the castle film essay

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Over-identification in The Castle : Recovering an Australian Classic’s Subversive Edge

“My name is Dale Kerrigan, and this is my story. Our family lives at 3 Highview Crescent, Coolaroo. Dad bought this place 15 years ago for a steal.” With these words, that open The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997), the ideology that motivates the characters and that drives the film’s narrative becomes immediately manifest: identity is inextricably linked to home ownership, the foundation of the “Australian Dream”. Over the course of the film, tow‑truck driving, working class “battler” and Kerrigan patriarch, Darryl, defies a government agency’s attempts to compulsorily acquire his family’s home. Against all odds he succeeds in his appeal to the High Court, establishing the legal precedent that “a man’s home is his castle” – effectively codifying the ideology of the Australian Dream as law and recording a victory for the “ordinary man”.

In 2006, Mark Vaile, then Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, shared his admiration for The Castle . He is quoted as praising it for showing that “there is nothing more important than family and that sticking together through the tough times is what gets you through 2 .” Vaile is not alone in his appreciation of the film, which has become adored in Australia. Indeed, many Australians strongly identify with the The Castle ’s characters. A 2010 survey found that the general public felt the film best represented the “real Australia”, and that Darryl Kerrigan was their favourite Australian film character 3 . Select lines from the film, meanwhile, have become a part of Australian vernacular – most notably, “it’s the vibe of the thing,”, and Darryl’s oft-repeated “tell him he’s dreaming.”

Yet while The Castle ’s popularity may have proven beneficial for Australian cinema, it has also had the effect of dulling the film’s subversive edge. The purpose of this essay is to bring that subversive quality back to the fore. Throughout The Castle , audiences are amused by Darryl’s delight in the most simple of pleasures: his wife’s uninspiring cooking, the serenity experienced at the family’s kit home in rural Bonnie Doon, securing a bargain through the newspaper’s classifieds sections, or the many items that take pride of place in his home’s pool room. Yet our laughter at these “simple” figures – caricatures of naïve working‑class individuals, or “Aussie Battlers” – and the distance this laughter creates between the viewer and the character, actually operates as a self-denial on the part of the supposedly more enlightened audience of their own subjection to the very same ideology that informs the Kerrigans’ actions. Discussing the function of laughter, Mladen Dolar, a prominent member of the Ljubljana Lacanian School, writes:

Laughter is a condition of ideology. It provides us with the very space in which ideology can take its full swing. It is only with laughter that we become ideological subjects, withdrawn from the immediate pressure of ideological claims to a free enclave. It is only when we laugh and breathe freely that ideology truly has a hold on us – it is only here that it starts functioning fully as ideology, with the specifically ideological means, which are supposed to assure our free content and the appearance of spontaneity, eliminating the need for the non-ideological means of outside constraint. [emphasis in the original] 4

Yet our laughter at the The Castle ’s principal characters and their adherence to the ideology of the Australian Dream in fact reflects an obliviousness to our own embeddedness within this very same ideological framework. The way in which we establish ourselves as the father to the “children” that are the Kerrigans masks our own position as children in relation to the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) that Louis Althusser identifies as operating to construct subjectivity 5 . The film’s exposure of patriarchal structures – Darryl taking charge to save his home and his family, and then his ultimate “rescue” thanks to the upper-crust Lawrence Hammill QC – reflects a political turn in Australia which, under the conservative government of John Howard that was elected in 1996, adopted a “leave it to the government” approach. As Lisa Milner has written, this was an era in which Australians were encouraged to feel at ease about their disengagement from politics 6

Developing on the above, this paper will argue that in The Castle ’s reflection of this ideological system, and of the individual’s ultimate powerlessness under it, there also exists the possibility for its very subversion. While for many The Castle may simply be a tale about a battler beating “the man” (as the Kerrigans’ comically incompetent lawyer Dennis Denuto puts it in court, “it’s your classic case of big business trying to take land and they couldn’t”), the film can also operate as a demystification and critique of prevailing ideology. Indeed, The Castle can be understood as overidentifying with ideology, and in the “surplus” of ideology in the film – this excessive association with the Australian Dream – there is a simultaneous affirmation and destabilisation of this very concept. This “subversive affirmation” – which will be explicated with reference to the writings of Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse as well as through a consideration of Slovene musical group Laibach, early proponents of such strategies – in actuality has a political effect. However comic The Castle may be, its overt representation of ideology can actually be understood as enacting a self-reflexivity on the part of the viewer that undermines the disengagement from politics that was being encouraged in late 1990s Australia.

The Australian Dream and the Kerrigans

In order to better understand the context out of which The Castle emerges, some discussion of the “Australian Dream”, to which the Kerrigans subscribe, and which has become ingrained in the collective Australian psyche, is necessary. While comparable in many respects to its more famous American counterpart, the Australian Dream centres on ownership of a detached house on a fenced-off block of land – complete with that iconic Australian invention, the Hills Hoist rotary clothes line 7 . In a nation principally populated by those of a migrant background, home ownership has developed an integral importance as the ultimate reflection of the opportunity presented by a new start in Australia.

In fact, home ownership is so important in Australia that its achievement has been identified as the “defining moment” in the housing careers of nearly 70 per cent of households at any one point since the 1960s 8 . So common was home ownership by the 1990s, that in 1991, only five years before The Castle was filmed, nearly 90 per cent of households became home owners at some stage of their lives 9 . Fundamentally, home ownership operates as a safety net for Australian families, and a footing for economic and personal independence.

On more structural terms, the importance of home ownership is also predicated on its position as a cornerstone of the Australian welfare state. In his examination of this welfare state’s institutional design elements, Francis G. Castles concludes:

It is impossible to understand the adequacy of Australian income support provision … without some consideration of the role of home ownership. … In Australia, where the prevailing social policy strategy has involved the modification of the primary income distribution via wage control, but state welfare expenditure is relatively low, horizontal redistribution becomes primarily a responsibility of the individual rather than the State. Individuals must save enough from their current wages to meet future eventualities, by far the most significant of which is the need for adequate income support in old age. Under these circumstances, therefore, home ownership and occupational welfare become the major guarantees of horizontal distribution for most families 10 .

A working paper by the Australian Institute of Family Studies explains that Australia’s statutory mandate that a living wage be paid also brings with it the responsibility to save to provide for oneself in old age 11 . The age pension is modest, and claimants are always income and asset tested (and are barred from disposing of assets in the five years prior to making a claim for a pension). This has meant that the primary way Australians have saved for retirement is through the purchase of owner-occupied housing which then enables forced savings to accumulate as the asset value of the house transfers to the owner-occupier through mortgage repayments. The house is generally paid off by retirement, minimising both housing costs and the amount of income support needed in later life. Thus, as Castles identifies, saving for retirement in Australia is more individually centred, as opposed to the collective saving for social security provisions that typifies many European welfare states 12 .

Through The Castle , we can appreciate that it is the security of home ownership that allows Darryl to delight in those very simple pleasures we mock him for enjoying. Yet Darryl’s ambitions ultimately mirror those of the many viewers who identify with him. While we may laugh at him, we also share his concerns. Thus, at stake in Darryl’s attempts to resist the compulsory acquisition of 3 Highview Crescent is not simply retention of the family home, but those very freedoms and securities that stem from its possession and which are coveted by the film’s audience.

The viewer as father

Having provided an admittedly brief illumination of the Australian Dream, I wish now to offer an explanation, through the writings of Sigmund Freud, of how a viewer’s initial response to The Castle may operate. In his 1928 journal article on humour, Freud writes:

If we turn to consider the situation in which one person adopts a humorous attitude towards others, one view … is this: that the one is adopting towards the other the attitude of an adult towards a child, and smiling at the triviality of the interests and sufferings which seem to the child so big. Thus the humourist acquires his superiority by assuming the role of the grown-up, identifying himself to some extent with the father, while he reduces the other people to the position of children. 13

A superficial reading of The Castle may do just this. When a viewer giggles at the Kerrigans and what they enjoy, when they are amused by Dennis Denuto’s incompetence, they are laughing at them. After all, even if viewers of The Castle can relate to the Kerrigans, as indeed many do, it is unlikely they truly see themselves mirrored in the exaggerated caricatures on the screen. When we parrot dialogue from the film there is a tacit acknowledgement that, in repeating this dialogue, we are “stepping down” to the Kerrigans’ level. On Freudian terms, we are the “father” to the foolish Kerrigan children.

