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Home , Camelia Frieberg, Cinema of Canada, David Hemblen, Erin Cressida Wilson, Paul Sarossy, Peter Gzowski

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature Teaching English Language and Literature for

Secondary Schools

Vendula Pšeničková

Identity and Loss in Films by

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil Dr.

2010

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Vendula Pšeničková

2

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. for his encouragement and his invaluable advice. I would also like to thank Josef Galetka and Milada Burianová for their patience and support.

3 Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 5 2. Atom Egoyan ...... 8 2.1. Biography ...... 8 3. Canadian Cinema ...... 26 3.1. Co-production ...... 29 3.2. Independent Film Production ...... 30 3.3. New Wave ...... 31 4. ...... 35 4.1. Synopsis ...... 35 4.2. Production ...... 37 4.3. Genre ...... 39 4.4. Narrative structure ...... 39 4.5. Mise-en-scene ...... 43 4.6. Cinematographic Properties ...... 48 4.7. Response ...... 50 5. The Sweet Hereafter ...... 51 5.1. Synopsis ...... 52 5.2. Adaptation ...... 53 5.3. Financing ...... 55 5.4. Narrative structure ...... 56 5.5. Mise-en-scene ...... 60 5.6. Cinemathography ...... 64 5.7. Music ...... 66 5.8. Response ...... 67 6. ...... 68 6.1. Synopsis ...... 68 6.2. Financing ...... 71 6.3. Adaptation ...... 72 6.4. Narrative Structure ...... 74 6.5. Mise-en-scene ...... 76 6.6. Cinematography ...... 81 6.7. Music ...... 83 6.8. Editing ...... 84 6.9. Response ...... 84 7. Loss and Identity in Egoyan’s Films ...... 86 7.1. Identity ...... 88 7.2. Avoidance, Repression and Denial ...... 99 7.3. Substitution ...... 114 7.4. Gaining Control ...... 125 8. Conclusion ...... 133 9. Works Cited ...... 137

4 1. Introduction

Atom Egoyan is the most critically acclaimed contemporary Canadian filmmaker. While he began his career in the 1980s as an unknown director of low- budged independent films, he has gradually taken on some more ambitious and generously funded films. Egoyan‘s early films were strongly influenced by his fascination with the Theatre of the Absurd and by his exploration of personal identity through recording technology. Despite the fact that these early films won Egoyan certain critical recognition at a number of domestic and international film festivals, they were generally perceived as too distanced and emotionally detached to appeal to a wider audience.

Egoyan‘s first shift to more emotionally available and commercially oriented films came in the mid 1990s with the release of Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter

(1997). A critical success of both the films at the Cannes International and two Oscar nominations for The Sweet Hereafter granted them wider domestic and international release, and also recognition from international audience. As a result, some of the supporters of Egoyan‘s earlier films accused the director of losing his artistic vision.

The second major shift of Egoyan‘s career came in 2005 when he released his most commercially oriented and his most generously funded feature film of his career Where the Truth Lies. At that time, even the most devoted advocates of Egoyan‘s work felt baffled and dissapointed ―by his recent turn to the popular‖ (Egoyan, ―Four Film‖).

They attributed this dramatic shift to the commercial pressure from the UK investors of the film and Telefilm .

I believe that these seemingly thematic transitions of Egoyan's films, attributed to his growing commercial success and international prominence, are, in fact, changes

5 of approach and depiction of the themes that were present already in films he made at the very beginning of his career. To a lesser or greater degree, the themes of fabrication of individual identity, interchangeability of identities, traumatic loss, and a process of coping with the loss have been tackled in all Egoyan's films from his early short films made on a shoe-string budget to his latest more than generously financed co- productions.

The changing funding patterns and the increasing commerciality of Egoyan's film has have naturally also been reflected in changes of the production process and of the visual style of his films. Although the topics and some of the narrative devices have remained consistent, the visual quality of production has gradually raised as Egoyan have has been able to afford high-quality equipment, setting, and promotional campaign. However, at the same time it also put Egoyan under pressure to keep up to the expectation and to produce high quality films that are increasingly accessible to a wider audience and commercially viable at the same time. This is naturally reflected in certain compromises of Egoyan's artistic vision.

Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to prove and demonstrate that despite the increasing commercial orientation and changing financing patterns of Egoyan's films, his chief preoccupations with the topics of identity and loss have never been abandoned.

In order to prove this, I will analyze three Egoyan‘s films that represent different stages of development of the director‘s career. There are several reasons for selecting these particular films for my analysis. Firstly, they reflect changes in financing patterns of

Egoyan‘s films. Secondly, they reflect the increasing commercial orientation, and therefore also the increasing emotional accessibility of Egoyan‘s films. Thirdly, they represent different approaches to the topics that are core interests of Egoyan‘s films - the construction of identity and dealing with loss.

6 In the second chapter, I will first consider some essential biographical facts related to the enduring thematic preoccupations of Egoyan‗s films. Then, I will provide an outline of Egoyan‘s films from the early low-budget student films to his latest film

Chloe.

In the next chapter, I will first discuss the chief aspects and the influences of the contemporary Canadian cinema in general. Then, I will put Egoyan's work into the wider context of contemporary Canadian .

In the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters, I will examine the process of pre- production, financing, the process of adaptation, cinematic techniques as well as the critical response to all three analyzed films.

In the seventh chapter, I will examine and compare the way Egoyan approaches the topics of construction of identity and dealing with loss in all three films.

7 2. Atom Egoyan

2.1. Biography Atom Egoyan was born in Cairo in 1960. He was the first-born son of Joseph and Shushan Yeghoyan, Armenian refugees who were living in Egypt at that time. His parents named him Atom in celebration of the completion of a new nuclear reactor. In

1963, after their daughter Eve was born, they emigrated to Canada. They settled in

Victoria in , changed their surname to the simpler Egoyan, and opened a furniture store (Kreyche).

Since there was not an Armenian community in Victoria, Atom Egoyan was brought up in isolation from the culture of his parents. They wanted to assimilate and did not want to be a part of the Armenian community in Canada. From the beginning

Egoyan set out to reject his Armenian roots and to assimilate into Canadian society.

Wilson quotes Hamid Naficy: ―Although Egoyan spoke Armenian as a child, he gave it up when he entered kindergarten to forestall ethnic embarrassment and harassment‖

(qtd. in Wilson 2).

This period of cultural displacement could be considered to be a significant influence on his later work and one of the reasons for his preoccupation with construction of identity, displacement, pursuit of emotional fulfillment and his fascination with storytelling. Egoyan explains his preoccupations:

It comes from arriving in a new country at a certain point, where you are part of an ethnic group. We came to Victoria, Canada from Egypt. I was very young. No one quite knew what we were. We were the only Armenian family there. We possessed a number of different personas. We could either be Arabs or Jews: we were other. When you‘re a child, you realize that your personality and identity is a construction. Not all immigrant children have this experience but my sense of who I was, was constructed. I was aware of who I was and that I wanted to assimilate. (Egoyan, ―The Rumpus‖)

8 Later in his life Egoyan tried to reconnect with Armenian culture through his films. He addressed this culture in all his films, to a certain degree, most significantly in

Calendar, which is set in Armenia and in Ararat where he reconstructed the Armenian genocide.

As a teenager Egoyan started reading and writing theater plays. He was particularly fascinated by plays by Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. Some of the features in his films stem from his fascination with Pinter and Beckett. Egoyan enrolled in Trinity College at the University of to study international relations and classical guitar, to pursue his dream of becoming a diplomat. Egoyan's reconnection with his original Armenian culture began during his studies at the university when he joined an Armenian student society and started learning his native language (Kreyche).

Egoyan also continued writing screenplays and producing films during his studies. He made several short films: Lust of Eunuch (1978), Howard In Particular

(1979), After Grad with Dad (1980), Peep Show (1981) and Open House (1982). After graduating from the university Egoyan joined Toronto's Tarragon Theater as a playwright, however, he decided to concentrate on filmmaking. He founded his own production company, Ego Film Arts, with the original aim of producing his own films.

However, as he points out in the interview with Nicole Holland, in recent years the company has also produced films by other Canadian filmmakers. He says the company specializes in the ―more challenging projects‖ of established directors like and it also supports a new generation of filmmakers by producing their first features.

Among those features are films like 's or Alison Murray's

Mouth to Mouth (Egoyan, ―‖).

In 1984, at the audition for his full-length feature Next Of Kin (1984), Egoyan met his muse and future wife, the Canadian-Armenian actress Arsinée Khanjian

9 (Egoyan, ―Atom Egoyan‘s Next‖). Since Next of Kin, Arsinée has appeared in lead or supporting roles in most of Egoyan‘s films. Together they have a son Arshile, whom they named after an Armenian painter Arshile Gorky. The character of Gorky appears in

Ararat.

Today Egoyan lives in Toronto. His artistic scope is wide and is not limited to film production. As was already mentioned, apart from directing and producing feature films, documentaries and TV series, Egoyan has written several opera plays and is the author of several art exhibitions. This includes exhibitions for the Irish museum of

Modern Art, Artangel in London and Le Fresnoy in France. Until recently Egoyan was also a faculty member of the and The European Graduate School in Switzerland (―CTV News‖).

As previously stated, Egoyan began his career as a playwright. After his graduation from university he joined the Tarragon Theater in Toronto. Jonathan

Romney believes that some of Egoyan‘s plays prefigured the topics of his films. Most significantly, an authoritative and abusive father is prominent in his play Fetish and

Tender (1983) and is later played on screen by . In addition, the topic of the Armenian identity appears in Open Arms (1984) (8). He also adapted Samuel

Beckett‘s Eh Joe, which he produced on the occasion of Beckett‘s Centenary

Celebration in April 2006. This was originally performed by the Gate Theater in Dublin and was later transferred to London‘s West End. For this, Egoyan was awarded The

Irish Times/ EBS Prize for Best Production (―Ego Film Arts‖).

Expanding his creative role even further, in 1996 he made his debut as an opera director with a successful production of Salome. Two the years later he wrote and directed his original opera Elsewhereness. This was soon followed by Dr. Ox’s

Experiment, which was written for the English National Opera in London. In 2004 he

10 produced Wagner‘s Die Walküre for the Canadian Opera Company. For this production he won the Dora Award (―Ego Film Arts‖).

2.2. Filmography

Short Films

Despite Egoyan‘s success as a theater and opera writer, he is mainly a . He began his film career with independent, low-budget short films in the 1980s during his studies at the University of Toronto. His imagination was particularly fueled by the theater plays written by his favorite absurdist writers, Harold Pinter and Samuel

Beckett. Carole Desbarats points out that Egoyan‘s early short films are inspired by the works of American and Canadian experimental filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage,

Michael Snow and Maya Deren (14). Jonathan Romney further identifies Egoyan‘s tendency to use ―‗models‘ rather than conventionally expressive actors‖ in his early films as being inspired by the films of ―European auteur modernists‖ like Pier Paolo

Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean- Luc Godard and Robert

Bresson. Also, his tendency to deal with the ―emotional and mental effects of recording technologies‖ was inspired by the films of some mainstream American directors like

John Cassavetes and Francis Coppola (8).

Desparats points out:

In these [early] works Egoyan seeks to exploit the different textures of the image, from video to silver emulsion, from documentary recording to , with a use of filters recalling the toning of silent films. [He] engages in an open-ended exploration of the image in movement, already practicing the Method that will characterize his full-length works: putting the cinema to the test of other techniques. (14)

His very first 240-minute-long feature Lust of Eunuch (1978), about a headmaster who gives a speech to an invisible audience, was screened in a Victoria art

11 gallery together with Luis Bunuel‘s famous surrealist short film Un chien andalou

(1928) and Beckett‘s Film (1965) directed by Alan Schneider (Romney 8).

Two years later he directed his second feature film, called Howard in Particular, about an experiment carried out by a large company in order to speed up a retirement process. Egoyan experiments with the combination of subjective and objective camera angles and recorded voice to achieve a nightmarish vision of the impact of technology on human life. The main character ―listens to a disembodied voice offering instructions for his retirement, orchestrating his actions so that, involuntarily, he comes to follow the tape‘s demands‖. This technique is further developed and the distinction between a voice from outside and a inner voice becomes blurred in Exotica and in En passant

(1991), an episode for a portmanteau film Montréal vu par, a story about a tourist listening to an audio-guide that gradually begins narrating ―the traveler‘s perceptions and feelings in an unfamiliar city‖ (Wilson 10).

In 1980 Egoyan produced another short film, After Grad with Dad, about a young man who is forced to converse with his girlfriend‘s father whilst waiting for her to get ready for a night out. The director concentrated on the depiction of the young man‘s paranoid perceptions of the whole situation. After Grad with Dad is the first of several Egoyan‘s films that directly address the topic of a father sexually abusing his daughter. Inspired by Egoyan‘s own relationship with a girl whom he later discovered had been abused by her father, the director deals with this issue later in Exotica and The

Sweet Hereafter (Romney 6-7).

In 1981‘s Peep Show the topic of technology is examined again. The director employs the system of ―audience camera‖, used in the famous opening scene of Welles‘

Citizen Kane, to make the audience follow the point of view of the camera independently of the characters in the film. Egoyan makes the viewer follow the

12 ―narcissistic voyeur [closing himself] up in the private peep show of the photo booth‖ where he ―gives free rein to his fantasies‖ only to be shown the photos of himself and to be led to a growing frustration (Desbarats 14).

1982‘s Open House is a story of a real estate agent who desperately tries to sell an old and abandoned house built by his parents. ―[T]he entire ritual of selling is a bizarre method of sustaining pride in a household drained of self-respect‖ ("Ego Film

Arts"). Open House is the first of Egoyan's film to be financially backed by the Ontario

Arts Council. The rights for the film were later bought by CBC and the film was screened as part of a series called Canadian Perspectives (Kreyche).

Next of Kin

It took Egoyan two years to raise the money required for his first full-length feature film, Next of Kin. He finally managed to acquire a small budget of thirty-seven thousand dollars, partly from the and the Ontario Arts Council (Wilson x).

Next of Kin is a story about a young WASP man, Peter Foster, who undergoes therapy together with his parents. He decides to play the role of the family‘s lost son after discovering a therapy videotape of an Armenian family who miss the son they had to give up as an infant many years ago.

Next of Kin is the first in a series of Egoyan's films (followed by Family

Viewing, , Calendar and Felicia's Journey) that portrays the way recording technology can influence relationships between people, the way it complicates human communication (to the point where people are unable to create any

13 intimate relationships) and also the way recording technology can alter people's memories.

Despite being Egoyan's full-length feature debut, Next of Kin was very successful and earned him a Genie nomination for Best Director, the Gold Ducat Award at the Mannheim International Film Week and also international distribution (―Ego Film

Arts‖).

Family Viewing

1987's Family Viewing was the first of Egoyan's film for which he was able to hire a professional film crew, thanks to the loan he received from the Ontario Film

Development Corporation (Kraus). This film had a budget of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars.

