The Devil's Playground

Christos Tsiolkas

• Publisher: Currency Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781760620202
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Radio

Fred Schepisi's film, The Devil's Playground, is an intimate portrait of a thirteen-year-old boy and the Brothers, living within the confines of a Catholic seminary. Tsiolkas invites you to share in his extensive personal experience of the film.

1

An Antipodean summer merges one year into another, and similarly, my memories of the summers of the late 1970s merge together. I begin thus because I have to admit that I cannot recall the exact date that I first saw The Devil’s Playground. It must have been a summer’s weekend because I remember a hot blast of sun hitting my face as I stumbled out of the theatre in Melbourne, and I furiously scrubbed at my cheeks to remove the telltale signs of the tears I had cried. Other things I remember of that summer in which 1977 merged into 1978 include sitting on a chair at the barber’s and flicking guiltily through a cheap soft-porn magazine—the sort that combined lurid photographs of big-breasted girls with sensationalist editorials on vice and sin. There were photographs of pale, angry British youths dressed in bin liners, safety pins through their clothes, and I recall thinking how frightening these young punks looked. I remember my voice breaking and I remember showing my friend Jane my first pubes.

The production notes for The Devil’s Playground state that it was completed in 1976. By the end of the following year I was twelve and I am sure that I was at least that old before I saw the film. Maybe this is a conceit. I identified so strongly with Tom Allen, the film’s central character, that I want to believe I was the exact same age as he: thirteen. Reminiscences always carry the danger of nostalgic reconstruction, but I do remember telling a teacher how I ‘liked that film a lot’ and she scrunched up her nose and asked me bluntly, ‘Do your parents know the kind of films you’re watching?’. An odd question.

My mother, who loved films and passed on this love to me, would come along with me to see Coming Home or An Unmarried Woman or Alien. She also took me to Gone With the Wind and It Happened One Night and, unbeknownst to her, handed down to me her passion for Clark Gable. Admittedly, trekking off to the cinema with my mother was somewhat embarrassing. The last thing a boy entering adolescence wants is to be seen hanging out with a parent. Nevertheless, the red cheeks were worth it. As she bought the tickets, I gained access to many films I wasn’t meant to see. For her, she got a translator by her side.

‘What did she say? What’s going on now?’

Around us the old Australian women would purse their lips and occasionally give us a serve.

‘Shut up. We’re here to see a movie, not listen to you wogs shout.’

My mother would be incensed. I would sink lower and lower into my seat. It wasn’t till years later, going to the movies in Athens, that I would realise how strange Australian movie going must have seemed to my parents. In Greece they do shout commandments and insults to the screen. As an adult I was to understand my mother’s fierce, passionate interaction with the melodramas and themes unfolding on the screen as a means of communicating her love of film to me. But at thirteen, I was only conscious of her difference. I recoiled from her, from her ‘wogginess’.

I started keeping certain movies from mum.

The Devil’s Playground was one of these. I had seen the trailer. I do remember that clearly. I remember making a mental note to make sure that I saw the film. What I had responded to were the images of the boys in the shower, the craggy ocker profile of the actor Nick Tate, who plays Brother Victor in the film. If I had no words for these instinctual responses to the images—homosexuality was, if not unknown, certainly not a word I would dare attach to myself—they were strong enough to make me seek out the strange, the difficult and the esoteric.

The Devil’s Playground was not a film any of my friends would have chosen to see. Just as I kept it from my mother, I also knew to go to the film alone, knew that there would be something dangerous in explaining my keen need to see it to any of my schoolyard friends. So sometime in the summer of 1977 or 1978, alone, in a nearly empty cinema, I saw the film.

Brother Victor smoking a cigarette. Tom Allen’s smile and Tom Allen’s arse. The underwater sirens attacking Brother Francine’s naked body. Two boys giving each other a clumsy hand job in the dark. The reflection of the trees on the car window as Tom is driven towards Melbourne and away from the seminary. The nausea I felt when Brother Victor condemns the seminary rules as ‘unnatural’, as making ‘poofters’ of the boys. Tom hanging out his piss-wet sheets to dry and rubbing his hands together against the cold winter air.

Looking through this list of memories, it strikes me as odd that I have included nothing about faith and spirituality, nothing about God. Like Tom, the film’s young protagonist, I too was determined to follow a Christian God into good works and self-sacrifice. Also like Tom, I was clutching at a permanent erection. It must have been that this religious struggle was part of what I was responding to. I have no other explanation for why the tears flowed so strongly after seeing the film.

It also strikes me that I was responding to the beauty within the film. The Devil’s Playground is full of sensual images. The film is all water and flesh—the fresh, smooth faces of the boys, the ragged, ageing profiles of the Brothers. The colours are cold but starkly intense—all blues and greens. In a sense, one of the reasons that the film has remained in my memory is that it is so ravishing to look at.

I have returned to The Devil’s Playground time and time again and each return has made me bring new questions and perspectives to the film. But what I want to convey about that first viewing is what it meant for a young teenage boy to suddenly see what is possible in cinema. Beyond the narrative of adolescent confusion and spiritual alienation, I responded to the canvas of the moving image. Beginning with a slow, languid tracking shot up a river, the screen pulsating with young flesh falling and playing in the water, I was enchanted by the ability of cinema to astonish me, to recreate and, more importantly, to re-imagine my sensory world.

As spectacle, the cinema had entranced me from the beginning. What made the experience of watching The Devil’s Playground different was the narrative of early adolescence that resonated completely with my own experiences and circumstances. This was an experience emotionally and viscerally different to watching the raid on the Death Star in Star Wars. The sense that movies were not only about entertainment, or about fantasy, was an electric charge for me at thirteen.

