Gabrielle Murray - Bad Boy Bubby

Bad Boy Bubby

Controversies

Series editors: Stevie Simkin and Julian Petley

Controversies is a series comprising individual studies of controversial films from the late 1960s to the present day, encompassing classic, contemporary Hollywood, cult and world cinema. Each volume provides an in-depth study analysing the various stages of each films production, distribution, classification and reception, assessing both its impact at the time of its release and its subsequent legacy.

Also published

Jude Davies, Falling Down

Shaun Kimber, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

Neal King, The Passion of the Christ

Peter Krmer, A Clockwork Orange

Gabrielle Murray, Bad Boy Bubby

Stevie Simkin, Straw Dogs

Forthcoming

Julian Petley, Crash

Lucy Burke, The Idiots

Tim Palmer, Irreversible

The Controversies series is a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about what limits if any should be placed on cinema when it comes to the depiction and discussion of extreme subject matter. Sober, balanced and insightful where much debate on these matters has been hysterical, one-sided and unhelpful, these books should help us get a perspective on some of the thorniest films in the history of cinema.

Kim Newman, novelist, critic and broadcaster

Bad Boy Bubby

Gabrielle Murray

Gabrielle Murray 2013

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First published 2013 by

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Acknowledgements

There are many people I would like to thank for their support and for their help in the preparation of this manuscript. Thank you to Rob Conkie for suggesting me as the author of this study. I am grateful to my editor Stevie Simkin for his patience and his insightful feedback, which greatly added to the clarity of the work. Ross Schnioffsky, research librarian at La Trobe University, made insightful contributions in the early stages of the work. Thank you to my postgraduate students Rajdeep Roy, for his technical advice, and Jade Jonteff, for her diligence as a research assistant. I am also thankful for the support of my colleagues in Media: screen + sound at La Trobe University.

As always, I am entirely indebted to my family the Murrays and most importantly to Robert Beullens, who acted as both sounding board and reader, and who makes every day richer and sweeter.

All screen captures are taken from Bad Boy Bubby, 2 Disc (Collectors Edition), Umbrella Entertainment, Australia, July 2005.

Introduction

whose genitrice keeps him imprisoned in a claustrophobic, windowless hovel. Terrifying him with tales of divine retribution and a toxic world whose polluted air will instantly kill him, Bubbys mother/keeper Florence (Claire Benito) ensures his submission to her physical and mental abuse. In a perfunctory way, she feeds him, shaves him and washes him, and then at night she mounts him for her own sexual pleasure. Physically a man, yet emotionally a child, Bubby is hopelessly dependent on his captor/abuser to the point where incest is normalized and it becomes one of his only pleasures. His world is torn apart when his father, a charlatan and a sleaze, appears, usurping Bubby as his mothers lover. In this twisted, philosophical Candide style fable (Rouyer and Ciment, 1995, p. 4), Bubby murders his drunken parents, suffocating them with cling wrap, and then escapes into what for him is the unknown real world.

From the moment the Australian director Rolf de Heers fourth feature, Bad Boy Bubby, took flight on the festival circuit in 1993, to its re-release in various DVD forms beginning in 2005, the film has polarized audiences. My brief description of its content is enough to suggest the films uniqueness, but also its confrontational nature. While this volume will endeavour to examine how and why (on the festival circuit and during its first release) Bad Boy Bubby produced such conflicting responses from audiences, critics and classification and review boards, it will also assess its status nearly two decades on. What we can confidently say about Bad Boy Bubby is that it is still a film that ignites powerful and diverse responses. In the last decade, the various ways in which the film has been discussed include: a theological inquiry as to its stake in the idea of redemption (Stephens, 2011); a critical analysis of its experimentation with the use of multiple cinematographers and binaural recording (Cat Hope, 2004; Hicky-Moody and Iocco, 2004); as an exploration of representations of mental and physical disability (Ellis, 2008); and as a subject of grassroots activism with the film listed by online animal-rights communities and individual bloggers as one to boycott. As I will discuss later in the section on animal cruelty and the cinema, Bad Boy Bubby is high on the hit list of many humane-society websites as a film to avoid due to its treatment of animals, specifically cats.

Censored by some and reviled by others, Bad Boy Bubby won numerous festival awards, including the prestigious Jury Prize at the 1993 Venice Film Festival. Today its impact on audiences seems to be just as strong; yet its legacy is difficult to assess. It is a film with a reputation that everyone has an opinion on; its a one of kind both a winner of a religious award and a film that was boycotted due to claims that a cat was tortured to death on screen (de Heer, 2010b). What is surprising, however, is that, despite all the hoopla, there is a paucity of sustained research on the film. De Heer has made a significant contribution to screen culture with the production of documentaries, television programmes and feature films. His thirteenth feature, The King Is Dead