arms and praised for her willingness to educate and expand their ways of thinking—completely contrasting the experience she had while living in Western civilization. By having Kate’s experiences be drastically different in the two societies, it shows how harmful Western civilization really is. In Western society, Kate aimed for making a change by expressing herself through her writing but was so constricted by the limits of society that she was forced to quit. 

Being constricted by the limits of society is something that people living in Western culture experience every day; however, it does not seem to bother them because they are brainwashed into thinking that living such a limited life is completely normal. Viewers are able to see the consequences of this mindless acceptance through The Girl and her little brother in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout as they venture into the Outback and find themselves in need to connect with nature. Because The Girl and The Boy have grown up “in a world where they learned proper etiquette, were taught to get educated to ensure future employment, and were given food instead of having to hunt for it,” they find themselves completely lost the moment they are put into an unfamiliar situation and forced to adapt (Bellesheim, par. 2).

As time elapses and The Girl and The Boy meet an Aboriginal who is willing to help them survive, their lack of knowledge and inexperience of other cultures is exemplified even further when The Girl is unaware of the language barrier that exists between her and the Aboriginal as she attempts to ask him for water. Viewers are also able to see the inexperience of The Girl and Boy the moment that The Girl comments on her brother’s appearance, exclaiming, “You must look after your blazer. It’s got to last. We don’t want people thinking we’re a couple of tramps” (Roeg, 34:28). The Girl’s exorbitant concern about the way her brother looks in the middle of the Australian Outback, as they are barely surviving and getting through each day, goes to show how poorly Western civilization prepared them for times where they would be exposed to a new way of living that is completely different from anything they have ever experienced before.

When people are exposed to something that they have never experienced before, there tends to be various ways in which it is handled. For the Kalahari Bushman, the exposure to a foreign object, such as the Coke bottle, initially caused chaos throughout society; however, once they realized that the bottle was not worth the trouble it was causing, Xi walked to the end of the Earth to throw the bottle in the sea and allow his society to go back to living in tranquility. 

Although the return to homeostasis was easy for the Kalahari Bushmen, it was not as easy for The Girl as she returned home from the Outback and realized everything she left behind will never be attainable for her ever again. As Roeg displays The Girl grown up with her husband as he speaks about his promotion at work, viewers are able to see her in another world, ignoring everything he says, as she thinks back on her time in the Outback where life was much simpler and filled with happiness. Looking at how different both situations of aberration resolve, it becomes evident that real living is being one with nature through a more simplistic way of thinking; however, the only way humans will be able to understand this is by testing limits, experiencing culture shock, and comprehending the fragility of homeostasis.

Works Cited

Antoine, Myrtchena. “What Do You Do with Trash: A Review of WALKABOUT & THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY.” Taking Giant Steps, 2017, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2017/03/what-do-you-do-with-trash-review-of.html.

Bellesheim, Allison. “Walkabout: Where the Wild Things Are.” Taking Giant Steps, 2017,

https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2017/02/walkabout-where-wild-things-are-by.html.

Eshetu, Hanna. “Pursuit to Restore Serenity.” Taking Giant Steps, 2018, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/11/pursuit-to-restore-serenity-by-hanna.html.

Gottwald, Benny. “Putting Masculinity on the Chopping Block.” Taking Giant Steps, 2018, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/02/putting-masculinity-on-chopping-block.html.

Roeg, Nicolas. Walkabout. Perf. Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, and Luc Roeg. Twentieth Century Fox, 1971. Film.

Spellman, Jennie. “The Dark Side of Civilization.” Taking Giant Steps, 2018, https://giantstepspress.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-dark-side-of-civilization-by-jennie.html.

Uys, Jamie, Director, writer and director. The Gods Must be Crazy.

Traverse & Transcend: Notes from a Walkabout by Benjamin Kelley Gottwald

You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the sea’s double rocks, and now you inhabit a foreign land.

 Euripides, Medea

“Hey, so we were taking earlier,” one of the ladies from Milwaukee said to me, “and we decided: this is your rite of passage.”

“You think so?” I looked up and asked, having just crammed into my backpack 35 pounds of food, water, clothes, and other miscellaneous, life-saving supplies I have been carrying with me for the past four days.

