A car pulls into an Ampol servo, a man emerges bug-eyed and the camera cuts to a close-up of an RAA street directory with a suburban estate circled in pen. He walks inside, finds a bottle of detergent and begins to guzzle the green liquid. The veins in his throat appear to open. Back in the car, speeding through the suburban streets, pursued by police cars he begins to mutter into a tape recorder: “The first phase is hallucinogenic, the second phase is glandular, the third phase …”, but his diagnosis is interrupted as the third phase (mutation) begins and his throat bursts wide open. He pours more of the green detergent into the gaping cavity but in the chaos his Monaro collides with a real estate agent’s van and he flies out of the front window. The camera cuts to an overhead shot of the cul-de-sac. Its asphalt geometry is familiar and, to some, as repellent as the man’s disfigured corpse.

Thirty years on, as we watch Body Melt (1993), the schlock horror classic directed by Philip Brophy, we are struck by the technical proficiency of the practical special effects, its nihilistic send-up of Australian archetypes but perhaps, most of all, by its vision of suburbia, the site in which this grotesque “splatstick” plays out. The film’s perverse fascination comes from the profound familiarity of the houses, lawns and streets which structure what the late Barry Humphries described as “the great suburban tundra”. Body Melt is a film that confronts the suburban condition through the grotesque mode. It is part of a long-standing tradition of anti-suburban art in Australia and gleefully and literally explodes one of the nation’s most cherished secular myths.

The origins of the anti-suburban tradition in Australian art

In 1911 Louis Esson, Sydney playwright and impresario, called for the destruction of the “vaunted purity of the suburban home”. He wrote:

The suburban home must be destroyed. It stands for all that is dull and cowardly and depressing in modern life … It stifles the devil-may-care spirit, the Dionysian, the creative spirit. It denounces Art, enthusiasm, heroic virtue. The Muses are immolated on the altar of respectability.

While Esson, a self-proclaimed Nietzschean socialist, articulates his disdain in the archaic tones of turn of the century bohemianism, his dismissal of the libidinal constraints of the home contains the seeds of an anti-suburban sentiment which would reappear throughout twentieth-century art and culture in Australia. From the artistic retreats of Norman Lindsay and the Heidelberg school, to the modernists of Heide, suburbia has been associated within the cultural imagination with all that contains and represses creative production and expression. As Marxist critic Humphrey McQueen argues, in his 1988 work Suburbs of the Sacred:  

Contemporary Australia is significant neither for its outback, nor for the concentration of its population in capital cities nor for suburban living. More distinctive is the importance that suburbia occupies in the national mentality, where it is at once enshrined as the ideal way of life and mocked as the enemy of culture and innovation.

For McQueen, suburbia is not “confined to certain geographical areas”. Instead it denotes a mental and ideological terrain which “aspires to ways of living that are most completely realised by nuclear families on garden blocks with detached houses”. In McQueen’s argument suburbia is the site in which national mythologies are generated and, simultaneously, the site in which social antagonisms are staged.

The question as to why suburbia maintains such a potent hold on the national imagination is entwined with the formation of the Australian nation-state. The word suburb comes from the Latin “suburbium”, in which “sub” (under) is added to “urb” (city). It denoted the outlying districts of a Roman city. The term suburbia does not appear in English until the nineteenth century and is a product of industrial modernity. It was coined to explain the explosive growth of the modern metropolis outward from the urban centre. Historian Graeme Davison argues that federated Australia was born modern and suburban. In the Australian context, the suburb is the founding spatial form and is central to early Australian social policies which, Davison argues, were inspired by Protestant evangelicalism, hygiene, romanticism and class distinction. It is precisely these elements which made suburbia attractive to official ideologues and urban planners and which were taken up and pilloried by anti-suburban aesthetes.

