The Title
The imagery in The Castle begins with the title. The entire plot of the film is about the legal standing implicated in the saying “a man’s home is his castle” which endows homeowners with certain rights while occupying their home which immediately end (or are supposed to, anyway) the minute they step outside. The title references this familiar saying to the point of ultimately staking the legal claim at its center upon it. It also serves as part of the foundation of irony on which the film’s humor derives as the Kerrigan family home is quite clearly anything but a castle.
The Little Guy
This is, of course, a David and Goliath story about the little guy going up against the combined power of a government in bed with a major capitalist entity. Darryl Kerrigan seems doomed from the beginning because he is among the littlest of little guys until he randomly comes into contact with an influential retired barrister. The full extent of the size of the Goliath being faced is put across in one of very few shots featuring an actual camera angle to convey meaning. The image of Darryl, his original lawyer who was completely out of his league and the newest member are shot from behind at a low angle in which the High Court building towers menacingly over them, thus situating visually the totality of the seemingly impossible task before them.
Living in Oblivion
The narrator of this little fable is Dale, Darryl’s youngest son. He has an old brother who is in jail, an older brother whom his dad refers to as an “idea man” and a sister whom everyone recognizes is dad’s favorite. Dale’s greatest achievement over the course of the film, by contrast—and one which his dad does make a fuss over—is quite literally digging a hole. Narratively speaking, Dale is pretty much superfluous to the story in that he has absolutely no impact on the plot nor is the focus of any subplot. What he is, however, is the narrator and his narration is absolutely essential for about 75% of the film’s humor of which about 75% springs from the oblivious nature of the Kerrigan clan. This aspect of their characterization is put across through imagery throughout, but is specifically unified by the opening and closing shots of the film which have Dale looking directly at the camera and saying “My name is Dale Kerrigan and this is my story” which it, without question, is most assuredly not.
The Kerrigan Home
The Kerrigan home that Darryl loves so much and fights so hard to keep from being demolished to suit the purposes of the neighboring airport is described by an opposing attorney as an “eyesore” because of all the various additions which Darryl has made to it. The imagery here is one of the most powerfully potent political statements in the film. The subtext of the battle royale being forced to surrender your home to more powerful interests relates, of course, to the theft of land from aboriginal tribes by the British settlers who colonized Australia and built it into the advanced nation it is today. The Kerrigan property is not the most envious in the world: next to an airport, lying beneath towering power poles, partly on a landfill and probably on soil with cancerous rates of lead. Despite this, Darryl has built something to be proud of. The subtext within the subtext of this imagery is that Australians enjoying the improvements made to what the country looked like before the British arrived had better beware since the same thing might just happen again with them in the role of the aborigines.