“Yeah,” she replied in a verifying tone, “this is how you become a man.”

Despite having readied myself entirely—bootlaces fastidiously fastened, map carefully examined, bandana neatly folded and tied across my brow—I sat on a wooden bench in the shelter’s bunkroom for a few minutes, thinking eagerly about her words. I wondered just what the verb become really meant: what it had to do with the five days I had spent in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the 30 miles I had walked over roaring rivers and mountain tops, the manhood two Midwestern mothers had claimed I had achieved. That conversation put the last day of my hike in a curious mood, and with 13 miles to go and three more peaks to summit, I took to the trail with the usual hiker’s mentation: simultaneously in awe of the sublime landscapes and lost in thought inside of my head. I discussed my journey’s purpose with myself. I wasn’t running errands in the woods for status, nor was I looking to wave a flag of masculinity from the barren peaks of mountains. I was looking for myself and nothing else. Having graduated high school one day prior to setting out for the hills, I did have something to prove, but this time it was an internal demonstration. In a word, I was on a walkabout.

The term comes from Australian Aborigine culture and represents the six-month journey every Aboriginal young man must take as a rite of passage into manhood. In that time, he must survive with little more than his skills alone, proving to Mother Nature herself that he can withstand the unforgiving Outback wilderness (Gibbs, par. 2). This odyssey into adulthood was best captured by British New Wave film director Nicholas Roeg in 1971, when he created a film that bears the selfsame term as its title.

When the opening shots of Walkabout—glimpses of quotidian city life in Australia—subside, a dicey and hazardous narrative unfolds. An English family drives into the scorching Outback to have a picnic. Yet behind the innocent meal lurks some malice; the father, who Roeg depicts as tragically ignoring his young son and perversely aware of his teenage daughter, suddenly draws a pistol on both of his two children. While the young ones do manage to find cover behind nearby rocks and brush, the following frame ensures us that the father had a similar fate in store for himself: it shows the car, having been ignited in flames, and the father, having shot himself in the head (Roeg).

From that point on, the two children—played by actors Jenny Agutter and Lucien Roeg—are fatherless and abandoned. They are left to their own devices under the scorching sun with little more than their school uniforms, a battery-powered radio, and the contents of a picnic basket. What follows is their dramatic and desperate attempt at surviving the inhospitable. They seem to fair well for a day or two, even managing to find a desert oasis; that is, until they wake up the next morning to find their precious water source dried up entirely. At this point in the film, the viewer can easily assume that doom has found its mark. Luckily for them, however, a young Aboriginal boy, played by indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil, comes into frame. With his skills and knowledge of the land, the Aborigine teaches the two to drink water from the same ground they believed had dried up, and takes them under his wing as he journeys across the desert landscape (Roeg). It is clear, at this point, that the two children have a destination: the civilized world from which they came. Yet plenty of viewers ask the same question of the Aborigine. As the movie’s title suggests, he too is on a walkabout.

As I watched the Aborigine in his pointed and communal interactions with nature—his effortful and modest hunting with wooden spears, his use of animal blood as a remedy for the young boy’s sunburn, his sense of navigation that borders on second-nature—I felt the same inspiration that came to me during my own rite of passage through the woods of New England. I must concede that the Aborigine’s walkabout is of a more serious and urgent nature, and his terrain far more unforgiving than mine. Still, beyond the physical and procedural, a deeper idea lies in the subtext, further connecting him and me: both of our excursions were opportunities to traverse and transcend the realities we take for granted, to show us a side of humanity and its world that we had previously never acknowledged.

My journey into the mountains showed me more than the flipside of nature; it elucidated the flipside of humankind. The Midwesterners with whom I spoke on that Wednesday morning in June were just two of the dozens of people I met on the sides of trails, on the summits of mountains, and in the quiet of shelters. With each new person I met, with each new way of life they showed me, I was exposed to a new mode of human interaction. It was a new kind of friendship—immediately formed in that unlikely meeting place—that would reveal to me some aspect of what it means to be human so starkly, I automatically cast away the separation that civilized strangers unknowingly hide behind. The whirlwind nature of my interactions with these people made them unforgettable to me; after that night in the shelter had ended, or that water break on the cliff had grown too cold in the breeze, it was a near guarantee that I would never see them again.

