ECU S2, 2020: CCC32111, ASSIGNMENT 2, Option 6, “Jindabyne”

TITLE: “Jindabyne, Water, Water, Everywhere, and…”

Susanne Lorraine Johnston 8 pages
2500 words (without quotes)

Assignment 2, Option 6, CCC32111, S2, 2020

Question:
Answer in a critical essay of 2,500 words, making specific reference to print and

film: How does ‘place’ function in “Jindabyne”?

“Jindabyne” is a 2006 film adaptation by Ray Lawrence and Beatrix Christian of Raymond Carver’s 1981 short fiction “So Much Water So Close to Home”. This critical essay will consider how place, and its absence and water function in Carver’s story, and how in his film, “Jindabyne”, Lawrence causes a magnificent landscape to function as Australian Gothic theatre. Though Carver and Lawrence each engineer the function of place to be the provision of comfort, the main focus of this essay centres around several examples of how Carver’s lack of place functions to amplify the terrifying spectre of gendered violence, and how place assists Lawrence to present gender and race issues.

“Place”, the noun currently has nine definitions and numerous sub-categories, and the verb has four (2020). Many of those definitions of place feature and are in operation in Raymond Carver’s “sparse new fiction” (Mosley, 2006, p. 23), where he provides little “specific background information” (p. 23). Instead, he instils tension in his 2009 work “So Much Water So Close to Home” and Carver describes his practice, saying “It’s true… I try to cut my words to the bone” (cited by Mosley, 2006, p. 23). These quotes explain Carver’s approach to place and setting.

Carver deliberately builds a up a distinct lack of information about place to increase tensions. Carver’s writing strategy forces readers to seek information about location in his modern, everyday “moral dilemma” (McFarlane, 2006, p.1). For Carver

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ECU S2, 2020: CCC32111, ASSIGNMENT 2, Option 6, “Jindabyne”

creates empty spaces where locations should be. He apparently sublimates the importance of place. In this absence of location information, Carver’s unhappy characters experience a series of unsettling events, where, as McFarlane says, Carver leaves out “actuality of place” (2009, p. 1) . Carver explains he omits much information “in order to imply a “landscape just under the smooth, but sometimes broken and unsettled, surface of things” (cited by Mosley, 2006, p. 23). In addition, Carver’s narrative strategy ensures all action first occurs in an unexpected place.

Harking back to the large number of definitions of place, in Carver’s 2009 story his sole narrator’s mind functions as ‘place’. Carver leads the reader into the mind of Claire, wife, mother and his female lead. Claire delivers Carver’s story, as his first-person narrator who sketchily describes life events, generally in real-time. While Claire’s “articulation [is]… time and again brushed off by her husband [it does] reach the reader”, (Kleppe, 2006, p. 39). At the same time, Carver deliberately creates uncertainty, causes Claire to name water sixteen times not counting the title phrase. As Carver’s story progresses the reader gradually realises Claire’s strange fixation with water, much of it real and nearby.

In particular, water appears whenever Claire tells the reader about journeys. An example is Claire’s narration of a short drive with her husband where they stop at a pond near their home. While there, Claire watches other men fish “So much water so close to home” (2009, p. 70), she thinks. Claire then questions Stuart, her husband, one of four men recently returned from a distant camping trip, about his journey: “Why did you have to go miles away?” (p. 70). As Carver’s writing style also provides no specifics of place to Claire, her question seems reasonable, and to operate on one level. For Claire’s stress levels, like community tensions, have risen since the men returned to their town. Yet Stuart, Carver’s male protagonist simply replies: “Don’t rile me”, then opens cans of beer for them both. Stuart’s words and action open the door to another interpretation. For this is the only time Claire drinks in this short story and yet alcohol features twelve times, and here, Carver links place and water to alcohol and combined they function as building blocks; alcohol with further warnings Twice before they complete their drive home Stuart tells Claire he “riled” by her (pp. 70, 71). Carver thus creates a metaphor; alcohol with water signal violence against females and this may happen in this place.