―Family Viewing is both a parody of popular genres focused on family life - soap opera, melodrama, even situation comedy- and in a sense, a faithful example of them‖ (qtd. in Wilson 23). It examines the story of an 18-year-old named Van. He is half WASP and half Armenian who decides to take his life into his own hands. Egoyan pictures the technology in the film as a double-edged sword that is at the same time a ―convenient tool for communication and an impersonal barrier to true human connection‖. On one hand it enables Van to see his lost mother and gather the courage to leave his father, but on the other hand it completely destroys any possible communication between the father and son (Kreyche).

Family Viewing was nominated for eight and received a tremendous honor at the Film Festival, when the famous German director

Wim Wenders gave away the prize for his own film in favor of Egoyan's Family

Viewing (Wilson x) .

14 Speaking Parts

Family Viewing was followed two years later by Speaking Parts. The film was financed with the money Egoyan made by directing episodes of US TV series like The

Twilight Zone Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The budget was eight hundred thousand dollars. The film is inspired by Egoyan's five-year experience of working in a hotel.

Lance, one of the hotel‘s employees and an aspiring actor, meets a television writer named Clara in the hotel. Clara has recently lost a lover and Lance reminds her of him. Lance uses that opportunity to seduce Clara. She gives him a part in a film she is currently working on. Meanwhile, Lance's co-worker Lisa, who is secretly in love with him, spends her working days observing Lance on the hotel surveillance camera and occupies her evenings renting films and repeatedly watching the scenes in which Lance appears as an extra. All her attempts to engage the absolutely disinterested Lance in a real conversation are futile.

In Speaking Parts Egoyan again experiments with the use of recorded images to blur the boundaries between the real and imagined. He uses the video images of the characters, and their obsession with them, to stress the ―. . . distance and estrangement between the viewer and the subject‖ (Kreyche).

Adjuster

With Speaking Parts Egoyan achieved worldwide critical acclaim and in 1991 he received an invitation to the , where his film Adjuster would premiere. Adjuster had a budget of $1.5 million. The making of Adjuster marked the beginning of Egoyan's long-term co-operation with the famous producer

(Wilson x).

15 Adjuster's main character is an insurance adjuster, Noah, who takes care of dismayed clients after they lose their homes. The story is inspired by an actual event; a fire at Egoyan's parents' furniture shop on New Year's Eve, 1989. The company that had insured the shop sent an adjuster to catalogue everything lost in the fire. Egoyan remembers: ―I began to think, what if he was going through a bad period and he did not know how to evaluate his own life?‖ (qtd. in Wilson 47) The film's focus is on Noah's wife Hera, a film censor and his relations to his clients.

As Emma Wilson reveals, Noah is unable to separate his personal life from his professional life. ―Noah is someone who can only exist when people project something onto him. Noah founders in his intimate environs; his work defines him, and he seeks to organize his life and libido around its various demands‖ (49). His obsession with his work leads to a growing alienation from his family and he is eventually abandoned by them. However, as Wilson suggests, their departure leaves us wondering whether it helps Noah to the freedom he needs or whether it deprives him of his only hope of achieving a normal, functional family life (53).

Adjuster received a wide US release and was distributed by .

The film was awarded the Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto Film Festival.

Calendar

The money Egoyan won for Adjuster at the film festival in Moscow enabled him to fulfill his dream of making a film in Armenia. Together with the money he received from the German TV stations ZDF and Arte, Egoyan accrued a budget of

eighty thousand dollars (Wilson x).

Calendar (1993) is a film about making a calendar in Armenia. A photographer and his wife, played by Egoyan and Khanjian respectively, along with their driver, visit

16 twelve different sites to take photos for the calendar. The relationship between the husband and wife dissolves and the photographer loses his wife to the driver. The three characters also represent different ―levels of Armenian consciousness: Nationalist,

Diasporan and Assimilationist‖ (Wilson 62). The scenes from Armenia are combined with scenes from the photographer's flat, where he has progressively invited twelve women for a date. He subsequently persuades them to make staged, passionate phone calls in their native languages that he does not understand. By listening to them the photographer re-lives the process of losing his wife, a process he barely noticed from behind the camera when he was taking the twelve photos in Armenia a year earlier.

Calendar was nominated for two Genie Awards and won the C.I.C.A.E1 prize for Best film in the Forum of New Cinema at the Berlin International Film Festival (―Ego Film

Arts‖).

Exotica

Egoyan's next film, Exotica (1994), has been considered a breakthrough film in many respects. It achieved much greater distribution and therefore brought Egoyan's film to a wider audience. Many transitions have been identified in this film, both thematically and stylistically. The film was produced with the financial participation of

Telefilm Canada and the Ontario Film Development Corporation.

Exotica is the story of several people whose lives are interconnected. They all live lonely lives, going through personal rituals that define their loss and pain. Egoyan

1 The CICAE was founded in 1955 by the national arthouse cinema associations of Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The CICAE's objectives are to encourage arthouse cinemas to come together under a common umbrella at the national and international levels; to obtain support for arthouse films from government bodies; to foster the distribution of high quality films from all countries, in all countries; through targeted cultural initiatives, to promote the screening of art films in order to increase audiences and foster production (―CICAE").

17 said that even though their behavior might seem absurd they ―transform their pain into self-made myths and legends‖ (―Ego Film Arts‖). We gradually meet Francis, who is unable to come to terms with the loss of his wife and daughter. He becomes obsessed with Christina, a night club dancer, whose performance in a schoolgirl uniform reminds him of his dead daughter. The other main characters are Eric and Thomas. Eric is a night-club DJ who has sacrificed his relationship with Christina to engage in a love affair with the owner of the club, played by Khanjian. Thomas is the owner of an exotic pet shop who invites strangers to opera performances. The multi-layered story evolves slowly, as the characters' sources of pain are gradually revealed. This culminates in the last scene, when the characters are finally made to face their traumas directly, and thus begin the process of getting over them.

Since Exotica gained immense success at the beginning of its screening, it was released on 433 screens nationwide. In Canada it screened for over six months and it grossed five million one hundred and thirty thousand dollars in North America only

(Wilson xi).

Exotica was also awarded numerous prizes at many film festivals and competitions, including Best Foreign Film by the French Critics Association, the

International Critics Prize at the Cannes Festival, Best Canadian Film at the Toronto

International Festival, and eight Genie Awards (―Ego Film Arts‖).

The Sweet Hereafter

The Sweet Hereafter (1997) was another breakthrough film in Egoyan's career in many respects. It was the first film for which he received a significantly larger budget; in this case, 5 million dollars. It was also Egoyan's first film in a series of adaptations

18 based on novels; all of the scripts for his previous films were written exclusively by

Egoyan himself.

It is the story of a small British Columbian town that has been devastated by a school bus accident in which most of the town's children have been killed. Big-city lawyer Mitchell Stephens then arrives in the town and tries to persuade the grieving parents to file a lawsuit against the bus manufacturer. This gives the parents someone to blame for the tragedy and triggers a rift among the grief-stricken community. The film mainly focuses on the various ways in which the local people deal with their personal tragedies as well as with the tragedy of the whole community.

The Sweet Hereafter won three awards at the Cannes International Film Festival, seven Genie awards at the Toronto Film Festival and two Oscar nominations, as well as gaining Egoyan worldwide recognition (―Ego Film Arts‖).

Felicia's Journey

Following the success of The Sweet Hereafter, Egoyan was offered to adapt another novel by Icon Films. The novel was written by William Trevor in 1994. Even though, as Romney pinpoints, the novel did not offer much scope for Egoyan's ―familiar iconography‖ that had already been significantly reduced in The Sweet Hereafter,

Egoyan accepted the project (Wilson 102).

The film is about a young Irish woman who comes to in search of her boyfriend Johnny, the father of her unborn child. She leaves Ireland and her father, who does not approve of the relationship. In England she meets Joseph Hilditch, a catering company manager, who puts her up and promises to help her find Johnny. As more of

Hilditch's life is revealed, we find out about his problematic relationship with his mother, a former cooking-show star Gala, whose video tapes he watches every day. He

19 may also be the killer of a number of young women, whom he offers a lift and then tortures them in his car while recording it on a video. Finally, after his attempt to attack

Felicia as well, he commits suicide.

As the title suggests, in Felicia's Journey Egoyan focuses on the theme of the journeys that must be made by both the main characters in order for them to form their own independent identities. As Wilson suggests, both Felicia and Hilditch are ―poised between childhood and adulthood‖. Felicia's naivety is caused by her age and inexperience. Hilditch, however, remains stuck in the past in order to connect with his dead mother. He watches the tapes of his mother's TV show day after day, reliving the traumas of his childhood. By this ritualistic behavior, which is another recurrent topic in

Egoyan's films, he tries to ―assert control over his mother‖ (Wilson 107, 108).

Similarly, he tries to achieve intimacy and control over his female victims by videotaping them. ―[H]e comes to associate the archival evidence as providing access to a control of intimacy‖ (qtd. in Wilson 108).

As they join each other on their journeys, they form a kind of pseudo father- daughter relationship. This eventually leads to Felicia's liberation from her domineering father, and to Hilditch's failure to achieve intimacy or the control he wants over Felicia, and hence to his subsequent suicide.

After the phenomenal success of The Sweet Hereafter, Felicia's Journey, which brought Egoyan only a Palme d'Or nomination at the Cannes Film Festival and four

Genie awards, could be considered as a disappointment for him (―Ego Film Arts‖).

Ararat

Despite the fact that Felicia's Journey was not as successful as The Sweet

Hereafter, Egoyan received a generous budget of 10 million dollars for his next film,

20 Ararat (2002). After filming two adaptations, Ararat was the director's first original script since Exotica. It was also the first film in which Egoyan addressed the topic of the

Armenian genocide directly.

As Wilson says, Ararat was a great challenge for both Egoyan and his producer

Robert Lantos. Not only because it was the first ―widely released dramatic movie‖ dealing with the Armenian genocide, which was for a long time officially denied, but mainly because he wanted to ―situate it in the present day‖ (118). He managed to do this by making a film that sought to represent the history of the genocide. Egoyan's film depicts an Armenian film director, Edward Saroyan, who reconstructs the siege of Van from the point of view of Armenian painter Arshile Gorky. Saroyan's film is a -like, bombastic ―big-screen epic‖ full of blood and extreme violence.

Romney notes that it is exactly the depiction of the genocide Egoyan satirized in his

1984 play Open Arms (180).

Romney believes that by recognizing the excess of Saroyan's film and at the same time recognizing the anger and ―desire to honor his mother, a genocide survivor

―that motivated Saroyan to make the film, Egoyan wanted to carry the ―authentic emotional impact‖ with a certain degree of skepticism (181).

Besides Saroyan's fictional film in Ararat, Egoyan also inserts a personal history of Raffi, who works as a runner for Saroyan's crew. Raffi has come to Armenia to find out the truth about his father, an Armenian freedom fighter. On his journey, Raffi makes his own footage, which Romney claims challenges the ―the intractable moral authority‖ over the Armenian history assumed by Saroyan that is to become a ―definite public account of history‖. As these two alternative stories are blurred, it becomes difficult for the viewer to distinguish between the different versions of the same history. By employing this strategy, Egoyan wants to stress the ambiguity of the truth. As Romney

21 believes, it was not in Egoyan's intention to present ―a black and white statement‖ about a historical event, like Saroyan's film does, but rather to encourage debate (178, 184).

The critical response to Ararat was rather mixed. Because of accusations that the film was Armenian propaganda, Egoyan decided to screen Ararat at the Cannes

Film Festival only out of competition. International release of the film was only limited

(Romney 171). Despite the fact that the film found its public, it grossed a total of only

$2.7 million and was therefore a commercial failure.

Where the Truth Lies

Three years later Egoyan released Where the Truth Lies (2005), a film based on a novel of the same name written by Rupert Holmes. The movie was a Canadian-UK co-production. The producers were able to muster a budget of twenty five million dollars, the most generous budget in Egoyan's entire career (McCarthy).

Egoyan's long-time producer Robert Lantos recalls that, unlike their previous collaborations, in order to get funding from they were forced to make a more commercial movie. Lantos called Where the Truth Lies an ―Egoyan movie for people who don‘t know Atom Egoyan‖, and a ―joy ride‖ that he did not really consider to be a festival film (qtd. in Lacey).

The main character is a young journalist named Karen, who sets out to uncover a mysterious crime that fifteen years earlier had led to the break-up of Vince and Lanny, an entertainment duo she had cherished. Karen's fascination with the duo originated in her childhood when, as a polio survivor, she had met them on stage at an annual polio telethon. As she tries to unravel their mystery, she becomes involved with Lanny and gradually becomes a victim of the duo's manipulations.

22 As far as the critical response to Where the Truth Lies is concerned, the reactions were varied. For some viewers, the film's commercial, narrative approach made the film more accessible than Egoyan's previously demanding films. Other viewers at least appreciated Egoyan's ability to preserve some of his personal style, even in this commercially oriented film. Yet for some of the fans of Egoyan's earlier films it was a disappointment, proving that even the most independent and prolific directors eventually yield to commercial pressure.

To his great disappointment, Egoyan's ambition to reach a wider audience with

Where the Truth Lies remained unfulfilled, as the film received an NC-17 rating in the

USA for one of the key erotic scenes.

Adoration

As Egoyan admitted in his interview with Peter Keough, the increased commercial pressure he had to face whilst working on his two previous films led him to make his next film Adoration (2008) on the comparatively modest budget of $4.7 million. This enabled him to regain greater artistic control over the new film.

According to the director, the film was partly inspired by his 14-year old son's high school drama and adolescents' heightened ―dramatic sense‖ of their identities, and partly by the real story of a Jordanian terrorist, who in 1986 used his pregnant girlfriend as a courier for a bomb on board an El Al plane (Egoyan, ―The Truth‖).

The story revolves around Simon, a 16-year old who has lost his parents and lives with his uncle. When Simon's French teacher asks her class to translate a news story about the terrorist, Simon builds a false identity as the couple's child and brings the story to the internet, causing strong reactions from a wide spectrum of different

23 people. Finally, after the true identity of Simon's parents is revealed and it becomes clear that his parents died in a car accident, a new family unit can formed

Despite the fact that, like Ararat and Where the Truth Lies before it, Adoration received mixed reviews, the film received a Palme d'Or nomination at the Cannes

Festival and a prize at the Toronto International Film Festival (―Ego Film Arts‖).

Chloe

After the more personal Adoration, Egoyan was offered another commercially oriented film, Chloe. It was the first film in his career that he directed but did not write the script for. It was also his first international production financed fully by the French

StudioCanal. In order to make the film more marketable, major Hollywood stars Liam

Neeson, Julianne Moore, and Amanda Seyfried appeared in the leading roles. The film premiered at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival.

Chloe is a 'reinvention' of a French film Nathalie (2003) directed by Anne

Fontaine. , a Canadian film director who had left that country to pursue a career in Hollywood, the film, was inspired by it and eventually bought the rights to it. He then contacted Erin Cressida Wilson to write the script for the film. Despite the fact that Reitman had initially wanted to direct the film himself, he decided the topic would be better approached by Atom Egoyan, whose work he had admired. Reitman recalls: ―We approached Atom to direct because philosophically, there is much in the movie that he has touched on in his own films. There is a definite connection in his work to the themes of Chloe‖ (qtd. in ―Chloe‖).