Yet this iconoclastic awakening brings about so much more from the perspective of the Aborigine; his departure from his rite of passage was totally unlike my own. My jolt of enlightenment carried less of a shock than his. As their narrative progresses, the three protagonists each develop differently, and each get a jolt of their own. The Boy grows calm, and through his curiosity of the events, he attempts adaptation. The Girl, however, keeps her blinders set on her return to civilization. Still, Roeg’s depictions of her interaction with nature—her adjustment, her efforts to relax and find solace in her predicament—contrast with his depictions of the Aborigine.

As critic James Berardinelli so aptly put it, “Walkabout is about the never-ending conflict between civilization and nature, and how the two constantly work to destroy one another” (Berardinelli, par. 4). His observation shines through as the film nears its end. In directing the film, Roeg had an opportunity to reconcile the injurious relationship of civilization and nature via the interactions of the Aborigine and The Girl, but he resolves to do the opposite. The Aborigine slowly grows enamored of the teenage girl, and this attraction comes to a head when he dances for her. The raucous tone of the didgeridoo, an Australian instrument, underscores the situation: she becomes intimidated by his advances, ultimately rejecting him. And the morning after these hijinks, the two British children wake to find their native guide dead, having hung himself the night before (Roeg).

The Aborigine’s death is something to be mourned in every aspect; Roeg condemns the relationship between civilization and nature when he cast the native young man into the absurd. Overwhelmed and crestfallen by this view of the world, the Aborigine became yet another martyr. Watching that scene, I couldn’t help but realize my fortunate circumstances: my journey of self-discovery showed me a new part of myself and the world in which I live that gave me hope for the future. It showed me the exigencies of life, a world’s worth of competing forces, but revealed them to me in a luckily benevolent light.

Still, the Aborigine will not go unavenged in my mind; as he fell victim to the great conflict of society and nature, he revealed to the world, in 1971, the true situation. The civilized world is not deserving of an unmitigated conquest over nature. I learned this on my own terms too, when I saw just how capable nature is of retaliation. My walk in the woods forced me to come to terms with violent storms, unrelenting winds, and the crippling cold. It gave me the same feeling Walkabout should bestow upon any attentive viewer: a humble urge to approach nature in peace and only peace.

Works Cited

Berardinelli, James. "Review for Walkabout (1971)." IMDb. IMDb.com, 1997. Web. 01 Mar. 2017.

Ebert, Roger. "Walkabout Movie Review & Film Summary." RogerEbert.com. N.p., 13 Apr. 1997. Web. 02 Mar. 2017.

Euripides. "Medea." The Internet Classics Archive. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, n.d. Web. 03 Mar. 2017.

Gibbs, Patrick. "Walkabout, Original 1971 Review: 'beautiful'." The Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 08 Nov. 2014. Web. 04 Mar. 2017.

Walkabout. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. Perf. Jenny Agutter and David Gulpilil. Twentieth Century Fox, 1971. Online.

Looking into Roeg’s Walkabout: Eyes Wide Shut by Alexa Grabowski

“There are those special movies that change your life after you’ve seen them. Then there are the almost miraculous movies that stay inside you and then change your life again every time you return to them” (Murphy, par. 1). As a biology major,  I found it extremely unsettling that there was more than one answer to the question at hand: What was this film really trying to tell us? The possibilities were endless and my brain was on the verge of short circuiting  trying to make sense of it all. I can lie and say that I had some spontaneous epiphany where all in the world made sense, but it didn’t happen like that. All of my interpretations were merely puzzle pieces until I took a step back and saw the bigger picture. I wasn’t wrong for believing acceptance and loss of innocence were part of the movie, because they were. What I was missing was perspective. With this newly acquired view, I saw that all of my interpretations were components of one big idea: Society is the monster lurking underneath our beds, and maybe, just maybe, we should be sleeping with one eye open.

