In a filthy, run-down kitchen, an adult man stands naked in a rusty bucket as his mother scrubs and cleans him. She serves him a bowl of pieces of bread covered in sugar and milk, asks him to apply her lipstick ("princess pink”) then, only a few minutes into an already weird film, things get a lot weirder.
In bed, the large and bedraggled Mam (Claire Benito) straddles her son, having sex with him while murmuring in her softest and most assuring tone of voice “good boy ... good little boy”.
The opening of writer/director Rolf de Heer’s 1993 cult classic Bad Boy Bubby is unnerving to say the least, and there’s a great deal more where that came from. This unrelentingly dark walk on the wild side – a character portrait of a trapped and tortured soul who has spent the first 35 years of his existence in a grotty apartment and is set loose on society, with humorous and tragic consequences – stunned Australian cinemagoers on its release.
Film fans asked each other "Have you seen Bad Boy Bubby? Can you believe it?" Word of Bubby’s adventures spread and became legendary. The film is classically confronting: we don't want to look but we can't look away.
While the opening act plays like a cattle prodder to the senses, the film gets easier as it progresses, expanding well beyond snapshots of random grotesquery. Childhood trauma, ruminations on God, behavioural science and a sardonic appraisal of the indie music scene are some of the topics in De Heer’s sights.
When Bubby’s mum leaves the house she puts on a second world war gas mask, raising him to believe the air outside is noxious. Her end is not a happy one. In the film’s most notorious sequence, Bubby kills his mother, his father and his cat using plastic wrap, then ventures into the wide world outside.
It is through the protagonist’s interactions with “normal” people that De Heer begins to draw observations about standards of civilised society and the consequences of formative years gone bad. Bubby sees a little boy in a Superman costume, shouts “little!” and follows him around. He barks and meows at passers-by.
With the film so closely told from Bubby’s perspective, observing this sort of behaviour has an odd affect. We know he is mentally ill, but through his eyes everyday things seem bizarre: the way drunk people sing and chant; the way shop customers order food; the way “normal” people look at and respond to each other.
In 2012, Nicholas Hope, whose crazy face and wild mannerisms proved unforgettable in the eponymous role, spoke to Encore magazine about the film. Hope argued there has long been a paucity of boundary-pushing local productions, citing Wake in Fright, Chopper and Bubby as the three bravest Australian films ever made.
“All three films were adventurous – but not in the same way as Bubby,” Hope said. And in a sense he’s right. Australian cinema is rarely as out-there as De Heer’s bizarre excursion into suburban sorrow, a mixture of grungy art film, fish-out-of-water black comedy and kitchen sink drama as imagined by Kafka.
If the film has a message, it's probably to emphasise the "nurture" in nature versus nurture; the idea we are all to some extent – perhaps larger than we may care to admit – products of our own environment. Bad Boy Bubby is also one of Australia's most unflinching portraits of mental illness. It is intimately focused on a dangerously unwell man, whose disturbing behaviour is not his fault.
In a delicious twist, when Bubby joins an alternative band, he entertains audiences by quoting into the microphone the horrible things his parents said to him. In this scene De Heer embraces his protagonist’s ability to express himself while skewering the crowd for not grasping the seriousness and pain behind Bubby's beat-poetry gone bad. The extent to which that question applies to the film itself – is it art, or voyuerism? – is one of the many things that makes Bad Boy Bubby so disquieting, and so compelling.