The story focuses upon Catherine, a middle-aged gyneacologist, who fears that her husband might be cheating on her. She hires a young prostitute named Chloe to seduce David. During their regular meetings, in which all the details of Chloe and

24 David's encounters are discussed, Chloe falls in love with Catherine and does not want to let her go.

The narrative in Chloe is linear, which is uncharacteristic of Egoyan's own narratives, but despite the fact that the script was not written by him, the story deals with topics that are examined very often in his own films.

Chloe has been highly successful commercially. As James Adams mentions,

Chloe made back its eleven million dollar budget in pre-sales before its actual release and the gross revenues are 8.5 million dollars.

At the moment, Egoyan is working on his project Moving the Arts for a German channel ARTE and is preparing for his next feature film Seven Wonders (―Atom

Egoyan‖).

25 3. Canadian Cinema

In order to understand the conditions in which Atom Egoyan produced his films, it is necessary to briefly outline the development of Canadian with its major influences, government legislations and agencies.

Canadians have always struggled to develop a that would have a particular common style and purpose. The majority of film critics and scholars agree that the main reason for ' inability to form their own distinct cinema is the strong and unceasing influence of their southern neighbor.

Seth Feldman, a professor of Canadian Studies, believes that the strong position of Hollywood as the major producer of films that are distributed all over the world is caused by the fact that it matured with the USA's rise of power and with rise to globalism. He says: ―Hollywood monopolized not just a trade in movies, but the definition of the medium‖ (4).

Another factor that further complicated Canadian filmmakers' situation was the fact that the growing Hollywood film industry took control over the distribution and exhibition system in Canada and, by providing its own films left almost no space for distribution and exhibition of Canadian independent films (Gittings 78-79). Charles R.

Acland explains:

Two international media giants, Viacom and Universal, are the parent corporations for our two main chains, and Cineplex Odeon, respectively. The resulting industrial structure has meant that Canada has been treated as an extension of the US domestic market for film. (2)

As a result, often even if the filmmakers in Canada manage to gather enough money to produce a film, they are virtually unable reach Canadian audience. Despite the success of a number of Canadian films at various international film festivals, 95% to

98% of screen time in Canadian cinema has been taken up by Hollywood films. This is

26 not only caused by the fact that most of the cinemas in Canada are owned by American corporations, but even most of the Canadian cinema owners prefer to screen Hollywood films and thus favor profit to support of Canadian filmmaking (Acland 2).

Discouraged by this lack of opportunities to work on large budget films in

Canada, many talented directors, technicians and actors left Canada for Hollywood, where they could pursue their careers. A number of these Canadians became world- famous directors, screenwriters and actors. Just to name a few, , Ivan

Reitman, , Dan Akroyd, , , Michael J.

Fox, , or Carrie-Anne Moss.

However, as Christopher Gittings argues, historically it was not only influence of the USA that undermined the development of Canadian feature-film industry.

Originally, it was under control of Britain. Since the creation of Canadian Government

Motion Picture Exhibits and Publicity Bureau2 in 1918, Canadian film production concentrated on production of documentaries that promoted trade and tourism. Unlike in Great Britain, Germany or the USA in the 1920s, in Canada the state failed to adopt any legislation that would support the development of Canadian feature-film production. Due to the Canadian government‘s failure to protect Canadian film production, distribution and exhibition together with uncontrolled expansion of

Hollywood film industry to Canada, it became almost impossible for Canadian feature independent films to achieve domestic distribution or exhibition (Gittings 76-78).

The establishment of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (1967) was the first of the Canadian government‘s attempts to support commercial feature film production in Canada. According to Clandfield, unlike the previous government

2 Canadian Government Motion Picture Exhibits and Publicity Bureau was in 1923 renamed to the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau)

27 initiatives, this time it was designed to assist with the production and distribution of theatrical features. Although since the CFDC preferred films that were ―distinctly

Canadian- illustrative and constructive of Canadian culture‖, their project often conflicted with the priorities of the exhibitors and therefore exhibition remained the major obstacle for Canadian filmmakers (87).

The late 1970s introduction of the tax shelter legislation3 that was designed to secure distribution and exhibition through US-owned companies led, as Gittings remarks, only to focusing on American market and thus sacrificing the Canadian spirit in them. Moreover, it was also often abused by many ―greedy producers and entrepreneurs who could walk away from their films with a great deal of money . . ., no matter how much the film lost at the box office‖ (97).

The short period from the fall of 1978 to the spring of 1981, during which the tax shelter legislation was in force, was, according to , a period of an unprecedented boom of Canadian commercially oriented ―Hollywood style‖ film production. It was, however, followed by a dramatic decline. The general view was that the Canadian film industry grew, due to the tax shelter legislation, too quickly and produced commercially oriented film, which were only inferior imitation of Hollywood films. Moreover, more modest projects by talented directors like , Don

Shebib, and were ignored (Wise, ―Canadian‖).

Nevertheless, the impact of this legislation was not entirely negative, since it also contributed to a generation of highly skilled film crews and helped to develop careers of such film directors and producers as David Cronenberg, Ivan Reitman or Robert Lantos

(Gittings 97).

3 Tax shelter is a method of reducing of the taxable income of the investor and as a result the tax they would have to pay to the ―tax collecting entities‖ is reduced ("Tax shelter").

28 In 1980's with introduction of quota system for Canadian television companies, television broadcasting created a new window of opportunity for Canadian feature films to reach Canadian audience. This shift to television feature film production was, as

Gittings points out, reflected in the transformation of the CFDC into Telefilm in 1984.

The agency's main goal has been to provide support for creation of quality Canadian films that would also be culturally relevant and accessible for domestic audience (95-

96).

3.1. Co-production

Another possibility for Canadian filmmakers ―to circumvent the US monopoly on distribution and gain access to new markets―, as is suggested by Gittings, is co- production (99). The very first co-production treaty with France was signed already in

1963. Today, Canada has treaties with as many as fifty-three countries and among

Canada‘s most successful co-produced projects are: Naked Lunch (David Cronenberg,

Canada, United Kingdom/ Japan 1991), Zero Patient (, Canada/United

Kingdom 1993) (Francois Girard, Canada/Italy/United Kingdom/USA

1998), The Barbarian Invasion ( , Canada/France 2003), Juno (Jason

Reitman, Canada/USA 2007) or Where the Truth Lies (Atom Egoyan, Canada/United

Kingdom 2005).

Although co-production is a possibility for Canadian directors' to gain bigger budgets and reach wider audience, it also often requires painful compromises of the directors' personal artistic visions.

29 This is described by Anne Wheeler4:

If I try to go international, they'll say the story is too Canadian. I've gotten that. On a bigger budget like that you have to have an international star, and you start playing this whole game of trying to get the star attached to the project and then maybe they want to change the actual location. At one point, this [particular project] was supposed to be shot on Island at the turn of the century in the opium days of Victoria. Gee, the closest possibility I came to getting it made was in Ireland, and it was going to change the story significantly, so I refused to do it, I said no I won't tell that story in that way. (qtd. in Gittings 101)

3.2. Independent Film Production

Since 1960s there began forming a new wave of young filmmakers independent of the government agencies. The major centers of this alternative film production that often tackled some transgressive and marginal topics were Canadian universities.

The underground films of the period often distinguished themselves from the mainstream film production by breaking sexual taboos and ran afoul of provincial Censor Boards. Filmmakers in this tradition did not serve the apprenticeship with either the NFB or CBC. They were not particularly shaped by contemporary trends in documentary and sought to make low-budget features as their first works. (Clandfield 100-101)

According to Clandfield, the main centers of activity were: Toronto, Vancouver and Hamilton (101). Among the best known Canadian filmmakers, who began their careers in this period is also the famous Canadian founder of a '' David

Cronenberg. Atom Egoyan in the late 1970s and 1980, similarly like Cronenberg, began his career as a film director with several low-budget short films produced during his studies at the University of Toronto. The release of his first full-length feature film Next of Kin in 1984 marked the beginning of the Ontario New Wave.

4 Anne Wheeler is a English Canadian film director, writer and producer from .

30 3.3. Ontario New Wave Directors associated with the Ontario New Wave came from the generation of young English-Canadian filmmakers of the 1980s, mainly students and graduates of

University of Toronto. Their original and innovative films rejected the mainstream US culture as well as the pessimistic films (Goin' Down the Road 1970 and Nobody Waved

Good-bye 1964) made by the earlier generation of English Canadian filmmakers like

Don Sheibb and Don Owen (Wise, ―Ontario‘s‖).

Their production methods were, according to Carole Desbarats, partially influenced by New Wave, their French Canadian predecessor in Quebec. The main objective of the filmmakers associated with Ontario New Wave was to express their skepticism towards the ―most fundamental principle of the Hollywood film: the belief in transcendent power of individual will‖ (13).

Apart from Egoyan, were among those talented young filmmakers also Peter

Mettler, Bruce McDonald, , Ron Mann, , Alexandra

Raffe, Holly Dale, Janis Cole, Colin Brunton, Janis Lundman and others. As Glassman and Wise point out, despite not having any written manifesto, their films shared a common aesthetics. The first films that marked the beginning of this group were Peter

Mettler's Scissere (1982) and two films by Ron Mann, a jazz documentary Imagine the

Sound (1981) and Poetry in Motion (1982). They were followed by Atom Egoyan's full- length feature debut Next of Kin (1984) two years later (Wise, ―Ontario‘s‖).

According to Wise, the members of this close-knit group of young Ontario filmmakers frequently cooperated on each other's films. ―Mettler shot Egoyan‘s Next of

Kin, Rozema's Passion and McDonald's Knock! Knock!, while McDonald edited

Mettler‘s Scissere, Egoyan's Family Viewing and Mann's Comic Book Confidential‖

(Wise, ―Ontario‘s‖).

31 The two major encouragements to the group's activities came in 1984 with introduction of the Perspective Canada at the Toronto International Film Festival in

1984. It was a series where the new English-Canadian films were often launched. The other encouragement came in 1986 with the foundation of Ontario Film Development

Corporation, an agency established to support film culture in Ontario (Wise,

―Ontario‘s‖).

The breakthrough film of Ontario's New Wave was Patricia Rozema's I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, released in 1987. The film was awarded at Cannes and received considerable international critical attention. The other significant films produced by the directors of Ontario New Wave are McDonald's Roadkill and Highway 61, Egoyan's

Speaking Parts, Family Viewing, and Exotica or Mettler's The Top of His

Head (Wise, ―Ontario‘s‖).

Despite all the critical attention and successes of Canadian contemporary films,

Canadian film industry is not commercially viable and remains heavily dependent on government funding. All the attempts to form Canadian national cinema that have a common purpose and would be also commercially successful have failed. According to Ted Mager, CFDC's willingness to support only Canadian films that are both profitable and ―contribute to the articulation of a Canadian cultural identity― at the same time are naive since, these two objectives are, for the most part, mutually incompatible

(qtd. in Feldman 8).

Nevertheless, the commercial inevitability of Canadian films has not had only negative effects on the country's film production. Over the time, many Canadian filmmakers realized that there is no point in trying to compete with Hollywood production and they took an advantage of the relative creative freedom that production of films in Canada allows.

32 Feldman notes:

We have also sorted out an old adage in the film industry: that the problem with film as an art is that it is a business and the problem with film as a business is that it is an art. Canada has solved both problems by divorcing the business from the art. The Americans bring the business of cinema; we fund the less lucrative, more artistic films, through a combination of industry subsidies and arts council grants. (11)

Not being ―seduced or deformed by market pressures― Canadian filmmakers can to deal with marginal topics such as breaking of various taboos, dysfunctional relationships, sexual deviations and catastrophic vision of technological progress and experiment with style (Egoyan qtd. in Monk 1).

Egoyan praised the Canadian system of state support in a foreword to Katherine

Monk‘s book Weird Sex and Snowshoes. He said that it has enabled him and his colleagues to experiment with style, tell unconventional stories, cast Canadian actors and simply make films without commercial pressure and all the industrial processes of

―homogenized film culture‖ (2).

These tendencies of contemporary Canadian films towards the marginal could be considered as a reaction to the overwhelming dominance of the US culture in Canadian media. In fact, a number of Canadian directors consistently oppose the narrative, stylistic and thematic conventions set by classical Hollywood cinema and try to ―define

[themselves and their films] through the difference‖ from what is American. (Pike

―Across‖). Schlomo Schwartzberg expresses the same idea:

We are outside the US, we get all their culture, all their TV, all their music, all their cinema, and we are always watching. It's not surprising that Cronenberg or Egoyan see things in that way. They sit in Toronto and look at the US with a probing eye. We're always analyzing ourselves, analyzing, where we stand vis-a-vis the , trying to be not too American. (qtd. in Macnab)

However, nine years after he wrote the foreword, the difficult situation of

Canadian films‘ exhibition has not changed much. There is no point in making quality

33 Canadian films, when nobody watches them in Canada. This is probably the main reason why only four years later Egoyan decided to shoot Where the Truth Lies with a budget of $25 million partly financed by the UK production company, set in

Hollywood of 1950s, with major stars Collin Firth and in the leading roles.

Similarly, many other Canadian filmmakers, who want to remain in Canada and at the same time reach larger audience very often make their films in co-production or focus on television production which, unlike the exhibition of feature films in cinemas, have strict regulations (―‖).

To sum it all up, Canada has for many years tried to create a distinct Canadian and at the same time viable film industry. The history of the Canadian feature film industry is marked by unsuccessful government attempts to come up with a policy that would help to circumvent the US controlled exhibition system in Canada.

The vision of commercially viable Canadian film industry was eventually abandoned and the introduction of the government funding has led to the production of a number of quality films made by Canadian filmmakers, who due to the lack of commercial pressure had a creative freedom to experiment with style and address some unconventional topics.

However, despite the critical success at various international film festivals,

Canadian film industry remains heavily dependent on government funding and the screen time for Canadian films in Canadian cinemas has not exceeded 5 %.

34 4. Family Viewing

In an interview with Peter Harcourt, Egoyan explains that the idea to make a film about a young man who decides to regain his history and identity originates in

Egoyan‘s fascination with the process of creativity used to alter difficult circumstances. His characters are often people who are ―finding creative means of making images or making scenario which somehow satisfy their neurotic compulsion‖. Egoyan believes that the purpose of art is to ―provide order and purpose‖ into our lives. It is often the only way his characters can deal with their pain and they use creativity as a kind of therapy. He adds, that however, his characters also often lose control over the process and it becomes destructive then (Egoyan,

―A Conversation by Harcourt‖ 89, 91).

Egoyan admits that the theme of the film is to a great extend autobiographical.

Inspired by his personal immigrant experience, he wanted to make a film about someone who tries to reclaim his own past and identity (Kreyche).

