By Griffin Reed

At the heart of Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 film Walkabout is something that comprises one of my greatest anxieties: the notion that, even when we’re doing our best to connect, there is some fundamental gap in subjectivity that can never truly be breached. The film follows a teenage girl and her little brother abandoned in the Australian Outback, and an Aboriginal boy who becomes their guide. The Aboriginal boy doesn’t speak English, and the white children don’t speak his language, either. Through this stark identitarian and linguistic divide, the film evokes a more universal intractability. Maybe we really are all living in separate worlds, all speaking different languages. It’s the movie’s final scene that’s stuck with me the most. In a flash-forward, we see that the girl is a married woman now, living in claustrophobic bourgeois security. While her husband monologues, she daydreams about herself, her brother, and the Aboriginal boy playing naked in a stream. Western art has long carried the trope within it that when settlers go into a desert that doesn’t belong to them, they find themselves reflected back, like a mirage. Walkabout reiterates this idea and suggests, too, that when communication across experience eludes us—because it is impossible, or because it would require too much surrender of the self—we retreat to the frictionless Eden of fantasy. For all that, I still find this ending beautiful, even hopeful. Perhaps it’s that in watching it, I see my own fears externalized, and I feel connection is possible, after all.

Griffin Reed is a writer from St. Louis living in Chicago. She’s the Managing Editor of Boulevard.