Six cultural preoccupations over the last month

Vale Blue Murder director Michael Jenkins

I was sad to heard of the passing at the age of only 77 of Australian director, producer and scriptwriter, Michael Jenkins. He was a significant presence on Australian screens, but it was on the small screen that he really made his mark.

His breakthrough work was the three-part 1983 series on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Scales of Justice. It was incredibly controversial for its time because of the focus on New South Wales police corruption, something everyone knew about at the time but seldom talked about publicly. Episode one followed a young police constable whose idealism is slowly devoured by the corruption he witnesses on the job. The following two episodes moved up the political ladder to reveal malfeasance at more senior levels of the police and political class.

Jenkins then directed what I would argue remains the single best piece of true crime television made in Australia, the two-part 1995 series, Blue Murder. He did a lot of other things, including helping to create the iconic Australian youth oriented television dramas, Heartbreak High, which ran from 1994 to 1999, and directing episodes of the underrated and now largely forgotten 1990s Australian crime drama, Wildside.

But it is undoubtedly Blue Murder that is major legacy. The show premiered on the ABC in September 1995, but was delayed in New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory until 2001 due to its potential influence on a legal case involving Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith, brilliantly played by played by Tony Martin in the series. After Queensland’s Fitzgerald inquiry in the late 1980s, police corruption was a major topic of public debate and, just as the economy was being deregulated by the then Labor government, so too was organised crime.

Blue Murder is set in Sydney in the 1970s and early 1980s and has two interrelated plot strands. The first is the relationship between Smith and former police detective Roger ‘The Dodger’ Rogerson (Richard Roxburgh), following Rogerson’s decision to grant Smith the ‘green light’ to commit crime without fear of police reprisal. The second deals with undercover cop Michael Drury (Steve Bastoni), who refuses Rogerson’s bribe to not testify against Melbourne heroin dealer Alan Williams (Marcus Graham). In retribution, Rogerson helps Williams arrange for Christopher ‘Mr Rent-a-Kill’ Flannery (Gary Sweet) to kill Drury. Drury survives the hit but is seriously injured.

There are several aspects to Blue Murder that make it so interesting. While it does not exactly glamorise Rogerson and Smith, neither does it depict their relationship entirely unsympathetically. And while it forms part of a rich heritage of gritty local true crime oriented television that dates back to programs like Homicide, it also radically breaks with it.

Through his relationship with Rogerson, Smith becomes involved in Sydney’s burgeoning heroin trade, a task he approaches with the zeal of a self-made 1980s entrepreneur. Rogerson meanwhile embodies the malevolent inversion of the clean-cut, by-the-rules police officers of earlier Australian television shows. Indeed, he is a rare Australian example of the characters in the American tradition of hard-charging cops who are not afraid to cross the line to fight crime, and then become criminals themselves. As Rogerson describes his job: ‘The only thing standing between your average punter and total anarchy is someone like me.’ Yet, despite this, he doesn’t put in long hours combing witness statements and interviewing suspects. ‘Real police work,’ he says in one of his voice overs, ‘the sort that puts hardened criminals behind bars, means forming relationships with people you wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire.’ In addition to organising a hit on Drury, Rogerson is shown destroying the career of a young policeman who refuses to release one of Rogerson’s informers, whom he has inadvertently arrested. There have also been unproven allegations he was involved, along with Smith, in the murder of sex worker Sallie-Anne Huckstepp (Loene Carmen in the show), after she goes on national television to talk about police corruption. Her murder remains unsolved and is unlikely to ever be as all the suspects are now dead.

I don’t want to be that person caught in a never ending spiral of lauding old culture as superior to new but watch at Scales of Justice and Underbelly (both of which are on YouTube) and marvel at how good they are compared to sensational tabloid garbage of recent local offerings, such as the Underbelly series.

The Long Seventies podcast: The People’s Temple and Jonestown

Podcast listening is not a habit I have ever got into, and there are only a handful I listen to with some regularity, including The Projection Booth, John Bleasdale’s Writers on Film, Twitch of the Death and Breakfast in the Ruins. Full disclosure, I may also sometimes appear on these shows. Anyway, to this select group I have now added The Long Seventies.

I have listened to one or two of their episodes in the past, but what has really brought me on board as a more regular listening was their recent episode on the Reverent Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. It is a long listen, which I completed on a lengthy return drive from depositing my daughter in Brisbane to start university but, if you ca find the time, it is well worth the effort. I have always thought of my as pretty full bottle on the history of Jones, but I got so much out of this episode, including his early background, his surprisingly progressive racial politics, and his links to very prominent players in 1970s San Francisco politics (such as Harvey Milk). It also featured a very thoughtful discussion of the nature of cults and how they evolve. Recommended.

Red Rocket (2021)

Sean Baker’s Red Rocket has been on my TBW list for ages and I finally got around to seeing it. The story revolves around a washed up Los Angeles porn star, Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), who is forced to return to the one horse town of his birth, on Texas’s Gulf Coast, after it all goes pear shaped in the city of dreams, for reasons we are never really clear about.

So many films set in the American deep south come across as poverty porn peopled by shallow, cliched characters. Baker certainly doesn’t pull any punches about the mostly depressing reality of small town life in the south, but Saber is a terrific character. A manipulative, opportunity self-focused hustler, who is also a completely unreliable narrator. But despite all this, you can’t help but find yourself barracking for him to get out of the mess he has made in one piece. Key to the film’s plot is Saber’s relationship with Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a young, whip smart, sexually experienced beyond her years almost eighteen old, who desperately wants to get out of town, and who Saber believes could be his meal ticket to re-entry into the LA porn scene as her manager.

Dune: Part Two

Given that this has just come out and, no doubt, a lot of you have not seen it, I am not going to say too much about Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to the first Dune film, except that I loved it and would’ve happily sat through another two hours of it. I especially dug the world building not all of which, from memory at least, is not in Frank Herbert’s novel. Indeed, this film made me want to re-read the book, which I last did in my early twenties. I believe he is now going to tackle the next book in the Dune cycle, Dune Messiah, published in 1969, and I am totally down for it.

Quatermass (1979)

I recently guested on one of the aforementioned podcasts, Breakfast in the Ruins, on the subject of the 1979 ITV television series, Quatermass. That meant, over the last couple of months I have also back and watched/rewatched The Quatermass Experiment (1955), Quatermass II: The Enemy from Space (1957) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). It was my third time on Breakfast in the Ruins and, as was the case with my previous appearances, Andy, who hosts, and myself covered a lot of territory: 1950s Cold War culture, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alfonso Cuaron’s 2006 film, Children of Men, 1970s New English Library paperbacks, and, via a long digression into the career of British actor Percy Herbert, the 1978 film, The Wild Geese, amongst many other topics.

I will, of course, alert readers to where they can listen to the episode when it is live.