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Tom Bensley

Film Review: Black Rain (1989)


I was home sick, watching a movie called Black Rain. It was largely formulaic, a paint-by-numbers tread through the American-cop-in-a-strange-land genre with a big shootout at the end, but there were a few painterly shots of Japan throughout. 


Barely paying attention to the dialogue amid vigorous bouts of nose-blowing into a mucous-soaked sock, I perked up as a particular scene began to play out. 


Michael Douglas is leaning against the counter at a diner talking to his friend when two Japanese men enter. One is carrying an assault rifle and he calls this to everyone’s attention, shocking the crowd into silence. A tense situation plays out between some other Japanese patrons at the diner, ending in a brutal execution. The manager of the diner shouts for everyone to keep calm, it’s just business. As the Japanese man with the assault rifle is leaving and everyone is beginning to regain composure, Michael Douglas and his friend reveal themselves to be cops. They pursue the men outside. 


As I watched Michael Douglas fire his weapon openly across the streets at the fleeing Japanese men, everything felt wrong. Instead of heroic, his actions felt reckless and frightening. I couldn’t help imagining myself caught in the crossfire of his haphazard police work. 


I paused the movie to message Rosie.  


‘I’ve really gone off movies where people are shooting at each other. It’s crazy that used to be my favourite thing.’ 


‘I can hardly imagine,’ Rosie wrote back.


‘So much like my dad it’s embarrassing.’


Rosie told me she thought Dad’s aversion to violence and guns was a good characteristic. And of course she’s right. And of course he was right. And of course, as the distance grows between us as we are now and our childhood selves, we fill that wide gulf with experience: 


Violence witnessed, the growing realisation that murder is not done by good guys against bad guys, that witnessing a gun pulled in real life is frightening because it can be wielded by the wrong person—and the increasing difficulty in determining who is even the right person to wield a gun. 


But as a kid, you watch a movie and the movie tells you Michael Douglas is the good guy, and he should be wielding a gun. His shots are intended for the evil Japanese guys, and he’s allowed to fire it across a busy street, and he’s not going to hit innocent bystanders in the process. 


When the towers went down on the 11th of September in New York city, we were partway through our Big Holiday around Australia.


Making our way to visit Mum and Dad’s friend Kevin in an Aboriginal community called Raminging, we’d been driving long hours along the arid highways of Arnhem Land to get there. 


We stayed overnight when we could, but a lot of this land up north is protected Aboriginal land. It’s illegal to pitch a tent and stay overnight on the side of the road like we usually would, so Mum and Dad pulled ten hour shifts driving to get us up to Kevin’s place. An air-conditioned house and beds to sleep in awaited us, which is one hell of a luxury when you’re living in a tent and covered in red dust all day.


During an overnight stay on this trip up to Kevin’s, we first heard about the attack on the World Trade Center. Other than that we had no idea what had been happening in the world. 


We arrived to stay overnight in a town along the way which I can’t remember, but Mum referred to it as a ‘funny old place’. There are a lot of funny old places the further up north you go. 


Finally with some reception, Dad got onto Nanna and she told him there’d been an attack. 


I wasn’t overly concerned with distant global events as a nine year old. I was just excited to arrive at Kevin’s, plug the family laptop in and play Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now.


We drove along red dirt roads as we pulled into Raminingning. Mum laughed at a Dog sitting on the side of the road with its pups. Kids sitting outside the commissioned housing projects would wave to us, white guests in a town with 811 inhabitants, predominately of the Yolgnu people. 


It was so hot during the day that the streets were deserted, as if it rained fire from the skies. We stayed indoors until the sun was no longer baking the landscape. Close to half of the land in the Northern Territory is indigenous land.


The TV was on constantly during our stay. Footage of the event played over and over, but still it meant little to me. It was far away and it was on TV. 


Kevin was a smiley, pot-bellied man who brewed his own beer in the backyard and smuggled in wine on the shopping barge that would arrive intermittently. A white person who’d come to Ramingining to contribute services to an otherwise starved community, he performed housing maintenance and worked with a few other Aboriginals. 


Since many resources were irregularly available in Ramingining, his shopping receipt from the barge was about a mile long. Simon and I stared at it, wide-eyed, as if it were some kind of rare artefact. 


Kevin laughed and grinned with his upper teeth a lot, but he had a harsh way of talking. There’s a particular brand of Australian who laughs as they say angry things. It can cause a great deal of confusion as to what’s going on inside of them. Kevin laughed and grinned as he told Simon and I we should stop sitting around playing computer games, get outside, do something else.