My first impression after passing through the not-so-pearly gates of the maze was, “Am I missing something here?” The buzzing noises in the background and the constant switching of frames had me believing that it was going to morph into a horror movie before my eyes, or at the very least, something out of the Twilight Zone. The school children were sitting in straight rows listening to their mundane teacher while soldiers were marching through the streets. People’s faces were not shown for the majority of the opening scene; they were cut off at waist level. The children even appeared to be panting like dogs while in class leading me to believe that Roeg wanted us to see them as a herd of animals rather than individuals. At that point I understood that there was going to be a hint of societal mockery throughout the film. In hindsight, I know that this was one of the methods he used to get his point across. He needed to make us see that society strips each and every one of us of our integrity and individuality, leaving an exoskeleton of a human in its place.

My first real interpretation was born when I noticed the sharp contrast between civilization and nature. One moment I saw a very structured society in which everything was in order, and the next moment a peaceful, empty desert appeared. When the father began shooting at his child and committed suicide, I assumed that he cracked under the pressure of work, a major component in civilization. When the aboriginal boy was hunting to survive, sport hunters came and left a trail of dead animals behind them. It was then that I made the connection. Director Nicholas Roeg wanted us to see that society is the root of all evil and destruction. In the city, everyone seemed liked miserable robots, but in nature, the tribe wandering the desert seemed to be extremely happy. People have been forcing themselves to act in a particular way for so long that they don’t even know the other option: freedom. Even after the girl and her brother escaped the desert, she still reminisced about the times she spent with the aboriginal boy. She longed to feel what it was like to be part of nature, because it’s where she was meant to be.

I thought I had it all figured out, but then I made the mistake of watching the movie again. This time, I came to the conclusion that this movie was about acceptance and the desire to mend the rift between two worlds. “After a time, these three youngsters cohere like a true family” (Muir, par. 4). The aboriginal boy was more than just a boy; he was playing the father figure of their pseudo-family. The first thing that came of the little brother’s mouth when he saw the aboriginal boy was “dad.” He hunted and cooked for them while they enjoyed themselves. He even took care of their wounds and offered to help them any chance he got. While the siblings were sleeping, he turned on their radio and listened to it for a while, almost as if it was an attempt to understand their language. The little brother even appeared to be painted in a tribal fashion when his sister was attempting to show the aboriginal boy that she wanted to go home. To parallel that, the aboriginal painted his face white while performing his mating dance. I don’t believe that he necessarily wanted to be white, just that he wanted to be part of the family.

Good things come in threes, so of course I changed my mind again after our class discussions. This film was about the loss of innocence. The father shooting at them and committing suicide was shockingly not what initiated this process. Shortly after the siblings found the water hole in the middle of the desert, the little brother, bottle in hand, asked his sister, “Does drinking give you a big, red, fat nose?” (Roeg, 0:28).The screen quickly flashed back to an image of their father. If their father had been an alcoholic, odds are that they lost their innocence a long time ago. They could no longer live in their bubble of a world after experiencing as much as they had. It’s a misconception that the loss of innocence is a bad thing; sometimes it simply the acquirement of knowledge. During the time they spent in the desert, the siblings were exposed to tons of new experiences that they wouldn’t have had if their dad hadn’t gone berserk. They now knew that there are different worlds out there and ways of doing things other than those they’ve been brought up to know. Maybe they’ll even appreciate things a little bit more and see that a dirty uniform shouldn’t be a priority. Whatever the case, they are now more in touch with reality than they were before. As Roger Ebert put it, “… all of us are the captives of environment and programming: That there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we simply cannot see” (par. 6).

I am here to tell you that there is, in fact, a solution to this web of imagery that Roeg spun. I’m confident that this film was intended to foreshadow the dangers of brushing off the primal instincts lurking in the shadows of our learned behaviors. He’s not necessarily telling us to sell our houses, quit our jobs, drop out of school, and set up camp in the outback as tempting as that may seem at this point of freshman year. He’s trying to reach out to us and tell us not to live with our eyes wide shut. What are our motives for doing the things that we do? Is it because it’s what we really want or is it because it’s what someone told us we should do? The parallels between the civilized world and the desert are unavoidable. We can live out the rest of our lives bound and held captive by society, or we can be free. It’s as simple as that.

Works Cited

Ebert, Roger. “Walkabout.” RogerEbert.com. 13 April 1997. 7 March 2016.

