The Monkey's Mask
( dir. Samantha Lang
)
2000
Victoria
:
Arena Films
,
2000
Z823407
2000
single work
film/TV
crime
Jill Fitzpatrick is a 28-year-old lesbian struggling to find both a relationship and work as a private investigator. When she accepts a job investigating the disappearance of a young female university student named Mickey, she soon meets the girl's poetry lecturer, the seductive Diana. The discovery of Mickey's strangled body sees the case taken over by the police, but the girl's grief-stricken parents implore Jill to help find the murderer. As the inquiry leads Jill towards a passionate liaison with Diana, she finds herself also entering the seamy underworld of Mickey's intimate life. The search soon begins to raise more questions than answers. For whom did Mickey write her sexually charged poems and what is the connection between Mickey and her two favourite poets? As Jill digs deeper, threatening messages in verse are left on her answering machine. Blinded by her passion, Jill is compromised in her search for the truth--until her own life is in danger.
Epigraph: Year after year / On the monkey's face / A monkey's mask. Basho
'What do you want a poet for?' / 'To save the City, of course.' Aristophanes
You see these grey hairs? Well, making whoopee with the intelligentsia was the way I earned them. Dorothy Parker
Gutsy Girls : Love, Poetry and Sisterhood
St Lucia
:
University of Queensland Press
,
2025
29170673
2025
single work
biography
'A unique behind-the-scenes story of love, sisterhood and the trail-blazing Australian poet Dorothy Porter
'Dorothy Porter was one of Australia's most charismatic and courageous literary figures. Achieving broader fame through her bestselling queer crime verse novel, The Monkey's Mask, and its film adaptation, she took poetry and performance to new heights.
'Her younger sister, Josie McSkimming, watched Dot become an award-winning poet, but it was a family of complex dynamics. Born to renowned barrister Chester Porter, Dot, Josie and their sister, Mary, grew up in an unpredictable family home on Sydney's northern beaches. Each forged her own impressive career, but Josie and Dot sought very different escapes from their formidable father. Josie fell into (and out of) evangelical Christianity and psychotherapy while Dot found 'the Arts' and sex.
'With unprecedented access to Porter's personal diaries and letters, Gutsy Girls is an intimate story of sisterhood, finding creative power and blazing your own trail.' (Publication summary)
'This chapter lays out the reasons that the verse novel has been unusually prominent in Australia, considering key examples such as Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask (1994), a lesbian detective thriller, and the four other significant verse novels she composed, to the late 1980s trio of Laurie Duggan (The Ash Range), John A. Scott (St Clair) and Alan Wearne (The Nightmarkets). It then goes on to discuss Indigenous and Asian-Australian practitioners of the verse novel form such as Ali Cobby Eckermann and Ivy Alvarez.'
'Literature is a reflection of the culture that spawns it. As a queer teenager growing up in Sydney’s outer western suburbs, my access to literature was limited to the books we had at home—airport novels—and the small collection at my high school library, mostly classics. So far as I knew, old white men wrote books; Ruth Park, Ursula Le Guin, Virginia Andrews and Danielle Steele were the exceptions.' (Introduction)
The Book Club [25 April 2017]
Sydney
:
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
,
2017
15261376
2017
film/TV
Host Jennifer Byrne joins regular panelists Marieke Hardy and Jason Steger, and guests Omar Musa and C.S. Pacat to discuss and review the international book Exit West and Australian novel, The Monkey's Mask by Dorothy Porter.
'The Monkey's Mask' : Film, Poetry and the Female Voice
St Kilda
:
Atom
,
2012
Z1927382
2012
single work
criticism
'A study of the ways in which the female voice is articulated in the novel and film adaptation of The Monkey's Mask. Through an analysis of the female voices within the film and novel, this book draws on Kaja Silverman's and Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Luce Irigaray's 'feminine language' to explore the ways in which the female body is voiced. It looks at the female voices within Samantha Lang's 2001 film. This book explores the ways in which image and voice work to express women's subjectivity. 