4.1. Synopsis

The main character of the story is seventeen-year-old Van (Aidan Tierney) who lives with his father Stan (David Hemblen) and his stepmother Sandra () in their ultra modern flat full of latest video equipment. Van's mother, who is an

Armenian, abandoned the family a long time ago and the only connection Van has with his mother and his Armenian roots is his beloved maternal grandmother Armen (Selma

Keklikian). Stan, in his attempt to erase his memories of the past, places Armen in a nursing house and secretly re-tapes the old home videotapes of Van and his mother with his and Sandra's home porn. By doing so, he at the same time deprives Van of his past and prevents him from fully embracing the other part of his identity.

35 Van unconsciously feels that there is something missing from his life and his frequent visits of Armen are a great source of comfort to him. He visits her as often as possible, even though she does not speak and spends all days just watching television.

On one of his visits, he befriends Aline (Arsineé Khanjian), a phone sex operator, whose mother shares room with Armen. At that time he does not know that his own father is Aline's regular customer and that he needs to hear her voice in order to be able to have sex with Sandra.

After Stan refuses to take Armen back home and Van discovers that his father has been using the family videotapes for recording of his homemade porn videos, he decides to take his life into his own hands and steals the tapes.

When he is asked by Aline to take care of her mother while she meets a client in

Montreal he finds her mother dead of an overdose. He realizes that it may be an opportunity to get Armen out of the nursing home and swaps their bodies. He persuades

Aline to take Armen from the nursing home to her flat and moves in with them. Stan, however, becomes suspicious and hires a private investigator. In order to prevent Stan from discovering Armen, Van has to move her to one of the empty rooms in a hotel, where he now works. When she is discovered by the hotel staff, she is removed to a homeless shelter. Meanwhile Stan, determined to find Armen, traces her to the hotel only to find the empty room with a smiling face of his ex-wife on a television screen.

Having lost control over his and his son‘s past he has been trying to deny so desperately, he collapses. In the very last scene of the film, Van and Aline meet Armen and Van's mother in a homeless shelter.

36 4.2. Production

Following the release of Egoyan's first full-length feature film Next of Kin

(1984) Egoyan seized an opportunity to acquire some skills of more mainstream filmmaking and to earn some money at the same time and worked as a freelance director of several both Canadian and US television programs. To name a few: In this

Corner (1985) for the CBC series For the Record and ―The Wall‖ (1985); an episode of Twilight Zone TV series (Romney 39-41).

Since Egoyan’s first feature film Next of Kin (1984) was made ―totally outside of any system‖ for only $35,000, he did not plan to apply for any kind of state funding

(Egoyan, Interview by Burnett). However, after he found out that Telefilm and

Ontario Film Development Corporation (OFDC) were using Next of Kin as an example of the kind of films they wanted to subsidy, he decided to use the situation and send them a script of his next film. He recalls the obstacles he had to face during the frustrating process of negotiations with both institutions in an interview with Ron

Burnett:

Because of the formal considerations in Family Viewing, I had no desire to make it into a higher budget picture. I was in a weird position. I had to marginalize myself to make sure I had total control over the project and that meant, for instance, not going to Telefilm and not pursuing investors whom I knew would not support the way I wanted to make the film. I think the OFDC understood that when they said, ―Look, we can give you more money than you‘re asking for, and the only thing we would suggest is that a lot of the stuff you want to shoot on video, you should shoot on video and film just in case the video doesn‘t work.‖ It was that sort of spirit that I felt could have undermined the whole approach to the production.

Eventually, he gathered a budget of C$160,000 and for the first time in his career he was able to hire a professional film crew. However, in order to maintain control over the production, he hired only as few people as possible Egoyan cooperated

37 with some of his colleagues he had already met at the production of his earlier films.

The cinematography was done by (Open House 1982, Next of Kin 1984) and the editing was done by Bruce McDonald (Open House) (Egoyan, ―Interview by

Burnett‖).

Egoyan is famous for his tendency to work with the same film crew and Family

Viewing marked the beginning of his long-term cooperation with some other members of his film crew like with the composer , with sound editor Steve Munro and with art director Linda Del Rosario (Egoyan, ―Four Films‖). Apart from Peter

Mettler, Egoyan hired also another cinematographer, Robert MacDonald, for Family

Viewing. As Romney notes Peter Mettler attended camera movement while the second cinematographer, Robert MacDonald, the lighting (Romney 42).

Egoyan decided to make his film about a family in order to keep the number of characters down and at the same time to be able to ―deploy the themes that you want to address with a minimum of means‖ (Egoyan, ―Interview by Burnett‖). However, his decision to shoot the film on video had nothing to do with the budget. It was purely for aesthetic reasons (Egoyan, ―Interview by Burnett‖). He wanted to make a film where 16 mm film and 1 inch video images would intervene and create a kind of mosaic structure of different textures of images that represent different generations (Egoyan, Family

Viewing, ―Commentary‖).

As Romney points out, this ―formal adventurousness‖ of Family Viewing reflects

Egoyan‘s dissatisfaction with The Next of Kin, where he, in reaction to the Canadian tradition of cinema vérité, emphasized the formal elements. However to his great disappointment The Next of Kin ended up ―resembling hand-held docu-drama‖ (42).

As was already mentioned, Egoyan did not want to use many characters in the film. The cast consisted of only five main characters: Van is played by Aidan Tierney,

38 whose brother Patrick appeared in the leading role of Egoyan‘s previous film Next of

Kin, Van‘s father Stan is played by David Hemblen, who later appeared in several other

Egoyan‘s films, his lover Sandra is played by Gabrielle Rose, a Canadian actress who was also cast in Egoyan‘s other films, Van‘s Armenian grandmother Armen is played by Selma Keklikian, and Aline was played by Egoyan‘s wife Arsinée Khanjian.

Khanjian has worked with Egoyan on all his film and played in most of them.

4.3. Genre Family Viewing bears the features of several different genres. Jonathan Romney likens the film‗s deadpan dialogues to an absurdist drama (46). For Janet Maslin it is a ―hi-tech black comedy‖ and for Carol Desbarats a ―family romance‖ turned on its head (qtd. in Wilson 23). A French film critic from La Monde, Louis Mackerel even called Family Viewing a thriller (Egoyan, ―Interview Chloe‖).

4.4. Narrative structure Like in all Egoyan films the narrative line of Family Viewing is non-linear. The plot is organized around the main character‘s attempt to reclaim his identity. There are several diegetic flashbacks to the main character‘s childhood in a form of family video tapes.

The opening shot of the film is set in the old people‘s house and shows Van from behind the trolley with trays. The following shot shows an old woman lying in her bed and lethargically watching a nature show. As the camera slowly recedes, it reveals that

Van is standing by her bed. Egoyan, in his commentary, says that this should create the

39 feeling that some crucial information is being withheld from the viewer so that the viewer‘s curiosity is aroused (Egoyan, Family Viewing, ―Commentary‖).

The following shot begins from a point of view of the television screen. Van approaches the TV and begins changing the channels and introduces all the other characters of the story respectively, each of them on a different channel with applauding audience in the background, ―featured like a star[s] of a sitcom (Wilson 25). This scene, according to Egoyan, illustrates ―how media become a central player in the dramaturgy‖ it also indicates the profound role of media in Van‘s life and also implies the malleability of the media images (Egoyan, Family Viewing, ―Commentary‖).

From the television screen there is a direct cut to the surveillance camera screen where we can see Aline entering a house. In Egoyan‘s words, its purpose is to introduce another use of media technology, which is primarily designed to protect us, but is threatening us at the same time, because it can be abused (Egoyan, Family Viewing,

―Commentary‖). She enters a dark room with nothing but the telephone on the desk and dials a number as the telephone starts ringing the sound bridges into the establishing shot of a building and then to a living room, where Van is sitting on a sofa watching

TV.

There is a striking difference between the more naturally-looking texture of the previous scene and the blue wash-out texture of the scene in the condo. This dramatic change of texture is, according to Egoyan, employed to mark the shift to another generation in which Van becomes trapped without access to his past and to mark the difference between the real and the imagined. The condo scene was designed to look very artificially and claustrophobic, like a soap opera with its rapid cutting, ―with all its camera moves and audience response‖ which remains even after the volume is turned

40 down and it becomes a comment on the action happening in the living room between

Van and Sandra (Egoyan, Family Viewing, ―Commentary‖).

The relationship between Van and Sandra seems to be very intimate and very likely of sexual nature. They sit on a sofa talking with their faces very close to each other, almost kissing, however before they actually kiss the film is stopped and rewound. Egoyan explains that this effect gives the story an impression that everything is flexible; everything is open to change (Egoyan, Family Viewing, ―Commentary‖).

In one of the following scenes from the condo, the viewer is introduced to Stan for the first time. He joins Sandra and Van and is sitting with them on the sofa in front of the television He is totally immersed in the TV show and hardly takes his eyes off the screen. Marie-Aude Baronian calls the condo scenes with the family gathered in front of the TV ―a caricature of western family ‗coziness‘‖ (148).

To this point, the viewer has not been given many clues that would help him/her to piece out the connections between the individual scenes. Despite the fact, that by that time the viewer has been introduced to almost all characters of the story, the plot seems almost incoherent. The viewer is given only pieces of information that is not sufficient enough to explain the motivation of the individual characters. As the story unfolds the viewer is given more clues. He is able to piece the plot together, however the narrative line remains fragmented and it requires lot of interpretation on the part of the spectator, who is expected to fill in the gaps in the plot.

Similarly, the ending is ambiguous and it is open to the viewer‘s interpretation.

Van calls the police and has Armen removed to the homeless shelter. According to

Romney, it is not clear if it is an act of saving or getting rid of her (55). When Stan also

41 collapses in the hotel room and looks at the TV screen there suddenly appears a smiling face of his ex-wife on the TV screen.

These last scenes from the homeless shelter, where Van and Aline meet Armen and Van‘s mother, intercut with the images from the old family tapes and thus make us doubt about the reality of the whole sequence.

The main mystery about what happened to Van‘s mother is never completely resolved. The viewer can only guess from some of the video shot, where she is gagged kneeling on the floor, that she abandoned her husband and son to escape Stan‘s abusive behavior.

Egoyan explains the narrative structure of his films in an interview with Hamid

Naficy. He says that the narrative structure of his films is not a premeditated attempt to confuse his audience, but rather a reflection of the way he thinks. ―In the films I have found a way of finding a structure that conforms to my own way of seeing things through‖ (49). He also admits that he is aware of the fact that the complex narrative structures of his films may put some viewers off, because not everyone is willing to actively search for the clues. He says:

I love the idea of randomness of film. I like the idea of stating at the outset of a film that what you see are just scenes that are placed together and that the actual glue that holds them together is your own subconscious rather than a narrative action in the classical way. The viewers have to somehow create their own hook, and that is something about my films that I think annoys a lot of people who like to have some sort of narrative. (49)

The point of view in Family Viewing is most of the time omniscient; however, it is occasionally adopted by one of the characters, a TV screen or even a diegetic camera.

This can be seen, for instance, in one of Stan‘s recording sequences, in the surveillance camera shots or in the scenes where the characters watch television or video.

42 4.5. Mise-en-scene

There are some temporal and spatial clues throughout the film that indicate when and where the story is set. Since Aline meets her client in Montréal, we can assume that the story is set in Canada, very likely in Toronto, where the film was shot.

As far as the temporal clues are concerned, the rerecording technology in the film is very advanced for 1986. Egoyan explains in the DVD commentary, that because recording technology at that time was in its infancy and that Van, who was 17, could not have a video tapes from his childhood in color, it had to be ―fudged a little by saying that Stan worked for the company that put them out‖ (Egoyan, Family Viewing,

―Commentary‖).

Most of the scenes were shot in the studio. The set was built in the back space of

Factory Theatre Lab. First of all they constructed the condo flat scene and then transformed it into the old people‘s home (Egoyan, ―A Conversation Harcourt‖ 85).

The settings of the film can be divided into two groups and each of them represents entirely different worlds. In the first group are Stan‘s condominium and the telephone sex establishment. Both these settings seem very impersonal and cold. Stan‘s condo looks very cold and artificial, more like a set from a TV show than a family home with all the shiny ultramodern furniture, large abstract paintings on the walls, the black and white color combination, the latest video equipment and a TV set with a video recorder, ―featured as the only significant furniture‖, in every room (Baronian 148).

Stan and Sandra‘s bedroom looks almost like a television studio with the camera and all the lights carefully arranged to light up their bed, where he stages his sex sessions.

Romney points out to the ―flat, blended-out effect‖ of the condo scenes‘ mise-en-scene that reminiscent of staged sit-com scenes (48).

43 On the other hand, in the scenes form the call centre, where Aline works, the depth is emphasized. It is a very dark and also very impersonal place. Except for telephone and some erotic posters on the walls, it is almost empty. Aline can hear the other women talking to their clients, but the only person she ever meets there is a reception clerk who just gives her brief instructions. Moreover, the front door surveillance camera creates an uncomfortable feeling of being secretly watched by someone.

In a stark contrast to the impersonal condo and call centre, the settings linked with the Armenian characters look much more domestic. Even though the residents only lethargically lie in their beds sleeping or with they eyes fixed on the TV screen, behind the blank faces of the residents, there are strong feelings and history. Even though the room is shabby, all the personal space is limited to the bed and a bedside table, the viewer can see some traces of their pasts and their families represented by the old family photographs and pictures on the wall, bright floral-patterned blanket and flower pots on the window sills. It is not surprising that the Armenian rest home seems cozier than Stan‘s modern flat, where memories are forbidden.

In the second half of the film, Van moves with Armen into Aline‘s flat. It again looks very different from Stan‘s condo. The flat is light; there are lot of plants everywhere and lot of red details, like a red sofa, red blanket on the wall and pillows.

Red color generally seems to be the color Egoyan associates with Armenian characters.

Aline often wears warm colored clothes, lipstick and nail polish, whereas Stan, Van and

Sandra are dressed in simple and elegant clothes in cold colors. The only time Aline wears black is after her mother‘s death.

Van‘s idyllic childhood videotapes project Van‘s longing for his missing mother and her culture. They are set in a large garden. It is a beautiful sunny day and Armen

44 and Van‘s mother sit at the table outside with little Van sitting on her lap singing an

Armenian song while Stan is behind his camera out of frame.

These shots date from perhaps ten or fifteen years before the main action, yet in their soft colors, streaked sunlight, an unknown language, they seem like images of another era and another country, mingling nostalgia for the mother with nostalgia for another home, another birthplace. The video suddenly reveals a lost impossible scene. The child comes into the frame and into the cradling arms of his mother (his relation with Sandra appears an ersatz version of this embrace). The mother shadows and mirrors her child, holds him and tends to him, infinitely gentle, creating a sacred image of maternity as she rocks him on her lap. (Wilson 30)

The shocking images of Stan and Sandra recorded on the same tape in Wilson‘s words ―contaminates‖ these sacred images of Van‘s mother and at the same time makes them even more sacred in Van‘s eyes (31).