Muir, John Kenneth. “CULT MOVIE REVIEW: Walkabout (1971).” John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV. 15 February 2011. 7 March 2016.

Murphy, Sean. “’Walkabout’ Is The Rarest Of Films That Will Change Your Life Again Every Time You return To It.” Popmatters. 3 June 2010. 7 March 2016.

Walkabout. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. Perf. Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, and Luc Roeg. 20^th Century Fox. 21 April 1998. Film.

The Dark Side of Civilization by Jennie Spellman

America likes to claim the title of being one of the most “civilized” countries, but what does civilized truly mean? After watching Jamie Uys’ The Gods Must Be Crazy and joining KP’s class discussions, I became genuinely disturbed by the word civilized and its true definition. Throughout our lives, we are influenced by societal norms and peer pressure. Everything we embark upon is done with the consideration of what other people will think of us. We are goaded into what we wear, what we do, what we buy all to answer the silent question: how will I fit in? In “The Ironic Hospitality of the Kalahari Desert,” Morgan Morrill writes of our American lifestyle, “There is barely time to breath in this machine-like world with the amount of meetings and activities that everyone has written on to their calendars” (Morrill, par. 1).

At first, I believed I was not a part of this machine-like world until writer and director Jamie Uys helped me understand just how deeply rooted societal conformity is in my life choices. He delivers the effects of restrictive societal norms for the viewer to experience first-hand. In comic fashion, The Gods Must Be Crazy analyzes the days of the week and our distorted perception of time. I thought back to the film Walkabout in which director Nicolas Roeg demonstrates that the true flaw of civilized culture is its inability to adapt or adjust to circumstances. He allows the viewer the chance to analyze the actions of a civilized British schoolgirl in the Australian Outback, an environment that is deeply unfamiliar to her. In different ways The Gods Must Be Crazy and Walkabout reveal how these pressures obstruct our ability to habituate, accommodate and acculturate to new conditions.

   

Furthermore, The Gods Must Be Crazy is a mockumentary about the Kalahari Bushmen and their way of living. The film compares the Bushmen lifestyle to the civilized lifestyle in apartheid South Africa. Uys employs satire in order to force the viewer to see the civilized world in a new light. Although Uys only focuses on the civilized world for a portion of the film, he targets the many failures of cultural adaptation. As the camera moves away from the serene and calm habitat of the Bushmen, the viewer is then hit with sequences of crowds, busy streets, and towering buildings (Uys, 00:05:30). The contrast that Uys creates highlights the wholesomeness of the Bushmen community against the civilized lifestyle displayed in short, chaotic fragments. The voice of the narrator accompanies these scenes in a demeaning tone. The narrator explains how “civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment and instead adapted his environment to suit him” (Uys, 00:06:36-00:10:30). The civilized man thus set standards for society, which we call social norms.

In “How Social Norms Affect Our Decisions,” Doctor Carrie Steckl describes social norms as, “expectations that inform us how we’re supposed to behave in certain situations – [that] are ubiquitous in our society” (Steckl, par. 2). She explains how social norms have four common aspects: they tell us what to do and what not to do; they are socially shared; they carry an element of control or sanction; and they highly influence one’s behavior (Steckl par. 3). These expectations ultimately control how we act as individuals and how we act as a community. 

In The Gods Must Be Crazy, Kate Thompson is a writer for a big city newspaper. When one of her coworkers asks her to write a story about handicapped children, she quickly refuses the idea saying, “Sorry. I’ll only print sweetness and light, even if it bores the pants off them” (Uys, 00:07:05). Just a few seconds later another one of her companions asks if she could write a story on the teacher shortage in Botswana. Instead of considering the idea, Thompson says again, “I don't know. I got bawled out for writing a story on mugging. My page should be sweet and light, like Liberace and Jackie Onassis” (Uys, 00:07:36). Thompson is letting social norms control her and what she writes about. Instead of writing about something that peaks her curiosity, she is limited by convention to write about topics that are “sweet and light” even if they may be boring. Society writes the script of our lives, and like good actors, we play the part. These constraints are preventing us from adapting and advancing as human species.

