Ordinary Australians? Reading Underbelly

Posted on | November 26, 2008 | 1 Comment

This is a slightly edited version of the Underbelly paper I gave in Melbourne last week. Comments are especially welcome before we submit it for publication.

Ordinary Australians? Aspiration, commodity fetishism and masculinity in Underbelly

by Melissa Gregg and Jason Wilson

Introduction
During the April 23rd screening of the Nine network drama Underbelly, Brisbane viewers sitting through the commercial break may have noticed something slightly perplexing: an advertisement for Victorian Tourism. This otherwise unremarkable occurrence took on unusual significance set against the opening scene for the episode, ‘Barbarians at the Gate’, in which the fictionalized Carl Williams appears on Derryn Hinch’s radio program to deny involvement in a string of unsolved murders. Of course, Underbelly’s main narrative arc involves a series of up to 30 killings in Melbourne’s criminal underworld during the years 1993-2004, alongside police efforts to restore order to the city. Why anyone watching the series would be contemplating Melbourne as an ideal holiday destination given this record of violence raises questions about the legitimate and illegitimate economies in effect during the setting of the series and its subsequent reception.

Later in the episode, the death of Andrew ‘Benji’ Veniamin in suspicious circumstances in the backroom of a Carlton restaurant is depicted in a highly aestheticised scene where the pivotal moment of death is juxtaposed with the brewing and filtering of a classically prepared Italian barista coffee. Melbourne’s much vaunted café culture is here inextricably linked to a network of organized criminal activity, both through the business hierarchies it suggests of a sector of the city’s significant Italian population and in terms of the leisure and consumption practices of typical of the night-time economy which has rejuvenated Australia’s inner cities, including Melbourne.

The reflections that follow arise from a set of interests we are developing for a book based on the first series of Underbelly and that, given the imminent second series, will no doubt take on further dimensions. Our analysis will focus on a range of issues including:

• the show’s status as a definitive example of Australian “post-broadcast TV”: DVD sales are the highest ever recorded, and prior to this patterns of consumption were facilitated by a high degree of illegal file-sharing to navigate a court order against its local screening in Melbourne

• its role in generating a national conversation about moral standards and values, particularly as the “real life” characters off-screen went on to exploit their increased celebrity for further profit

• promotional strategies employed by the DVD promoters (e.g. war chalking) and Channel Nine in its efforts to create a hyper-masculine programming “flow”: on-screen flash-up ads associated the program with other ratings winners, setting images of criminal characters against other “bad guys” on screen such as Gordon Ramsey and hosts of the weekly Footy Show

• homosocial desire and queer sociality in the text: Carl Williams’ heterosexuality and lack of extended family are in many ways explicitly contrasted with the networks of affection and affiliation shared by the “Carlton Crew”

• the “true crime” genre in Australian popular culture, and the celebrity economy attached to disreputable folk heroes stretching as far back as Ned Kelly

And finally:
• how Underbelly offers a commentary on the period of “aspirational suburbia” which arose as the dominant political discourse in Australia under the timeframe of John Howard’s Prime Ministership. Here we would point to the use of talkback radio to narrate events unfolding on the show (evidenced in the opening of ‘Barbarians at the Gate’) given how regularly talkback was taken by politicians and media commentators alike as a barometer for the opinions of “ordinary Australians” during Howard’s term. A further example would be the Charcoal Chicken salad bar which conveyed a banal suburban family milieux for the show as well as providing a key location for Carl to conduct business. On marked occasions Roberta Williams would say to the children, “Let’s get a slushy” so that the men could at the table could be left to talk “business” i.e. the plot to kill Moran.

For the rest of this paper we explore how the show blurs tidy conceptual oppositions to suggest that murderous ambition coincides with ordinariness. In this sense we argue it offers a counter-narrative to the period of consumer confidence and material aspiration that flourished in the late 1990s and the first few years of this decade.

Ordinary Australians
At one level, and to follow the scripting of the fictional series, the cycle of revenge killings depicted in Underbelly begins with Alphonse Gangitano’s execution of Greg Workman and starts in earnest with the non-fatal shooting of Carl Williams by Jason and Mark Moran. Following this there are tit-for-tat murders between Carl’s crew on one side and the Moran family and the so-called “Carlton Crew” of inner-city gangsters on the other. In between, there are a range of subplots that develop particularly in relation to the sexual appetites of the main protagonists. Meanwhile the compelling portrayal of Carl Williams’ wife Roberta at several moments appears reminiscent of the influence of Lady Macbeth. Indeed the moment of outrage and danger captured by the series is one of interruption to established ways of doing business between men. An unknown outsider’s cocky ambition invades the territory and the established hierarchy of a comfortable circuit of profitability. So while real life knowledge of the events that followed Carl Williams’ entry to the Melbourne drug market are probably enough for many people to find this unappealing television, the prospect of following the web of rivalry and power plays that seemingly drove the spiral of violence took on a certain curiosity dimension given these wider cultural associations – it was an Australian story that bore elements of Shakespearean tragedy.