Yet in this laughter, and one’s positioning themselves in this way, what is really occurring is a denial of one’s own status as “child” to a broader ideological structure. Freud’s essay continues by stating:

…a man adopts a humorous attitude towards himself in order to ward off possible suffering. Is there any sense in saying that someone is treating himself like a child and is at the same time playing the part of the superior adult in relation to this child? 14

This is what ultimately occurs in this common response to The Castle . The laughter of the viewer, as they witness the Kerrigans’ almost cultish dedication and devotion to their house and the accompanying ideology around the Australian Dream, masks that very same viewer’s own embeddedness within that ideology (in the Australian context at least). As described above, the idea of home ownership is so fundamental to the constitution of the Australian state that the rhetoric of the Australian Dream is inescapable. It infiltrates every aspect of life in the country, every sector of society, and is ultimately unavoidable. The only difference between the “father” and the “child” in this instance, however, is that the Kerrigans are open about their identification with this ideology, while the amused viewer thinks themselves above interpellation.

The history of subversive affirmation and Laibach

Laibach, Laibach , 1980, linocut, 59 x 43 cm

It is in the Kerrigans’ overt identification with this ideology that a truly subversive edge to The Castle might be identified. It is the film’s excess of ideology that calls into question that ideology itself – a process that, in analogous circumstances, has been labelled “subversive affirmation”. A lucid overview of this concept and its history is provided by Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse in their essay “Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance”. 15 While they locate its origins in the 1920s, Arns and Sasse attribute the increasing use of subversive affirmation in the West since the second half of the 1990s to the technique’s adoption in socialist Eastern Europe after the 1960s. They describe the practice as follows:

Subversive affirmation is an artistic/political tactic that allows artists/activists to take part in certain social, political or economic discourses and to affirm, appropriate, or consume them while simultaneously undermining them… In subversive affirmation there is always a surplus which destabilises affirmation and turns it into its opposite. 16

A paradigmatic example of this, and one necessary to interrogate before returning to The Castle , is the career of Slovene musical group Laibach – the musical wing of the broader multidisciplinary Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) art collective. Of the group, Alexei Monroe writes:

“Laibach” was the name by which the Slovene capital Ljubljana was known during the Nazi occupation of the city (1943-45) and under the Austrian Habsburg Empire (the name was first recorded in 1144). Laibach’s cross was not a direct reference to anything else, but had several associations. … [Among these are] the black cross markings on Second World War German military vehicles and aircraft 17 .

Laibach, The Deadly Dance , 1980, linocut, 59 x 43 cm

The problematic associations of the name Laibach, as well as the appropriation of military symbols and the violence of the posters announcing the group’s formation, naturally proved controversial, and Laibach developed some notoriety for what Marina Gržinić terms their “hyper-literal repetition of the totalitarian ritual 18 .” Arns and Sasse assert that:

With Laibach and NSK, we are dealing with a subversive strategy that Slavoj Žižek termed a radical “over-identification” with the “hidden reverse” of the ruling ideology regulating social relationships. By employing every identifying element delivered either explicitly or implicitly by the official ideology, Laibach Kunst and later Neue Slowenische Kunst appeared on stage and in public as an organisation that seemed “even more total that totalitarianism 19 .”

Two case studies provide examples of such over-identification. The first is an event of 1986-87, when the NSK’s Novi Kolektivizem (New Collectivism) design department submitted a creation based on a Nazi poster to a competition organised for the Day of Youth celebrated on 25 May, Tito’s birthday. They received first prize for their work which simply replaced certain Nazi insignia with Yugoslav equivalents. The committee judging submissions praised NSK for their poster, arguing that it “expresses the highest ideals of the Yugoslavian state.” The Day of Youth poster controversy exemplifies NSK’s working method during this period, which Anthony Gardner explains as follows:

… NSK did not slavishly illustrate the state ideals in the manner of socialist realism or other official aesthetics. Rather, it self-consciously and controversially combined such illustrations with images from earlier totalitarian regimes, suggesting an ideological continuum between post-Tito Yugoslavia and its oppressive antecedents 20 .

New Collectivism’s prize-winning work (left) and its Nazi antecedent (right)

This “hyper-literal repetition of the totalitarian ritual”, to repeat Gržinić’s words, also comes through in the aesthetics of Laibach’s music videos and live performances. Perhaps the best example is 1987’s “Opus Dei (Life is Life)”, which saw Laibach rework Austrian band Opus’ hit single “Live is Life”, turning the Top-40 feel‑good anthem on its head 21 . Gone was its catchy poppiness, replaced by distorted guitars and marching drums. Suddenly the track became a fascistic call-to-arms, with Laibach’s members appearing in olive military attire and polished army boots in the accompanying music video.

Still from the Laibach video Opus Dei (Life is Life), 1987, directed by Daniel Landin, published by Mute Records

When faced with such a video, and a live performance by Laibach that mirrors this same aesthetic, one does not know whether to laugh at the performance they are witnessing, or to be shocked by the overt identification with a totalitarian aesthetic. 22

Yet it is only in the continual replication of nationalist iconography that the totalitarian potential of that language can be revealed. And it is in the uncertainty as to how to respond to this language, and in the accompanying self-reflexivity, that the capacity for a critique of ideology exists.

Over-identification and The Castle

While much more could be written about Laibach and NSK, I wish now to return to The Castle . The concept of subversive affirmation, for which Laibach’s actions stand as a paradigmatic example, provides a useful framework for revisiting the film and unearthing its potential to operate as a critique of ideology. It goes without saying that in The Castle there is far more overt humour and irony than in the work of Laibach. The question of whether or not the film’s content should be taken seriously never arises, nor does the film question whether the state’s conduct is totalitarian in nature. Even if Laibach are mistaken in their positing of post-Tito Yugoslavia as such a totalitarian state, the belief nevertheless infuses their work, endowing it with a gravity arguably absent in a film like The Castle . Given this distinction, and The Castle ’s obviously comical nature, one might argue that there is no “over‑identification” in the film, and that only the Freudian reading of it offered earlier in this paper has currency.

However I wish to suggest, with specific reference to the unique Australian context – particularly in the aftermath of the 1996 election of John Howard’s Liberal Party to government – that over-identification and subversive affirmation are equally valid methods by which to deconstruct The Castle and its operation. As stated earlier, a large number of Australians genuinely identify with the Kerrigans; significantly, this reflects an Australian association with the underdog, and the figure of the “battler”. Crucially, the notion that the self-reliant individual constituted the backbone of Australian society was fostered by the Howard government that had just come to power when The Castle was released, and which would remain in office for eleven years thanks to the votes of working-class Australians termed “Howard’s Battlers”. Indeed, this reconstitution of the Australian as a “do-it-yourselfer” is reflected in the fact that The Castle was produced on a budget of only $750,000 AUD and filmed in a mere ten days. A low budget film that became a hit, it itself evidences the entrepreneurial spirit and self-sufficiency being championed at this time. In his examination of this period in Australian life, political scientist Don Aitken notes an increasing individualism taking hold in the country. He asserts that Australians

…have been advised, and are content, to settle for less, for a more individualistic view of society… we have lost a strong sense of what our country “stands for”, because that is a statement about “us” rather than about “me” 23 .

In The Castle , the Kerrigans are ultimately left to fend for themselves. Despite the incorporation of their neighbours into their struggle against the compulsory acquisition of their homes, there is an individualistic streak, as well as a degree of fortune, to their victory. They are the battlers “doing it tough” and their predicament reflects the change occurring in Australia during this period. Their helplessness is reflected by the fact that it is only the charitable intervention of Lawrence Hammill QC that saves the Kerrigans. As David Callahan writes:

Darryl Kerrigan succeeds through the system rather than against it, suggesting that it is only on the level of the personal that the system can be made to work; one can have no faith in civil mechanisms in the maintenance of civility 24 .