Drawing on the founding character of suburbanisation, Brigid Rooney argues that suburbia cannot be disentangled from the wider history of settler colonialism:

Australia’s colonial history — its chequered dealings with its northern neighbours, its White Australia policy and present border control policies, its internal dispossession, marginalisation and biopolitical management of the life-worlds of Aboriginal people — constitutes the not-always-visible but nonetheless structuring condition that underpins suburban modernity.

If settler colonialism operates through violent dispossession, imposition of property relations and attendant historical forgetting, the suburb is the site in which these forces are especially potent and yet particularly occluded. Rooney delineates a series of major phases of suburbanisation in Australia. The first emerges in the late nineteenth century as part of the Gold Rush expansion of the Eastern colonies and copper mining boom in the South which lead to the growth of the cities of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. The next push occurred during the interwar years prior to the Depression and corresponded with the growth of train and tram lines. The largest movement outward occurred in the post-World War II period in which suburbs attained their true endlessness, “governed by the triumph of the automobile”. (Rooney 7) While this period has been understood to mark a demographic move from country to city, it may be better understood as the point at which suburbanisation became visible as the dominant pattern of spatial and social life.

While this history of the Australian suburb is schematic, with each period of growth exhibiting its own local peculiarities, we can nonetheless suggest that suburbia’s expansion indexes the wider social transformation of infrastructure and economy in Australia. We may also suggest that the suburb evolves its own particular form of subjectivity, homo suburbiensis, with its own specific desires and dreams.

From flight to grotesque in suburban infinities

The emergence of the post-1945 sprawl was the point at which anti-suburban sentiment crystallised into a recognisable critical position. One of the most evocative of these reflections occurs in George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), in which the narrator climbs onto the roof of his bungalow and gazes out at the fatal monotony of the roofs of his suburb:

… there was nothing all around me, as far as I could see, but a plain of dull red rooftops in their three forms of pitching and closer to hand the green squares and rectangles of lawns intersected by ribbons of asphalt and cement, and I counted nine cars out in Beverley Grove being washed and polished … there were fixed rituals about this, so that hedges were clipped and lawns trimmed and beds weeded, and the lobelia and the mignonette were tidy in their borders, and the people would see that these things were so no matter what desolation or anxiety or fear was in their hearts, or what spiritless endeavours or connubial treacheries were practiced behind the blind neat concealment of their thin red-brick walls.

The fundamental operation of Johnston’s suburbia is its power of “blind neat concealment”. Johnston envisions a landscape in which existential ennui is masked behind well-trimmed lawns and a new secular ritual of weekend car-washing has replaced the rites of religious observance. What Johnston reveals is the manner in which architecture and urbanism intersect with a specific way of life, characterised for the narrator by conformity and psychic repression.

In a different vein, architect Robin Boyd’s canonical text, The Australian Ugliness (1960), decried with a modernist disdain “the featureism” of the suburban landscape. For Boyd the dull monotony of suburban architecture was overcompensated for by an obsession with “features” which would catch the eye and provide a site of visual interest for their owners. Boyd notes:

… the living-room thrust forward as a feature in the façade, a wide picture window as a feature of the projecting wall, a pretty statuette as a feature in the picture window, a feature wall of vertical boards inside the featured living-room, a wrought iron bracket holding a pink ceramic wall vase as a feature on the feature wall, a nice red flower as a feature in a vase.

In this description, which reads like a Gertrude Stein poem, Boyd sees the predominance of kitsch within suburban architecture and decor as a reflection of a deeper incapacity of suburbia to sustain authentic aesthetic experience. What Johnston sees as “concealment”, Boyd characterises in aesthetic terms as an “evasion of the bold, the realistic, the self-evident”. If Johnston gazed in horror at a suburban void, Boyd recoiled in revulsion at the “laminated patterns of pink resembling Aurora Australis” which clamoured to fill the abyss.

