February 13, 2008, or The Baleful Enchantments of an Apology

This essay argues that the 2006 Ray Lawrence film Jindabyne can be read as a national allegory (in Fredric Jameson’s sense of the word) for the cultural politics of the national apology to the indigenous people of Australia made by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. It argues that the film portrays the cultural politics of that apology as both fraught and ambivalent.