The inability to revamp and reshape our limited outlook is taken further in the film Walkabout. Roeg shows us the journey of a teenage British girl and her younger brother who must endure the Australian desert on their own when they are abandoned by their suicidal father. During their “walkabout,” they encounter a young Aboriginal man who is accustomed to the dry Australian desert. Throughout the film, The Girl is unable to acclimatize to the Aboriginal way of life due to the expectations of her civilized lifestyle. In “Walkabout: Where the Wild Things Are,” Allison Bellesheim writes, “The two children are symbols for civilization, as they grew up in a world where they learned proper etiquette, were taught to get educated to ensure future employment, and were given food instead of having to hunt for it” (Bellesheim, par. 2). Coming from a strict and demanding society, The Girl cannot conform to a new way of life in her walkabout. This theme is highlighted throughout the whole film, but it can specifically be seen when she first meets the Aboriginal hunter. She is unable to ask him for water due to the language barrier (Roeg, 00:36:30). Further on in the film, The Girl worries to her younger brother about their appearance, even though no one is there to see or judge them. She says, “You must look after your blazer. It’s got to last. We don’t want people thinking we’re a couple of tramps. And you’ve put a hole in your pocket. Don’t! You’ll ruin your nice shoes” (Roeg, 00:34:28-00:37:10). Her bizarre reaction is merely an effect that social norms have engraved in her brain. Even further into the film as The Girl, The Boy, and The Aboriginal are painting on the rock walls, she complains saying, “I wish we had a proper pencil” (Roeg, 01:10:53). Her rigid upbringing in a “superior” and civilized society has caused her to become so incredibly closed off to change that it obstructs her from refashioning herself. My classmate Lindsay Knight describes her as, “cracking under modern society, living the same type of monotone lifestyle instead of adapting to the Aboriginal way” (Knight). Mentally stuck in her civilized ways, she proves unable to grow culturally.

On the first day of class, we learned about three diseases in our society, especially for our generation: short attention spans, overwhelming competition with one another and a paralyzing fear of being judged. The third one stood out to me the most. It is the fear of stepping out of social norms, which stops us from widening our outlook and deepening our personal growth. One elemental step in life that people are unfamiliar with is college. In American society, it is assumed that one will go to college right after high school. However, this may not be the right path for everyone. Although high schools host college fairs and college panels, they seem to be missing a very important alternative: gap year programs. This past semester, as I was studying at Hofstra University, one of my closest friends taught at a private school in Thailand. Not only was she pursuing her interest in becoming a digital arts teacher, she was also evolving and growing as a person. Her gap year “walkabout” helped her discover her true path in life in a way she would have never been able to have done while in college.

Having the strength to step out of the societal comfort zone enables us to learn in rare ways. Without this courage we are forever stuck in society’s restrictions, stopping ourselves from becoming our best. We visually identify the consequences of conformity in these two films as the inability to make individual choices. The way in which “modern” society forces conformity so strictly in The Gods Must Be Crazy and Walkabout has helped me to discover a new way of living. As I have grown throughout my first year in college, I have learned to not care what others think. I have been able to overcome my fear of being judged, which has led me to grow intellectually and as a person. The toxicity of conformity in today’s society is apparent to me now, and if others are not willing to see this, we may not be able to advance and adapt to upcoming obstacles. As the true meaning of civilization is uncovered in these films, the question is raised: how will viewers defy the high pressures of social norms and break out of the cage society puts us in?

Works Cited

Bellesheim, Allison. “Walkabout: Where The Wild Things Are.” Taking Giant Steps. Kirpal  

Gordon, 13 Feb. 2017. Web.

Knight, Lindsay. February 12, 2018. Class Discussion.

Morrill, Morgan. “The Ironic Hospitality of the Kalahari Desert” Taking Giant Steps. Kirpal

Gordon, 14 Mar. 2018. Web.

Roeg, Nicolas, director. Walkabout. Twentieth Century Fox, 1971.

Steckl, Carrie. “How Social Norms Affect Our Decisions.” Mental Help Network.

mentalhelp.net, 26 Apr. 2013. Web.

Uys, Jamie, director. The Gods Must Be Crazy. Twentieth Century Fox, 1984.