Wider Screenings film review

THE JAMMED (2008: d. Dee McLachlan)
pr. Sally Ayre-Smith, Andrea Buck, Dee McLachlan; scr. Dee McLachlan; ph. Peter Falk; m. Grant Innes McLachlan; ed. Anne Carter, Maryjeanne Watt; art d. Emma Wicks; cast. Emma Lung, Veronica Sywak, Saskia Burmeister, Sun Park, Masa Yamaguchi, Todd McDonald, Kate Atkinson, Anna Anderson (89 mins)
(updated 02-Nov-2011 3:21 PM )

The Beginnings of Australian Screen's Assessment of the National Immigrant Detention Policy Initiated in the Howard years informs Dee McLachlan's perception of Aussie film in early C21st

A concise, harrowingly realistic look at Australian immigration procedures regarding the detention of denied-status refugees anchors The Jammed in a well-established tradition of Aussie neo-realism, most recently in evidence in the Cate Blanchett / Hugo Weaving look at heroin dependence in Little Fish.

For director McLachlan, Australia’s mandatory Immigration detention system encapsulates what John Howard’s citizenship test proclaims as “Australian values”: the systematic negation of human rights and the enablement of a system of Patriarchal oppression as epitomized by the sex trafficking industry flourishing in illegal Melbourne brothels.

This depiction of immigrant Australia – reactive by definition to authorities investigating the lucrative “people trafficking” industry – is far removed from traditional depictions of European Australian immigrants as popularized by British director Michael (Peeping Tom) Powell in They’re a Weird Mob. Indeed, no other Australian film to date has taken such a cogent view of Australia’s multi-cultural identity as The Jammed, emerging as it does at the end of the John Howard era and the beginning of Kevin Rudd’s Prime Ministership (himself destined to be remembered purely as “the apologizer” as he will inevitably renege on his promise to deliver Australia a Republic and, if he has his way, introduce a mandatory internet filter giving his government as much control over the free flow of information on the internet as the Chinese Communist Party).

There’s a heavy, grim social determinism to the overcast Melbourne surrounds here in long shot and through windows in vibrant, tense deep focus cinematography by Peter Falk. But Falk and McLachlan interrupt the realism with flashbacks from the detainee – first in glimpses of her sexual abuse by indifferent Aussie men (clients of the illegal brothel in which she is forced to work) and then in somewhat brighter lit explorations of her initial contact with the sexual trafficking industry from Asia to Australia. Young male recruiters lure with promises of big money to be had in Australia, first by “exotic dancing” / stripping: meeting the girl at Sydney airport, the recruiter passes her onto another and so forth. There’s a network of connections running through the sex traffickers who, in this film’s clever look at gender exploitation and collective feminist responsibility, being all male represent Patriarchy’s systematic oppression of women through sexual commodification and socio-cultural exploitation.

Synopsis (contains spoilers)

Director Dee McLachlan in The Jammed looks at the considerable problems facing a new generation of Chinese-Australian women, leaving China for Australia (the “lucky country” as tourist jargon perpetuates an outright lie) on the promise of better pay and a better life.

The plot concerns two Chinese women – 1) an illegal immigrant in her early twenties (Emma Lung), and 2) a mother come from China to Melbourne to look for a missing relative who may now be involved in prostitution. The mother appeals to Veronica Sywak for help and Sywak slowly descends into the mire of sex trafficking in contemporary Australia. Indeed, The Jammed was inspired by the death in Immigrant detention Centres of two women who had been brought into Australia as sex slaves and treated with contemptible inhumanity by Australia’s mandatory detention system, depicted here as an absolutely monstrous embodiment of Australian Patriarchal hypocrisy: the script was based on actual case transcripts and carries the hallmark of authenticity entirely lacking from Film Victoria’s investment in the execrable bourgeois mediocrity of, for instance, the more popular but absolutely trivial My Year Without Sex.

Narrative Structure, Patriarchy and the Mechanisms of Australia's Sexual Exploitation Underbelly

The film’s two story narrative unfolds in parallel: Sywak’s missing person investigation (starting with the legal escort / brothel industry in Australia) balanced with the flashback story of a woman lured into sex slavery to pay off an ever-increasing debt to those who claim to offer her opportunity in the “lucky country”. The systematic exposure of the sex slavery operation is fascinating.