The Kerrigans’ slavish devotion to the Australian Dream, but ultimate vulnerability, reveals the absolute absurdity of the dismantling of Australia’s welfare state during this period – a support system which, as demonstrated, is so contingent upon private home ownership. Notwithstanding the Kerrigans’ success in court, by witnessing the family’s plight the film’s audience becomes conscious of their own comparable helplessness under neoliberalism. Responses of this nature are described by Arns and Sasse when they write:

… when speaking of subversive affirmation we are not dealing with critical distance but are confronted with a critique of aesthetic experience that – via identification – is about creating a physical/psychic experience of what is being criticised 25 .

The excess of ideology in The Castle operates to produce such an experience and a kind of subversive affirmation, with the viewer, despite how amusing they might find the Kerrigans, ultimately identifying with and relating to the precarity of their situation. Critically, by coming to realise the similarities they share – something made possible by the film’s excessive spotlighting of the “battler” figure – the viewer takes a critical first step in any attempt to resist the neoliberal turn that demands such self-reliance. Finally, in further support of a reading of The Castle as possessing a subversive quality, I wish to emphasise its conscious engagement with the contemporary political environment in Australia. During the film’s first courtroom scene, lawyer Dennis Denuto argues that the attempt to compulsorily acquire the Kerrigans’ home is in conflict with the “vibe” of the Constitution. In making this argument he cites as precedent 1992’s Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) , a landmark constitutional law case that rejected the doctrine of terra nullius , and in so doing recognised the existence and persistence of native title under common law. While this scene may be read as naïvely associating the struggles of the Kerrigans with those of Australia’s native population and their dispossession at the hands of their European colonisers, it also reflects an awareness and engagement with the Australian political landscape that supports a reading of the film as possessing a politically engaged, and indeed consciously subversive, edge.

While the popularity of The Castle may have blunted its subversive character, this very popularity is integral to the film’s political potential. The excess of ideology in the film allows viewers, particularly those in Australia, to perceive of their own position under neoliberalism, and develop an awareness of their construction as self-reliant “battlers”. However comic The Castle may be, its overt representation of Australia’s turn towards individualism operates as a necessary first step in any attempt to resist the neoliberal paradigm, and recover some sense of collectivity. It is also worth recognising that, even 21 years after its release, The Castle has not lost its relevance. As I write this paper, Australia’s ruling Liberal Party has changed its leader with the hope – amongst other things – that it will improve their prospects of re-election in 2019. In justifying the decision to depose a sitting Prime Minister – an increasingly regular occurrence over the past decade – one parliamentarian stated: “… [a new leader] will be able to reconnect with the Howard battlers [and] bring them back into the … fold 26 .” Not only are “Howard’s Battlers” as relevant as ever, but the importance of home ownership remains as fundamental to the constitution of Australian society, even if the purchase of a home is becoming increasingly unattainable for Australia’s younger generations. Given Australia’s increasingly bleak political outlook, now seems an ideal moment to revisit The Castle and rehabilitate its capacity to critique existing ideological structures, and, most importantly, to subvert their dominant rhetoric.

• This paper developed out of a seminar on cinema and ideology taken with Professor Pavle Levi at Stanford University, and I would like to thank him for his insightful feedback as I worked on a preliminary draft of the piece. ↩
• Mark Vaile, quoted in Lisa Milner, “Kenny: the evolution of the battler figure in Howard’s Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies 33, no. 2 (2009): p. 160. ↩
• See Isabel Hayes, “The Castle best represents Aussies,” The Sydney Morning Herald , 6 October 6 2010, http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/the-castle-best-represents-aussies-20101006-1674q.html ; and “The Castle hero Darryl Kerrigan best represents Australians: survey,” The Australian , 6 October 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/the-castle-hero-darryl-kerrigan-represents-australians-best-survey/story-e6frg6n6-1225934896300 . ↩
• Mladen Dolar, cited in Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008), p. 4. ↩
• See Louis Althusser, “Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays , Ben Brewster, trans. (London: NLB, 1977), pp. 121-176. ↩
• Milner, “Kenny: the evolution of the battler figure in Howard’s Australia”: p. 157. During this era, social commentator Hugh Mackay also reflected that: ‘It’s really a case of leave it to (Prime Minister) Howard, leave it to the Government. See Hugh Mackay, quoted in Michelle Grattan, “Following Howard’s way to victory in war for a nation’s soul,” The Age , 21 February 2006, p. 1. ↩
• See David Hayward, “The Great Australian Dream reconsidered,” Housing Studies 1 (1986): p. 213; Jim Kemeny, The Myth of Home Ownership (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1981); and Ian Winter, The Radical Home Owner: Housing Tenure and Social Change (Basel: Gordon and Breach, 1994). ↩
• Steven C. Bourassa, Alastair W. Greig and Patrick N. Troy, “The limits of housing policy: home ownership in Australia,” Housing Studies 10, no. 1 (1995): p. 83. ↩
• Max Neutze and Hal L. Kendig, “Achievement of home ownership among post-war Australian cohorts,” Housing Studies 6, no. 1 (1991): p. 8. ↩
• Francis G. Castles, “The institutional design of the Australian Welfare State,” International Social Security Review 50, no. 2 (1997), pp. 33-4. ↩
• See Australian Institute of Family Studies, Social polarisation and housing careers: Exploring the interrelationship of labour and housing markets in Australia (Working Paper No. 13 – March 1998). ↩
• Francis G. Castles, The Working Class and Welfare (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985). ↩
• Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 9 (1928): p. 3. ↩
• Freud, “Humour”: pp. 3-4. ↩
• See Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse, “Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance,” in East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe , IRWIN, ed. (Cambridge; London: MIT Press; Afterall, 2006), pp. 444-55. ↩
• Arns and Sasse, “Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance,” p. 445. ↩
• Alexei Monroe, Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (Cambridge, Massachussets; London, England: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 3. ↩
• Marina Gržinić, “Neue Slowenische Kunst,” in Impossible Histories: Historical Avant-Gardes, Neo-Avant-Gardes, and Post-Avant-Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918-1991 , Dubravka Djurić and Miško Šuvaković, eds.  (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003), p. 249. ↩
• Arns and Sasse, “Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance,” p. 448. ↩
• Anthony Gardner, Politically Unbecoming: Postsocialist Art Against Democracy (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The MIT Press, 2015), p. 120. ↩
• Monroe, Interrogation Machine , p. 231. ↩
• Don Aitken, “What Was It For?: The Inaugural Don Aitken Lecture,” University of Canberra, 25 November 2005. ↩
• David Callahan, “His Natural Whiteness: Modes of Ethnic Presence and Absence in Some Recent Australian Films,” in Australian Cinema in the 1990s , Ian Craven, ed. (London; Portland: Frank Cass, 2001), p. 105. ↩
• Arns and Sasse, “Subversive Affirmation: On Mimesis as a Strategy of Resistance,” p. 446. ↩
• Mathias Cormann, quoted in “Scott Morrison sworn in as Australia’s 30th prime minister – politics live”, The Guardian , 24 August 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2018/aug/24/liberal-spill-malcolm-turnbull-peter-dutton-scott-morrison-liberal-spill-politics-parliament-live . ↩

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‘It’s the vibe’: 25 years on, how The Castle became an Australian classic

The low-budget comedy has been quoted in the high court, made Bonnie Doon synonymous with ‘serenity’ and carved itself a unique space in the national imagination

P ractically every Australian has a favourite line from The Castle. For some it is the serenity of Bonnie Doon , the daggy dad kitchen conversation (“ what do you call that, darl? ”) or the jousting sticks for sale on Trading Post (“ tell him he’s dreamin ’!”). For others, it is the classic exclamation: “ This is going straight to the pool room !”

That Castle-speak remains pervasive today is just one indicator of the 1997 film’s enduring cultural resonance. The relatively low-budget local production has become one of the most beloved Australian movies of all time. Next month, the film will celebrate its 25th anniversary.

“When we first did a sit-down read, it was just a funny, lovely, humble, charming little film,” Tiriel Mora, who played suburban solicitor Dennis Denuto, tells Guardian Australia. “But very much a little film. We shot it in 10-and-a-half days, and that included a half day in Canberra for the high court stuff. We couldn’t possibly know that it would resonate like it did.” But resonate it has, at the time and ever since. “It just grew and grew and grew,” he adds.

