Boris wrote on Aug 6
th, 2022 at 1:39pm:
The Drunken Boong video has become a genre in itself, a genre where everybody with a camera phone is welcome to film the Boong in his natural habitat, drinking, singing, dancing and having fun. Who could forget Gordon's long grass party, with its colourful drunken tranny celebrating her birthday in style, or the Central Desert VB monument, where thirsty drinkers gather to add a splash of green to the red earth, can by can?
The hallmark of the genre is its juxtaposition of the drunken Boong with his environment, the large, empty land mass of Australia, the dead heart. Irony is a central rhetorical device. The primitive drunkenness of the Boong is always contrasted with the trappings of modernity. The Boong, it asserts, has been given all he needs, but he chooses to drink. Nature itself rests in the background, a testament to the intractability of the primitive, untamable nature of outback Australia.
Here we have Chappy, an elderly shirtless Boong, dancing with gay aplomb to the Boney M disco classic, Rivers of Babylon. Here, in the outback dirt, the drunken Chappy gesticulates, moving his limbs in spasms of carefree abandon, his grey-bearded face grimacing with the spasticity of intoxication. Here, Chappy dances his native dance, not happy, not sad, but alone. It is a performance of grim self-determination, of survival. Chappy is fueled, as it were, not just by the grog, but by the phone camera's gaze. At the video's end, we hear the cameraman laugh, and we are brought into the moment. There, as the screen fades to black, we know. Chappy will reach for another drink, an attempt to quench a thirst as big as the outback itself.
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