Loss and Transformation: Mourning and The Finished People

Abstract

IF REPRESENTATION CAN BE UNDERSTOOD in relation to kind of it does, one of fundamental aspects of this work is labor of facilitating pleasure, pain, sorrow, or comfort. This essay aims to examine a recent Australian film, The Finished People (2003), in regards to way that its production and its address to an audience operate in terms of value and efficacy of emotions of sadness and loss. One reviewer describes The Finished People as the first real film about cruel country we have become (Byrne). This comment is testament to way characters and events in film reference contemporary Australian public sphere. Composed of multiple narratives dealing with homelessness, poverty, and drug abuse, this film explores lives and desperate decisions made by three young men living in Cabramatta, a Sydney suburb. The despair and despondency demonstrated by these characters will be examined in order to understand how viewer is addressed in a manner that encourages particular kinds of resonance and recognition regarding pain of loss. It is loss not only of material security but of hope, loss of promise of diaspora, that saturates lives of these individuals. The representation of this loss seeks an emotional recognition in audience of particular ethical failings within social and historical world itself, such as deficit of affective bonds of community. In understanding value of these emotions in regards to social function of representation, my aim is not simply to identify a sense of loss for characters and in social imaginary, but to theorize how, through a process of mourning, this loss and sorrow might be transformed, politically, for a reconfigured and enabling approach to these lost or absent objects. I draw on work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein because her theorization favors productive capacity of emotions and demonstrates what Kathleen Woodward calls metapsychological process, which is concerned with surviving or transforming loss through re-presenting or reinterpreting it (97). Translating this psychical process into an interpretation of a text that tries to affect its audience offers a way of exploring how The Finished People might circulate in very world-contemporary Australia-it seeks to represent. The Finished People is an unusual and difficult text to categorize, both in its generic attributes and because of its awkward fit in taxonomy of recent Australian cinema. This awkwardness owes something to context out of which film emerged: it began as a project at a community welfare center and was scripted by director-producer, Khoa Do, in collaboration with a number of nonprofessional actors who make up cast. The Finished People began with a group of unemployed youth who were taking classes in mathematics and English at Open Family Youth Social Services Centre in Southwest Sydney suburb of Cabramatta. One of them suggested making a film, and Do was asked to work with group. The film evolved out of her classes in camera work and scriptwriting. The group worked with Do in creating characters and drafting a screenplay that reflected environment that exists in and around Cabramatta and attempted to represent subjective experience of homelessness and drug abuse.1 So while narrative's three plotlines are fictional, they draw on experiences of writers. Moreover, filmmakers' use of digital video technology, cinema verite-style camera work, and voice-over commentaries that sound as if they were recorded during an interview, result in a formal sensibility associated with documentary representation. This sensibility coexists with sequences that seem highly choreographed and feature awkward acting and improvised dialogue. The three distinct storylines film is organized around represent condensed chapters in lives of male protagonists. …