The most striking feature of the mise-en-scene is the omnipresence of the screens. As Baronian points out they are used to project a great variety of images ranging from TV shows and home movies to porn (149). Naficy calls the space created by the screens in Egoyan‘s films, a ―third space‖. It is the space ―where you enter the video or inhabit the intersection of video and film texts‖ (48). He likens this space to a ―hall of mirrors, where one surface reflects or refracts another‖ and where the viewer feels as he was ―caught in maze of surfaces‖ (48).

There is a considerable difference between the function of television and video image in the film. Elena del Río explores this difference in her essay ―Fetish and Aura‖.

She argues that while the television functions as a ―permissible, non-conformational framework of communication‖, the function of video is portrayed as more ―malleable‖ and at the same time more ―ambivalent‖ medium., because it is used as a ―repository of repressed desires and sociably unacceptable practices‖ (34).

45 Moreover, as pointed out by del Río, the depiction of television images within the film varies according to the setting in which it is watched. The television monitor in the living room of Stan‘s condominium works as a central point of family life, a place where the whole family gathers and watches the TV together. The camera is placed behind the TV set and therefore viewer cannot see the screen directly. He can only hear the sound and see the reactions to the particular show on the faces of the family (36).

On the other hand, the television images from the TV placed in Armen‘s room in the nursing home are presented in juxtaposition with the cinematic images of the people in the room and provide a running commentary on their actions and lives ―Montage becomes a powerful tool of estrangement and dissociation, dislodging the institutions of the family and of television from the safety of their customary boundaries‖ (del Río 36).

The video is portrayed as a highly ambiguous medium. For Stan it represents the mean in which he can erase his memories and his feeling of guilt as well as all the traces

Van‘s Armenian heritage and re-tapes them with the recordings of his and Sandra‘s sexual encounters. According to the Baronian, it gives him a sense of power and control over both his and Van‘s past (150).

On the other hand, Van uses the very same videotapes are used by Van to recover his past and identity, which are the aspect of his life that he has no other possibility to access (Egoyan, ―Family‖).

Figure expression and movement

The acting in Family Viewing is stylized without any trace of emotion. The dialogues are flat and often revolve only around the TV programs. Romney likens the

46 film‘s dialogues to a ―verbal ping-pong‖ that is characteristic of ―absurdist drama‖ (45-

46).

In an interview with Ron Burnett Egoyan explains that all the dialogues were thoroughly rehearsed and the lack of spontaneity is intentional. His goal was to explore the idea that technology can help us to ―trivialize ourselves‖. He says that the acting in the film emphasizes the irony of the characters who believe that technology can

―simplify [their] lives‖ in order to avoid dealing with their complexity and pain. ―[T]hat is where the irony of the film comes off, in terms of the language it employs—where

[Stan] tries desperately to be a ‗TV Dad,‘ to give advice and it‘s so pat it becomes ridiculous―.

Peter Harcourt links ―Egoyan‘s Pinteresque dialog‖ and the acting style with the characters‘ uncertain sense of identity. He says: ―This style of acting, however, is also appropriate to the characters' uncertain sense of self, to their efforts to relinquish received identities and to renegotiate new ones, as cinematic spectators must negotiate new ones with them‖ (4).

All the characters of the film undergo some major changes throughout the story.

These changes are also reflected in their expressions, gestures and movements. The most dramatic change is probably undergone by Van. As he matures he realizes the importance of Armen in his life. At the beginning of the story Van‘s seems to be influenced by the numbing effect of the TV. His movements and speech are restricted and his facial expression is blank. However, once he discovers the old video tapes, he becomes much more energetic: his movements become more dynamic, his behavior more self-confident and his expression more alert. As Baronian points out:

Instead of staying home as a passive viewer, Van becomes an active spectator who is capable of making his own judgments and eventually becomes conscious of the meaning of his past, for instance, via heritage of his ethnic roots. (149)

47

Stan and Sandra are also forced to abandon their comfortable roles of passive observers as they lose control over Van‘s memory and Van‘s affection respectively.

After Van leaves the condo and moves in with Armen in Aline‘s apartment, they both seem to be on the verge of insanity. David Hemblen‘s Stan transform from the blank faced ―TV dad‖ to an obsessed maniac with a frantic look in his eyes. Sandra evolves from the ―sex bunny‖ she was at the beginning to an adult woman (Egoyan, Family

Viewing, ―Commentary‖). Reserved and detached Aline becomes more emotionally invested as she opens up to the world around her. Even Armen, who has been completely lethargic, comes alive as she is shown the family videos.

4.6. Cinematographic Properties

The formal play of Family Viewing is based on interplay between images of different textures. The texture of the film represents reality and the grainy, washed-out texture of the video images represents ―the reflection of [the character‘s] state of mind‖

(Egoyan, ―Emotional‖ 4).

The film was shot in studio in Toronto and took only fifteen days. The film was shot with 16 mm camera and the condo and video scenes on 1 inch Beta with ―life switching‖ video camera in order to make the difference between the film and video texture more obvious. The video footage was then transformed to film. The whole film was then blown up to 35 mm (Egoyan, ―Egoyan‘s Journey‖ 121).

In order make the condo scene look like a soap-opera, the scene was shot on two cameras at the same time. The cutting was very fast, like in television, and it was done live (Egoyan, ―The Accented‖ 57).

48 Egoyan also used high camera angles in order to simulate the surveillance camera. This method is employed mainly in scenes where Aline is entering the call center and later in Montreal in the hotel where she meets her client. Egoyan notes that he used a cut from a hallway to hotel room, where would not be any camera, to make the viewer aware of the unusual camera angle and places him into a position of a voyeur who is watching something he or she is not supposed to see (Egoyan ―The Accented‖

57).

Unfortunately, as Egoyan, says in the DVD commentary, since the film was for financial reasons shot on 16mm and then blown up to 35 mm for projection, the formal structure have not been fully appreciated by its audience, because Family Viewing was distributed mainly on video and DVD.

Film sound, both diegetic and non-diegetic, plays a crucial part in the film‘s overall effect. As far as the diegetic sound is concerned, as was already discussed the sound coming from TV often comments on the action. Egoyan, however, also uses diegetic sound to enhance the film‘s continuity. The action taking place at several sets of the film is linked via sound. For instance, the scene in the nursing home where Stan is attacked by Armen cuts to the nature show on TV. There is an owl that has just caught a mouse and the TV commentator‘s voice creates a sound bridge into the shot of

Stan watching the same nature show at home.

Aline‘s appearance on the screen is preceded by a tinkling sound. The sound seems non-diegetic as the source of the sound is never shown. However, in one of the later call centre scenes, the source is revealed, when the viewer can see Aline talking to her client and playing with wind chimes hanging from the ceiling.

The music was composed by Mychael Danna. Family Viewing was his first collaboration with Egoyan and since then he has been Egoyan‘s sole film score

49 composer. Danna recounts that the music for Family Viewing is very expressive and sometimes it ―[runs] counter to the mood provoked by the actions onscreen‖ and thus it could be said that it even ―[runs] counter the music convention‖ (Danna, ―Leaving‖).

The most dominant feature of music is the sound of tribal drums and percussions that together with the documentaries on TV emphasize the ―dominance of nature‖. Despite

Danna‘s remark that the score sometimes ―[runs] counter to the mood‖, Egoyan felt that the music works very well a hint of the characters` feeling that are otherwise almost nonexistent in the film. He says:

Mychael‘s work allowed me a freedom to stylize the performances. Where the music in most films just underlines emotions displayed onscreen we had the unique opportunity to suggest what is not evident: the underworld or the subconscious of characters (qtd. in Danna, ―Leaving‖)

4.7. Response

Family Viewing was highly successful with film critics. The film sparked of a new wave of interest in Egoyan‘s work. Some critics, however, objected to certain detachment and coldness of the film.

Egoyan considers Family Viewing to be his favorite film. He also admits that it bears probably the most autobiographical elements of all his films. Similarly like Van,

Egoyan believes that his grandmother helped him to access the Armenian culture.

Family Viewing was nominated for eight Genie Awards and received a tremendous honor at the Montreal Film Festival when the famous German director

Wim Wenders gave out the prize for his own film in favor of Egoyan's Family Viewing.

50 5. The Sweet Hereafter

Following the success of Egoyan‘s first more commercially oriented film

Exotica, Warner Bros offered Egoyan to shoot a thriller Dead Sleep written by Scott

Fields and John Stockwell. He hoped to cast Susan Sarandon into the leading role, however, the production company refused, because Sarandon would not attract enough spectators. Egoyan discouraged by studio protocol eventually decided to stick to his priorities, remain a director of independent films and to make his next movie, The Sweet

Hereafter, again through Alliance and Ego Film Arts (Romney 126-127).

The Sweet Hereafter goes even one step further than Exotica in its orientation on wider audience. Some of Egoyan‘s critics criticized his earlier films for its coldness and emotional detachment of its characters. The Sweet Hereafter was Egoyan‘s attempt to make a film that would be more accessible for its audience and at the same time he wanted to preserve the most significant visual, narrative and thematic features that have become characteristic of his films. In an interview with Susan Bullington Katz Egoyan states:

This film had a much broader appeal than Exotica, because all you need to know if you are ever confused is that it is about a community before and after an accident. . . . The characters are identifiable, they are very vivid, and we see them through their darkest hour, but we understand and are given enough idea of what their routines and their habits and their relationships are that we can invest ourselves in them in a more direct way. (97, 102)

The audience‘s reactions to this shift varies, nevertheless The Sweet Hereafter was certainly for a long time considered Egoyan‘s most commercial film until a release of even more commercially oriented Where the Truth Lies (2005) and Chloe (2009).

51 5.1. Synopsis

The Sweet Hereafter is a story of people in a small town in British Columbia.

After most of the town‘s children were killed in a tragic school bus accident, the grieving residents are trying to cope with their pain. The film begins when a big city lawyer Mitchell Stephens () comes to the town in order to represent the parents of the killed children. He believes that the bus collision was not an accident and he is trying to persuade the grieving parents to take legal action against the bus manufacturer. Stephens, who is a father himself, he lost his daughter Zoe (Caerthan

Banks) to her drug addiction a long time ago. Her frequent calls to ask him for money only aggravate his pain and his sense of helplessness. In a desperate attempt to find some meaning of the tragedy and find someone to blame, he channels his frustration into the lawsuit.

By claiming that ―no tragedy is an accident‖ he stirs up the emotions of the parents again and thus interferes with their process of healing. As he investigates the accident and interviews the parents of the dead children and the only two survivors of the accident, fifteen-year-old Nicole (Sarah Polley) and the bus driver Dolores

(Gabrielle Rose), he recruits them to join the class-action lawsuit. Their reactions to

Stephens‘ effort differ. Dolores, the Otto‘s (Arsineé Khanjian, Earl Pastko) and Nicole‘s parent‘s (Tom McCamus, Brooke Johnson) agree to join the lawsuit, while Billy Ansel

(), a widower who lost both his children, refuse to get involved.

Nicole, who remained paralyzed from the waist down after the accident and on whose testimony is Stephens‘ case based, sabotages the whole lawsuit when she says that the bus driver was speeding at the time of the accident.

Before the accident, Nicole lived in a dream about becoming a rock star and was

52 involved in an incestuous relationship with her own father. After the accident, she feels betrayed by him, because she realizes the truth about their relationship when he makes her testify in order to get compensation. As she realizes her father‘s real motives, she refuses to be manipulated any more and takes her fate into her own hands. Nicole‘s lie is not only a revenge on her father and her own way to move forward from both tragedies of her life, but by dismantling Stephens‘ case the whole community is able to get over the tragedy as well.

5.2. Adaptation

The Sweet Hereafter is Egoyan‘s first adaptation; he wrote all the previous films himself. The novel of the same name written by an American author Russell Banks was given to Egoyan as a birthday present by his wife Arsinée Khanjian. Egoyan was extremely impressed by Banks‘ ―ability to give urgency to the most banal aspects of these people‘s lives‖ and he also felt that the novel, about a grief-ridden community overwhelmed by a recent tragic accident of a school bus, was in many respects thematically and structurally quite close to his own work (Egoyan, ―A Conversation by

Bullington Katz‖ 95). He recalls:

And I felt that it was the first time I read material which had similarities in some ways to my own films, but also was a huge leap ahead in terms of the maturity of the piece and the challenges it presented. I was at a point where I really wanted to surprise, and I was convinced that it was the thing to do to try and see if I could honour and serve the spirit of the book and also make it personal. (95)

53 Another reason that convinced Egoyan to try to adapt a material written by someone else was the fact that he got tired of the way he constructs his own characters:

I felt I had made a number of films inspired by stories that came from the universe that was in my own head, but it was becoming all too familiar for me. I wanted to find something that would challenge me and still provide a framework on which I could impose my own structural concepts, and this was the perfect story for that. (qtd. in Willson 89)

As is pointed out by Romney, Banks was actively involved in the whole process of film-making. Egoyan frequently consulted the script with him and even went to visit some places where Banks set his novel. Moreover, Banks and his daughter appeared in the film. Banks in a cameo role of Nicole‘s doctor and his daughter Caerthan Banks played the drug addicted, HIV positive daughter of Mitchell Stephens. Romney believes that this was one of the important factors that helped to promote the film in the USA

(194).

Despite the fact that the film remained close to the spirit of the original novel,

Romney says that it certainly cannot be considered a ―faithful adaptation‖ of the novel.

―The film tests the limits of faithful adaptation, as if Egoyan wanted to see how far he could go without the fiction ceasing to be Banks, and how close he could stay to the spirit of the original without the film failing to be his own‖ (129). Egoyan made several substantial changes in his script that diverge his film from Banks‘s original novel. Apart from omitting several key sequences of the novel, he added his own scenes and motifs.

As far as the narrative structure is concerned, Egoyan added another temporal level to the original story and thus made the film‘s narrative line even more fragmented.

He also had to change the novel‘s point of view. While in the novel, Banks can enter the characters‘ minds and express their feelings by use of language, Egoyan has to express the same visually trough images. For instance, while Egoyan reveals Stephens‘

54 motivation by portraying his nostalgic memories of his lost family in a flashback almost without any need of words, Banks expressed the same in his novel in the following way:

I can‘t tell you why I connect that terrifying drive to Elizabeth city over two decades ago to this case in Sam Dent now, where children actually died . . . , but there is a powerful equivalence. With my knife in hand and my child lying in my lap, smiling up at me, trusting me utterly, with her face swelling like a painted balloon, progressively distorting her features into grotesque version of themselves, I felt the same clearheaded power that I felt during those first days in Sam Dent, when the suit was taking off. I felt no ambivalence, did no second guessing, had no mistrusted motives- . . . Now in my dreams of her, . . . Zoe is still that child in my lap, trusting me utterly- even though I am the man who secretly held in his hand the knife that he had decided to use to cut into her throat, and thus I am in no way the man she sees smiling down at her. . . (qtd. in Cardullo 45)

Probably the most notable addition to film, which gave the film a new mythical dimension, was the insertion of Robert Browning‘s poem The Pied Piper as a metaphor for the action in the story. Egoyan admits that the idea was suggested to him by his friend and mentor Allen Bell. Egoyan recalls that when he told him the synopsis of The

Sweet Hereafter, Bell noted that it is a ―modern version of Pied Piper‖. He says that it is the poem that gives him a sense of authorship of the film (Egoyan, ―A Conversation by Bullington Katz‖ 100).

