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Romper Stomper (1992)

Synopsis

Hando (Russell Crowe) and his best mate Davey (Daniel Pollock) lead a rampaging gang of neo-Nazi skinheads in Footscray, Melbourne, during the 80s. They beat up young Vietnamese migrants, get drunk and fall down, living off the dole, in a disused tyre shop draped with Nazi flags. Gabe (Jacqueline McKenzie), running from an incestuous relationship with her rich father, joins the gang as Hando’s girlfriend, but Davey is also attracted to her. When young Vietnamese retaliate, led by Tiger (Tony Lee), the skinheads escape to a disused warehouse, where Hando plots his revenge. Gabe pursues her own vengeance, by leading the gang into her father’s house. When Hando kicks her out, she tells the cops where the gang are hiding. Routed again, this time by the police – Hando, Davey and Gabe take to the road.

Curator’s notes

by Paul Byrnes

Romper Stomper was an incendiary device aimed at the culture of comfort in middle-class Australia in the early 90s. It had the exact effect that its writer-director intended, provoking outrage and retaliation, which then attracted a large youth audience to see it. The mayor of Fitzroy in Melbourne denounced it, along with the prominent Australian critic David Stratton, who said it should have never been made. Several film-makers said it was racist towards Asians, and sympathetic towards skinhead Neo-Nazis. Many similar things were said about Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, made in the UK 20 years earlier, a film from which Romper Stomper borrows heavily – but the outrage was similarly misdirected.

One of the reasons that Romper Stomper was so shocking was that it was so well made. It placed the viewer as a participant in the action, implicating us in the enjoyment these young men and women feel during the exercise of violence. Geoffrey Wright’s refusal to condemn their actions is part of this challenge to the viewer – you may want to disown them, but he makes you one of them, by the way he places the camera. The accusation of racism is hard to understand, given that he simply shows the young Vietnamese men responding to extreme provocation. They are hardly depicted as victims, in that sense.

Wright’s skill with action and violence, so early in his career, reminds us of another debut feature film from 13 years earlier, Mad Max, but Romper Stomper is altogether more morally complex and challenging. It’s not about the dystopian future – but the ugly present. In another sense, it’s a continuation of the Australian bush-ranging film traditions of the Story of the Kelly Gang, made in 1906, but without the bush, or the sentimentalism. In a way, Hando and his mates are the modern descendants of the Australian outlaw ethos – protecting their land, just like the Kellys. They’re just a whole lot more alienated from the wider community, but their own sense of community is very strong. The film is about family at heart – the Vietnamese family, the skinhead family, and Gabe’s own completely screwed up wreckage of a family. It’s not pretty or comforting, but it’s an incredibly exciting film to watch, and that forces the viewer to confront his or her attitudes to violence as entertainment.