The Castle tells the story of the Kerrigan family’s battle to save their suburban Melbourne home, their castle, from compulsory acquisition as the airport bordering the property seeks to expand. Father Darryl Kerrigan persuades local solicitor Denuto (more familiar with defending petty criminals – including Kerrigan’s son – than the constitution) to challenge the acquisition. After Denuto loses the case, retired barrister Lawrence Hammill QC (played by Bud Tingwell) offers to appeal pro bono to the high court. Against all odds, they win.

For some, the most well-known and consequential of the numerous catchphrases of the film comes from the courtroom scene where Denuto flails haplessly for a legal authority to support his client’s case. “It’s the constitution, it’s Mabo, it’s justice, it’s law, it’s the vibe,” says Denuto .

“It is rare that popular culture and the high court intersect,” says George Williams, a law professor at the University of New South Wales. “Never have they done so more spectacularly than with The Castle. The movie places the high court at the centre of a David and Goliath battle that taps into deeply held Australian values around fairness and home.” Williams says that under the real law of section 51(xxxi) of the constitution (which prohibits the federal government compulsorily acquiring land other than “on just terms”), the Kerrigans would have lost. The opposite outcome however, he says, made for a better storyline.

One reason for the film’s cult status is that its producers, Working Dog, have left The Castle to a life of its own. They have largely refused to speak publicly about the film; executive producer Michael Hirsh declined an interview request from Guardian Australia. In an interview last year with Radio New Zealand while promoting the TV series Utopia, Hirsh’s Working Dog colleague Rob Sitch said, “I think in some ways the smartest thing we did was stay out of the way. It’s been a gift that keeps on giving for us.” The movie is often repeated on Channel Nine and is available to stream on Stan.

“What is so refreshing about The Castle is its profound Australianness,” says William MacNeil, an honorary professor at the University of Queensland and leading expert on law and culture. MacNeil says the film corrected the cultural cringe that had previously seen Australian audiences more familiar with US or British legal dramas. “Indeed, Denuto makes so much of its ‘vibe’ that the Australian constitution – hitherto unknown in terms of its dramatic possibilities – practically becomes a leading character in the film.”

In turn, the amorphous “vibe” has permeated the typically rarefied language of the legal world. The concept has found its way into many legal arguments, including in numerous hearings before the high court. Denuto’s famous submission was quoted in a NSW court judgment in 2010 , while a Queensland lawyer sued for $250,000 in defamation damages after being described as “Dennis Denuto from Ipswich” ( he lost ).

Such is the movie’s resonance within the law that it was the only film to gain an entry in the Oxford Companion to the High Court of Australia. In a rare break from his silence around the film, the entry was written by Sitch, who directed and co-wrote The Castle. “It is a sweeping saga that takes the harsh Australian outback, the rugged characters of the Anzac legend, the spirit of Banjo Paterson and ignores them in favour of a greyhound-racing tow truck driver who never meant to be a hero,” he jests.

In the written entry, Sitch also takes aim at the high court authorities, who refused to permit filming inside the brutalist court building in Canberra. Instead, the courtroom scenes were filmed in Melbourne, before a quick trip to Canberra to film outside the high court. Mora recalls the filming was done on a freezing Canberra Saturday, with local journalists press-ganged into being extras. “That added authenticity,” he chuckles.

But The Castle, released five years after the high court’s landmark decision in Mabo, also contained a more serious message. “The film was not just brilliant entertainment,” says Emeritus Professor Tony Blackshield from Macquarie Law School. “Its real social function was to communicate a deeper social understanding of the importance of Mabo.”

Blackshield suggests that the scene where Darryl Kerrigan exclaims that his predicament has helped him understand how Indigenous Australians feel about dispossession “is the central point of the film”. (In another scene , Denuto somewhat mischaracterises Mabo in a legal argument: “That’s your classic case of big business trying to take land … and they couldn’t.”)

The movie was released at a time of increasingly fractious national discourse, after Mabo and the Native Title Act had recognised that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities had legal rights to land. “The film becomes this wonderful intervention, that flips this idea of home and country and land into a language that becomes identifiable [to mainstream Australian audiences],” says Professor Kieran Tranter, chair of law, technology and future at Queensland University of Technology. At a time when rightwing politicians and newspapers were arguing against native title, The Castle “sold a story to a nervous nation that was quite reassuring”, says Tranter.

Mora suggests The Castle’s political message was “pointed and yet subtle” (although he acknowledges, laughing, “that doesn’t make sense”). “The very powerful underlying theme of the film is about justice, and that’s justice for all, not just for some people,” continues the actor. By using an ordinary suburban family as the vehicle, Mora suggests, it made “bigger questions of injustice to first Australians more approachable”.

These remain live political issues (including before the high court). “[The Castle] touched on a very significant conversation that we are still having,” Mora adds. Whether it would be considered appropriate today to make a film indirectly addressing Indigenous issues with a largely white cast is questionable. “There are a lot of problems talking about [Indigenous] stories without having [Indigenous] representation,” admits Tranter.

Asmi Wood, a Torres Strait Islander and professor at the Australian National University College of Law, says The Castle has withstood the test of time. An expert on Indigenous legal issues, Wood often discusses the film with first-year law students and is full of praise for its subtle political message. “To make people understand that there is another group of people who might feel alienated, for different reasons and different circumstances, but to create that level of empathy, I think the film is absolutely brilliant,” he says.

But for all The Castle’s cultural commentary, legal legacy and political purpose, it remains popular because it guarantees a laugh. “I think it was very funny,” says Wood.

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The Castle Movie Analysis

If someone was to ask you to best describe the movie ‘The Castle’ in one word, how would you respond? You’d probably respond by saying something like ‘witty’ or maybe ‘relatable’. Well, you wouldn’t exactly be wrong, but what if I were to tell you that actually it’d be ‘unfair’.

Throughout the movie ‘The Castle’, Sitch implements innuendo such as racism, classism, and sexism to effectively convey a satirical and consequently unfair representation of Australian society. Read as Bentley Burke analyses ‘The Castle’ and justifies how it is an unfair representation of Australian society.

Racism is a common innuendo contrived through aesthetic features; Sitch appeals to the audience by playing the harmful and bigoted racism off as harmless and innocuous. The two instances of racism that the character Farouk embodies are that Middle Eastern people are terrorists and drug dealers. This is expressed multiple times, through dialogue and mise-en-scene. An example of these being exploited through mise-en-scene is when Darryl asks his neighbours for $500 each to pay Dennis Denuto, the lawyer representing Darryl and the neighbours in court's fee, and Farouk pulls $500 in cash out of his pockets. This alludes to the unfair stereotype that 'wogs' are drug dealers. Moreover, Middle Eastern people being terrorists is communicated when Farouk says "He say plane fly overhead, drop value. I don't care. In Beirut, plane fly over, drop bomb. I like these planes" and "My friend go to your house, put bomb under your car and blow you to f*cking sky". This racism unfairly isolates Middle Eastern people as a threat to society and promotes the notion that they are wogs, deadbeats. 

Farouk's grammar in the dialogue above is an example of diminutisation, which is insinuated to be the result of Farouk's lower-class background. This is a case of classism, a reoccurring theme throughout the movie, and leads me to my next point. 

The movie depicts the working-class as bold but naïve, arbitrary, and ignorant. However, in reality, Australians would describe the working-class as hardworking and neither necessarily ignorant nor genius.

In particular, when the working-class has been portrayed as bold but naïve was when Darryl first went to court; Darryl made bold statements and accusations, however, when asked what law exactly the Government was breaking, Darryl was speechless, unable to back up what he was saying, and the case was thrown out of court immediately. Furthermore, Darryl not being prepared infers he is whimsical and arbitrary. This unfairly implies the working class doesn’t prepare for things and doesn’t think things through properly before doing something.