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ECU S2, 2020: CCC32111, ASSIGNMENT 2, Option 6, “Jindabyne”

Carver’s absence of detail here in this sunny, watery, public recreational space is a signal of what may happen to any woman in any place. Claire further recounts “We sit on a bench in the sun”. Where Stuart says “Relax, Claire” (Carver, 2009, p. 70), Claire desperately seeks details about the female body her husband found in the remote region. Claire attempts to gather this information from her husband to “make sense of her place in the family” (Kleppe, 2006, p. 39). She receives no such information. In its place she may expect violence.

Next day, Claire drives from home to town where she is comforted by a visiting her hairdressers. While Claire’s nails are manicured, her hair washed and styled, her stylist Marnie, says “Well get you fixed up for it” (Carver, 2009, pp. 71, 72). Marnie thus gives Claire the only support she receives in this story, and this place of beauty treatments and human warmth functions to provide real solace and safety. This is Claire’s preparation for a long, solo drive to another town. This journey (p. 72) creates another big, empty space where the reader wonders about violence, whether it is perpetrated within these private lives (Hallett, 1990). Water is present, for Claire travels to the unfamiliar place for the funeral of the unknown murdered girl (p. 73).

That girl recently found floating in the Naches river. By four men including Claire’s husband Stuart (Carver, 2009, pp. 68, 69). Carver’s “style” (Hallett, 1990) is

specifically… the fate of women who are victims” (Kleppe, 2006, p. 39). Claire, the stay at home wife-mother, who now drives along alongside that same Naches river the murdered girl was tossed into (Carver, 2009, p.73). Thus Carver’s perspective presents this story, though through his lead character’s mind.

Claire and Stuart’s domestic relationship functions as “subversive practice” where Carver questions his “authorial self” (Berryman, 1990, p. 1). Such “post- modern distress” (Lehman, 2006, p. 2) occurs when relationships fail and apply pressure to masculine identity (Bullock, 1994). Joining water and places fails to make Claire a gendered spectre, while obsessed by places with water Claire is not

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ECU S2, 2020: CCC32111, ASSIGNMENT 2, Option 6, “Jindabyne”

mad. She exhibits stress and horror whenever she closely observes the world she must exist in.

The most startling example occurs at book’s end, where, returning home from the funeral she finds her husband drinking whiskey (Carver, 2009, p. 74). This causes Claire to becomes fearful about their child’s safety, then finds their son is in the backyard, away from his father drinking in the kitchen, While Claire hurries her intimacy with Stuart, before their child enters their home, her mind-space again fills with that haunting, repeated phrase about water (p. 74). So much water, again signalling danger, this time to herself and their child, and even to Stuart. For their home is no place of safety.

A literary adaptation by Ray Lawrence and writer Beatrix Christian of Raymond Carver’s 1981 short novel “So Much Water So Close to Home” sits in the dark heart of Lawrence’s 2006 Australian film “Jindabyne”. Lawrence structures Carver’s 1981 core to become one strand in a bunch of “hybrid”, “multifacted” Australian Gothic narratives (Raynor, 2009, p.1). Lawrence’s most important information to his viewer is delivered by landscape. In his 2006 full-length feature film, Lawrence’s chosen landscape. His his chosen cinematography tells the viewer of history, a country and a region; Lawrence’s landscape for Carver’s “urban fiction” (McFarlane, 2006, p. 1). Lawrence displays a landscape filled with direct messages, and almost no blank spaces.

Carver’s core 1981 tale is outfitted with what seems an unnecessary emphasis on aesthetics. Lawrence recalls he said to Beatrix Christian “Let’s go where we want to set it and see what happens” (cited by McFarlane, 2006, p. 2). His 2006 film is not pictorial, rather, the natural beauty jolts in reaction to “the horror perpetuated” (McFarlane, 2006, p. 2). Into the “physical location” Lawrence structures values “fluid, uncertain or shifted“ (Rayner, 2014, p. 2), for he sites Carver’s tale in the company of other stories whose subjects are not fiction.

