As I wrote a few days ago, I quite enjoyed Furiosa, the Mad Max spin off film.
Sadly, it appears to have been a flop, which is quite sad as I have always loved Mad Max, and the Roadrunner cartoons (which are the perfect manifestation of this genre).
News reports have emerged that the Australian and NSW taxpayer have been responsible for funding the bulk of this film, with estimates being that the Federal Government has stumped up $150 million and that the NSW Government has put up $33 million.
That is quite a lot of money to put into funding one movie.
The supposed benefits to Australia from funding such a film are two fold. The first is that having such a film made in Australia may provide employment benefits, particularly in the local film industry. The other is that films can contribute to the local arts scene and to Australian culture.
The first argument is a rather Keynesian one, and I am skeptical about it. Pouring a lot of taxpayer money into one film is unlikely to unlock a lot of economic benefits. Keynesian activities, such as subsidised film making, or Kevin Rudd’s various recession avoidance initiatives in the time of the GFC, or other expressions of government largesse, rarely end well.
The willy-nilly use of taxpayer funds with limited accountability does not result in outcomes of great benefit to the community, even though you might argue that the chancers who profit from the loopholes, as in the various GFC era schemes, might trickle their new found riches back into the economy when they increase their luxury spending.
And a lot of the really bad films made in Australia Cinema history are the Ozploitation films from the 1970s and early 1980s, when government policy allowed for extremely generous tax deductions for investment in film making. Like, have you ever seen the 1981 film Starstruck? The only good thing about it is the soundtrack.
The second argument is the somewhat elitist cultural one, that government needs to fund the arts. Our art galleries, operas, ballets, theatre companies, symphony orchestras etc possibly need to have government funding. Similarly our local artist and literary scenes.
This doesn’t always work well either. Some subsidised literary magazines appear to have a censorship agenda where they blacklist writers whose political views do not align with the editors. Quite a lot of the political myth making on television is tax payer subsided, such as some of the distorted views of political history espoused in such ABC miniseries as the 1988 classic ‘True Believers’.
In terms of my own artistic tastes, I am reminded of Dostoyevsky when he wanted to be good. He really wanted to be good and pious and god fearing. However he liked women, vodka and roulette too much.
In a similar vein, I would like to be the sort of person who goes to the Opera, the Symphony, the Ballet, and to gallery openings and exhibitions, whilst sipping a glass of wooded chardonnay in the intermission whilst my ABC bumper sticker wearing Tesla sits in the Arts Centre garage.
But I am not really that sort of person. I am from a working class background in Footscray, with mostly peasant origins (despite being 1/16 of a Count in ancestry). I have some rather bogan tastes, and would prefer to watch an action movie in the cinema and share a bottle of shiraz afterwards.
So, much as I deplore the use of over $180 million of taxpayer money for making a Mad Max film, I prefer to see the money spent on that than on other cultural subsidies like Opera and Ballet.
Because at least there is a very very good chance that I will watch the film.
Lost For Words! 