Darryl is a   tow-truck driver, a ‘typical'   working-class job, and makes an honest living.  The working-class is shown to enjoy the simple pleasantries of life, watching greyhound racing, going fishing, and DIY projects. A running joke in the film is that all working-class families have a pool room where they keep their prized possessions; whenever Darryl is gifted something, he routinely exclaims "This is going straight to the pool room". This appeals to the audience as, albeit a stereotype, is still relatable. In Chris Lilley’s ‘Ja’mie: Private School Girl’, the upper-class Ja’mie is portrayed as the near opposite of the middle-class Darryl, which is suggested to be the result of the class distinction.

The middle-class is also portrayed as being somewhat ignorant. Tracey is the 'pride of the family’ because she has a TAFE degree in hairdressing, which most of society wouldn't accredit as much as Darryl does. Moreover, Tracey’s degree in hairdressing is a snide sexist joke and leads me to my next point.

'Light-hearted' sexism is a stereotype touched on in the film. The stereotype that the stay-at-home wife cooks and cleans is very apparent in ‘The Castle'. Sitch portrays Sal as heavily dependent on Darryl, who is the breadwinner for the family, and further emphasises Darryl’s dominance in the household by frequently filming him from low-angle close-up shots. Tracey’s degree in hairdressing is a very feminine subject to have a degree in and alludes to Sitch’s bigoted view that women can’t do the same things as men as they are universally different. This trait is shared in Ja’mie, who is portrayed as the harmony of femininity.  

In summary, Sitch successfully uses prejudices such as racism, classism, and sexism, in order to efficiently manifest an unfair representation of Australian society. We vividly remember 'The Castle' fondly for its comical and witty humour, but we often forget its crude and unsavoury undertone. To top it all off, I believe movies like ‘The Castle’ and their unfair representations of Australian society are detrimental to the community and if they are to continue it is possible that someday society will forget how to judge people by their character, and instead base their views off excessively melodramatic films.

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Early in "The Castle," the happy Kerrigan family is served a chicken dinner by Sal, wife of proud Darryl and mother of daughter Tracey and sons Dale, Steve and Wayne; Wayne, currently in prison, is the only one missing from the table. Dad ( Michael Caton ) observes something on the chicken and asks his wife ( Anne Tenney ) what it is. "Seasoning," she says proudly. Dad beams: "Seasoning! Looks like everybody's kicked a goal." And so life spins along at 3 Highview Crescent in Melbourne, where the Kerrigan home sits surrounded by its built-on rooms, screened-in porch, greyhound kennel, big-dish satellite and carport. For Darryl, it is not so much a house as a shrine to one of the best darn families in the universe, and he proudly points out the plastic Victorian gingerbread trim and the fake chimney to an inspector--who is there, as it turns out, to condemn the property under the laws of eminent domain.

The Kerrigans don't want to move. They've been told that the three most important words in real estate are "location, location, location"--and how could they improve on their home's convenient location, so close to the airport? So close, indeed, that jumbo jets pass within inches of the property line, and the house trembles when they take off.

"The Castle," directed by Rob Sitch , is one of those comic treasures like " The Full Monty " and " Waking Ned Devine " that shows its characters in the full bloom of glorious eccentricity. The Kerrigans may be the proudest and happiest family you've ever met, what with Dad's prosperous tow truck business and the inventions of Steve ( Anthony Simcoe ), the "idea man" who specializes in fitting tools together so they can do two jobs equally badly. Tracy ( Sophie Lee ) is the only college graduate (from beauty school), and Dale ( Stephen Curry ) is the narrator. Dale frequently quotes his dad, who observes, as he gazes up at pylons towering over the home, that "power lines are a reminder of man's ability to generate electricity." Dad is a bit of an idea man himself, taking advantage of a narrow room by building an even narrower pool table for it. Meanwhile, Steve searches the Trader ad paper for bargains, making sudden discoveries: "Jousting sticks! Make us an offer!" So tightly knit is the family that Dale proudly reports that during mealtimes, "The television is definitely turned down." So it is with a real sense of loss that the Kerrigans discover they may be evicted from their castle, a fate they share with their neighbors Jack and Farouk.

The movie's comic foundation is the cozy if spectacularly insular family life of the Kerrigans. They think almost as one. When Darryl rises to offer the toast at his daughter's wedding, he begins expansively with, "speaking as the bride's parents. . . ." Australia seems to abound with peculiar households, and the Kerrigans are wholesome, positive-thinking versions of such strange samples of Aussie family life as the dysfunctional weirdos in " Muriel's Wedding " and the sisters in " Love Serenade ," who date a disc jockey who is a fish. I can picture them in the audience to view the finals in " Strictly Ballroom ." The film develops suspense with a big (or, actually, a very small) courtroom finale. The Kerrigans determine to mount a legal battle against eviction and hire an attorney named Dennis Denuto ( Tiriel Mora ) to represent them, against his own advice (he specializes in repossessions).

When he approaches the bench, it is to ask the judge, "How am I doing?" or to whisper urgently, "Can you give me an angle?" He gives the case his best shot (Dale informs us he "even learned Roman numerals" for the appeal), but it isn't until a kindly old expert in constitutional law (Charles "Bud" Tingwell) comes on board that they have a prayer.

This is the sort of movie the British used to make in black and white, starring Peter Sellers , Alec Guinness , Terry-Thomas and Ian Carmichael . It's about characters who have a rock-solid view of the universe and their place in it, and gaze out upon the world from the high vantage point of the home that is their castle. The movie is not shocking or daring or vulgar, but sublimely content--as content as the Kerrigans when Mom not only serves pound cake for dessert but is so creative she actually tops it with icing sugar. At a time like that, she doesn't need to be told that she has kicked a goal.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Castle (1999)

Rated R For Language

Anne Tenney as Sal Kerrigan

Anthony Simcoe as Steve Kerrigan

Wayne Hope as Wayne Kerrigan

Tiriel Mora as Dennis Denuto

Stephen Curry as Dale Kerrigan

Sophie Lee as Tracey Kerrigan

Michael Caton as Darryl Kerrigan

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Cultural Perspective: Analysis of Australian Values in the Film "The Castle"

Table of contents, introduction, analysis of 'the castle' through the cultural perspective.

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The Castle by Rob Sitch

The Castle, directed by Rob Sitch, is an Australian comedy, which delves into the lives of a stereotypical Australian family, the Kerrigans. The film touchs on issues close to home in a humourous way. The audience is introduced to the classic Aussie family, narrated in the viewpoint of the youngest of the Kerrigans, Dale. The setting is a lower class Melbourne suburb, adjacent to an airport. The head of the Kerrigan household, Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton), is simple, but a man of incredible pride.

He is a typical Aussie bloke who is adored by his family yet disregarded by society. Nonetheless, seemingly oblivious to reality, Darryl lives and rules in his own home, which he calls his castle. “A mans home is his castle” he states . Sal Kerrigan (Anne Tenney) is the classic Australian housewife, who is wholly devoted to her family, and especially her husband. Her cooking lacks sophistication of any form, yet is praised beyond any professional chefs wildest dreams. The Kerrigan children mirror all the somewhat deficient, uninspiring characteristics of their parents.

The eldest, Wayne, is in jail, but is still accepted by his family. Steve is an inventive mechanic who truly makes his father proud. Tracey (Sophie Lee) is the only girl in the family, and as is made quite obvious, is the favourite. She is considered to be the most successful in the family, since she is the only one who has completed any form of tertiary education. Tracey is a certified hairdresser. This made her dad mighty proud. She was also the first to get married. Her husband, Con Petropoulous (Full Frontals Eric Bana), is a Greek, kickboxing accountant.

As the story unravels, the Kerrigans are faced with a major dilemma, in the form of a compulsory acquisition of their home. The land on which their house is built, is needed by the corporate giant Airlink to build the largest freight handling facility in Australia. And so the Kerrigans embark on an odyssey to save their castle from acquisition and consequent demolition. This film was far from technically amazing. No special effects were notably employed, as wowing audiences with technical brilliance was not the intent of this movie.

This lack of effects resulted in the film appearing to have been recorded in the eighties. The need for a crisp, effective image was ignored, and the result was a “Homey” film. Sound was fairly standard too. Technicalities aside, there were many other opportunities for The Castle to redeem itself. A very commendable aspect of the film was the casts superior performances. Despite all cop-outs on Australians, the character portrayals was very entertaining. The simple dialogue was easy to understand , and the plot was kept you in suspense and was original.

