Peter Weir’s The Plumber is an easy-enough watch: it’s a late-1970s made-for-TV thriller by a highly competent journeyman that clocks in at 76 minutes. The film follows master’s student Jill (Judy Morris), and her travails with an oddly threatening and bizarre university plumber, Max (Ivar Kants), predominantly while her careerist doctor husband is out of town or otherwise can’t be reached. Weir lays out a very simple class dynamic between the two, one reflexive of the tension boiling up in the post-radical, heading-towards-austerity decade, that between the upwardly mobile and the destitute.
Max’s incursions into the apartment—which always lead to more severe plumbing problems than what he came in with—are bridled with an underlying threat of sexual violence. This is an inflection done by Weir’s scene construction itself, where his camera chooses the point-of-view of Jill to highlight her innate and increasing fear of Max; it’s the basis of all the thrills in the film.
What’s interesting, too, is how much The Plumber marks Max with signifiers of the working-class left, from his labor-minded politics to his interest in playing folk music. Meanwhile, Jill and her husband are coded as a kind of liberal elite, with his work gaining interest from the World Health Organization, and her anthropology research focusing on indigenous tribes. This conflict between Jill and Max reveals a conservatism to her beneath her ostensibly liberal demeanor. While she’s more than happy to research peoples outside of her “normal” world—she makes a vocation out of it—Jill’s immediately afraid to interact with someone who isn’t like her, who she doesn’t understand.
Strangely, Weir’s film reminded me of another 1979 genre film from the opposite side of the Commonwealth: David Cronenberg’s The Brood. While his earlier film Shivers can be read simultaneously as an ultra-conservative reaction to the free-love generation and analysis of that reaction (Cronenberg has said he sympathizes more with the sex-zombie masses of that film than the ones hiding from them), The Brood really only makes sense as a hateful, misogynistic film wherein an angry and ill woman’s psychological power is so great that she can manifest violent humanoid creatures which try to kill her ex-husband and child. It’s the kind of movie that gets made when a man is going through a very vitriolic divorce.
The Brood regularly and increasingly proves the ex-husband’s fears to be founded—even underplayed—to such an extent that one would struggle to argue against its obvious thematic drive given that the film’s so confident and consistent in it. Because of this, The Brood is most interesting if thought of not as something that exists in a vacuum, but rather as something which reveals the culture and time-period it emerged from. The Plumber, similarly, has a perspective issue, where it assumes that audiences would cling to Jill’s point-of-view over Max’s. Everything in Weir’s construction of the film amps this up, making Max seem increasingly psychotic but only to Jill, the emphasis of the husband away, etc.
Weir is examining Jill’s conservative impulses, the reactions she tries to keep away in polite company which are forefronted when, suddenly, a working-class person enters her domestic space. But, Weir is only doing this by playing into that latent fear in the audience member, or at least what he presumes to be latent. In this sense, Weir is having his cake and eating it too by making a movie which prods at something very interesting (liberals’ underlying conservatism), and then, meanwhile, inviting the audience to embrace Jill’s psychotic estate and give her at least some vindication at the end.