Babakiueria

This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire.


This is a work that I don't feel all that well equipped for, as it was made by Australians for Australians about Australian race relations in the 1970's and 1980's. I'm not Australian, I've never been to Australia, and I only know the very, very broad strokes of the country's colonial history. So, I'm sure there's a lot in this 1986 short film that's going over my head. I'll try my best, but I'm warning you all ahead of time that my best is likely to still be lacking.

Babakiueria is a mockumentary, purportedly from a dream-logic-y alternate world in which dark skinned people (played mostly by Australian aboriginal actors) have settler-colonized a continent inhabited by native white people. The title comes from the opening scene, in which dark-skinned explorers wearing 17th century European uniforms land on the shore (in anachronistic motorboats, for some reason) and plant a bizarre flag on the soil before the baffled eyes of some white picknickers. When the captain asks one of the natives what his people call this place, he says "Um...it's a barbecue area." To which the captain replies "Babakiueria. I like it."

Over two centuries later, the nation of Babakiueria has declared independence from the bizarro-European empire that established it, and a supermajority of dark-skinned settlers have taken almost everything and pushed the white "Native Babakiuerians" into ghettos and reservations. The rest of the movie is a proper mockumentary, following a Babakiuerian anthropologist as she tries(***) to explore the state of the modern Native Babakiuerian community and its difficulties integrating into mainstream society.

Think along the lines of "Live From Joburg," the short film that "District 9" was eventually adapted from. All the way down to the comically unsympathetic narrator.

The mockumentary rotates between three basic types of clips. Some are from the time the anthropologist spent living with a native family on their reservation (which looks like a whitebread suburb, only with less maintained houses and lawns). Some are taken from interviews with Babakieuran politicians and police officers overseeing the native communities. Some are free-floating coverage of traditional Native Babaqieuran cultural practices and social events, filtered through the most paternalistic whiggish lens imaginable.

The strongest bits are probably the ones where she's interviewing the host family about how they feel about their treatment by the government, and "innocently" reminding them that there will be thousands of black Babaqieurans watching this so they should choose their words to make sure they have the desired impact. The actors they got for the parents do a really good job at portraying strenuously-suppressed terror as they whisper platitudes about how things are okay, they get how it is, there's maybe some room for improvement but things are mostly fine, really.

This hits its most intense point toward the end of the video, when their older child gets taken away to be raised by a black family, and they have to smile for the camera and talk about how glad they are for the greater opportunities this will give her. The narrator says that she understands how sad they must feel; it's like that time she had to say goodbye to her own mother, before she went away on vacation one time.

When the family's younger child tries to speak up in earnest, his father drags him away from the camera whispering about how if he's not careful they're going to lose him too. The narrator doesn't seem to notice.

...

Apparently, Australia was doing this well up until the 1970's. Generally in the case of aboriginal children who had white blood in them, but probably not exclusively that case.

I figured Australia had a history of this, since most of the Anglo settler states do. I didn't realize they were doing it more recently than, eg, Canada. So, I learned something.

...

Another standout was the interview segments with the Babaquieran "Minister of White Affairs," especially when he had to justify his approval for a project that would expropriate a huge section of native land - with a financial district, major roadways, and suburbs in it - to set up a nature preserve.

Apparently, this character is based on John Bjelke-Peterson, who governed the state of Queensland throughout the seventies and eighties. He seems to have pioneered a lot of the extra-deranged rightwing policies that the Australian federal government itself has adopted in more recent years. Aside from being about 95% Hitler with regards to labor rights, aboriginal rights, and the environment, he was apparently making it illegal for women to travel out of state to get abortions in the seventies. Might have directly inspired the current US Republican party on a few policies.

The narrator tries to ask him hard-hitting questions, but she folds so quickly - and effectively falls back on his own positions in more pseudo-humanitarian terms during her solo segments - that she doesn't even seem like a well-meaning liberal ignoramus so much as a malicious rightwing plant hired to legitimize the new expropriations. The most suspect bit was when, right after teetering on the edge of acknowledging the existence of state violence against the natives, the narrator shifted gears and did some cultural coverage of native traditions that glorify death and violence - like Veteran's Day parades and sportsball tournaments - in order to immediately construct the narrative of a bloodthirsty warrior culture that requires fire to be fought with fire. I don't think I've seen well-meaning liberal ignoramuses do this. I have seen rightwing concern trolls do it. At least, in the countries I'm more familiar with.

Maybe that was the intent of the filmmakers, maybe it wasn't, but that's how she comes across to me. Again, if I was more familiar with Australian politics I might have a better idea of what she's coded as.

...

Another interviewee is a white "pick me" police chief who's been leading crackdowns against what are theoretically his own people. Implicitly a result of either an "adoption" program like the one we saw the host family be victims of, or just a profoundly cynical and/or self-hating individual. He's able to be more openly, vocally racist than the politician is, on account of his skin color giving him a pass. Presumably, that's the entire point of him holding the office that he holds.

Alongside this character, we see a recurring clip of some black schoolchildren singing a racist nursery rhyme about white drunkenness and suicidality, only to be joined in the last few instances by a couple of white classmates standing at the periphery of their little throng.

The final few clips have the host family dispossessed of their house and property, not too long after the loss of their daughter. They get shipped off to a barren wilderness somewhere with the clothes on their back and little else as part of an "opportunity program" meant to foster prosperity via adversity. The son runs away, and is implied by the final shot to have become a terrorist of some stripe. The narrator has her most punchable line at all when, after seeing the now-childless couple being driven away, she emotes about how she'll always remember her time with them fondly, and how she's sure they will do the same for her.

...

The reason I describe this as a dream-logic world is because...well...the sense of time and place are sort of all over the place in this movie. That's probably intentional, to add an extra layer of more lighthearted humor to contrast the hard-hitting social commentary, but I personally found it more confusing than it was worth. Probably a me problem rather than a movie problem, but like...for example, in the opening scene we see the natives wearing modern white person clothes and barbequing steak and hot dogs around modern-looking grills and park benches. The invaders are wearing 16-1700's naval uniforms, but landing in modern-ish motor boats.

In the modern mockumentary section, it seems like we're still at the same tech level. While we see the struggle of traditional Native Babaquieran lifestyles trying to persist in the modern world - depicted as crumbling underfunded suburbs and crumbling underfunded commercial districts with crumbling, underfunded eight lane highways connecting them, that the anthropologist narrator cringily exoticizes with every word she speaks over this footage - we never even get a look at what the colonizers' society looks like and how it differs. The most we get to see is the inside of a politician's office and a few rooms of a police department. I understand that imagining a whole alternate society for these bizarro-settlers would be both beyond the scope of what the movie is trying to do and undermine part of the joke, but like...I don't know, my autistic-ass mind just has trouble engaging with this without constantly banging these questions against it.

I guess part of it is that the aspects of traditional whiteness being played with here - the suburban sprawl, the giant highways and parking lots, etc - are things that only exist because of the conditions of settler colonialism in our own world. There's a reason you find so much more of this shit in America and Australia than you do in England. Which once again forces me to wonder what the hell the settler Barbaquieran cities look like, if they were built in identical conditions but apparently don't look anything like this.

...

Anyway. People who ARE more familiar with Australia seem to almost unanimously love this movie. The fact that this film was largely created by aborigines certainly vouches for its sincerity, if nothing else. I personally liked it, both for the cunning bits of double-edged humor and for how well it aligns with what I know about the patterns of late Anglosphere colonialism in general, but I'm just not familiar enough with the concrete details of Australia to feel more strongly. If I was, maybe I'd outright love this piece. Or maybe I'd be more critical of it.