Nicholas Roeg, R.I.P.

Roeg with David Bowie on set of
The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1976
photo in Times today

Filmmaker Nicholas Roeg died the day after Thanksgiving. He was 90. (Link to New York Times obit.) When his early films came out, Joyce and I went to see them--and we were never quite the same afterward. They were all so ... different. And so were we, thanks to Roeg.

You can read about his films in the obit, but I want to write a little today about just one of them, Walkabout (1971), a film that could have ended or altered my teaching career.

In the mid-1970s I was teaching 7th graders at Harmon Middle School in Aurora, Ohio. English--which we called "Language Arts" at the time. I had settled on an idea for a literature unit--Coming of Age (seemed fitting for 12-year-olds). We read stories, talked about coming-of-age rituals here and there, we wrote about the process in our world. And I decided--in my 30-something wisdom--to show Nicholas Roeg's film Walkabout, a story about an Aborigine boy in Australia who encounters two youngsters abandoned in the Outback by their father, who came there to commit suicide. (Link to film trailer; the entire film is also on YouTube.)

The boy is on a "walkabout"--a coming-of-age ritual which requires that he survive on his own--no human encounters.

But the two city kids are clearly doomed without help. So ... he will lead them back to "civilization."

I had read a lot about the film--it had even been featured (if I remember) in one of the student publications I subscribed to (published by Scholastic). I read the novel on which the film was based (by James Vance Marshall, 1959). My note inside the book reminds me I read it in October 1974, so that must have been the school year when this all happened.

my copy

But I did not preview the film. Why bother? It was featured in a Scholastic publication! The book suggested no ... worries.

And--let's be defensive here--this was in the pre-video era; I had to rent and screen a 16mm print. I did not have a 16mm projector at home--and there was no way I was going to lug one of the school's home, no way I was going to stay at school late one day and watch all 100 minutes of it.

And so ... the die was cast.

And die I nearly did when I showed the film to my first group of students.

I had arranged to show it up on the stage, curtain closed (nice and dark that way--and the noise of the soundtrack would not disturb the nearby classes. Harmon was an "open" school at the time--i.e., noisy as hell, few walls, etc.).

I should add that I had a student teacher that term--a nice young man from Kent State.

Okay, the movie is whirling along. And then ... a scene at a kind of Edenic pond. Isolated. Lots of foliage. They decide they'll all go for a swim.

Nude.

Full frontal nudity. Male and female. Adam and Eve before the Snake.

The purest silence that ever existed reigned on the stage during that scene. I didn't know what to do. I decided that I would just let the scene progress and pretend I had intended this--a demonstration of how mature I believed my students to be.

Afterward, in the remaining minutes where I'd paused the film (it would take 3 days to show it all--with time for some class business and some Q&A before and after each installment), the talk was subdued, and there was not a single word mentioned about the nudity.

I was positive that when the kids went home and told Mom and Dad they'd seen ... body parts ... in a film that Mr. Dyer had shown them, my phone would be ringing--as would the phones of the principal, the superintendent, all of the members of the School Board, the governor, the President, the United Nations, ...

I gave my principal a heads up. He looked at me the way I deserved to be looked at.

That night ... not a single phone call. Nada. Not to me or anyone else. I could not imagine why. All I could do was be grateful.

In the next two installments (which I did preview) there was nothing ... untoward. And, I should add, that on that first day, in subsequent class periods, I turned off the bulb during the Eden-pool-party scene. This was not popular: All of those kids had heard they were going to get to see something pretty raw in English class that day.

Some weeks later, my student teacher's tenure was over, and as we were talking about what he'd learned, etc., he said the one thing he would never forget was that he should always preview the films he was going to show.

I kind of acted as if that had been the entire point of my ... (mis)behavior.

So, Nicholas Roeg (1928-2018) ... a wonderful filmmaker and, for me, a very significant teacher. R.I.P.