The extraordinary American success of the Australian film Crocodile Dundee has made it a good time to be an Australian in American. Instead of asking if one is British, or South African, people recognize the Australian accent, the America's Cup, the ANZUS Alliance, Robert Hughes' book on Australia's convict origins. Paul Hogan's tourism commercials and most of all his film, Crocodile Dundee, have all contributed to a small American vogue for Australia.
Australian Mateship
That Crocodile Dundee would be a huge success in Australia was to be expected. Hogan has become through his many television shows a national hero in Australia, an embodiment of national myths about maleness, Australian mateship, egalitarianism, and the right attitude toward life.
That his first venture into film should be such a success in America is more remarkable. The humor of small, idiosyncratic, and geographically isolated societies tends to travel badly and that of Australia is no exception. Australian humor is too laconic, sometimes too understated, too bound up in legends of bushmanship and social pathologies of alcohol and sexual segregation to be easily understood beyond its own shores. There are too many in-jokes, too many national code words.
Crocodile Dundee, a relatively small-budget film without a single star known to American audiences, does not at first glance look like a winner in the United States. The pace is slow, the story slight. There is no adventure, almost no sex, not much characterization. The film has only one plot gimmick - taking a bushman from the outback of Australia's isolated Northern Territory and forcing him to cope with the most sophisticated city in the world, the Big Apple. Even that gimmick, the innocent in New York, is hardly original. Yet Crocodile Dundee is a remarkably well-constructed film. Within its genre of light comedy, it is one of the best films Australia has ever produced.
Light comedy is a deceptively difficult genre in which to succeed. More perhaps then any other form, it demands of its practitioners that art which conceals an art. Its greatest exponent in the modern novel is P.G. Wodehouse; it is impossible to imagine a more precise, economical, or entertaining prose stylist. Yet, for the most part, the literati fail to recognize the genius of Wodehouse. They cannot fully appreciate the pearls he casts before them because of the genre in which he works. They cannot believe that the most striking and original metaphors in modern novels are to be found in stories about the romantic foibles of amiable young nincompoops in English country houses.
As E.M. Forster pointed out in that classic pamphlet, Aspects of the Novel, the novel must first of all tell a story. Social comment, psychological insight, even stylistic pyrotechnics are dependent on the success of the storytelling. G.K. Chesterton made the same point when he rightly observed that he was not really a very good novelist because he preferred to see ideas nakedly doing battle with each other, rather than dressed up as characters - which is not to say that a good novel may not be underpinned by profound ideas.
Least Likely Genre
Light comedy, in
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