Women are lured in their home country (China and Europe) with the promise of money dancing in Australia. The operators pay for their trip and arrange for a Visa. When the individual young woman (or “girl”) finds out that the work involved is actually prostitution, it is too late for her to do anything: she is indebted to the operators for travel and visa expenses to the tune of some $50,000 and threats to call the police bring only laughter and the admission that Australia’s corrupt police are in on it – there is no police presence in this film at all as Australian authority is represented by the detention centre. Interestingly enough, part of the exploiter’s hold over the girl is through threats of her landing in Australia’s immigrant detention scheme, backed up with rumours of fascistic torture by immigration authorities (stories of sewing lips shut to prevent eating and locking people in solitary confinement to drive them mad). In short, fear of Australia’s mandatory immigrant detention system ensures that people do not speak out against the oppressors, ironically allowing the oppressors just the leeway they need to carry through on their rape and enforced sexual slavery of young girls, just as they maintain the façade of Aussie sophistication necessary to blend in to proper society.

The men running the sex slavery operation – a form of indentured servitude technically speaking – are abhorrent rapists, indifferent to women except as sex objects despite their pretenses otherwise. Symbolically, this is Patriarchy as defined by the radical feminist movement since Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon and exemplified by the sex slavers: the systematic rape and forced sexual exploitation of women by men – capitalistic sexual commodification in the “lucky country”.

Sweaty, fat orgasming men pay the girls as they accommodate their animalistic urges, the ringleader (a well-respected Aussie) being a man of false charm and fake concern for his “property”, a man of pure moral hypocrisy. There’s a grim tenderness and humour amidst this bleak reality though – some clients are not aware of the slavery aspect of their indulgence (one tattooed behemoth willingly mails a postcard for one of the two Chinese girls, the one being investigated by Sywak) and after seeing men at their most intimately vulnerable as they lose themselves in the sex act, the women joke at and ridicule the male sexuality they must contend with, just as they are in effect defined and imprisoned by it, forced to define themselves solely in reaction to Patriarchy’s sexuality Amusingly, the rapist oppressor driving them seems threatened by these girls’ scorn for the men they deal with.

Moral Relativism and Narrative Irony in The Jammed

In this, The Jammed displays a remarkable moral relativism. There is no absolute good nor evil in this vision of Australia: indeed, the real “evil” here is the government system which perpetuates sexual inequality – Australia as “the lucky country” itself, here a nation of charlatans and hypocrites indifferent to humanity.

Even the film’s complementary distinction between oppressed and oppressor is not a simplistic dialectic, instead qualified by the realities of sexual need within a Patriarchal (and specifically, as later implied in the film, Christian) nation such as Australia. One of the prostitute’s minders falls for her, his cultural attitude to women different to his Australian boss, completely indifferent behind sunglasses – the pimp as businessman. Ironically, for McLachlan the Aussie pimps here are emblematic of a “true blue” Aussie masculinity, their Asian compatriots mere rapist-lackies conditioned by the legacy of their own countries’ attitudes to women and gender relations (especially the pervasive view of the sexually submissive or sublimated women, exemplified by both the prostitute and the housewife – both effectively in indentured service to men under Patriarchy). One Aussie male – again a symbolic Patriarch – is not beyond urinating on a woman to humiliate her and keep her in line: such is Patriarchally conditioned socialized contempt for the women sexually abused and exploited in Australia today. If ever there was a film which clearly separated sex from any relationship to love it is The Jammed – sexuality here is a human need which the male hierarchy of Patriarchy has appropriated into its commodification of women: such treatment of women is inherent within Patriarchal Capitalism as represented by the microcosm of the brothel’s indentured service / prostitution racket. McLachlan’s boldest move is to make this symbolic microcosm an allegory of Australian machismo and imply the system of mandatory detention as a moral hypocrisy indifferent to humanity and in violation of essential UN human rights – the “lucky country” indeed.

Ironies mount in The Jammed. The illegal brothel housing the trafficked women is owned by a woman, a gallery owner absolutely indifferent to the effort to locate a missing and possibly prostituted girl and completely unaware of her husband’s duplicity in sponsoring her gallery and the brothel.

Post-Feminist Theory and the Contempt for Australian Patriarchy

McLachlan’s contempt for airy society is in evidence here, her sheer disgust for the pretences of Australian Patriarchy and the loathsome women who have capitulated to it, quite ready to profit from ownership of a brothel as long as they are not individually troubled or contacted about whatever it is that they in essence enable with their continued indifference – it is a woman who owns the establishment these men use to prostitute younger, socio-economically disenfranchised young women into prostitution.