That summer of The Devil’s Playground is also the summer when I stumbled into the small auditorium of an art-house cinema and saw the Italian film, Padre Padrone. I believe that there are moments in life, rare but unquestionable, in which an experience transforms consciousness. My lifelong love of film can be traced back to my love of spectacle—but the imperative to make cinema central to my intellectual and emotional life can be traced back to that period of my youth in which I read myself in the confused, Catholic boyhood of Tom Allen and in the harsh, patriarchal servitude of the shepherd boy in Padre Padrone.

Of course, I was neither a Sardinian shepherd nor a Catholic schoolboy. But in a sense both these films spoke eloquently to the differing worlds I found myself in. The Mediterranean agrarian poverty of the Taviani brothers’ film was the world from which my parents had emerged. School was becoming, for me, the place where my parent’s world, concerns and values were excluded and where I strived to discover what it might mean to be Australian. I think it was this dislocation, trying to make sense of an old world—Greece—and a new promise—Australia—that partly led to the tears I shed. Whether it was God or home or even something called masculinity, I felt close to the innocent Tom, trying to be a good boy but betrayed always by my cock, my fantasies, my daydreams and my wish for freedom. Until I had the means and the capabilities for this freedom, the dark caverns of movie houses became its closest approximation.

In Padre Padrone the abused, illiterate shepherd boy eventually takes himself back to school, completes his education and writes the autobiographical book which will inspire the filmmakers. This yearning for an education, which also symbolised an avenue to independence and freedom, was what I wanted for myself. This particular yearning is not visible in The Devil’s Playground, but I always imagined that the young Tom Allen was to grow up and become the director Fred Schepisi. Tom’s inability to remain faithful to the Bible’s vengeful God is truly a pagan celebration of the body and the senses, as Pauline Kael so deftly pointed out in her review of the film.¹ But if his instinctual pursuit for freedom is not distilled in a thirst for knowledge or enlightenment, there is nevertheless a strong sense of this particular film being Schepisi’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It may say more about the ‘Australianness’ of this film that an intellectual direction for Tom is so adroitly avoided. No-one suggests to him—neither teachers nor family—that possibly the crafts of the imagination are the natural home for such an inquisitive, passionate and restless boy.

It is only in retrospect that it strikes me as astonishing that I was barely an adolescent and I had sat through The Devil’s Playground and Padre Padrone. And sitting through is far too inadequate a description. I was entranced, knocked out, stupefied—and yet it would be a rewriting of personal history to not admit that for periods I was also bored and confused. This was a language no-one had assumed a need to teach me. If I could not make complete sense of the films I had viewed, it did not matter as much as the fact that I had glimpsed possibilities and freedom.

I don’t think that freedom is too strong a word. At the end of The Devil’s Playground Tom runs away from school and hitchhikes towards the big city. The shepherd’s son in Padre Padrone gains his education and writes his book. If I had been born into a previous generation or, possibly, if I had been born into a different class, I may have found this sense of art’s ability to liberate through literature. I had read enough already at thirteen to glimpse—just glimpse—that the nineteenth-century European world was full of precocious rich brats able to spout their philosophical epistles in Latin, classical Greek and French. But I had only my rudimentary demotic Greek, my prole Australian English and the world of the image. It was through deciphering and learning the language of image that I first gained the tools to re-imagine my world. Of course, I had to discover words, the richness of the written language, to make sense of these imaginings. Film became the bridge that allowed me to master the English language.

The critical heritage of popular music has a well-documented exploration of rock music as a means through which working-class lads found creative freedom and sometimes wealth and excess. There is cultural theorist Greil Marcus’ deification of the white-trash Elvis; there is the class transcendence of British rock’n’roll and northern soul, a trajectory that takes us from the Beatles in 1960s Liverpool to the Happy Mondays and Oasis in post-acid-house Manchester. The histories of jazz, soul, blues and hip-hop make little sense if their writers do not engage with the politics of race and the contradiction of class.

This is not a pronounced current in film criticism. The auteur theorists in the United States argued an aesthetics denuded of politics and the European critical tradition post-1968 became increasingly academic and elitist. The critical analysis by non-Western critics, for valid reasons, focused more on the effects and relationships of race and imperialism than on the subjectivities of working-class audiences. Even Marxist-derived film criticism has a very limited bibliography when it comes to the transformative experience of film watching and making for people from the working classes.

My viewing of films in itself did not place me outside the world I had been born to. My mother, my friends, in fact most of my social world watched and loved film. A process of alienation only began when the form of my cinema going began to change, when I started leaving behind the blockbuster and going to the foreign movie, when I sneaked into seeing something called The Devil’s Playground.

Of course, there is a sense in which Tom Allen is forever etched in my mind as the young, fresh-faced child whose body refused repression. Water imagery suffuses The Devil’s Playground, and Tom’s adolescent body can’t stop spurting. He pisses in his bed, he wanks and ejaculates. One reason why the film made such a strong impression on me, but did not shock or upset me, was that Tom’s inability to command his body to be ‘good’—in the narrow sense of his Catholic faith—did not condemn him to the tyranny of evil, to God’s eternal silence. A couple of years after The Devil’s Playground I was to see Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, and there I did experience true spiritual terror.² Schepisi vanquished the fears that the Brothers of Tom’s faith had attempted to instil in him. Tom’s very pagan body, his refusal to cleave his flesh into the opposites of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, came to me as a reprieve at thirteen. By allowing me a glimpse into a future not dominated by authoritarian or ascetic or tyrannical morality, it is no surprise that I left the cinema high, exhilarated and inspired. And it was no wonder that in Tom Allen I had finally encountered a hero—not the hero of the Western or science fiction, but a hero that seemed more flesh and blood than even the schoolmates around me.

In later years, going to the film again, I was to become aware that in its treatment of the adult characters—the celibate Brothers—the film was much less benign. Bu...