The show held fascination for other reasons, notably due to the casting choices made. The majority of talent and most of the key roles were played by well known actors from previous TV appearances. For instance, Jason Moran’s father was played by Kevin Harrington, who gained a significant reputation playing David Bishop (son to Harold Bishop) on Neighbours, as well as Kevin, the archetypal “Howard battler”/ “ordinary Australian” on the highly popular Seachange (ABC). Harrington’s other major roles of the period include film parts in The Dish, Australian Rules, and The Honourable Wally Norman, and like many other actors coming to Underbelly, there were major conflicts between the “characters” played and the history of associations accumulated in the CVs they brought to the project. Jason Moran’s mother was also played by a Neighbours star; Moran’s wife was from Home and Away; meanwhile Benji Venjamin (Damian Walshe-Howling) was a police officer in Blue Heelers. Carolyn Craig’s straight-laced blonde cop in Underbelly brought to mind her own previous role in Blue Heelers, not to mention her impossible mission to appear after the departure of the immensely popular Lisa McCune, whose star shone so brightly throughout the period of the underworld war.

These casting choices might be read as an argument about quality: that Nine still has the power to amass an all star cast. Promotions which featured Vince Colosimo at the vanguard of the full set of characters certainly reinforce this. We might also see Underbelly as providing something of a backlash against the ‘trivial’ mainstream content for which other networks had been willing to settle. Read in this way the show can be seen as a return of the repressed: a corrective to the stagey innocence of the 1990s.

Underbelly offers a flipside to the televisual mainstream of the period it claims to represent. It flaunts televisual memory of peak shows of the 1990s and early years of the decade, whether mainstream or next generation, “youth” programming (Colosimo consolidated his household fame in Ten’s Secret Life of Us during 2002-3). This heightened sensitivity to questions of corruption raised in the story given viewers’ parochial susceptibility to bestow innocence and venerability to such well-known faces.

Yet this flipside operates on another level. Here we want to be explicit and highlight that the escalating violence depicted in Underbelly’s plot is of course driven by hotheaded paranoia, machismo and material aspiration, but also by the massive expansion, even “mainstreaming” of the use of party drugs throughout the last two decades. In this sense it puts a new spin on the ideas of ordinariness that have been taken as read in both political discourse and cultural criticism for many years.

Economics and ecstasy
The original conflict between the Morans and Williams is over market-share in this booming drug trade. In early episodes, Carl surreptitiously uses the Morans’ own pill press to make high-quality MDMA which he sells at lower prices than the established drug cartel. Anyone who saw it will remember the pivotal and formative scene in which Roberta and Carl consummate their desire for each other and a better life on the couch, as pills roll endlessly out of the machine. The high-end lifestyles, the long list of contract assassinations, the employment of bodyguards and the endless legal battles that follow for the protagonists are all financed with drug money gleaned from supplying the clubs of Melbourne with the industrial quantities of ecstasy pills which are integral to the culture of post-MDMA clubbing.

The divide between the metropolitan consumption culture and the suburban origin of the drug suppliers (the point of production) is observed in the text in several ways. The suppliers only ever take stimulants, particularly speed – they don’t take pills themselves. Their drugs are cut up or snorted in the open in a single club usually populated by other underworld figures, with dancers who always seem to be dancing just for them. This individualised and exclusive experience is a complete contrast to ecstasy’s all welcoming embrace.

The show makes a point of completely avoiding any part in the commodity fetishism that surrounds ecstasy consumption among the middle class. The experience privileged in the text is that of the drug pushers; the key silence of the text is the point of consumption. The dealers are never shown inside mainstream clubs but are filmed entering and leaving – with a particular focus on bouncers letting them in ahead of the queue (the role of security staff in enabling the illicit night-time economy is another dimension worth exploring). The warring suppliers remain on the outside, in alleys and carparks – the liminal spaces that are also amenable for the violence that inevitably ensues. When the protagonists do engage in drugs they are always in cocooned, protected venues: the strip club, the hotel room, or Carl’s house. They are never part of the same public, social, communal setting that we take to be the defining aspect of ecstasy’s mass appeal. These are instead the zones that provide shelter for the eponymous “underbelly” of the night-time economy – the spaces that the middle-class consumer would prefer not to see. Here the echoes with The Sopranos’ avowed business interests, in waste management, are clear: each setting uncovers the toxic, shameful and frightening elements behind legitimate economic transactions.

Underbelly shows us the structural links between violence, drug production and distribution and the now mainstream practices of hedonistic weekend drug consumption. Screening in 2008, at a time when a spate of misbehaving football stars only made these connections more prominent, the show provided a framework by which these developments might be traced. These externalities that complicate both celebratory accounts of drug and club culture and progressivist accounts of the renewal of inner-urban precincts by means of the “night-time economy” are part of the industrialization of global club culture over the last decade or more. An expansion of precincts and venues dedicated to after-hours leisure, many of which have been driven by deliberate policy change, mean that “super-club” equipped precincts like Darling Harbour, Fortitude Valley, the Gold Coast and parts of Melbourne’s CBD not only help attract forms of tourism from beyond the city, they do so from within the city as well, bringing revelers in from the suburbs to inner-urban regions.