Auteur director Lawrence chose an arresting arena of Australian countryside. To present ideals about real, historic injustices unresolved in today’s contemporary Australia (Roberts, 2005), Lawrence deliberately “relocated” Carver’s 1981 story,

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ECU S2, 2020: CCC32111, ASSIGNMENT 2, Option 6, “Jindabyne”

and others to sit within an “anterior text”, a brilliant environment filled with dark history (McFarlane, 2006, p. 1). Lawrence’s wants landscape to function as a “superb theatre for implied violence and dark, unresolved conflict” (McFarlane, 2006, p. 3), as multiple layers of Australian Gothic tragedy.

Lawrence here explores conflict between Australia’s original people and “The Crown”. Though Carver’s 1981 story gives Lawrence “other places” gender violence “roots” (McFarlane, 2006, p. 1), Lawrence dedicates his 2006 film to indigenous actor Kevin Smith. Neil Armfield wrote of this NSW Walbunga clan elder, his deep involvement in their long unresolved land claim. His tribe call him “nuyrama”; he knows culture, the land talks to him, he can join “totems and Dreaming” (2005, p. 2). Playing tribal leader and murdered girl’s father, at film’s end Smith devises, conducts a traditional funeral pyre in the grass, and reveals that smoky place’s powers.

In his opening scene, on sleek, bitumen road snaking though primly fenced and farmed colonial-marked landscape, Lawrence deposits contemporary evidence of racial conflict. A hilly region early indigenous people knew well where he films in sacred places. Flooded lake Jindabyne now floats above and covers much evidence of those people (Curiousity Rocks, 2020). This place is not safe for the girl, Susan, an indigenous performer, who drives alone, sings, sweetly yearning “Jindabyne”. Soon she becomes horribly frightened, then violently murdered by a white man on that road in the very region her people come from within the Snowy Monaro.

Early in this 2006 film, with the viewer in freefall about what exactly is going one, Lawrence shows what appears to be firm ground. A place of safety, into homes, and family life there. For those places, with displays of inhabitants’ familial love, to cause the viewer to relax. However, they too soon become sites where family members reveal inhabitants’ important, unresolved and often barbed conflicts.

Lawrence imprints Carver’s story into that drowned region. McFarlane (2003) muses how nature supports Lawrence’s mimesis, his intention to realistically convey historic social messages of great importance. The ripples the murderer causes as he tosses in a girl’s deathly still and severely damaged body are soon forgotten by the large lake’s waters, even as he flicks his smoking cigarette down upon her. Here the

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ECU S2, 2020: CCC32111, ASSIGNMENT 2, Option 6, “Jindabyne”

viewer sees “the power of the aesthic principle… more is less (Barth, 1986, p.1), with Lawrence building Carver’s 1981 spare tone into this gender violence landscape.

a Gothic landscape in Lawrence’s 2006 film appears as the men descend steeply, down to that hidden river running though this remote region. First, they see an area already riven with huge power lines, clear signs of modern life. These powerfully affect the youngest male, he is spooked at how they drive up and down the steep hills, wires buzzing through the surrounding region, so he scrambles back up the hill to get away. Then Lawrence frames the specific places where Stewart, in the water, moves the body, ties the leg with a string to a drowned tree, each an Australian Gothic image. Emanating out of what appears to be normalcy, an established Australian tradition when responsible, reliable family men go each year to camp in an isolated place.

In the film, Lawrence shows the four men fish in this remote Nachos river. Here he supports a “parable”, via a “conscious crafting of complex narrative situations” (Raynor, 2014, p. 4). For they stand in that pristine, clear and gently flowing, magnificent waterway, wash their dishes there. Yet all the while all see a real woman’s body floats nearby (Carver, 2009, p. 69). During those days the trout they catch here prove hard. Yet the men’s actions here are far more unpalatable.

In book and film, Claire is further horrified to learn Stuart’s party stay there, and they stay a girl’s body with a tender. To get to that River Nachos, the five-mile walk with their packs over a final rough area is rationale for staying several days (Carver, 2009, p. 67). However, this year, a dead person is there before them in that place, (p. 68). This scene and its breaks function to support further Lawrence’s creation of an Australian Gothic atmosphere. This remote, Australian valley is now forever linked to the tragic decision; four men chose to keep company, here, for several days with the dead body of a girl.

