Nick Cave Is The Anti-Mel

Have I ever shared with you my theory that Nick Cave is the Anti-Mel?

One of the most underrated films of last year was the Cave-scripted Aussie western The Proposition. Sort of an Unforgiven in the Outback, it featured an Irish crime family in the 19th century, at a time when Australia was still "god-forsaken land" and not even remotely capable of graduating a Clive James, Robert Hughes or Germaine Greer. Anyway, Guy Pearce plays Charlie Burns, one of the baddie brothers who's given a choice by a grizzled and world-weary British constable with the distinctly Conradian name of Captain Stanley. (Ray Winstone, looking like he hasn't seen the business end of an air conditioner since the Sexy Beast rap party). The choice is this. Charlie can either hunt down and kill his far more psychopathic brother Arthur (the brilliant Danny Huston), or watch their little brother Mike whipped to death. What to do.

Well, as it turns out, choose both options, as Charlie is soon saved from the aboriginal ravages of the bush by the very man he's tasked to deliver up to the Law. Charlie and Arthur lead a hypnotic and sun-stroked charge back into budding Sydney (or wherever the one-horse town of the film is set) to avenge poor Mike's use as a bargaining chip in selling out the fam, but not before Mike is in fact lashed by the now-morally tortured Cpt. Stanley.

Here's where Cave's anti-Mel bona fides come into play. The whipping scene is easily one of the most haunting and unnerving moments of corporal punishment committed to celluloid since The Passion of the Christ. However, unlike Gibson's messianic snuff film, The Proposition is not violent for violent's sake and instead of fetishizing Karo syrupy gore and gashes, the camera pans away from the victim during the worst moments of brutality to show the pained look on the flagellator's face: Stanley obviously hates doing what he's doing, and thinks such an act has compromised his law-and-order principles beyond measure — certainly beyond his civil servant's charter of establishing a sliver of civilization in the Antipodes.

Fancy that, then. Two Australian expats. One's a gothic punk demon who quotes Byron (I recently discovered that "red right hand" is a line from Byron's epic vampiric poem The Giaour) and is internationally known as a hollow-featured Prince of Darkness. Yet he, it turns out, is infinitely more humane and mentally sound than the chiseled, Jew-baiting Braveheart of Malibu.

I'd like to see a Senate subcommittee address MPAA ratings and pop culture indeceny by making mention of this irony. In the meantime, here's Cave singing the heavens-shaking power ballad, "Straight to You."