Although Banks set his novel in Adirondack in the USA, Egoyan shifted the setting to a small town in British Columbia in Canada in order to be able obtain funding from Canadian cultural institutions (Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter ―Commentary).

5.3. Financing

The film was produced by Alliance Communications Corporation and Ego Film

Arts, with participation of Telefilm Canada, the Harold Greenberg Fund and the Movie

55 Network, and the assistance of the film tax-credit program. The final budget was C$5 million (―Ego Film Arts‖).

5.4. Narrative structure

Similarly to Egoyan‘s previous films, the narrative structure of The Sweet

Hereafter is non-linear. The film is structured around the time of ―before and after the accident‖ (Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter, ―Commentary‖). Margarete Johanna

Landwehr suggests that Egoyan intentionally makes the viewers put together the fragmented pieces of seemingly unrelated and sometimes even contradictory narrative threads themselves, to simulate the sense of ―confusion and disorientation‖ that the traumatized citizens of Sam Dent felt after the accident.

Despite the film‘s multiple narrative threads, this time, unlike in Egoyan‘s previous films, the viewer is able to piece out the links between these individual narrative threads much more easily. As Jonathan Romney notes: ―The fragmentation affects the time scheme rather than the relations between characters, which for Egoyan are unusually clearly defined‖ (130).

The whole film consists of four main time sequences. There are two flashback sequences. The first one is set at the time of approximately twenty years before the main action when Mitchell Stephens‘ daughter Zoe was still a baby. The second set of flashbacks is to the day before and the day of the bus accident. The main action covers the time after the accident when Mitchell Stephens arrives to Sam Dent. Egoyan also incorporated a flash-forward, which is not in Bank‘s novel, to about two years after the accident, when Stephens‘ meets Zoe‘s childhood friend during a flight and the community of Sam Dent seems to be finally recovered from the tragedy.

56 The syuzhet of the film consists of the short fragments of all the time sequences, presented out of chronological order. The first half of Egoyan‘s film is mainly presented from the perspective of an ―outsider coming into a community‖, Mitchell Stephens and then shifts to Nicole‘s perspective. Wilson asserts that as he investigates the accident and interviews the town‘s people, ―[his] experiences become a mean of showing us certain scenes and experiences indirectly‖ (93). This is most obvious in the scenes preceding the accident. There are three surviving witnesses: Nicole, who suffers from amnesia and does not remember anything about the accident, Dolores, the bus driver, and Billy Ansel, who was following the bus and waving at his children. As the film presents the events leading to the accident, we can see shots from both inside and outside the bus. Some of them are taken from Billy‘s point of view, but some other shots are taken from an omniscient perspective. Patricia Gruben suggests that, since

Egoyan cuts back and forth between the scenes of the accident and Dolores recollecting the events of that morning during her interview with Stephens and her voice-over narration runs through the whole sequence, those images of the accident are in fact

Mitchell Stephens‘ mental visualization he construct during the interview (266).

The film opens with a flashback. It is a tracking shot from above. First, we can see a wooden floor and as the camera slowly pans trough the room, we discover that there is a young couple sleeping naked on a mattress with their baby-daughter curled up in her mother‘s arms. Wilson calls this tranquil and nostalgic scene a ―tableau of familial bliss‖ (Wilson 91).

After this idyllic scene there is a cut to a scene with Stephens entering a car wash, then another cut to his daughter Zoe arriving to a telephone booth and calling Stephens to ask him for money. This is followed by a crane shot of a country fair with a stage, where the viewer can see Nicole and her band rehearsing and as the

57 camera pans down, her father Sam enter the frame as he proudly watches his daughter on the stage while she is smiling at him. After that the viewer sees Stephens again, this time stuck in the car wash. Struggling with his umbrella, he gets completely soaked. He enters a cluttered garage office and looks out of a window. The non-diegetic soundtrack changes to a sound of screaming children and trough Stephens‘s eyes the viewer can see a wreck of a yellow school bus. That same bus, in the scene that immediately follows, is taking the town children to the fair. At that time the viewer has no idea how are the scenes and the characters linked and it takes at least another couple of minutes before one is able to link some of them together.

As far as the point of view is concerned, most of the action is narrated by individual characters during their interviews with Stephens. Their recollections are pictured both visually and in voice-over. Other events are presented by the characters directly. Romney argues that these constant shifts of point of view prevent the viewer from relying on any of the characters‘ truth. He also notes that it is difficult to recognize which scenes are presented objectively and which are presented subjectively (131).

As was already discussed, the scene of the accident is most likely partly

Stephens‘ visualization of the event and partly Billy Ansel‘s experience. Similarly, the events from twenty years ago, when Zoe was still a child, are apparently presented from

Stephens‘ perspective as these warm images clearly reflect his nostalgia (Romney 131-

132).

The barn scene is, on the other hand, reflects Nicole‘s romantic relationship to her father Sam. There is a hint of a possibly incestuous relationship already at the very beginning of the film. Before we learn that Sam is Nicole‘s father, we may consider him to be Nicole‘s boyfriend. The viewer learns about incestuous relationship only later

58 when Sam picks up Nicole from Ansel‘s and they enter a candle-lit barn where they make love. Egoyan comments:

What‘s compelling about this sequence is how the viewer sublimates in the course of the film. Because the viewer is so consumed with the image of the bus crash- the second ‗catastrophe‘ scene. . . . - the precise meaning of the first scene is vague‖. (qtd in Wilson 97)

The story then continues and we witness ―new, troubled relations between

Nicole and her father after the crash, we find that we must retrieve this scene from our memory to make sense of what occurs subsequently in the diegesis‖. Egoyan explains:

―What I find particularly powerful about this gesture is that it attempts to demonstrate - cinematically – how a victim of incest would actually recover a buried moment from their past‖ (Wilson 97).

Egoyan further explains that he wanted the actual scene of the incest to look unreal in order to portray how Nicole tries to mitigate the fact that she is sexually abused by her own father by romanticizing their relationship. He says that he wanted to portray another type of incest than is usually show: ―This one isn‘t based on power and violence. It arises from confusion and intense love that has gone off the rails. She and her father have built themselves a dream world‖ (Wilson 98). Nicole‘ romantic perception of their relationship is a defense mechanism that enables her to cope with the situation. Nevertheless, as Wilson pinpoints this ―protective façade‖ falls apart after

Nicole stays paralyzed (98).

Throughout the whole barn scene we hear the words from Brown‘s poem in

Nicole‘s voice over. The poem first appears in the film when Nicole reads it in bed to

Ansel‘s children. The verses then continue to be read by her during the whole film.

According to Cardullo, ―[the poem] is meant to be a lyrical rendition of Nicole‘s

59 feelings and ultimately her motives‖ (45). By inserting The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Egoyan provides Nicole with an alternative voice that serves as a metaphorical comment of her subjective views of the events.

5.5. Mise-en-scene

The Sweet Hereafter was mainly shot in Merritt, British Columbia. The shooting started on 28th October 1996 and took seven weeks (―The Sweet Hereafter‖).

Unlike Family Viewing, where was only a minimum of exterior scenes, landscape plays a crucial role in the aesthetics of The Sweet Hereafter. As Romney notes: ―a far cry from Egoyan‘s familiar hothouse atmosphere‖ The Sweet Hereafter abounds with landscape and winter scenery. By framing the character of Mitchell

Stephens against the landscape imagery, Egoyan not only draws the viewers‘ attention to Stephens‘ position as an ―isolated outsider‖, but he also highlights the contrast between the immensity of Canadian landscape and the fragility of people (127).

Egoyan also emphasizes the contrast between the coldness of the exterior and warmness of interior scenes. The exterior scenes reflect the vastness and cruelty of the untamed nature, whereas the exteriors represent the characters‘ refuge from the harsh environment where they can feel safe.

As Stephens visits the homes of the dead children‘s families, the viewer can see how their environment reflects their state of mind and motivation. Egoyan pays close attention to every detail of the settings and Sarossy used a deep focus close-ups that enable the viewer to see the characters‘ facial expressions as well as the interiors of their houses.

60 Egoyan describes the Otto‘s house as a ―sanctuary‖ (Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter,

―Commentary‖). It embodies their need to feel protected from both the nature and people. Billy Ansel‘s office is, on the other hand, cluttered as he probably does not feel the need to keeps things organized after he lost his wife and both children. Dolores‘s house is full of photos of the children she used to drive to school every day reflects how important they were for her.

Light is probably one of the key features of the mise-en-scene. Sarossy does not follow the classical film lighting convention of using a one main source of light. His gaffer David Owen comments:

[Sarossy‘s] lighting is emotive; it's about a way to feel, it's not ‗motivated.‘ I get really bored with people who say you have to have light coming from the window, or whatever. It's photography we're doing here, not geometry. To Sarossy, it's a simple matter of ―telling a story with your lighting‖. (qtd. in Barr)

It is not only used for illuminating the objects so that they could be seen, but has its own narrative function. employs the light in order to achieve specific aesthetic and psychological purposes. It is a major tool for expressing the threat and foreshadowing death. This can be spotted in one of the first scenes, a moment before

Stephens sees the wreck of the school bus, he drives into a car-wash and a strong white light shines at the end of it.

The other most intensely lit scenes are: Stephens‘ flashback, where he is holding his little daughter prepared to ―go all the way‖ and cut her throat, bright light is also coming out of the bus windows a moment before the accident and last scene, a flashback to the night before the accident, when Nicole leaves the Ansel‘s children bedroom and walks up to the window into the light. Also the moment before Nicole

61 enters the barn with her father, she is underlit, which gives her face almost an ethereal look and suggest that the scene is to a high degree influenced by Nicole‘s imagination.

The distance between Stephens and adult Zoe is not only heightened by completely different surrounding – Stephens is in a rural area, whereas Zoe in a big city near to a highway – but also by a different time zone. When she calls him to tell him that she ‗tested positive‘ for HIV, it is already dark in Sam Dent, while it is still a broad daylight in the city.

In general, however, Sarossy prefers soft light. Owen says that Sarossy likes using ―dimming lights in and out of a shot, playing with shadows and different-colored lights, cross-fading― Sarossy also believes that the multi-source light suits the narrative structure of Egoyan‘s films (Barr). He says:

You have a group of five or six different people whose lives interconnect, but that's not entirely obvious at the beginning of the film. As the story evolves, you begin to understand how they connect. So for me, to mix many sources and have many shadows as characters walk in rooms or by windows is in keeping with having multiple characters who sort of collide with each other. (qtd in Barr)

Sarossy recalls that the lighting process of The Sweet Hereafter was extremely complicated. Since the bus accident had to be shot in winter and the production began already in October, the studio scenes had to be shot before other scenes. The budget was not high enough to allow for any ―back-and-forth movement‖ between Merrit and the film studios in Toronto. Therefore Sarossy had to survey the location in advance to be able to the ―anticipate the changes by the time [they] were going to [shoot] there‖

(Barr). He continues:

To some extent, we had to make the interiors generic enough to be able to cut with either a blizzard or a brilliantly sunny day, and yet not so generic that they look completely dull. A lot of time and care was spent on the type of curtains we used, so they were transparent enough to see something outside for depth, but not so much that it would never cut together if a month and a half later we encountered radically different weather conditions. (qtd. in Barr)

62 Fortunately the geography of the location was favorable for shooting. According to, Sarossy there were only a few hours of direct daylight and for the rest of the day there was ―ambient skylight, and a ―brilliantly sunlit mountain in the background‖ (qtd. in Barr).

Figure Expression and Movement

The acting in The Sweet Hereafter is subdued. Dialogues are quite scarce and most of the characters‘ emotions are conveyed only by face expression and subtle gestures. Also the most climactic scenes are silent, since Egoyan rather relies on visual images than language.

A strong sense of before and after is also reflected in the characters‘ postures and expressions. Dolores was vivacious and energetic; however, after the accident she is completely devastated. She is obviously in denial as she talks about the children in the present tense. Her nervous tension is even heightened by the collar that restrains her movement. Ian Holm, as Mitchell Stephens, looks like a worried parent in the first scenes; however, throughout the story he changes into a heartless manipulator, who believes that he knows what is best for everyone.

The character who develops the most throughout the film is Nicole, played by

Sarah Polley. Although she is silent for the most of the time, she has very intense presence and is able to express emotions through her eyes. The cinematographer Paul

Sarossy explains:

Whenever we were shooting Sarah Polley, I always made a point of lighting her frontally. [A]s she was the symbol of truth in the film, I wanted the image of her face in no way clouded by shadow. Ian Holm's face is treated very differently; he is always lit very much from the side, very sculptured, and you really see the architecture, the shape and contours of his face. The juxtaposition really keeps the two characters separate." (qtd. in Barr)

63 By the end of the film Nicole‘s posture and expression visibly changes and as she starts gaining her inner strength she manages to overpower both Stephens and her father.

5.6. Cinemathography

Egoyan‘s director of cinematography, Paul Sarossy, employed Panavision

Panaflex Gold II and Panavision E-Series anamorphic lenses that create widescreen and slightly distorted image that heightens the vastness of the landscape (Barr). Sarossy says he is a huge fan of anamorphic format:

Anamorphic is amazing for the landscape of people's faces. It's a wonderful format; there's almost a magical thing that happens with the lenses. When projected on a large screen, suddenly your peripheral vision is that much more filled, and you are experiencing things on a much grander scale. Of course, as soon as you are working in the widescreen format, it decides for you upfront the manner of coverage you use in any given scene. Because you can comfortably fit two or three people in a shot, there is the temptation to shoot master-scene coverage, meaning you shoot the whole scene in one sinuous move as opposed to cutting it up into distinct shots. (qtd. in Barr)

As far as the film stock is concerned, Sarossy notes that even though he does not like to use high-speed stock he employed Eastman Kodak's Vision series 5279 stock, because it is fine grain and has ―tremendous information in the shadows‖ (qtd. in Barr) -

The day exteriors were shot on 5248. Despite the fact that many cinematographers would, according to Sarossy, use slower-speed stock, because it is grainless. He, however, had to deal with quickly changing light conditions and therefore he decided that it would be less complicated to use intermediate-speed stock instead of changing high-speed and slow-speed stock throughout a day (Barr).

Since Canadian wintry landscape plays an important role in creating of the film‘s atmosphere, Sarossy uses numerous tracking helicopter and panning crane shots of the snowbound mountains and employs long takes to enhance the suspense of the

64 action. This is the most evident in the scene of the actual crash. We see the yellow school bus snaking on the hilltop road, dwarfed against the huge mountain range, in a tracking helicopter shot. All of the sudden, the bus is seen as it slides off the road from

Billy‘s point of view. This shot is followed by an unbearably long take of Billy getting out of his car, running to the embankment and frozen in shock he watches the bus falling down. Then from the side of the road, we see the bus rolling down slope and sinking into ice-covered lake, all in one long take. Romney claims that this strategy makes the scene look even more dramatic than if it was shot more conventionally:

Egoyan could have done the conventional thing, putting us inside the bus as it sinks, immersing us in the children‘s screams and the cracking of ice in Dolby stereo. But he rejects spurious vividness: the crash is presented strictly from a viewpoint of a distant observer, making us feel at first hand the bewilderment of someone witnessing the event that changes his life. (132)

Sarossy‘s camera is very mobile; it either pans down to the scene and up the sky in numerous aerial shots or it slowly follows the characters as they move in the scene and gives the viewer enough time to explore the details of the set.