Lawrence finds and uses such details from Carver’s book. His landscape echoes Carver’s 2009 questioning of the places Claire always finds herself. The beauty of Lawrence’s 2006 choice of place matches his bigger tale and he does justice with high Jindabyne, historic, Australian country mise-en-scene (Rayner, 2014, p. 1). In Lawrence’s filme he shows historic Jindabyne hold a up modern

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ECU S2, 2020: CCC32111, ASSIGNMENT 2, Option 6, “Jindabyne”

mirror (Lambert and Simpson, 2008) and shows Australia its history, how it looks today as the awful contemporary Gothic of Australia (Raynor, 2014). Yet while place here supports Lawrence’s primary mimetic desires (McFarlane, 2006), Lawrence here also reflects Carver’s equally effective creation Claire, a creature of his male- gaze horror, the unreliable environment of her mind.

Lack of place functions to ably support of writer Raymond Carver’s 1981 short story “So Much Water So Close to Home”. An abundance of place is everywhere in director Ray Lawrence’s adaptation of that story into his 2006 Australian movie “Jindabyne”. In each, place occasionally functions as comfort zone, yet generally functions to support the presentation of tragedy. Throughout, Carver reduces all unnecessary detail and causes the unsettling spectres of the mad woman and other gender violence to be functioning in every place in his story. Where his story takes place is uncertain; while he presents the mind of Claire, his sole narrator and female lead, as already unstable, still her internal voice still clearly functions as place. For Claire’s mind is the lens through which the reader views all other places of Carver’s story, inside, outside and around the key characters’ home. Which home also functions as the departure point for mostly dangerous journeys. Lawrence discards Carver’s narrative strategy. He choses instead to film his larger, far bigger and entwined version of Carver’s core story, with two of its journeys, in a strange, historic, outback and relocated town and its surrounding, drowned region. An eerie, uniquely Australian landscape. Lawrence’s chosen place functions to superbly assist him, auteur with a great grasp on cinematography, to develop and display his unique form of contemporary Australian Gothic tragedy.

Reference
Armfield, N. (2005, September 24). A Great Spirit Now Returns to the Land.

Sydney Morning Herald.

Barth, J. (1986, December 28). A Few Words About Minimalism. Byline. Book Review Desk. New York Times.

Berryman, C. (1990). Decade of Novels: Fiction of the 1970s: Form and Challenge. Whitston.

Bullock, C. J. (1994). From Castle to Cathedral: The Architecture of Masculinity

In R. Carver’s “Cathedral.”

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ECU S2, 2020: CCC32111, ASSIGNMENT 2, Option 6, “Jindabyne”

The Journal of Men’s Studies, 2(4), 343–351. https://doi.org/10.3149/jms.0204.343

Carver, R. (2009). ‘So much water so close to home’.
In R. Carver, What we talk about when we talk about love. Vintage. (Original work published 1981)

Curiousity Rocks. (2020). New South Wales Government

Department of Environment and Heritage. https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5063428

Kleppe

Lambert, A., & Simpson, C. (2008). Jindabyne’s Haunted Alpine Country: Producing (an) Australian Badland. M/C Journal, 11(5). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.81

Hallett, C. W. (1990) Minimalism and the Short Story: Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel,

and Mary Robinson. Mellen.

, S. L. (2006). Women and Violence in the Stories of Raymond Carver.

Journal of the Short Story in English

http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/497

. 46 | Spring.

Lawrence, R. (Director). (2006). Jindabyne [Film]. April Films.
Lehman, D. W. (2006). Symbolic Significance in the Stories of Raymond Carver.

Chercher. Open Edition Journals. Spring. Special Issue, 75-88 McFarlane, B. (2006). Locations and Relocations: Jindabyne and Macbeth.

Metro Magazine. Issue 150. Bauer Media Group.

