Contemporary Australian Films

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My chosen incubation technique extended upon these suggestions: I selected five contemporary Australian films to perform the function of ‘pre-sleep stimuli’ (Runco & Pritzker, 1999). This decision was based on my impression that dreams and films are intrinsically connected, a notion supported by Yellowrobe (qtd in Pagel, 2010) who surmises, ‘Film imagery is similar to dreams, sometimes the same components with different characters. Films are dreams. What we try to do, is to create archetypical dreams’ (p. 158). I hoped that through repeated exposure over a period of time, the thematic, structural, and aesthetic elements of the films would be subliminally absorbed and ‘incubated’ in my mind — influencing, infiltrating, and ultimately enhancing …show more content…
Brent is an emotional wreck after being the driver-at-fault in a car accident that claims the life of his father. Clouded by the smoky-haze of marijuana, and with no vision for the future, Brent lives day to day and self-harms with a razor blade that he keeps on a chain around his neck. Even his girlfriend Holly can’t stop him from derailing. At school, Lola, a sociallyawkward wallflower, asks Brent to the upcoming school dance. On the night of the school dance, after being rejected and feeling dejected, Lola and her father kidnap Brent, with plans to torture, lobotomise, and ‘fix’ him. I selected The Loved Ones because it is stylish, grotesque, and has a dark, comical tone. It deals with the archetypal themes of adolescence: drugs, dating, sex, rejection, revenge, but delivers them in original and surprising ways. The film’s ‘torture porn’ premise offers laugh-out-loud moments which provide temporary relief from the queasy moments, and this dynamism inspired …show more content…
The depictions of violence are brief and graphic (but never glamorised); and the brutal actions of the Cody family are never glorified. The gritty realism of the film is reinforced by the natural and crude dialogue spoken by the film’s antagonists. Locked in their bunker of a house — which is camouflaged by overgrown plants — the characters refuse to accept responsibility for their own miserable lives, or admit to their part in making the world a dangerous place to live. Exploring themes of family, loyalty, violence, murder, police corruption, and vigilantism, Animal Kingdom presents a bleak portrait of suburban Melbourne in the