Romney claims that some of the panoramatic views from the sky and the barn scene ending with a ―pan up to the rafters‖ might be explained either as from a ―detached supernatural viewpoint‖ or a gaze of the dead children (137).

Since Egoyan's characters communicate their feelings rather through their facial expression of subtle gestures than through language, he uses many close-ups and medium close-up shots that enable the viewer to see the actors‘ faces in detail. Even though Egoyan prefers to shoot the dialogues in double shots to the conventional shot/reverse shot scenes, in The Sweet Hereafter he employed both type of dialogues.

Interestingly enough, the camera keeps slightly tilting even during these dialogue scenes.

65 The overall image of the film is sharp and clear.

5.7. Music

The music score for The Sweet Hereafter was composed again by Mychael

Danna. Stuart Hoffman explains that Danna‘s film score does not reflects the action on the screen. He rather ―approaches film from a more oblique perspective, delving deep to find a subtext that illuminates the film's theme from an unexpected angle‖ (Hoffman).

When he composed the score for The Sweet Hereafter he got inspired by The

Pied Piper of Hamelin, the poem that parallels Nicole‘s story. Danna‘s medieval score similarly like Browning‘s poem gives the film a sense of ―timelessness‖ (Egoyan, The

Sweet Hereafter ―Commentary‖). He employed number of various instruments ranging from Iranian flute, recorders and viols (Hoffman).

His music helps to enhance the film‘s atmosphere and that is the reason why

Egoyan has asked him to compose the music to all of films. He says: ―What is extraordinary about Danna is his ability to deal with a degree of emotional consequence through the music which may not have always been immediately apparent‖ (Hoffman).

The song ―Courage‖, which appears at the beginning in original version and by the end of the in a cover version sung by Sarah Polley, was composed by a Canadian rock band called the Tragically Hip. According to Egoyan, the song functions as an

―anthem of Nicole‘s decision‖ to destroy the lawsuit (Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter

―Commentary‖).

66 5.8. Response

Despite the fact that some of Egoyan‘s hard-core fans considered The Sweet

Hereafter to be too commercially oriented, the critical response in general quite was positive. from Chicago Sun-Times called it ―one of the best films of the year and readers of Playback even voted the film as ―the best Canadian movie of all time‖ (qtd in Dillon).

The Sweet Hereafter was also enormously successful at various film festivals all around the world. Among many other awards the film was nominated for two Oscars

(Best Director; and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium); won the

FIPRESCI Prize; the Grand Prize of the Jury; and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Festival, won seven Genie Awards including the Best Motion Picture; the

Best Achievement in Direction; and the Best Achievement in Cinematography, and the

Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto Film Festival (―The Sweet Hereafter‖). It received also wider theatrical release than any of Egoyan‘s previous films and it could be said that from both critical and commercial points of view The Sweet Hereafter together with Exotica is up to now the most successful film of Egoyan‘s entire career.

67 6. Where the Truth Lies

After having completed such an intense project as Ararat, Egoyan wanted a change and to work on ―something less personal‖. ―This film is a change of gears for me. I wanted to do a kind of homage to a film genre----that has had a huge influence on my experience of cinema in the first place‖ (Egoyan qtd. in McSorley).

Egoyan‘s longtime collaborator and producer, Robert Lantos, fell in love with the story the moment Egoyan gave him the first draft of his script. He recalls: ―I was riveted and seduced by the screenplay's revelations, sensuality and suspense‖. He thought that a film noir was a ―perfect next step‖ for Egoyan that could help him to appeal to a wider audience without abandoning his very distinct method of filmmaking.

According to Lantos, his main ―mission‖ was to keep the balance between the film‘s wider accessibility and preservation of Egoyan‘s style (qtd. in ―Serendipity‖).

A significantly larger budget, stronger production values, together with an international cast were the main strategies they employed in order to a attract broader audience

(―Serendipity‖).

6.1. Synopsis

The story begins when a young journalist, Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman), decides to uncover the truth behind the mysterious break-up of a popular Hollywood comic duo of the 1950s. Their breakup followed a discovery of a dead body of a young woman in Lanny Morris‗s (Kevin Bacon) and Vince Collins‘ () hotel suite bathtub. Although, thanks to the contacts of their mafioso friend Sally Sanmarco

68 (), neither of them was charged with the murder, it was the end of their professional cooperation as well as their friendship.

Karen‘s infatuation with both comedians began when she, as a little girl, who recovered from polio in a hospital that was supported by Lanny and Vince was invited to the stage as a ‗miracle girl‘ during their annual telethon. While she was on the stage with them, Lanny came up to her and with tears in his eyes whispered: ―You are a very special girl. Forgive me:‖

Fifteen years later, after the death of her father, Karen wins a one-million contract from her publisher to write a book that would reveal the truth about the death of Maureen O‘Flaherty (Rachel Blanchard) and the duo‘s break-up. While Vince agrees to be interviewed for the book, Lanny refuses claiming that he is completing his own memoirs and he lets Karen read the first chapter to discourage her from her own project.

Karen then happens to meet Lanny accompanied by his butler Reuben (David

Hayman) during a flight to New York. Since Lanny knows her name from their previous correspondence, she decides not to reveal her true identity and introduces herself under her friend‘s name. Lanny then takes her out on a date and they spend a night together in his hotel room. Karen is later sent other chapters from Lanny‘s written accounts, where he describes his and Vince‘s scandalous life-style full of women and pill-popping. He admits that Karen was in their room that fateful night in order to interview them for a campus paper, but he claims that he does not know anything about her death.

In the meantime, Vince is reluctant to start talking about the incident. He takes

Karen to a pageant in Wonderland, the clinic where Karen was treated as a child. Karen meets there her own alter-ego, a singer named Alice dressed in the same dress as Karen

69 wore fifteen years before for the telethon. The next day, Vince invites Karen to his house and after she arrives she learns that he also invited Lanny, whom he has not seen for fifteen years. Karen panics and tries to avoid meeting Lanny, however it is too late.

He recognizes her and after their argument, Karen leaves the house in tears. She is then invited by Vince for a dinner in his house. During the dinner he drugs her and brings

Alice, the singer from Wonderland clinic who seduces Karen. During their sexual encounter, Vince is taking photos of them. The next morning, he tries to blackmail

Karen with the photos. However, Karen refuses to leave the case and he physically her attacks her. Aware that he lost all the control over his past, he checks into the hotel, where Maureen died and commits suicide. Karen then focuses on the investigation of

Maureen‘s death. She receives the third chapter of Lanny‘s memoirs with confession.

According to him, the night before the telethon after Maureen finished her interview they all mixed some pills with alcohol and had sex. While he was making love to Maureen, Vince tried to have sex with him. . Lanny burst into rage and pushed him off. Vince, shocked by Lanny‘s reaction, left the room and Maureen used the opportunity to blackmail Lanny. After that Lanny went to his bed and left Karen sleeping on a sofa. The following morning, he found Maureen dead. The mafioso nightclub owner Sally Sanmarco than transported her body from the Miami hotel in a crate with lobsters. Maureen‘s body is then discovered the next morning in a bathtub in Lanny‘s and Vince‘s hotel room in New Jersey.

After reading the chapter, Karen realizes that everything Vince did and told her was planned and described by Lanny in his memoirs and she confronts him in his office, where he reveals the words he told her at the telethon had nothing to do with her. After their confrontation, Karen runs into Lanny‘s butler Reuben and when he offers her

70 a record of the fateful night from Maureen‘s recorder, she puts the clues together and identifies Reuben as the person who murdered Maureen and than blackmailed Vince.

In the last scene, Karen visits Maureen‘s mother to tell her that she discovered the murderer of her daughter, but that she decided to publish the story only after deaths of all the people involved.

6.2. Financing

From the very beginning Egoyan realized that Where the Truth Lies was going to be made on a different scale to any of his previous films. He comments: ―When you're dealing with a budget like this and you're dealing with subject matter like this, you realize you have a potential to reach a much wider audience‖ (qtd. in Stone).

Another important factor that lead to the film‘s greater commercial orientation, were the changes in the nature of the Canadian government funding policies. Egoyan recounts:

The middle film - something like The Adjuster, let's say - is hard to do these days. Once you are involved at a certain budget level you have to perform in a different, perhaps more restrictive way. It seems it's either bigger budget stuff or something totally handmade. . . . That middle film is harder and harder to make. (qtd. in McSorley)

Robert Lantos points out that, since a large part of the film‘s budget came from a group of British investors who wanted a ―UK tax write-off ― and an ―equity position‖ in return, the film was shot in Britain as well as in Canada and the USA. Lantos commented: ―Films are made wherever it is most economically viable to shoot them,

71 sometimes it's because one place is cheaper than another. London is probably the most expensive place on Earth, but there's an equally compelling reason to come here, which is that there is significant financing available for films that qualify as British‖ (qtd. in

Hart).

The film was also financed by Serendipity Point Films, First Choice Films,

Astral Media, Telefilm Canada and Corus Entertainment. The final budget was $25 million (―Where The Truth Lies‖), five times the budget of The Sweet Hereafter and

Egoyan‘s highest budget to date.

6.3. Adaptation

Where the Truth Lies is an adaptation of the eponymous novel written by

British-American song-writer, playwright, composer and novelist Russell Holmes.

Egoyan says he was particularly attracted by Holmes‗s personal and detailed knowledge of the entertainment business of the 1950s. He notes: ―I think one of the most attractive aspects of the novel is that you feel as though you have access to something that is otherwise very private‖ (qtd. in ―Serendipity‖).

Where the Truth Lies is similar to his earlier films Adjuster, Exotica and The

Sweet Hereafter in the way it explores ―how the requirements of a profession might allow a character to deal with neurotic tendencies that would not be otherwise socially acceptable‖. The profession of entertainer is, according to Egoyan, especially fascinating because entertainers are ―being celebrated and paid to be someone other than

72 who [they] are, and yet everyone wants [them] to be that person‖ (Egoyan,

―Filmmaking‖ 2). This brings certain privileges, but also certain pressures.

Egoyan says that whenever he has written a script based on a novel, he has wanted to celebrate the original novel and has tried to closely cooperate with the author.

On the other hand, sometimes it has been necessary to follow his instinct and explore some other issues that have not been tackled in the original novel (―Serendipity‖).

Probably the major change from the original novel is the nature of Karen‘s relationship to Lanny and Vince. Egoyan says that he felt that in the novel Karen‘s relationship to them is too ―much rooted in the present‖, and therefore he intensified her relationship by making her a polio survivor, the ―miracle girl‖ who, at the age of twelve, appeared on the stage with Lanny and Vince and has adored the duo ever since.

Similar to the The Pied Piper of Hamelin‖ in The Sweet Hereafter, this invention also met with approval from the author, who felt that it gave the story ―another dimension‖

(―Serendipity‖).

In the novel, Lanny and Vince are based on the real lives of the successful 1950s comedy duo and . Egoyan considered this fact to be too distracting for the film‘s ―dramatic potential‖, and he therefore decided to create his own fictional characters The director eventually came up with his own American/British duo, whose ―comedy routines‖ were based on the distinction between the stereotypical portrayal between the USA and Britain‖ (Egoyan, ―Filmmaker‖ 2).

73 He recalls:

I just felt if you look at characters like David Niven and Rex Harrison - and Noel Coward before that - they had this place in American culture at that time. It was possible to have this kind of idea of one character who is like the pre-rock and roll kind of combination of Lanny Bruce and Elvis Presley – sort of very impulsive, very rude, a kind of character who is always being tamed by the voice of civilization. That seems to be an act that could have existed. It kind of conforms to the ego/id construction of any duo, going right back to Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy. There was always one character who was misbehaving and the other one who was trying to civilize them. (2)

6.4. Narrative Structure

Similar to all Egoyan‘s previous films, the narrative of Where the Truth Lies is fragmented and presented from various perspectives. The duo‘s life in the 1950s, when

Lanny and Vince were at the peak of their careers before splitting, is narrated through a series of flashbacks.

The viewer has to actively participate in the process of creating the fabula out of syzhuet. However, unlike in Family Viewing, Exotica or The Sweet Hereafter, this activity is not so demanding and Egoyan provides the audience with enough clues to help the viewer to follow the narrative without getting lost. This is also due to Egoyan‘s greater reliance on the role of language in the film. Most of the events and memories are commented upon by Karen in her voice-over, and Where the Truth Lies is thus

Egoyan‘s most ‗viewer-friendly‘ film. Nevertheless the film‘s ending remains surprising and just like in other Egoyan‘s films it is up to the viewer to decide whether he wants to believe it or not.

74 The film opens with a flashback scene to the telethon and of a dead female body in a bathtub. After the flashback the film cuts to the 1970s. This shift in time is clearly indicated and the viewers are not forced to work it out themselves just from the context, like in Egoyan‘s previous films.

In the second scene Karen is introduced. From her conversation with Vince and her voice-over we learn of her intention to write a book about Lanny and Vince that should shed light on the case of Maureen‘s death and the split-up of the duo which followed.

Then the narrative shifts back to the telethon scene. This time the viewer hears a young girl talking about her recovery; however, the camera is not close enough to see her face. It will only be revealed about forty minutes into the film that this is Karen fifteen years earlier. The next scene is accompanied by Lanny‘s voice-over. He talks about the duo‘s heyday and it is not until the following scene that we find out that the narration has been taken from a chapter in his memoirs. As Karen‘s investigation progresses the narrative keeps shifting from the 1970s to the 1950s and we learn a great deal more about all the characters‘ motivations and lives.

As far as the point of view is concerned, some sequences of the film are presented directly from Karen‘s perspective and the other sequences ―act out the episodes from Lanny‘s unpublished accounts‖. As in Egoyan‘s other films, none of the narrators are reliable. ―Each segment of the narrative offers a version of events but does not necessarily represent what actually happened‖ (Wilson 129).

75 During the film Karen is not only emotionally involved in their story, but she also becomes sexually involved with Lanny and Alice from Vince‘s clinic. There are some scenes in the film (such as Karen‘s hallucinations after she is drugged by Vince, her dreams and some of the telethon scenes) that obviously directly mirror Karen‘s state of mind. Furthermore, we can infer that other parts of the story, that Karen could not have witnessed directly, are actually Karen‘s mental visualization of the events that she has learned about from other characters. Everything seen in the film is possibly influenced, to some degree, by her imagination and her infatuation with Lanny and

Vince. Therefore we can consider Where the Truth Lies to be a completely subjective narration.