Needless to add, this gallery owner represents the height of chic fashion and (asexual) womanly elegance, her absolute contempt for the Chinese mother seeping through. Male intimidation is a major factor in the continued freedom with which sexual traffickers act – threatening rape. As such, the depiction of rape in The Jammed (occurring early) and the threat of rape as used to keep women in line is again reflective of the radical feminist position that rape is Patriarchy’s way of keeping women in line and under their strict control: in effect priming them for sexual servitude on the fear of sexual violence. There are two alternatives to women under Patriarchy – capitulation or rape.

There is no man to the rescue here: this is feminist cinema at its most potent. Director McLachlan does not associate all men with the exploiters, but the sympathetic male characters are either cluelessly insignificant (Sywak’s blind date) or reluctant to get involved (her lover): indeed, the great enemy here is indifference, the suggestion put to Sywak as she helps the Chinese mother that it is not her problem and she should not get involved. But in a sense it is her problem just as McLachlan implies it all women’s problem – it is women who must respond to the inherent sexual exploitation of Patriarchy. Women alone can end the exploitation and suffering of their gender by the Patriarchal oppressor: it is this theme that makes The Jammed Australian cinema’s most potent contribution to the international feminist movement, thankfully here avoiding the distraction of feminism’s misguided condemnation of pornography to concentrate on sex trafficking as inherent in a Patriarchal culture. Thus it is an issue for women – men are part of the problem by virtue of the sexual socialization given to them under the governing power structure of Patriarchal Capitalism to which the response, as McLachlan sees it, must be a collectivized feminism beginning with the individual defiance of male intimidation. Women must overcome the intimidation and fear tactics used by Patriarchy – specifically the use and threat of rape to keep women in line – if there is ever to be true gender equality amongst men and women and, in this films terms, a non-exploitative sexual commodification.

But McLachlan is under no illusions or false optimism about feminist solidarity and the film’s eventual revelation of the truth about the relationship between the sexually exploited daughter and the mother who sold everything to find her is film’s most devastating and poignant irony, an indication of the trans-cultural values of sexual trafficking and indentured service which permits the forced prostitution of women by men – Capitalist inevitability at the cost of what should be an innate humanity.

Capitalism, Humanism and the Myth of the "Lucky Country"

This dialectical opposition between Capitalism (as represented by sex trafficking) and humanism (as represented by a collectivized feminism at least in the abstract as McLachlan considers it) makes for a harsh critique of Australia’s indifference to its own horrendous sexual socialization in failing to combat the illegal sex trade as effectively as is needed.

The quagmire of immigration detention established at the outset is just the social condition needed for the successful intimidation of immigrant women (both Chinese and European – the exploiters are a truly multicultural outfit, again an ironic debunking of the myth of Australian multi-cultural unity constituting the “lucky country” under John Howard’s “Aussie values” citizenship test).

There are no easy solutions to the predicament in The Jammed, borne as it is in the socio-economic desperation of women adjusting to the realities of a Patriarchal Capitalist-driven system of economic exploitation (sexual in this film’s metaphoric interpretation of such) which, as this film reveals in a clever near-throwaway scene of the sex slaves watching a televangelist, is not simply Patriarchal but Christian. The hypocrisy of Christian Australian morality is such that it would offer it’s exploited, sexually sublimated women only the word of God (another male construct – and presumably allowable Detention Centre reading) as solace: a sham if ever there was one. The only alternative to this moral absurdity for one sex slave coming into Australia under such terms of exploitation is suicide. Where is God now? Indeed, God is the justification used by hypocritical men to protect and condone a culture which permits the systematized sexual exploitation of women (inferred but not stated directly in The Jammed which nevertheless does equate its thesis on the horrors of Patriarchy with Patriarchy’s basis in Christian facades of moral decency and propriety). Perhaps the most telling analogy here is that both the pimps and the immigration department lock these women in rooms, denying them their human rights in accordance with a Patriarchal Christian Australia indifferent to both human suffering and the sexual exploitation of the women it claims to protect.

McLachlan’s Patriarchal Christian Australia in The Jammed is a nation of hypocrites and oppressors in which the pimp is little different to the Immigration officer. Indeed, the leading immigration officer (again a woman) is worse – she absolves herself of any humanity in deference to bureaucratic procedure (an excuse the Nazis made for their indifference to human suffering – just following orders).

The “lucky country” is a myth, and no film shows Australian hypocrisy in claiming that moniker than The Jammed.

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