It is quite a disturbing thought to think that this is the way that the Australian film industry presents itself to the rest of the world. It is movies like The Castle that give the rest of the world the impression that Australians are pathetic, uneducated, classless yobbos. This impression was given of the Kerrigan family, but other characters proved to the world that the Kerrigan’s were “special”. This film does not do justice for the vast majority of city-dwelling Australians who do not even come close in resembling this typecast, but most country bumpkins would be able to relate to the issues of land rights and eccentricities.

The Castle comically exploits every element of the stereotypical Australian identity, and suceed due to its excessiveness. Australians generally accept this film in good humour, and most would find it quite entertaining. It certainly lacks any form of intellectual stimulation, though a lot of hearty laughs are brought on. But for those who may take this film seriously, and perceive Australians to be just as the characters in the film are, then I am truly ashamed to label myself an Australian.

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The Castle Australian Identity Essay

The Castle is a 1997 Australian film directed by Rob Sitch. The film follows the antics of the unemployed Kerrigan family who live in a decrepit and run-down house near an airport in Melbourne, Australia. The Kerrigans are constantly harassed by the local council and their attempts to improve their home or fight back against the council are consistently thwarted.

The film was a critical and commercial success, grossing over $10 million at the box office. It has been praised for its humor and sharp social commentary. The Castle was nominated for seven AACTA Awards, including Best Film, Best Direction, and Best Screenplay.

The Castle, written and directed by Rob Sitch, is a comedic look at the lives of a typical Australian family, the Kerrigans. The film explores common domestic concerns in an amusing way. The audience is introduced to the traditional Australian family through Dale, the youngest Kerrigan son. A lower-middle-class Melbourne suburb adjacent to an airport serves as the backdrop for this drama. Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton), head of the Kerrigan household, is simple but extremely proud.

The film The Castle focuses on the Kerrigan family and their battle to keep their home, which is being threatened by the construction of a new airport runway. The family are told they must vacate their home as the government has compulsorily acquired the land on which their house sits. The family takes the government to court in an effort to keep their home, with Darryl Kerrigan representing himself. The case works its way up to the High Court, with comical results.

The film The Castle is a feel good film that will leave you laughing and cheering for the underdog. The film is a great example of Australian humour and the Kerrigan family will quickly become your favourite Aussie family. The Castle was released in 1997 and is still one of the most popular Australian films to date. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Darryl is a typical Australian guy who is adored by his family yet ignored by the public. Darryl, on the other hand, lives and rules in his own house, which he refers to as his castle. “A man’s home is his castle,” he says. The Kerrigan family are uninspiring classic Aussies: Sal Kerrigan (Anne Tenney) is the traditional Australian housewife, who is totally devoted to her family and especially her husband. Her cooking lacks refinement of any kind, but it’s praised beyond all professional chefs’ wildest expectations. The Kerrigan children possess all of their parents’ flaws and inadequacies.

The eldest child Wayne (Wayne Hope) is a total failure. The middle child Tracey (AlisonWhyte) is average in every way, and the youngest son Steve (Steve Eccles) is an aspiring jockey. The film follows the familys interactions with various authority figures who threaten their idyllic existence. The most significant of these intrusions are from The Department of Main Roads, who want to demolish The Castle to make way for a new freeway. The second major threat comes from a property developer, who wants to buy the home from under them.

The film is set in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Coolaroo. The Kerrigan family live in a Housing Commission home which is being threatened with demolition by the government to make way for an airport expansion. The father, Darryl (Caton), is a working man who is passionate about his home and his family. The mother, Sal (Tenney), is a devoted housewife who loves her husband and children. The eldest child, Wayne (Hope), is a failure. The middle child, Tracey (Whyte), is average in every way. The youngest son, Steve (Eccles), is an aspiring jockey.

The film follows the family’s interactions with various authority figures who threaten their idyllic existence. The most significant of these intrusions are from The Department of Main Roads, who want to demolish The Castle to make way for a new freeway. The second major threat comes from a property developer, who wants to buy the home from under them.

The film was written by Sitch, David Michôd and Andrew Knight. It was produced by Working Dog Productions and released by Universal Pictures. The film was shot on location in Coolaroo and Essendon Airport in Melbourne.

The eldest, Wayne, is incarcerated but still receives his family’s love. Steve is a talented mechanic who makes his father very proud. Tracey (Sophie Lee) is the only girl in the family and, as a result, the favorite. She is recognized for her academic achievement because she is the only one of her family to obtain a bachelor’s degree. Tracey works as a hairdresser with a license. Her father was overjoyed by this news. She was also among the first to get married , marrying Con Petropoulous (Full Frontals Eric Bana), an accountant from Greece who specializes in kickboxing

The family live in the Melbourne suburb of Coolaroo. The house is a run-down weatherboard, but to them it’s home and they wouldn’t have it any other way. The father, Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton), is the head of the family. He is a simple man who just wants the best for his family. The mother, Sal (Anne Tenney), is the heart of the family. She keeps everyone together and makes sure that they are all happy.

The film follows the Kerrigan family in the lead up to, and including, Wayne’s court case. The court case is over whether or not their home will be demolished to make way for an airport expansion. The whole film is narrated by Darryl Kerrigan, which gives us an insight into his simple way of thinking. The film is also very funny, due to the family’s innocence and their general lack of intelligence.

The film ends with a victory for the Kerrigans, as the court case is won and their home is saved. The film leaves us with a feel-good feeling, as we have seen how important family is to the Kerrigans, and how they would do anything for each other.

I recommend The Castle to anyone who wants a good laugh and a feel-good film. It is an Australian classic and I’m sure you will enjoy it as much as I did.

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A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s The Castle

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Although we know Franz Kafka’s novel under the English title The Castle , it’s worth pointing out that we might also make a case for calling it ‘The Lock’: Schloss , in the novel’s original German title, means both ‘castle’ and ‘lock’. Kafka’s The Castle is about both a castle and about deadlock. To unpick (or unlock) this enigmatic text, let’s take a closer look at it, starting with a brief summary of its plot.

The Castle : plot summary

A young man, a land surveyor known only as ‘K.’, arrives in a village in Europe, intending to call upon the Count who lives in the castle above the village. Going to a local inn, K. requests a room but is told there are none available, but is offered a bed of straw in the building’s taproom, where he spends the night. The locals stare mistrustfully at him.

He is awakened by a man who tells him that the village belongs to Castle Westwest, and if he wishes to sleep here for the night he must seek the permission of the Count up at the castle. When K. tells the man that he has been summoned to the village by the castle, he is given a bed in the landlord’s own bedroom.

K. next attempts to visit the castle so he can obtain permission to stay in the village, as directed by the man who woke him. On his way, he stops at a tanner’s shop, where he is once again made to feel unwelcome. Returning to the inn from the night before, he meets two assistants who work at the castle.

A boy gives K. a note from the castle. It is written by a man, Klamm, who requests that K. speak to the mayor of the village. When K. follows the boy, back to what he thinks is the castle, hoping to sneak inside under cover of darkness, he instead ends up in the boy’s home, and the boy’s sister takes K. to a new inn. There, he meets Frieda, who turns out to be Klamm’s mistress. K. and Frieda make love, but this lands K. in hot water back at the inn where he is staying, for it turns out that the landlady is Frieda’s mother.

The mayor tells K. that he was summoned to the village by mistake, but he offers K. the job of janitor in the village school instead. K. reluctantly accepts, before marrying Frieda. K. receives a note from the castle addressed to ‘the land surveyor’, and assumes it is for him. The letter congratulates him on his work and tells him to keep it up. Later, however, K. will discover that the note was almost certainly an old one meant for someone else.

K. moves into the school, which comprises just two classrooms: he and Frieda, along with his two assistants, have to live in one classroom while the other is used, swapping rooms as the syllabus dictates. Distrustful of the assistants, K. locks them out of the school and tries to reach Klamm at the castle. When he returns, he discovers that Frieda has begun an affair with one of the assistants.

Although the villagers hold the castle in awe and believe it runs smoothly and efficiently, this is obviously not the case, since an administrative cock-up led to K. being invited to work as surveyor there even though no surveyor was needed. A meeting with a secretary of the castle yields nothing.

