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Holy crap, the movie Wake in Fright is incredible. "Ya new to the Yabba?" is absolutely haunting. I'm not sure where to begin with it. I usually watch a movie on my side monitor while I code or work on something, half focused, paying attention to the audio and catching up on the subtitles. * But I absolutely could not do that for this, much like the John Grant I kept getting dragged back into Bondanyabba. It's like Brazil with Wristcutters' aesthetic. It's like Stranger in a Strange Land meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It's the scorching bender of an idealistic intellectual; a descent from an ivory tower, down through the roil, into the Yabba.

I'm not sure what the Yabba is exactly, but it seems to be Bataille's economy, an acceptance of base materialism. It's a zig zag between the baseness of the id and the functional structure of ego. John repeatedly hits bottom again and again, almost falling out of the yabba, but each time he's picked up and dusted off by a more permanent resident of the Yabba. You get to see all spectrums of awareness. Doc is well aware of the madness and happily participates in it. Jock knows the yabba and draws more people into its thrall. Tim lives almost fully in the ego, dipping into the id from time to time. Dick and Joe are the mirror to Tim. Each of these characters draw John towards their level and then plunge him into beer, figuratively and literally.

I might not be giving the Yabba enough credit. There is one scene, the Two Ups scene. Where a mob of men are gambling on the results of two coins flipped. Men throw money down in piles in a chaotic fashion, then when the coins land there is an equally chaotic looking rush to pick up the correct piles. John balks at this initially, how do the winnings get honestly distributed? Jock, John's guide into the Yabba, simply explains that everyone makes sure the money gets where it needs to go. So John tries to gamble and at first it looks like John has flat out lost his money. But then a shout comes from the crowd "Where's the guy with the jacket!?" and John's money gets back to him, winnings included.
This is an interesting distinction. Both the expected rules of order from John and the rules of the Two Ups pit are a form of super-ego. There is an order to the madness; the biggest difference is where it lies. John's arbitration and understanding of society comes from some kind of government or authority figure. He expects there to be an arbiter of law. But that's not how the Yabba works. The super-ego there exists in mob rule. Each member lives by their own understanding of the rules, and due to some miracle† it is the distributed super-ego of the mob.

Ultimately though, I'm just trying to put smart words to a movie where a guy fights a kangaroo to the death IRL.