Based on Australian writer Peter Carey’s 1972 short story “Crabs” and written for the screen by Peter Smalley, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1986 film Dead End Drive-In is a post-apocalyptic satire with layers of national meaning that will be lost on most American viewers, but with which many Americans will no doubt sympathize. The protagonist, Crabs (Ned Manning), is an aspiring tow truck driver fascinated by the nighttime world of automobile accidents and confrontations with the marauding, crash-cannibalizing Karboys. His pursuit of thrills takes an unexpected detour, however, when he and girlfriend Carmen (Natalie McCurry) visit the reputedly sketchy Star Drive-In only to find themselves its captives after police steal two of his wheels. High walls topped by electrified fencing surround the lot, and Crabs will spend the remainder of the movie figuring out a way to escape.

Carmen and most of the other residents of the Star, however, see no reason to leave. The drive-in’s manager, Thompson (Peter Whitford), is “very fatherly” in Carey’s words [1] and administers the Star paternalistically as a microcosmic junkyard socialist utopia, rationing concession food. In Carey’s story, he “explains the meal ticket system – the government will supply them with ten dollars’ worth of tickets each week, these tickets can be spent at the Ezy-Eatin right here on the drive-in” [2]. “Australia itself was once considered what we now call a Democratic Socialist society, until the Howard era [i.e., 1996-2007] brought in both the two-party system and 100% capitalism,” Matty Clarke explains in his article “Australian Socialism: Unique and Proud”: “We were 50% socialist and 50% free market which, through regulation and national industry, allowed us control to heat and cool our economy” [3].

Dead End Drive-In can be interpreted as a reflection of the changing attitude of the Australian state and of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) toward the Australian nation. In “Crabs”, Carey depicts the safety net of the socialist system negatively, noting that Carmen “has got fatter” and that her face “is older” from living confined in the drive-in, being inactive, and eating its greasy food [4]. Echoing the restrictive and European-oriented immigration regime that prevailed in Australia until the seventies, “the drive-in is closed to visitors,” Carey notes [5]. “After all, from its inception, the ALP and the mainstream union movement championed the ‘White Australia policy’, which excluded Asians and other nonwhite migrants from the national community,” writes Jon Piccini: “The powerful, rurally based Australian Workers Union (AWU) represented the mainstream of the Australian labor movement and stood at the head of the ALP’s right. They regarded antipathy toward Asia as central to the maintenance of high living standards” [6]. “A major aspect of ‘Crabs’ was the conflation of cars in mid-20th-century Australia with notions of (white) masculinity, freedom and even Australianness,” Claire Corbett holds forth somewhat obnoxiously:

“Crabs” conveyed a sense that the car both expressed and denied an essential (white) Australianness. Part of being a white Australian was in a sense to be nowhere, to operate in a liminal space, to be insulated inside the interior of the car. There was no reality to the country outside the boundaries of the car, which were the boundaries of the (male) body. [7]

The status quo at the Star changes with the arrival of a truckload of foreigners, however. In Carey’s story, these range from Indians to “children, black, with swollen bellies”, who “run past shouting, chased by a small English child with spectacles” [8], while in Dead End Drive-In the newcomers are overwhelmingly Asian. Whereas Arthur Calwell, who led the ALP during the sixties, had supported the White Australia policy, the ALP’s position shifted with the ascendancy of Gough Whitlam, who served as prime minister from 1972 to 1975, the year that the system of race-based immigration restriction was finally abolished.

Carmen worries that she may be raped by one of the Asians, and a contingent of the white men at the drive-in – including Mickey (Murray Fahey), who wears a swastika pin, and Dave (Dave Gibson), whose hairstyle marks him as a Teddy Boy throwback – attempt to win the protagonist over to the cause of racial solidarity, but Crabs remains unmoved and only desires “to be free” as Carey puts it [9]. Contented in their tolerably comfortable concentration camp, the whites have been insufficiently vigilant, with the men smoking dope and the young women taking the birth control pills dispensed by the Star’s seemingly benevolent management, unwittingly facilitating their own demographic replacement. The birth control angle is not mentioned in “Crabs”, although Carey does observe that Carmen’s “sweater is covered with small ‘pills’ of wool” [10]. “The whole place stinks of filthy wogs,” Carmen gripes in Carey’s story [11], but Crabs, like Carey, is sympathetic to the non-whites. (The author has bemoaned “the murderous history of our country” [12] and that his ancestors “invaded the land, slaughtered many of its occupants, did their best to destroy the culture and to breed out, in one way or another, blackness” [13].) Crabs, as indicated by his Bundeswehr shirt in the film, is a product of the postwar order, the Bundeswehr being the NATO-aligned incarnation of Germany’s army, its antifascist founding principles extolling “the conduct displayed by members of the military resistance against Adolf Hitler, especially the attempt of Claus von Stauffenberg and Henning von Tresckow to assassinate him” [14]. In welcoming immigrants and rejecting nationalism, Crabs can be viewed as Dead End Drive-In’s Gough Whitlam figure.

Gough Whitlam

The matter of the drive-in’s name, the Star, also warrants attention. “The Star Drive-in was across the road from Monash University,” Carey recalled in 2017: “Those roads were my roads. I recognised them later in Mad Max.” [15]. Advertising itself with a six-pointed neon star not unlike a distended Magen David in the movie version, however, the drive-in evokes both Jewish media power and Zionism – an association reinforced elsewhere on the lot by graffiti of a Star of David crossed out and a swastika rendered beside it. On the gate of the security road leading to the drive-in is another six-pointed star, with the system of gated roads “splitting the community into sections and controlling avenues in and avenues out, you know, rather like Israel and the Gaza Strip,” director Brian Trenchard-Smith observes in his audio commentary [16]. (Notably, Jewish names are absent from the list of producers, one of whom, Damien Parer, is the son of a famous photographer of the Second World War, also named Damien Parer, who purports to have been anti-Semitic [17].)

If Crabs is a Gough Whitlam figure, then his desire to extricate himself from a Zionist tyranny makes sense, as Whitlam broke with the ALP’s traditional support for the Jewish state in asserting “a more independent and progressive foreign policy” at the time of the Yom Kippur War, writes Grace Brooks: “Then Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam criticized US arms shipments to Israel while refusing to publicly condemn Syria or Egypt for their attacks on Israel.” “Indeed, there is evidence that Whitlam’s independent stance motivated the CIA’s partial involvement in his dismissal,” she continues: “In particular, the CIA was worried that Whitlam was about to inform Parliament about the secret US intelligence presence in Australia via their spy base at Pine Gap” [18]. Carey, who wrote “Crabs” before Whitlam’s prime ministership, “has no doubt the US government, under Republican President Gerald Ford, was suspicious of Australia’s Labor government and reacted against Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s threat to reconsider the lease on the Pine Gap satellite tracking station,” relates Susan Wyndham [19]. In keeping with such concerns over espionage, Dead End Drive-In depicts surveillance monitors and a mysterious computer system in the manager’s office at the Star. Significantly, just before Crabs makes his escape, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s 1975 film The Man from Hong Kong appears on the drive-in screen, establishing an implicit link between the events in Dead End Drive-In and the period of Whitlam’s radicalism.

Texturing, sometimes reinforcing, and sometimes at odds with the closed, socialistic dystopia – the Ezy-Eden – suggested by Carey’s short story is the set of meanings and embellishments Trenchard-Smith and his collaborators bring to the adaptation. For Trenchard-Smith, the Star and its sister drive-ins in a near-future gulag archipelago are a reactionary project of “the haves” to imprison potentially rebellious youth, the impoverished, and assorted undesirables, including foreigners. The objections raised by the Star’s white internees to the arrival of the Asians parallels “many of the sentiments expressed by Australians as regards immigrants from Vietnam who were coming in, in some numbers, from […] various refugee camps across Asia,” explains Trenchard-Smith, who acknowledges that Dead End Drive-In received government funding through the New South Wales Film Corporation due to its anti-racist messaging:

Indeed, social problems did occur when a little bit of ghettoization was allowed to happen, and one whole suburb of Sydney, Cabramatta, is predominantly a Vietnamese suburb and […] I’m a believer in immigration, myself. Immigration is what made America what it is, immigration made Australia what it is, and we are all citizens of the same planet. There is only one race, the human race, and eventually I do believe we’ll all come to accept that and embrace it. [20]

Dead End Drive-In vastly improves upon Carey’s original story, not least by the inclusion of a great deal of action and excitement not present in the unprepossessing source material, but in some ways it is also less honest. Fleshing out Carey’s spare delineation of the near future, Dead End Drive-In opens with captions giving a sense of the global scope of economic and ecological collapse, one of which reads, “CAPETOWN, April 1st. 1989: The great white massacre, 103,000 die.” This factoid, alluding to the Apartheid system still in place in South Africa, establishes the potential stakes for Australians. If they do not want to be slaughtered by the racial others they despise and antagonize, it is implied, they should learn to live with them as equals. It is against the xenophobic instinct in his countrymen, therefore, that Crabs rebels. In “Crabs”, by contrast, Carey is less flattering toward his protagonist, whose progressivism is more abstract and nihilistic. Having “forgotten Carmen”, his countrywoman, he determines that his “situation has become such that no progress is possible,” Carey continues: “Crabs is now formulating a different direction. Movement is essential, it is the only thing he has ever believed” [21]. Society, like the immobilized cars at the Star, has ceased to rumble and move. He is impatient to be free – but to what end? Crabs, who in Carey’s story was bullied as a child, is motivated by antisocial resentment. The drive-in for him “is like the beach when he was a kid. Everybody is doing something. He would like to blow them all up” [22]. In Dead End Drive-In, Crabs’s escape is a moment of crowd-pleasing triumph, but in Carey’s version he “has no sense of direction” [23]. He is, in other words, lost.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 44.

[2] Ibid., pp. 42-43.

[3] Clarke, Matty. “Australian Socialism: Unique and Proud”. Independent Australia (June 13, 2019): https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/australian-socialism-unique-and-proud,12802

[4] Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 46.

[5] Ibid., p. 45.

[6] Piccini, Jon. “Australian Labor and the ‘Color Line’”. Jacobin (March 1, 2020): https://jacobin.com/2020/03/australian-labor-party-alp-white-australia-policy-bill-shorten/

[7] Corbett, Claire. “Peter Carey Navigates Australia’s Past”. The Monthly (February 14, 2018): https://web.archive.org/web/20180423121238/https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/claire-corbett/2018/14/2018/1518564143/peter-carey-navigates-australia-s-past

[8] Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 48.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., p. 46.

[11] Ibid., p. 48.

[12] Mills, Jennifer. “Talking ‘Crabs’”. Overland (Spring 2017): https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-228/interview-peter-carey/

[13] Haas, Lidija. “Peter Carey on Facing Australia’s Original Sin”. Financial Times (January 5, 2018): https://www.ft.com/content/a795d98c-f0be-11e7-bb7d-c3edfe974e9f

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeswehr#Founding_principles

[15] Mills, Jennifer. “Talking ‘Crabs’”. Overland (Spring 2017): https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-228/interview-peter-carey/

[16] Trenchard-Smith, Brian. “Audio Commentary”. Dead End Drive-In [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2016.

[17] Aitken, Ian, Ed. The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013, p. 703.

[18] Brooks, Grace. “The Australian Labor Party Has Always Been Loyal to Israel”. Jacobin (January 22, 2024): https://jacobin.com/2024/01/australian-labor-party-israel-palestine

[19] Wyndham, Susan. “For Peter Carey the Whitlam Dismissal Is More Than a Memory”. The Sydney Morning Herald (October 20, 2014): https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/for-peter-carey-the-whitlam-dismissal-is-more-than-a-memory-20141020-118seh.html

[20] Trenchard-Smith, Brian. “Audio Commentary”. Dead End Drive-In [Blu-ray]. Hertfordshire: Arrow Films, 2016.

[21] Carey, Peter. Collected Stories. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998, p. 49.

[22] Ibid., p. 46.

[23] Ibid., p. 50.