K. meets the son of a man named Otto Brunswick, whose wife claims that she is from the castle. K. believes that getting close to the young man, Hans, will help him to gain entry to the castle. The novel finishes mid-sentence (Kafka died before he could complete it), with K. having become well-regarded by the castle; he is offered a new place to stay, in one of the inns.

The Castle : analysis

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) has been called everything from a modernist to an existentialist, a fantasy writer to a realist. His work almost stands alone as its own subgenre, and the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ – whose meaning, like the meaning of Kafka’s work, is hard to pin down – has become well-known even to people who have never read a word of Kafka’s writing. Perhaps inevitably, he is often misinterpreted as being a gloomy and humourless writer about nightmarish scenarios, when this at best conveys only part of what he is about.

As the critic John Sutherland observes in his hugely readable How to be Well Read: A guide to 500 great novels and a handful of literary curiosities , the opening of Kafka’s The Castle recalls a very different novel: Bram Stoker’s Dracula , which also opens in central Europe where a young man is in search of the Count (Count Dracula, of course) who lives in a castle.

But unlike Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s novel, Kafka’s ‘K.’ (the initial suggesting the author himself) will never reach the castle and Kafka’s novel will not go anywhere. As the above ‘plot summary’ shows, the novel doesn’t even have a ‘plot’ as such – in keeping with many modernist texts, which are more concerned with moments, characters, psychological states, and fleeting impressions than with telling a clear story with a solid plot.

If The Castle is a quest narrative, it is utterly unlike any previous quest in fiction, because K. never makes it to the castle, even though the castle is right there next to the village.

So, what Kafka is doing in The Castle – or part of what he is doing – is hollowing out the traditional novel, removing those elements which we might consider essential (a plot, a teleological objective possessed by the protagonist, a clear chain of cause-and-effect) in order to present it to us anew. The Castle is, then, not so much a novel as an anti-novel, when viewed this way.

As we remarked in our analysis of Kafka’s short fable ‘ Before the Law ’, one of the ways to ‘get’ Kafka and understand what his work means is to view it as one vast metaphor for the struggle of life itself.

So The Trial , the novel in which ‘Before the Law’ appears, is not about one man’s specific trial for some specific crime, but is instead about the ‘trials’ of living, the ‘process’ (to use the original German word for the novel’s title) of dealing with a nagging sense of guilt for some vague and unspecified sin or wrongdoing, just as it is about the ‘process’ or ‘trial’ of negotiating innumerable bureaucratic obstacles that dominate our adult life.

One critic, Mark Spilka, produced a study in the 1960s, Dickens and Kafka: A mutal interpretation , which argued that Kafka, like Dickens, was essentially childlike in his understanding of the world. And children both fail to understand the need for tortuous administrative and legal process (where necessary) and immediately see through such processes when they are clearly unneeded, or even actively harmful.

Viewed this way, Kafka is essentially the authorial version, writ large, of the little boy at the end of ‘ The Emperor’s New Clothes ’ who calls out the delusion that all the adults are blindly (or, in many cases, willingly) following.

But how would such an interpretation work for The Castle ? K., we might say, is another Kafkan everyman, seeking employment and a home.

The castle and surrounding village represent both. The various obstacles he faces as he tries to carry out his job and fit in with the community of villagers represent the various trials and challenges we all face as we, similarly, attempt to find our place in a society from which we feel increasingly isolated – and especially if, like Kafka, we are ethnically or religiously part of a minority (Kafka’s Jewishness) or isolated from society because of illness (it’s worth remembering that Kafka was dying of tuberculosis when he wrote The Castle ).

However, virtually all of Kafka’s work can also be analysed from a religious perspective, and The Castle is a prime example. For Edwin Muir, one of Kafka’s finest English translators, in an informative reading of The Castle in Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays. , Kafka’s novel is about a man’s attempt to live his life according to the divine will (represented by the castle), among ‘the community of the faithful’ (the village).

The castle is there above the village, as God is above man; but although K. feels its presence there and meets its representatives (priests?), he never actually gets inside the castle himself.

As in ‘Before the Law’, the secular world of the here-and-now, where men ferociously guard ‘the law’ and determine what is the ‘right’ way to get to God and heaven, is all man on earth can know and see for sure. So if ‘Before the Law’ is a parable for religious faith, it is one which ends, not with revelation and epiphany, but simply with death. The man who devoted his life to attempting to gain admittance to God has died and still not gained admittance.

The same might be said of K.’s quest to understand the workings of the castle and his ultimately fruitless attempt to be accepted by the community of believers.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Franz Kafka’s The Castle”

I’m afraid The Castle was one book I just couldn’t get into. It seemed to pretty much cover the same ground as The Trial and not do it anything like as convincingly. Despite this, it is still Kafka and still marvellous in its own way.

I’m with you on that. Kafka was best in the short format, for me; The Trial was the most successful of his longer works. I wouldn’t ever recommend people start with this one!

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You can get the 'Harold & Kumar' movie for free from White Castle. There's just one catch

White Castle already had cemented its icon status long before Harold and Kumar came along, but the Columbus-based burger chain is ready to celebrate this year's 20th anniversary of the cult-classic movie that bore its name.

Running through mid-June, customers who order a Crave Clutch − that's a box of 20 sliders, for those who've not had a craving recently − are to get a promotional code from Movies Anywhere for a digital copy of "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle."

Just like in the film − which follows title characters Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn) as they encounter wild animals, Neil Patrick Harris and other detours on their way to satisfying a late-night hunger for sliders − orders must be placed at a White Castle counter, through its app or for delivery between 7 p.m. and 3 a.m. to get the free movie.

See our list: What are Ohio's most iconic foods?

The offer also is available through Fandango at Home for people who buy two of any size packages of White Castle sliders at retailers.

Movies must be redeemed with the code obtained at White Castle restaurants by Aug. 31. Movies must be redeemed with the code from retail purchases by Dec. 31.

White Castle also is to celebrate its movie career with Harold- and Kumar-themed cups that are available in the restaurants and with merchandise for sale through whitecastle.nadelstore.com .

The site is selling customized T-shirts that replace the names of Harold and Kumar in the movie's logo with two of the purchaser's choice.

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After Setbacks, a Textile Artist Finds New Success

Venues across the U.S. and beyond are giving Liz Collins, who first found fame as a fashion designer, the art-world recognition that had eluded her.

By Laura van Straaten

Reporting from Umbertide, Italy

This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.

During an art residency last year in a former castle in the Umbrian countryside, the textile artist Liz Collins sat in her temporary studio stitching a needlepoint. She was surrounded by long bulletin boards, on which she had tacked dozens of her gem-colored watercolor works and ink drawings, along with images of shapes that inspire her. On her worktable lay swatches of the silk and Lurex she would soon use to render her paintings and drawings into textiles.

Though American, Collins, 55, has made Italy a habit for more than a decade. Her time in the residency program at Civitella Ranieri came amid weeks of traveling among the various high-end textile mills around Lake Como, where she routinely commissions small runs of intricate weaving made to her specifications. She later transforms those textiles in her Brooklyn studio, scissoring and pulling artfully at loose threads to shape a new creation.

“She deconstructs it, and ends up with something yet more complex and amazing,” explained Lynne Cooke, a senior curator for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., who organized the group exhibition “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” that opened last month (through July 28) at the museum whose lawn was a teenage hangout for Collins while growing up in suburban Virginia.

Cooke’s description helps explain how Collins made “Heartbeat” (2019) — the most recent of six creations that span her career and will be among the 160 works by more than 50 artists at the exhibition.

“It’s one of the many goals of this show to bring to visibility certain artists who I think have been overlooked,” Cooke said. And she counts Collins among them. Indeed, “Woven Histories” positions the artist alongside Anni Albers, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Rosemarie Trockel, Sheila Hicks, Sonia Delaunay — all known for their textiles — as well as stars of abstraction in other media like Kandinsky, Klee and Yayoi Kusama.

This month Collins is back in Italy to debut new work at the Venice Biennale (through Nov. 24). It is a milestone for anyone but especially for Collins, a queer, feminist artist who has felt frustrated at times by finding closed doors in the art world after quickly finding success designing fashion at the turn of our century.