Mosley, J. (2006). Senior Paper. Sinking the Titanic: The Iceberg and its Minimalist Implications In

Raymond Carver’s Fiction. The University of North Carolina.

http://toto.lib.unca.edu/sr_papers/literature_sr/srliterature_2006/mozley_john. pdf

Place. (2020). In Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English. Place. (2020). In Oxford Learner’s Dictionary of Academic English.

Rayner, J. (2014). Adapting Australian Film: Ray Lawrence from Bliss to Jindabyne. Studies in Australasian Cinema 3(3), 295-308
DOI: 10.1386/sac.3.3.295_1

Roberts, G. (2015). Discrepant Traumas: Colonial Legacies in Jindabyne. In A. Ward

(Ed.). Postcolonial Traumas. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137526434_11

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Absolutely no disrespect here from one who is involved. Lately ​I’ve thought a lot about the whole ‘domestic’ violence ‘thing’​ and this piece is my drawing together of some ideas –  at a most early stage.

​My thoughts accelerated in Melbourne when I happened to attend a commemorative event for a wonderful friend, Lorraine Elliot. ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), in concert with Lorraine’s family, launched a new​ partnership/foundation, the “Lorraine Elliot AM Education Fund”. ACMI’s promotional flyer state the intent is to provide strong education support for girls/ladies.

At the event the guests previewed “Suffragettes”, the movie. A fitting, engaging event, memorable for various complicated reasons I am still devolving. Firstly, because the movie is extraordinarily powerful in itself.

Secondly, this vital story provided an eloquent demonstration of the huge power inherent in the medium. The story and the communication medium worked to superbly convey a strong cultural message.

Third, in this cultural commodity  is a vital message, yet it is a message currently under concerted attack – and by attacks in extraordinarily diverse forms. Attacks consistently carried out throughout the world.

Forth, this message in the movie and the story properly delivered – to an audience which contained a most powerful, and ‘estranged’ key public.

And, fifthly, post-viewing it was stunningly clear this movie succeeded in converting attitudes held by some number of that important audience. As a result, b​eing in the ACMI​ centre immediately after the movie was electrifying. Why so?

Well, firstly, Lorraine Elliot was widely loved and admired on many levels. So, in addition to many girls and ladies, a great many men, young and old, were in the audience.
​
Electrifying, because of the large number – of men – who could be heard admitting, often with bewilderment, the movie had stunned them, shown them many matters (about life as another sex, in their own environment) they were unaware of – till then.

After the movie one young man said to me:”it’s a movie that should be mandatory viewing for every single male”.

This, and other open and honest male admissions starkly demonstrated, to me, as committed student of our modern communication modes & of many of our puzzling problems today, how many of our ‘cross-gender’ and other difficulties stem from an unknowing-ness of all others.

So this was an extraordinary evening, the movie, the prior and post events. All caused me to think deeply about a second matter, a subject that is always with us.

How  how we (any/all ‘people/s’ – as that’s what we ALL are, even today) communicate. If you will, (as I’m quite sure you can, in your mind’s eye), visualise. That which we engage in every second of every day – communication. Consider for a few minutes each of two examples – of various key parts of ‘discrimination in communication as subject’:

Why – is “Domestic Violence” so appallingly, improperly, and inappropriately titled? What should this monstrous matter be termed?

W​hy – do we ‘​need’ a “Minister for Women”? When, apparently we don’t need, as we don’t have, (do we, in any form?) a “Minister for Men”? Why don’t we properly rid ourselves of this contradiction?

Possibly because we are, all, so very often, still, totally unaware. Yet very possibly, you, as have I, come across these types of ‘divide’ many times in the past. Like me, you have possibly discussed this matter – in terms related to matters other than ‘communication’.

What occurs (it seems to me) is:  unless we ‘ordinary people’ have experienced that “thing” (whatever it may be) – personally, in some manner – we often cannot actually ‘enter’ into visualising the matter properly.

So we cannot understand – as we cannot teach ourselves what is actually occurring to the other person, or persons, what they are experiencing in their space.Each about the other, equally. I propose we begin an identification of processes that will give us these skills.

Peace, love, justice, laughter, happiness, X old Susanne