A vital component of clubbing in the contemporary night-time economy is drug use, and those drugs which are characteristically linked with post-rave club culture – ecstasy, amphetamines and cocaine – can’t be made, sold, obtained or consumed legally. This means that an important input into the night-time economy is, by definition, criminalized. Nevertheless, the combination of clubs, dance music and drugs is now a mainstream element of youth culture, and is no longer, on the face of things, a marginal or especially resistant practice. Indeed, to the extent that dance culture is mainstream the routinized contact between “ordinary Australians” and the criminal individuals and organizations who supply drugs to clubland can no longer be denied.

This interface between criminality and the mainstream is, in a curious sense, in plain view. A particular scene in Underbelly demonstrates this vividly in the bashing of a bouncer at the hands of one of Carl’s crew and the silence of witnesses questioned by police investigating the matter. But in the light of the context in which the show was screened, drug consumption and the interface between celebrity and infamy had become a form of spectacle. The episode “Earning A Crust” screened the same week that Wayne Carey appeared on Andrew Denton’s Enough Rope – an interview in which he tried to deny his association with Jason Moran (Carey had previously been a character reference for a Moran trial). It was also the time that Olympic swimming hopeful Nick Darcy was charged with battery after a night of drinking, and the football season was in full swing. This would prove to be a season where footballers of both local codes would be caught on several occasions publicly engaged in a number of the activities depicted in Underbelly. This is not to forget that 2008 was the season that followed Rugby League star Andrew Johns’ appearance on The Footy Show confessing to the use of ecstasy throughout his career – a career that coincided with the period of the gangland war.

In this context, Underbelly offers a historicising function for a wider set of cultural phenomena, pinpointing the moment when club and drug culture became mainstream. Ultimately it was in the period of Melbourne’s gang wars and the tenure of the conservative Howard Government that Australians became the highest per capita consumers of ecstasy in the world. The 2004 National Drugs Strategy Household Drugs Survey found that 21 per cent of Australians aged 20 to 24 had used ecstasy, and that 13 per cent had used it recently. For all Australians aged over 14, in 2004 the number who had tried ecstasy was equal with the number who had tried cannabis, at 11.4%. (For comparison, it’s instructive to note that according to the ABS around 15% of Australians attended an AFL match in 2005, and only 9% attended a Rugby League match.) These facts, combined with Underbelly’s distinct televisual properties, contribute to make an idyllic portrayal of Australian suburbia somewhat anachronistic.

Aspirational masculinity
Carl’s eventual arrest takes place at a neighbourhood park, in the middle of a barbecue with friends (to adopt a phrase, it’s a real “barbecue stopper”). This is an overriding symbol of how the show places ordinary Australian leisure practices alongside criminal indulgence and murderous rivalry. What we had learned from watching Blue Heelers for 12 years was that the cops always won in the end. The narrative always seemed to resolve itself with a drink down at the local at the conclusion of each episode. In Underbelly, in all but the final episode, the cops become increasingly helpless with each installment. The story consistently ended with their failure, which was a breach of the traditional generic expectation of the cop show but also of Australia’s belief that answers will be found and offenders charged and prosecuted. Underbelly’s narrative structure operated on the opposite premise: on the knowledge that each episode would bring an ever more outrageous slaughter as the story’s climax. Once this moment eventuated the show quickly came to a close, to reiterate the point that the murders are senseless.

As visitors to Melbourne we can’t contemplate what this rendering of hapless police has done to existing feelings about the histories portrayed in the show. But watching Underbelly from Queensland, with its own history of organized crime, was to recognize that the issues being raised by the text weren’t isolated. It’s worth closing, then, reflecting on the special bond that linked the fate of Detective Steve Owen of the Purana Task Force and the upstart Carl Williams. The ambition shared by the two men – one who makes a point of his clean, white collar image, the other who wears shorts and thongs to most of his business meetings – asks us to question how very different they are. Williams oversees an appalling amount of bloodshed to maintain his achieved status, while Owen acknowledges that going to the funerals of slain villains is an important networking event and career stepping stone. A lingering lesson from Underbelly is that the white collar professional and the suburban entrepreneur had more than a little in common, particularly in the desire for a kind of self-motivated class mobility that many would claim as the commendable aspirational spirit of the decade.

Category: Viewing

Comments

One Response to “Ordinary Australians? Reading Underbelly”

  1. glen
    November 27th, 2008 @ 5:53 am

    if you do want to look at bouncers further, Sarah Thorton discusses their role in the club scene in _Club Cultures_ as having a kind of valorising function (my words, not hers), which you probably already know about. Plus “Getting on the Door and the Staying there” in _Danger in the Field_ for some participant observation (!!!) bouncer action.

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