Voicing his critique in 1960, a time of transition in global capitalism toward intensified patterns of mass consumption, Boyd depicts suburbia as the site in which commodification is realised at the level of space and design. Andrew McCann thus notes that what concerns Boyd and other post-war critics is “the reorganisation of suburbia as a site of consumption, domestic hygiene, rationalisation and national identity formation … in which the ‘everyday’ itself becomes viable as an object of cognition, in which suburbia, as the embodiment of everyday experience, also solicits fantasies of escape or flight”. This fantasy of escape is staged for Boyd as a radical modernist reorganisation of built space and, in the case of Johnston, as an escape out of Australia altogether to a bohemian community in Greece. Yet for many Australians suburbia, ugly or otherwise, remains the place in which they must work, live and create. Flight is not an option.

The literary equivalent of Boyd’s disdain was voiced by Patrick White in his 1958 essay, “The Prodigal Son”. White casts the suburbs as, “the Great Australian Emptiness in which the mind is the least of possessions … and the march of material ugliness does not raise a quiver from the average nerves”. White famously set his novels in the fictional suburb of Sarsaparilla on the outskirts of Sydney. Rooney suggests that White’s fiction is beset by a tension between a forgetting of colonial dispossession of space and a complex evocation of suburban psychogeography. If his early texts such as The Tree of Man (1955) still contained a sense of a romantic pastoral resistance to urban life, he slowly moves toward what can be understood as a mode of suburban grotesque. In the Sarsaparilla novels White developed a withering critique of the small mindedness of the residents of his fictive suburb, reaching its awful apogee in his underappreciated late work The Solid Mandala (1966). In this book a number of characters rehearse Whiteian suburban archetypes, from the repressed wife and good neighbour, Mrs Poulter, to her cold brooding husband. In contrast to Johnston, McCann notes that White’s late fiction is more complex than merely representing suburbia as a place from which his characters seek to escape. Instead, he notes that “White’s resistance to suburbia frequently consists in staging the instability and potential perversity inherent in forms of representation that consolidate a commercialised image of the good life”. In other words, White realises the grotesque potential for subversion hidden within the suburban idyll.

This perverse potential is manifested in the eccentric twin brothers at the heart of The Solid Mandala, Waldo and Arthur. If Waldo represents the repressed aesthete, unable to write because of his stifling internalisation of suburban mores, then Arthur is the “holy fool”. He is a suburban seer through whom the repressed energies of the suburb are released. In a disarming scene in the book, a young Arthur stages his “cow tragedy”, mooing on the verandah of their suburban home. White, from within Waldo’s perspective, writes,

… from shame Waldo began to feel terror … it was suddenly so grotesquely awful in the dwindling light and evening silence … thundering up and down the verandah he raised his curved, yellow horns, his thick, fleshy, awful muzzle. The whole framework of their stage shook.

This sense of the grotesque, understood by Waldo as something horrifying, is by the book’s conclusion, the route through which a vision of another world within the suburb is realised. What is significant about White’s transformation of the anti-suburban novel is that it no longer posits an exterior non-suburban site for revelation or realisation. It is from within the suburban, through the grotesque mode, that an anti-suburbanism can evolve into something beyond fantasies of flight.

Body Melt and the suburban grotesque

 The suburban grotesque draws on the historical traditions of the grotesque and their capacity to undermine representational orthodoxy through the merging of opposites. The grotesque is an aesthetic category which describes hybrid representational forms that depart from established generic traditions. The grotesque first entered English in the work of the polymath Thomas Browne who, in his Religio Medici (1643), noted, “[t]here are no grotesques in nature”. The word derived from the Italian grottesca, meaning cave or grotto and was used to describe Roman decorative art which appeared on frescoes rediscovered in the fifteenth-century excavation of ancient sites such as Nero’s palace. The Renaissance painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari, described the grottesche as:

a type of extremely licentious and absurd painting done by the ancients…without any logic, so that a weight is attached to a thin thread that could not support it, a horse is given legs made of leaves, a man has crane’s legs, with countless other impossible absurdities and the more bizarre the painter’s imagination the higher he was rated.

