Bad Boy Bubby
Article by Jonno Blood
Bad Boy Bubby
The priest screams nonsense from the stage. And the crowd cheers.
He stares like a shaman, hair erupting either side of a naked pate, like an electrocuted friar.
Ranting incoherently, he chastises himself and mimes sex.
The vestments and dog collar are stolen from his late father, who he suffocated with clingwrap. The rants are retellings of his abuse, and the gyrations are for his mother.
The pretend priest is exalted for behaviour that would urge us to cross the street in the hard light of Monday morning. As a mob-audience we burn our concepts of normality at the altar of entertainment. Bad Boy Bubby shows us the absurdity of what we call normal to begin with.
The film opens grey and bleak, in a drab concrete walled apartment. For Bubby, played disturbingly well by Nicholas Hope, the world has always been this grotty room. He has only known his mother. She has abused him with the twisted love of Jocasta Complex perversion since birth, telling him the outside air is noxious.
We arrive to see her sponge a naked 35-year-old Bubby, and serve him sugar and milk-soaked chunks of bread, before bedding him, cooing ‘good boy… good little boy’ while gyrating over him.
She keeps him weak and dependent with a toxic elixir of fear and isolation. Whenever she leaves the apartment (telling him not to move a muscle. Jesus is watching) she dons a WWII gas mask to preserve the lie of a poisoned world.
The broken soul that is Bubby is devoid of ego. He mimics rather than creates; Mimics the suffocating control of his mother, the clumsy charm of his prodigal father ‘You’re a sexy woman Flo.’
There’s a sick logic when he wraps his pet cat in cling wrap and seals off the air. A mimicked cruelty of his mother’s creation. As a cat lover this is the most challenging scene for me. It helps only a little that the feral cat they used for the scene was humanely put down by a vet prior to being wrapped.
It almost feels like justice when Bubby turns his cling wrap on old Ma and Pa. We sense his liberation as he stands by the corpses, in striped pygamas, holding his plastic-wrapped cat, eating a cockroach. And, yes, actor Nicolas Hope did eat the roaches.
Emancipated from his incestuous cage, Bubby sets off into the clear air – resplendent in pyjamas and jacket – into an alien world of bewildering normality.
Footnote for foley fans: Director, Rolf de Heer positioned two binaural mics in Hope’s wig to get those lovely suffocating sounds and Darth Vader gas mask breathing in real time.
Bubby embarks on a Kafkaesque journey into the confronting confusion of the outside world. His cultural innocence highlights the absurdity of relatively normal behaviour. As he fumbles his way through the banal, parroting one-liners, the barking of dogs, and the deriding words of his late parents. It's a crash course in the fuckedupedness of life.
Each stage of Bubby's journey was shot by a different Director of Photography to give a unique and experimental feel, resulting in a ludicrous 31 different DoPs. De Heer’s novel approach was also evident in his decision to shoot the entire film in sequence, allowing Hope to improvise and build his parroted vocabulary from the characters Bubby encounters as the story unfolds.
Our manchild-parrot protagonist is dazzled by the delights and dangers of the world outside his cage. Once free of old lady Flo he goes with the flow, getting by with a collaged lexicon and a complete ignorance of the rules. The Clingwrap Killer finds guidance in the curiosity and sympathy of others. In his baffled, lawless innocence he oscillates from fear to jubilation, before finding his superpower as a kind of disabled dragoman, and his music, belting out the lyrics of an abused and neglected soul.
Like any anti-hero worth its salt Bubby also finds his love, Angel, who reminds him of his mother, at least physically (great big whoppers of things). Angel has her own emotional parental enslavement to escape. But clingwrap is always handy.
In protest to rumours, at the time of shooting, of the reintroduction of capital punishment to Australia De Heer contemplated ending the flick with Bubby copping the death penalty. Lucky for Bubby the rumours proved to be just that, and De Heer stuck with a less final ending.
Thirty years on, Bad Boy Bubby is arguably more poignant now than it was in ‘93, as our sense of normality embraces the absurd with eyes firmly shut. As a film it makes us think as much as it makes us cringe. It disgusts us, it confronts us, and we cheer the revulsion.