I Would Like to See It: The Proposition

The archetypal Western takes place at the line of demarcation between so-called civilization and barbarism, plumbing the limits and nature of both forces. Nick Cave and John Hillcoat’s The Proposition seems at first to tread similar ground, pitting the civilizing Australian colonial force exemplified by captain Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone) against the Burns gang, three brothers of varying levels of criminal brutality ranging from young, naive Mike Burns (Richard Wilson) to jaded outlaw Charlie (Guy Pearce) and on into the savage hinterlands of human cruelty with eldest brother Arthur (Danny Huston), a roving brigand who delights in rape and murder. Yet from the first fly spotted crawling across Captain Stanley’s broad, flushed mug, the security civilization promises is laced with visible decay. Its artifice exists to punish, its artistry and culture to celebrate that punishment. During a climactic scene a young man with a high, clear voice sings beautifully and longingly of Ireland as he rapes a woman, conjoining a sort of nascent proto-nationalism to the body of barbaric violence.

Wherever structure and connection form, atrocity follows. Charlie’s pact with Captain Stanley, meant to sacrifice a little justice in pursuit of a greater good, costs him the lives of both his brothers, leads to the rape of Stanley’s wife Martha (Emily Watson) and destroys Stanley’s career. The Burns gang itself as a family unit both biological and ersatz enables Arthur’s violent impulses just as the organization of the film’s nameless frontier town enables both Mikey’s horrific punishment for another man’s crime and the wanton slaughter of Aboriginal Australians as a scapegoat for general “disorder” in the area. Order itself in the sense of Western civilization is a machine, and the product it manufactures is the destruction of all other ways of being as well as the immiseration of its own citizens. It is, to quote David Roth, a “blank, sucking nullity” which permits for nothing but its own eternal re-justification through bloodshed. As Mikey is whipped to death by order of town magnate Eden Fletcher (David Wenham) you can see it happening in real time, the crowd first insisting on a spectacle of mortification, then becoming repulsed by said spectacle, then convincing themselves it was necessary, thus setting the stage for its repetition.

Throughout the film, Hillcoat’s camera lingers on emptiness and dereliction, many shots framed small and low under the yawning Australian sky. With Charlie we walk in silence through the wreckage of a house his brother burned. The Burns gang itself resides in an open-ended canyon, a negative space worn into the world by a force long since departed. Flies swarm over everything and everyone, feasting on a dead world that hasn’t yet come to understand its own destruction as colonialist violence thrashes wildly, coils tangled like ship’s knots, fangs sunk into its own body. It has nothing to offer the world it has killed. “What’ll you do now?” a dying Arthur asks Charlie as the film draws to a close. The two brothers sit side by side at the edge of the desert, framed by its sunset void. Charlie doesn’t answer.