Suburban dreaming: fantasy in Muriel’s Wedding (1994) and Sweetie (1989)

This article considers the ‘Suburban Turn’ in Australian cinema through the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy. Through close analyses of Muriel’s Wedding (1994) and Sweetie (1989), the suburbs are read symptomatically as a primary spatial locus for the making and unmaking of ideology, with each text locating an enigmatic image which provokes the truth of the fantasy. Critical accounts and popular representations cast suburbia as marked by its geographic and psychic liminality, dithered from the commercial promises of the urban and the fantasies of natural plenitude associated with the rural. In the 1990s, Australian cinema constructed a unique fantasy of the suburbs which retained this in-between quality. In Muriel’s Wedding, fantasy takes on a protective function, allowing the title character a space away from the demand for conformity which dominates her hometown of Porpoise Spit. However, the emergence of the striking image of the burnt backyard in the family home insists that the elevation of fantasy is not without a cost. The world of suburbia in Sweetie is fragmentary and disquieting, metaphorised by the relational breakdown between sisters, lovers and parents. The film concludes with an impossible sequence of a childhood performance which paradoxically symbolises both transcendence and immanence of the suburban.