The grotesque began to take on a life of its own, referring to artistic hybrids which did not fit within existing aesthetic divisions. For example, the novel was derided upon its inception as a grotesque form which could not be grouped among the existing generic divisions of the tragic or the comic. The ‘grotesque-comic’ was used to describe a form of improvised theatrical performed on religious carnival holidays in which official order was reversed and authority was parodied. Numerous fantastical creatures, such as gargoyles, devils and demons in the paintings of Bosch or the stones of Gothic architecture were deemed grotesque. White’s character Arthur embodies the grotesque principle of transformation in which the human and the animal are fused while his performance of a wordless mooing tragedy merges the comic with the terrifying. One may suggest that the suburb, an interstitial site between the city proper and the country, is the perfect place for such a form to take shape.

Brophy’s Body Melt is a film in which the suburbs are construed as a testing ground for capital’s biopharmaceutical bodily technologies with predictably grotesque results. It begins in the idyllic suburban estate of Homesville (shot in Myers Court, Werribee), where a local health laboratory has sent the residents of Pebbles Court a series of what appear to be vitamin supplements. The substance is in fact Vimuville, an acronym for “Visceral Muscular Vitalisation of Latent Libidinal Energy” and the residents of Homesville are its unwitting test subjects. But the substance is highly unstable and the film quickly descends into a series of expressionistic explosions of phlegm, slime and vomit as tongues expand, erections explode and heads melt.

In an essay on the horror genre, aptly titled “Horrality” published in Art and Text in 1983, Brophy noted that “The contemporary Horror film tends to play not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it”. In this regard the special effects by Bob McCarron, who worked on Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992) and Mad Max 2 (1981) and Mad Max 3 (1985), are appropriately vile. What Body Melt takes up is the manner in which the body, like the suburb, is a site which is coded by flows of property, commodification and consumption. Much of the film’s humour comes from its relentless parody of health and wellness culture. The suburb in Body Melt is explicitly linked to the self-contained commodified body — it is the spatial equivalent of the private person.

In the modern age Mikhail Bakhtin, the great Russian literary theorist, developed a sustained analysis of the grotesque body through his study of the fifteenth-century French novelist Rabelais. For Bakhtin, Rabelaisian bodies, exemplified by the vulgar majesty of his characters Gargantua and Pantagruel, were a trace of the survival of a popular festive carnival culture which undermined official order. Rabelais’ work revelled in the excretory power of the body, taking pleasure in the operation of:

… the dismembered parts, the separate organs, the gaping mouths devouring, swallowing, drinking, the defecation, urine, death, birth, childhood, and old age. The bodies are merged with each other or with objects and with the world. A tendency toward duality can be glimpsed everywhere. Everywhere the cosmic, ancestral element of the body is stressed.

In Rabelais, Bakhtin glimpsed a survival of a communal body that had not yet been contained and constrained by capitalism. Industrial modernity stresses a self-contained individual, in which the actions of bodily comportment, sexual life and eating, “have been transferred to the private and psychological level where their connotation becomes narrow and specific, torn away from the direct relation to the life of society and to the cosmic whole”. Body Melt releases these elements of the constrained individual body of homo suburbus and revels in the chaos which ensues.

Body Melt is distinct from the slew of copy-cat body horror films that emerged in the late 1980s after the success of David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) and Videodrome (1983). For Australian viewers, what is so compelling about the film is that the suburbia depicted is one that has been imprinted on our optical unconscious by serialised television fantasias. It is an inverted Ramsay Street or Summer Bay with Brophy describing the film as an “infected Neighbours”. The cast is drawn from the ranks of Australian television of yesteryear, with faces dimly recognisable from Blue Heelers, Neighbours and A Country Practice all subjected to gruesome mutation.

