Hello there,
I’m sharing my wicked little piece that is a response to ‘The Dressmaker’. I hope you like it.
Sample response ‘The Dressmaker’ – note that I haven’t used a prompt.
Socially excluded, Mad Molly lives on the outskirts of Dungatar, at arm’s reach from the small-minded townsfolk in Jocelyn Moorehouses’s 2015 film noir The Dressmaker. Quintessentially mad according to stereotypes of crazy ladies – think Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, and Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre fame, she is unpredictable, challenging conventional 1950’s norms, and as a result, the good folk of Dungatar treat her with mistrust. My Uncle Mick is mad. He got a life ban from his local IGA for upsetting the manager. When I was eight, he took pot shots at our Jack Russell Rocko whilst we took cover, and when my mum was a kid, and he was a young lad, she received, for straying onto his veggie patch, a pitch-fork through the leg. Uncle Mick’s behavior is extreme and that he has anger management issues is beyond dispute. However, my take on Mick is that there is a bit of the cray cray going on there, backed up by lengthy stories of his exploits, a narrative fine-tuned over 78 years and quantified furthermore by my personal encounters with a man who does not, as Hamlet does, feign madness, but for whom madness is the sum total of the man himself. The difference between Mad Molly and my Uncle Mick is that Molly is a product of social exclusion, whilst Uncle Mick’s maladaptive penchant for upsetting the status quo seems to be a result of some genetic anomaly that definitely has not mutated into our family.
Cinematically, the fictional town of Dungatar is a washed-out patchwork of tonal beiges, the purple haze of sunset muting, as Tilly Dunnage asserts ‘I’m home you bastards’ the midday harshness that eats its way into the paintwork of weather-worn houses that are as colorless as the people who inhabit them. The Golden Fleece fuel sign and Singer sewing machine illuminated in the evening gloam signify the unchangeability of a community where outsiders must save themselves by escaping. Imbuing the lifelessness of the town with a color born out of a creative knack for designing dresses and honed under the tutelage of Parisian Designer Madame Vionnet, the cosmopolitan Tilly Dunnage is by virtue of a past that has been mythologised, both a threat and an enigma. The incongruity of her couture in this 1950’s wheat-belt town establishes Tilly as Mad Molly’s daughter, a woman who ‘doesn’t get out much these days’. Left to languish in a stupor of filth, our first encounter with the infamous woman is of an ailing bed-ridden mother who has seemingly lost her mind – one of the tell-tale signs of madness perhaps? She fails to recognise her daughter, retorting, ‘I don’t even know who you are’. Infusing the story, fragments of Tilly’s childhood memories elicit disturbing impressions of the past. The chemist’s finger-pointing, ‘Your mother’s a slut and you’re a bastard’ become formative character references that stigmatise the pair and establish a legacy that builds towards the inevitable label of madness that taints them both. Contesting this story, Tilly returns to remember the past so that she can rid herself of the label of murderer that defines her. Accused of murdering Stuart Pettyman as a ten-year-old, she implores her mother to remember so that she can break a curse and challenge the legend surrounding her name.
Perhaps the taboo around madness and mad people is that they speak truths no one wants to hear. Indeed in The Dressmaker, both Tilly and Molly become scapegoats, enabling the perpetuation of secrets that mask double lives. On a personal quest to challenge the script and free herself from the burden of guilt, the act of remembering is, for Tilly, a rewriting of an identity that the fashion halls of Paris cannot remodel. The increasing urgency to unburden herself of claims peddled by scape-goaters and cultivated by a community for whom duplicity and deception are ingrained motivates Tilly’s homecoming. Populating the story, the double lives of Constable Ferrat, and the lecherous Evan Pettyman, amongst others, are gradually revealed. The stakes are high as the myth of Tilly Dunnage as a ‘murderer and a curse’ must be firmly upheld.
Uncle Mick is a successful businessman and, once as a sergeant in the Federal Police force, was responsible for the policing of half of Melbourne. Ordering the entire fleet to stand down and attend his then-girlfriend’s 21st birthday party, he wielded his power like he wielded his firearms, with reckless abandon. Once when an equally mad Slovakian in a siege situation held a gun to a hapless victim’s temple, Mick instructed all attending police officers to knick off. Subbing in for the victim, he became the recipient of a handgun to the head. All ended well with the two downing tumblers of Scotch into the early hours at the assailant’s house. After talks with the Slovakian Ambassador to Australia, the criminal was secretly deported and never seen again. Another time, Uncle Mick deliberately set off gunshots, dispersing a mob of Hereford cattle that drovers were resting for the night. He boasts about the mayhem he caused. Proud of his fox-like cunning, Mick skytes about successfully contesting the 27 charges laid against him after leading police on a merry dance around the northern suburbs of Melbourne in a Datsun 180b. Law enforcement officer and offender, madness seems to inure Mick to the paradoxes of his past. As an avid fisherman, he once contacted the media, telling them the story of the 3kg trout he caught in the Maribyrnong River. Pictured on the front page of the Herald Sun, the midshot of man and fish was a complete hoax; he’d netted the fish on a trip in the mountains.
Madness or high jinx? There is a fine line between the theatrical antics of a larger-than-life character and a pathological social miscreant. But there is something of the unhinged about Uncle Mick. During the summer break, we paid Mick a visit – the boys were keen to do some fishing down the coast. Setting off in the early morning dawn with boats in tow, I travelled with Mick whilst the boys tailed us. It was blowing an easterly, so we headed for the other side of the bay, a ten-minute car trip. Nearly clipping a cyclist, Mick muttered something about having no time for those bastards. Without the luxury of a shoulder, the cyclist had to hold his ground. Clancy, my eldest son, later asked Mick whether he saw the cyclist’s feeble one-finger salute, a powerless remonstrance against the road rage of one unforgiving uncle. ‘Don’t look in the rear vision mirror’ was Mick’s response. ‘And that’s true for life’, he followed up, and I wondered at this moment about a man for whom introspectivity got in the way of things. I think that for the truly mad, moments of reckoning are perhaps unassailable red lights and there can be no line drawn in the sand for those who choose to run the gauntlet. As a rule-breaker, Mad Molly is punished. Giving birth to a fatherless daughter, Molly’s adulterate actions necessitate a kind of amnesia; she wilfully forgets the past, freeing herself from the guilt that is not her own. Equally, for her daughter, remembering becomes the only way of liberating herself from the guilt that is not hers to take on. So I wonder about the way we tally up our actions and account for our sins, and I wonder perhaps about the truly mad who seemingly wear their teflon-coated armour and soldier through life wrecking things without taking any prisoners along the way.
In the end, both Tilly and Molly look in the rearview mirror and find the truth that is denied them. Memory empowers them, but for Tilly, community acceptance does not follow as she redefines the past and, with the help of Barney’s testimony, confirms that Stuart Pettyman, horns locked in his bull-like stance, is the author of his demise. Launching himself at her, Tilly in true matador fashion steps aside. She is innocent. Revealing ‘he done it to himself’, Barney releases Tilly from the myth of a curse that Molly tells the townfolk is on them. It is the illumination of the Golden Fleece sign and the Singer sewing machine that accentuates in the opening scene the only route for Tilly Dunnage if she is to save herself from a madness that is not of her making. Uncle Mick isn’t going anywhere. And when he needs something from the supermarket, no ban from a university-educated know-it-all will deter a man who makes up his own rules and plays by them.