‘It’s too hot!’ we’d protest. 


Alcohol is prohibited in Ramingining, as it is in many remote, indigenous communities up North. In place since 2007, the ban was reinstated after an apparent wave of property damages. Many people (including some Aboriginal groups), expressed concern about the return of alcohol to the communities, fearing for the safety of the women and children. 


A widespread myth among white Australians is that the genetic disposition of Australian Aboriginals made them more susceptible to alcohol abuse.


Soon after the event, George Bush gave a statement about his intention to invade Iraq. 


You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.


‘I can’t bloody believe this idiot,’ Dad said to the TV. 


Dad had this derisive laugh he reserved for what he deemed to be the utmost expressions of stupidity. When he was really aghast, he’d put his head in his hands along with the laugh. He did this now while I sat on the floor playing Carmageddon 2 on the laptop. 


‘You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,’ Dad repeated. ‘The man is a damn war criminal.’


I couldn’t quite understand Dad’s indignation. Wasn’t that just how it worked? If you were attacked, everyone who didn’t take your side automatically took the attackers’ side. I kept my mouth shut because Dad seemed to be upset, but to my 9 year old self, George Bush’s statement made perfectly good sense.


Carmageddon 2: Carpocalypse Now was a racing game which pitted your car against other racing vehicles. Your competitors included a forklift with jagged spikes at the front, a drag racer, and other exaggerated vehicular opponents. You earned points for ramming the other drivers and winning races, but racing wasn’t really the point. Playing it, I would drive my car off the main race track and drive along the sidewalk to run over as many pedestrians as possible. Telephone poles would lift as if plucked like daisies when you rammed into them, and pedestrians, even dogs, would explode in a bright red splattershot of gore, limbs detaching like skyrockets. 


We bought Carmageddon 2 when Simon and I had pooled our pocket money together to buy 10 old computer games which were being sold in an ad in the trading post. Dad was paying for some of it too, and he spoke over the phone with the man from the Trading Post. 


On the phone, having heard about the ages of the kids he was giving his ultra-violent videogames away to, the seller expressed some concern. He told Dad he wouldn’t sell us one of them, and that he probably shouldn’t sell us Carmageddon 2 either. 


‘I told him "Nah look, that’s the one he’s really interested in so we better have that one," Dad told me later when we went to pick up the games. 


Simon and I had played the demo version of Carmageddon 2 and we were disappointed to find in the full version that pedestrians had been replaced by zombies with green blood. It had been released with this censorial adjustment in Australia. We went online to find a ‘blood patch’ so we could switch the green blood to red. 


We wanted our games with ragdoll body physics so the limbs would flail about realistically as they were sent flying by fists, vehicles, or hand grenades. We enabled Grand Theft Auto 3 with the ‘gore’ cheat code for more dense blood splatters and disembodied limbs. Headshots should remove heads, all car games should have the option to run over pedestrians—the Burnout series was a terrible disappointment for this. 


Dad was wearied by our insatiable digital bloodlust. One morning Simon and I had stayed in bed until 11am on a weekend and we were sitting on the top bunk together, playing Dynasty Warriors 3 on our PS2. Dad walked in and stood there for a moment with his hands on his hips. 


‘Get a life, you two,’ he said and walked out. 


This upset me and I turned away from our co-op session toward the door left wide open. I was worried and I started to say maybe we should stop playing.


My big brother didn’t take his eyes off the game. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. 


Dad told me once he’d seen on the news that two young guys had been playing Grand Theft Auto and they left their house, attacked, and killed someone on the street. He saw the clear correlation between the joy towards pointless murder those games encouraged, and the acts which the media reported had followed, and he eschewed any other details. I kept my mouth shut about the probable thousands of hours I had put into those games, but I’m sure he knew it anyway.


The Witcher came out when I was 14 and I was playing it after having just bought it. Standing by my desk while I was playing, he asked me what kind of game it was, what you did in it. 


I smirked. ‘Kill shit.’


Rolling his eyes, he asked no more questions, but he did laugh.


***


Black Rain isn’t really worth the watch. Some unsettling violence—that may or may not be a commentary on shoddy American police work—and a poignant Karaoke scene elevate the movie slightly, but it doesn’t do anything Ridley Scott didn't end up doing better in his later movies. 


For completionists only. 


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