In a particularly tasteless moment Cheryl, a pregnant mother, played by a young Lisa McCune, searches in panic for the placenta of her foetus which is racing around her kitchen, a bottle of Ajax Spray and Wipe prominently displayed on the counter top. Later, in a homage to Alien (1979), the placenta asphyxiates her husband. In a piece of inspired casting the villain of the piece, Doctor Carrera, is played by Ian Smith, the lauded petit-bourgeois shop owner, Harold, of Neighbours fame. Suburban grotesque in Body Melt makes clear the way in which suburbia as an Australian fantasy space is sustained by the channel of tele-technologies, beaming into the home a vision of nation which in a work of fiendish feedback replicates itself at the level of bodily functions and desires. Liberating these forces, in Body Melt, does not result in heroic self-realisation but explosive and cartoonish violence.

 The deconstruction of suburban mythos is unashamedly crude, yet this is precisely how the grotesque mode punctures the force of historical forgetting which sustains the Australian nation-state. The film appears at the tail-end of an Australian cinematic moment, retroactively dubbed “Ozsploitation”, which played fast and loose with national myths to project a perverse vision of the country back at its citizens. There are direct homages in Body Melt to the killer pig hunt in Razorback (1984) as well as the automobile excesses of Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris (1974). What these films share with Body Melt is an attempt to profane the secular myths which sustain Australian capitalism. Body Melt continuously escalates this transgressive tendency, with a beloved kangaroo eventually killed, as per Wake in Fright (1971). Body Melt goes one better, with two in-bred children cutting out and eating the animal’s adrenal gland.

One could argue that this force of transgression was of a piece with the cultural vision of the 1990s, a relic of a tendency toward transgression that ran out of steam as the culture industry converted subversion into profit. Yet there is a latent political energy within Body Melt which is missing from much twenty-first century cultural production, namely its capacity to draw on a reservoir of grotesque sensibility to undermine the bourgeois wowserism which rules the roost in our institutional cinema, literature and art world.

Against Property and the Picket Fence

The grotesque mode carries within it the trace of historical violence and thus operates as a sharp intrusion into our historical amnesia. As McQueen argues,

Australia’s grotesque has derived from a cultivated forgetfulness that has been occasionally fractured by artists reminding us of what we have done, and of what has been done to us.

In an aside, when a character in the film notes that the vitamins were sent from a health laboratory, a character remarks, “that old chemical plant? That place was shut down years ago”. This throwaway line alludes to the ecological destruction and attendant illnesses which have resulted from industrial poisoning of soil and air. Capital’s colonisation continues to reconfigure the bodies and desires of the suburban test subject.

Yet to read the film as an overt political allegory would be to somewhat miss the point. Instead, the suburban grotesque is a mode whose scatological exuberance allows it to bring to the surface underlying tensions and antagonisms, and thus reveal the ideological fault lines within the amnesiac fantasies sustaining homo suburbiensis. Historical memory in the suburban grotesque emerges at the level of spatial relationships and bodily forces. Rather than decrying the ugliness of the suburbs or longing for escape, the grotesque mode releases the collective energies latent within the sprawl. Against the power of property and the picket fence the suburban grotesque offers swollen tongues and exploding heads.

Works referenced 

Bakhtin, M, 1971, Rabelais and His World, The MIT Press, Cambridge.
Boyd, R, 1963, The Australian Ugliness, Penguin Books, Ringwood.
Brophy, P, 1983, “Horrality —The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films”, Art & Text, vol 11, no 1, pp 85–95.
Esson, L, 1980, Ballads of Old Bohemia: An Anthology of Louis Esson, Red Rooster Press, Ascot Vale.
Johnston, G, 1990, My Brother Jack, Collins, North Ryde.
McCann, A, 1998, “Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White’s Perversity”, Australian Literary Studies, vol 18, no 4, pp 56–71.
McQueen, H, 1988, Suburbs of the Sacred, Penguin Books, Ringwood.
Rooney, B, 2018, Suburban Space, The Novel and Australian Modernity, Anthem Press, London.
Vasari, G, 1907, Vasari On Technique, translated by Maclehose, L, J.M Dent & Company, London.
White, P, 1969, The Solid Mandala, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth.