The gardern is yours, I will take the kitchen

Week 6 – Suburban Mayhem

The period of 1990s saw the uprising new trend for both the film-makers and the social topography – the discovery of the suburbia. As educational opportunities spread to incorporate more women, so did the film industry, bearing more stories told from women, who now had more authority with knowledge over their creative products. It was, then, a natural progress to see the shift in the themes of films of this era from the outback to the domestic situations, as women still spent more time at home than the man. The suburbia, a blind-spot caught between the central city (urban) and the rural, was considered to have no worth for attention, perhaps because the Australian narratives had/have strong associations with the land. According to this, the suburbia would have no characteristics of the Australian culture without belonging to neither of the opposite ends of the spectrum. This was, however, proven to be wrong by the female story-tellers, who resided in the suburbia to witness the hybridity of characteristics of the two ends mysteriously dwelling in their suburbia culture as Simpson phrases, ‘ Australian suburbia is a bizarre, mysterious and even threatening place – but far from aesthetically empty’ (Simpson, 1999). Moreover, it seems that the portrayal of the backyard of these houses reveals a lot about the revolutionary changes of the gender power relations of the time.

As a common notion, male figures usually maintain the backyard while female figures are taking care of the inside of the house. The depiction of this notion in films can already be taken as a metaphor of equalisation of the different sex, for the male figures on screen are taken back home from the empowering and emphasising outback, to share an equal amount of household work. The configured balance of these two separate parts of the house (inside the house and the backyard) sums up to ‘a sphere of cultural (and domestic) maintenance’ (Simpson, 1999). As the mother burns the unmaintained backyard prior to the suicide, the corruption of the family is revealed through the depiction of the backyard – Perry abandoning his responsibility to mow the lawn, the absence of the father and Muriel and Tony’s inability to alter the situation. The analysis of the backyard that appears in Muriel’s Wedding (P.J. Hogan), provides a perfect guide to understanding the shift of power from the masculine to the feminine in both domestic and social sense.

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