Issue 170

Maria
and I saw Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
recently while in Canberra. We were looking forward
to seeing it as it had been recommended by friends, although
we had concerns as some of them had reservations about
the amount of violence.
When we arrived at the theatre the first thing I noticed
was that the Canberrans exiting the session before ours
seemed to be uniformly middle-class retirees, as opposed
to say a session at the Nova in Carlton where we’re
used to seeing a wacky bunch of misfits stumbling into
the light. That’s Canberra and that’s Carlton,
of course.
But, getting back to the movie. I’d read somewhere
that the director, Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin
McDonagh, had brought an outsider’s perspective
to what is essentially an American story, set as it is
in Missouri, so I was looking for that perspective all
through the movie – and not really seeing a lot
of it, although the cop central to the story, (local police
Chief Willoughby, played by Woody Harrelson) seems to
be oddly philosophical and internationalist in outlook
for a cop in a regional US township – he’s
married to an English woman (who lapses incongruously
into an Australian accent, possibly because she was played
by an Australian actress, Abbie Cornish).
Maybe the ending also betrayed something of another sensibility.
While there was some pretty mindless violence to be winced
at to be sure, (to be sure), the usual American predilection
for righteous vengeance being seen to be done was avoided
in favour of the just the possibility of vengeance being
wreaked in some future episode – or not –
as our heroine, played with customary terseness by Frances
McDormand (again wearing an oddly citified lesbo hairstyle
it must be said) and the only-slightly redeemed and significantly
char-grilled anti-hero, ex-Officer (Jason) Dixon drive
off uneasily to Idaho in the early morning sun armed to
the teeth and with the intention of calling somebody to
account for something.
Despite these anomalies I enjoyed the film overall, probably
more than, but at least as much as In Bruges, one of McDonagh’s
earlier pieces.
But, whatever the merits of the movie, it’s got
me thinking about billboards. Advertising billboards are
nothing new, of course, and still a respectable way to
get the word around. As with any other form of advertising
it’s difficult to quantify their effectiveness,
but there are some you can discount immediately. For instance,
billboards advertising breakfast or drive show radio personalities
are in your face purely to inflate the egos of the jocks
involved (and are probably the clincher points in their
contracts), but unless the personalities concerned double
up on the telly there’s clearly no advantage to
the ratings in having a face-for-radio up on a billboard.
Advertisements for cars loom large over toll-ways and
I’m still.. read
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Why
should an atheist miss going to church? Should an atheist
go into church? What possible reason could there be for
an ardent non-believer to enter the doors of an institution
whose foundations are floating on the thin air of faith
and superstition.
Let me start with the observation that made me consider
writing this blogette: I have an intense loathing of Easter
in Australia. It is Christmas and New Year condensed into
a couple of desperate days, highlighted by football, rock
concerts, full pubs, closed shops, smoke haze and roads
choked with cars full of families and fools escaping from
the cities for what they see is their last vaguely warm
holiday. And escape can be to anywhere. Though, for some
reason, they all seem to congregate near to me no matter
where I may be.
Better to stay home in the city where, for once, it would
be quiet and peaceful apart from the sound of houses being
broken into, cars being stolen and leaves falling into
already overburdened gutters. At home you can avoid that
strange custom of eating fish on Good Friday, an institution
that was not, as common belief would have it, started
to protect the fish industry of ancient times. Christians
were only not meant to eat meat on proscribed fasting
days, for example the Wednesdays and Fridays of the forty
days of Lent. This was not a problem for the poor as they
generally couldn’t afford meat anyway but fish,
by being a cold-blooded creature, was seen as a loophole
in the religious directive for those of more substantial
means.
Incidentally if you live in the Orkneys you don’t
have to eat Puffin Pie, a concoction sanctioned at some
stage by the Church as also not actually being meat as
these particularly colourful and comic birds spend so
much time diving underwater that they might as well be
fish. Damn the feathers and the flying. Eat your Puffin!
So at Easter and Christmas I wonder about those people
who go to church twice a year, filling the pews with bobbing
confusion and mumbled contrition. Do I stand now? Do I
kneel now? If I close my eyes I won’t know when
to do either so I’ll keep my eyes open. They shuffle
out avoiding eye contact with the cleric, be he Priest,
Parson or Bishop, hoping that they don’t make the
collection ‘tap and wave’ with a credit card.
How else can they get rid of their Indonesian bank notes
if not in church?
On the positive side the foreign currency replaces the
fly buttons that previous generations of fathers deposited
with astounding insouciance in the collection basket
apparently unconcerned with the
ever-increasing opening in the vestibule that was uncovered
when they put their hats back on their collective heads.
Just in case you thought that going to church more regularly
made you a better person I would point out that Peter
Dutton is a regular..
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