Beneath Clouds/Wild Cat Falling Essay

Comparative essay – Beneath Clouds and Wild Cat Falling
Ivan Sen’s 2001 film Beneath Clouds and Mudrooroo’s novel Wild Cat Falling are both immensely similar but also very different in context. In both texts, we see the journey of young aboriginal people who are progressing through a stage of immense change in their life. Suffering racism, prejudice and alienation, the young people must break down barriers and lead a journey both physically but also inside themselves on a search for self identity.
The post modernist and post colonist context in which Wild Cat Falling is set, possesses the themes of alienation, hopelessness and disconnection during a time of immense racial vilification against black people and are explored by Mudrooroo very effectively. The protagonist is portrayed as having little hope in life and would prefer if he were to be locked up in ‘Freo jail’ in which he sees a refuge from normal life. “Nothing is right, nothing is wrong. Everything exists in itself and by itself. All things are separate and alien from each other.” (p92) Evident in this quote is the dysfunctionality and disconnection that post modernist literature refers to in such detail. The 1960’s, a time of racial tension is more closely reflected in Beneath Clouds that expected. The 2001 film explorer’s immense change but the context of it compared to Wild Cat Falling is surprisingly similar. The themes of racial vilification and social dysfunctionality are explored again through the film.
Beneath Clouds explores the lives of two young aboriginal people, a girl names Lena who leaves her hometown in search of an Irish biological father and Vaughn, a teenage ‘screw-up’ who breaks out of a minimum security prison to reach his mother who is on her death bed and wished to see Vaughn for the first time in two years. Wild Cat Falling is a novel by Colin Johnson (known traditionally as Mudrooroo) about a young aboriginal man who takes on a white society he believes is against him. In this...