In Venice, Collins has two works on view in the main exhibition, curated by Adriano Pedrosa , the first biennale curator to identify openly as queer. His chosen theme for the biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere,” focuses on artists from groups historically marginalized by the art world or persecuted by society, and includes Collins among many queer artists.

In the central pavilion of the Giardini, Collins’s “Rainbow Mountains Moon” and “Rainbow Mountains Weather” depict an abstract cosmic landscape. At more than 10 by 16 feet apiece, they nod to a kind of intricate and labor-intensive tapestry that for centuries could only be made “thread by thread,” Collins said. She created the two loosely layered jacquard wall-works at the TextielLab in Tilburg, the Netherlands, on a van-size mechanized loom.

The biennale follows a presentation at Galleria Rossana Orlandi during Milan Design Week of Collins’s most recent collaboration with Sunbrella that upcycles the American textile company’s industrial selvage: an immersive art installation alongside a line of totes, pillows and throws. She keeps a foot in such commercial work; steps from her Brooklyn studio, umbrellas she designed with Sunbrella adorn cafe tables in a public space below the Manhattan Bridge.

At the National Gallery, a standout of “Woven Histories” is “Pride Dress” (2003). Alarmed by the fervent patriotism around the American invasion of Iraq, Collins created the gown with the celebrated fashion designer Gary Graham as part of a never-completed series on the seven deadly sins. The gown of worn-out American flags sutured together takes on new meaning 20 years later, centered as it is in the gallery devoted to “Community and the Politics of Identity.”

“What interested me was how it could be reread in terms of the gender wars, which are roiling in this country,” Cooke said. It “speaks very forcefully and eloquently to the rending of the social fabric,” she added, and yet, because of the way the flags are knit-grafted together, “I see it as an act of reparation.”

The museum has welcomed Collins as a hometown hero with a short film about her on its website. “Woven Histories” travels next April to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Collins has lived for more than a decade, after its run starting in November at the National Gallery of Canada , Ottawa. (The show debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art last fall. A book based on “Woven Histories” was named one of the best art books of last year by Holland Cotter of The New York Times.)

The MoMA presentation of “Woven Histories” will run concurrent with a solo midcareer retrospective in yet another formative place for the artist, at the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design . Collins was a faculty member at RISD after earning both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in textiles. She said that exhibition will open in July 2025 and is expected to travel. She anticipates RISD will showcase garments that earned her ink in the fashion trades and glossies of the late 1990s and have become collectors’ items . It may also feature textiles she is making as the first artist-in-residence at LongHouse Reserve , the arts center established in East Hampton, N.Y., by the renowned textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen , who died in 2020.

“The successes that are happening now are replacing some of the frustrations I felt,” Collins acknowledged. Her work has been singled out many times in art reviews of group shows, including for her installation in the 2017 exhibition “Trigger” at New York’s New Museum. But the artist had been working without gallery representation and selling work through one-off shows and at fairs like the Spring/Break Art Show that don’t require it, until she signed last month with the Candice Madey gallery on New York’s Lower East Side. That gallery will stage a solo show of work by Collins opening June 20 (though Aug. 2), which will include smaller versions of her biennale tapestries.

The artist is outspoken about how hard it is for those who are past the age of prodigy and too impatient for the cliché narrative of 80-and-still-at-it. Frankly, she said, when it comes to being middle-aged, for women especially, “there is a bias.” She does not want to wait until she is “decrepit” and has to “to be carried around by my assistant” — or worse, for the posthumous discovery.

Until the dissolution of borders between craft and fine art in recent years, there have not been “many people that really understand what I do,” she said. But, she said, “I’ve been working for 30 years so I have a lot to say!”

What she has to say includes personal insight on craft as a means to heal trauma.

“Very early on, things really exploded and fell apart in my world,” she said, recalling emotional experiences that “make my work what it is.” From 4 years old, she was raised as the youngest of three children by a single mother when her parents divorced. Her father, a Navy captain, moved away from the family. The suicide of a teenage brother destabilized the family anew.

Back in her makeshift studio in Italy, overlooking the verdant courtyard of a castle turned creative paradise, she pointed to the bulletin board above her. On it she had pinned a recent aerial photo of one of the massive sinkholes that — thanks to the climate crisis — now pockmark our planet.

That swirl of a sinkhole, which can look happily cartoonish in the bright hues in which she renders its shape, is a motif that appears often in her work. “As a child, the bottom dropped out,” she said. Subsequently, she is obsessed with rupture: “The voids, the black holes, the sinkhole.”

Her work is not just personal; it’s political, a response to “obliteration, horror, suffering,” as she put it, caused by war or other human-made crises.

It is that duality that appeals to Collins.

“Alongside the sorrow and horror and terror and all of the upset is total exquisite elation and joy,” she said. “I’m interested in those states of mind and having visual language that conveys those states.”

“Even though things can be awful,” she said, looking at the riot of color all around her, she doesn’t ever forget “the euphoria of being alive.”

Inside the Venice Biennale

The 2024 venice biennale features work by more than 330 participating artists from some 90 countries scattered throughout the city..

 Hits of the Venice Biennale:  These 8 highlights drew the big crowds so far, including a  sonorous symphony made by fruit, an underwater spectacle and a modern-day Tintoretto.

Bangkok Takes Its Place on the Stage:  Bangkok, called the Venice of the East by European missionaries  and sailors who fell under the city’s spell centuries ago, will celebrate its fourth biennale this fall

Dissent, Diplomacy and Drama:  A look at pivotal years of the art festival , including when Mussolini brought Hitler to the show.

Did America Cheat to Win in 1964?:  A new documentary takes a hard look  at the persistent rumors around Robert Rauschenberg’s win in Venice in the midst of the Cold War.

An Unpopular Rebellion:  Poland’s right-wing government tapped the artist Ignacy Czwartos  for the Venice Biennale before it was voted out of office. The new government canceled his show, but he is staging it anyway.

Turning a Prison Into a Gallery:  For its offering at this year’s Venice Biennale, the Holy See chose an unusual venue : the Giudecca women’s prison.

The Castle (1997 Film) Literary Elements

By rob sitch.

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

Leading Actors/Actresses

Michael Caton, Anne Tenney, Stephen Curry

Supporting Actors/Actresses

Anthony Simcoe, Sophie Lee, Wayne Hope

AACTA Award winner for Best Original Screenplay; Australian Movie Convention for Australian Movie of the Year

Date of Release

10 April 1997

Debra Choate

Setting and Context

Modern-day Australia in the suburb of Coolaroo in Melbourne.

Narrator and Point of View

It is narrated by the youngest son Dale Kerrigan.

Tone and Mood

Satirical, Humorous, Suspenseful, Content

Protagonist and Antagonist

Protagonist: Darryl Kerrigan; Antagonist: Local authority, bureaucracy

Major Conflict

The Kerrigan family values their home which is about to be acquired by the local authorities for expansion of the airport. Headed by Darryl, the family finds means to keep their home despite the legal battle that is in the works.

The climax reaches when Darryl comments on his household being more than bricks and mortar but a home.

Foreshadowing

Dale Kerrigan commenting on the current value of their house foreshadows the events during negotiations with the authority.

Understatement

Dale’s narration understates the situations taking place through funny and subtle comments.

Innovations in Filming or Lighting or Camera Techniques

The director incorporates medium shots to emphasize the significance of family particularly in shots during meals.

The film alludes to the common saying about a man’s home being his castle. It is a conviction among the working class in Australia (battler) regarding their household and commitment.

Parallelism

The protagonist parallels the struggles of land rights in Australia between theirs and that of the Aboriginals.

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The Castle (1997 Film) Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Castle (1997 Film) is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for The Castle (1997 Film)

The Castle (1997 Film) study guide contains a biography of director Rob Sitch, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Castle (1997 Film)
• The Castle (1997 Film) Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for The Castle (1997 Film)

The Castle (1997 Film) essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Castle (1997 Film), directed by Rob Sitch.

• Language and Connections to Culture in The Castle

Wikipedia Entries for The Castle (1997 Film)

• Introduction
• Legal principles