6.5. Mise-en-scene

Since Where the Truth Lies is a period film and a genre film, it was especially important for Egoyan to reproduce the look of the 1950s and 1970s as faithfully as possible. Egoyan has always paid close attention to every single detail of his films.

Therefore during his preparation for the production of Where the Truth Lies he studied a number of vintage films as well as noir and neo-noir films. He particularly studied the way the voice-over narration is employed (―Serendipity‖).

The contribution of Philip Baker, Egoyan‘s production designer since The Sweet

Hereafter, was particularly crucial. His main source of inspiration for Where the Truth

76 Lies was the work of architect Morris Lapidus, a designer of such ―50's landmarks as

Miami's Fountainbleu Hotel and the Eden Roc‖ (―Serendipity‖).

Most of the interior scenes were shot in a studio in London. The Versailles

Presidential Suite, where Lanny and Vince stayed during the telethon, was, for example, built at Shepperton Studios in London. Baker explains: ―This ultra-swank set is decorated in pristine beige-on-beige tones, which serve to intensify the sordid and unseemly nature of the events that will occur there. For this set Barker used a style known as ―‘Mi-Mo‘ or Miami Modern, [a style founded by Lapidus]‖ (qtd. in

―Serendipity‖).

Baker was convinced that Lapidus‘ style would be appropriate for the set.

―[Lapidus] felt that he could take the average American and make them live like movie stars. It's a style that's all about façade, not substance. That's what the film is about too - the whole entertainment industry and the fallacies we have about Hollywood. [I]t's flamboyant, it's over the top, it's playful. There's no symmetry, no straight lines, and it's the perfect sort of happy playground in which all these horrible things can occur‖ (qtd. in ―Serendipity‖).

The inside of the airplane, the Miami hotel room and the interior of Vince‘s house were all constructed at the studio as well, but the Stahl House, a modernist house designed by Pierre Koenig in , was used for the exterior scenes of the house. Toronto's Valhalla Inn, with its ―glass-sided‖ swimming pool, was turned into

The Blue Grotto Nightclub. The final scene was shot on the Hollywood back lot

77 because Egoyan believed that it went well with one of the film‘s chief topics, the

―fabrication of entertainment‖ (MacDonald).

The film‘s set design goes hand in hand with the period costumes and make-up, therefore the film‘s overall look is a result of a close cooperation between the production designer and costume designer. Since Where the Truth Lies is a ―multi-era film‖, the biggest challenge for Egoyan‘s costume designer Beth Pasternak was ―to find styles that I thought the male characters were going to mature into‖ (Pasternak). She recalls:

A lot of the initial ‗50s fittings for Kevin didn‘t suit who he was inside, so I tried styling from Elvis - the rockabilly look of wearing black T- shirts under white jackets - and that really clicked. For Kevin‘s character in the ‗70s, I thought of jean jackets and a lot of neckerchiefs. I used Faye Dunaway‘s look from the film Network for Alison Lohman, because she was playing a news personality.

The use of make-up in the film is very natural. In the 1970s sequence Lanny and Vince have to look 15 years older, so Firth wears a silver wig and false mustache and both their faces look more wrinkly and sagged.

Lighting

Egoyan and his director of cinematography, Paul Sarossy, used Gilda, a film noir directed by Charles Vidor in 1946, as a reference. They were particularly interested in the way in which ―diffusion was used in classic noir film, which is typically recognized as a style that is very deep contrast, a look typified by detective films of the

'40s. Yet there was something very soft, romantic, and glamorous to these images‖

(Egoyan qtd. in ―Serendipity‖).

78 Sarossy, however, points out that he did not employ this strong front lighting in the 1950s sequences, but in the more contemporary sequences of the 1970s. He explains that he and Egoyan intentionally chose ―the anti-Hollywood route‖, reversing expectations by ―using the visual lexicon of the '70s in our '50s material, and using the darker contrast of the film noir for the '70s. In a way we've turned the standard vocabulary of these two periods on its head‖ (qtd. in ―Serendipity‖).

He achieved a ―sun-bleached, harsher realism, showing the characters as part of the world‖ in the front-lit 1970s sequence and a sense of isolation in the back-lit 1950s sequence (Strauss).

Casting

Due to the film‘s commercial aspirations Egoyan could not cast his favorite

Canadian actors into the leading roles and he had to look for more bankable stars that would attract a wider audience. Nevertheless, he found some smaller parts for his veteran actors. His wife Arsinée Khanjian, together with Gabrielle Rose and Don

McKellar, played Karen‘s publishing executives; also David Hemblen played a hotel concierge and Maury Chaykin, plays the mafioso Sally Sanmarco.

Casting of the two leading male roles was challenging for Egoyan. He needed actors who could perform Lanny‘s and Vince‘s comic acts and also embody the duality of the characters‘ personalities. He eventually decided to cast Kevin Bacon into the role

79 of the impulsive and rude American Lanny, and Collin Firth into the role of the English gentleman, who is in reality seriously disturbed.

Egoyan says:

We wanted to create a totally new act . . . and the only way I felt comfortable being able to do that was to find actors who were prepared to use their personas in the act itself. So Colin has this patina of civilization. English manners. Fair-mindedness. He contrasts with Kevin, this nascent, more impulsive, kind of dangerous, erotically charged figure. (qtd. in MacDonald)

It was also important for Egoyan that Bacon and Firth were able to play out the marriage-like relationship between the men, which is described in detail in the novel, through their acting.

Colin Firth, as Vince Collins, was certainly cast against type. Even though his portrayal of Vince shares many common features with his performance as Mr. Darcy in

Pride and Prejudice or Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary, in Where the Truth Lies his character has a darker dimension, which is new for Firth. Egoyan explains that he wanted to use an aspect of the actors‘ persona and then ―flip it on itself‖ (Egoyan,

―Filmmaker‖ 3).

Firth himself found this ambivalence of his character very appealing: ‖Rather than just playing a psychopath or mass murderer, it was interesting to play someone who is apparently what you expect me to be, and then take off the mask to reveal something darker‖ (qtd. in Colbert).

On the other hand, Kevin Bacon has an image of ―being dangerous and impulsive‖ just like Lanny Morris‘ public persona. However, as Egoyan notes: ―again

80 he‘s, in fact, the most controlling and the most superego-like character of them all, in terms of his meticulous attention to controlling every aspect of that act‖ (Egoyan,

―Filmmaker‖ 3).

As far as the main casting of the young journalist Karen, Egoyan recalls that he had to face a huge decision. He says that even though the character in the novel was

―very mature, confident and ambitious‖, with no stronger connection to Lanny and

Vince, he saw the opportunity to explore the ―relationship to celebrity and the ability to develop a character who adored these two men as a child and who felt that they were somehow responsible for saving her‖. Therefore he had to cast someone who was partly still a child, but was able to mature into a woman in the course of the film and as he argues: ―Allison Lohman is one of a few actresses who are capable of that and also of playing herself as a twelve-year-old child‖ (qtd. in Wilson 138).

Lohman definitely has the naivety and child-like quality Egoyan wanted, however, as a number of critics have pointed out, she does not appear as convincing as the adult she was supposed to grow into by the end of the film.

6.6. Cinematography

Sarossy shot the film with a Panavision camera in a 2.35:1 widescreen anamorphic format which was, according to Sarossy, a ―happy return to the more glamorous frame shape of widescreen‖ (qtd. in Strauss). The film was mostly shot on

Kodak Vision 5279 500T and Vision 5246 250D stocks and Fuji Real 500D stocks were occasionally used for interiors and ―experienced a mixture of daylight and fluorescent lighting‖ (Strauss).

81 As he did when working on Egoyan‘s previous films, Sarossy operated the camera himself. In most of the scenes he used one camera on a dolly. Nevertheless, for shooting the telethon scenes that involved many extras, it was necessary to use two cameras. Sarossy recalls that probably the most complicated shot of the whole film was a bar scene below the swimming pool in Valhalla Inn, where the camera had to follow the characters ―through the entire bar, filled with extras‖ (qtd. in Strauss).

Since the ―visual style‖ of the film was mainly based on the contrast between the

1950s and 1970s sequences, it was necessary to enhance the difference between those periods by employing ―filtration to create a glowing effect and add certain luster to the

'50s footage‖ (Strauss).

Egoyan notes that it was ―the first time he and Sarossy have used this much filtration and stylized movements and composition‖ (qtd. in Strauss). He also adds that due to the larger scale of the film's production, which included working with a foreign crew, the most difficult aspect of Sarossy‘s work was to maintain the continuity of the film's look.

Generally, the camera in Where the Truth Lies is used much more conventionally than in other of Egoyan‘s film. Egoyan reduced the number of shots taken from some unusual angles or unmotivated camera moves that he had frequently used in his previous films.

82 6.7. Music

Music for Where the Truth Lies was again composed by Mychael Danna. Unlike

Egoyan‘s previous films, in Where the Truth Lies the music has a special role. Music is to a large degree a part of the film‘s dieresis and is therefore not only one of the means of enhancing the film's atmosphere, but it is also necessary to consider the fact that it is a period as well as a genre film. Danna, who has composed music for all eleven of

Egoyan‘s previous films, describes their collaboration on this film as a completely new experience: ―It was a whole new kind of music for me to explore, and the set was great, we had a twelve piece band backing up these guys. . . . It‘s going to be a lot of fun‖

(Danna, ―‖).

Egoyan explains that the music in Where the Truth Lies was strongly influenced by Wagner‘s music, because he started preparing the film right after the premiere of his production of Wagner‘s Die Walküre for the Canadian Opera Company. He recounts:

―Music was very much on my mind as I was preparing for Where the Truth Lies. I was excited by Wagner's brilliant use of motifs in his orchestral score, and I wanted an expressive symphonic sound in this film‖. Egoyan adds that he and Danna had sought inspiration in the film scores composed by Bernard Herrmann, who was also influenced by Wagner, and in Elmer Bernstein's scores to ―The Sweet Smell of Success and Duke

Ellington's jazz tracks for Anatomy of a Murder. The rich score for Where the Truth

Lies combines these lush orchestral strains with the early 1970s influences of such bands as Roxy Music, Santana, Funkadelic and The Mahavishnu Orchestra‖ (qtd. in

―Serendipity‖).

83 6.8. Editing

For Egoyan the process of editing Where the Truth Lies was quite different from the editing of his previous films. He says that for his previous films, he had made some major plot changes during editing and the films were being modified until the very last moment. Since Where the Truth Lies is more ―plot-driven‖ he could not make any late changes. He says: ―[T]here were so many bits of information that had to be deployed at a certain moment in time; you can't really change it because there's something so formulaic about that sort of film‖ (Egoyan, ―Interview- Atom‖).

6.9. Response

The film premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival in May 2005. The critical response was again rather mixed. Many supporters of Egoyan‘s previous films were disappointed by his shift to more commercial film-making.

In his review for Variety, Ted McCarthy said it was ―an unconvincing film‖. The

New York Times‘ reviewer Manohla Dargis mainly criticized Egoyan's approach to the narrative structure: ―[Egoyan] seems to want to deconstruct celebrity through the familiar mechanics of a murder mystery. Yet because he also doesn't want to be imprisoned by genre, he tries to shake loose its rules‖ (Dargis).

Not all critics were disappointed. The film was nominated for the Palme d'Or at

Cannes and Egoyan won the Genie Award for the Best Adapted Screenplay. In The

Herald's review, Hannah McGill called the film ―[Egoyan‘s] most pleasurable movie

84 yet‖ (McGill) and View London's reviewer Matthew Turner even said that Where the

Truth Lies is a ―sexy, stylish and hugely entertaining mystery drama with a sharp script, gorgeous set design and superb performances from all three leads - this is one of the best films of the year‖ (Turner).

As previously stated, Where the Truth Lies was aimed at a much wider audience than any of Egoyan‘s previous films. To his and Lantos' bitter disappointment the sex scenes in the film proved to be problematic, as it received an NC-17 rating instead of the R rating both Egoyan and Lantos intended. Consequently, this limited the film‘s commercial appeal. Egoyan commented on the NC-17 rating:

It means certain newspaper chains won‘t advertise the film and it means that certain theaters won‘t show it, as well. I don‘t have direct experience with it having never been there before, but it seems to be a real issue. I‘m very disappointed as a result. (Egoyan, ―Filmmaker‖ 1)

Egoyan presented another version, in which he cut out some of the erotic scenes.

His distributor decided, however, that the missing scenes were essential and the film was released unrated. As a result, the film was not as commercially successful as Lantos had hoped and it grossed only $3.5 million worldwide, only two hundred thousand dollars more than The Sweet Hereafter (―Mojo Box Office‖).

85 7. Loss and Identity in Egoyan’s Films

The loss of a loved person and the issues of identity have always belonged among the dominant thematic preoccupation of Egoyan‘s work. The process of mourning and the construction of one‘s identity should not be considered only as the themes of Egoyan‘s films, but also as the main causal mechanisms that drive Egoyan‘s characters – and thus also the whole narratives.

Egoyan began his career as a playwright, and he wrote his first play when he was only thirteen years old. Monique Tschofen and Jennifer Burwell assert that the topics of traumatic loss and identity could already be identified in these very early plays

(5); and over the course of his 40-year career, Egoyan has explored these topics from various perspectives.

Tony Rayns believes that the themes of Egoyan‘s films and plays are to a substantial degree autobiographical. He says: ―Egoyan is one of ―writers-directors‖ who base their work on deeply personal preoccupations and use it to confront issues they want to resolve for themselves or to exorcise personal demons‖ (qtd. in Boe Stolar

183). In an interview with Tschofen, Egoyan admits what has attracted him to play- writing the most was the ―idea of how drama could deal with the notions of dysfunctionality‖ (Egoyan, ―Ripple‖ 344). He explains:

If there were certain situations that I found untenable in my life, I was able to use drama as a way of dealing with some of the frustrations that arose. I loved the process—and maybe it‘s neurotically inspired of making other people do things that they wouldn‘t do otherwise, and being able to organize people in a certain way that seemed to have some semblance of order. (344)

Similarly, like Egoyan himself, the characters of his films attempt to gain control over their pasts, lives, the lives of their families and their fate through the staging of various orchestrated scenarios and through the manipulation of other people.

86

In their essay ―Mobile Subjectivity and Micro-territories‖, Tschofen and Burwell connect Egoyan‘s enduring thematic preoccupations to his Armenian origin and propose that the topics of traumatic loss and identity in various permutations stand as a metaphor for the issues connected with the Armenian genocide5 and its subsequent denial that deepened the trauma. They claim:

Egoyan reveals himself to be grappling with two core issues: the severity of the trauma produced by the events of the genocide themselves followed by their erasure from ―official‖ history, and the absence of a ―place‖—a home or homeland—from which one could manage this trauma and anchor one‘s culture, language, and identity. (125)

Nellie Hogikyan supports the claim of Tschofen and Burwell; and in her essay

―Atom Egoyan‘s Post-exilic Imaginary‖, she also links Egoyan‘s thematic unity to his

Armenian roots. Even though Egoyan has never considered himself to be a diaspora filmmaker, Hogikyan argues that his films reflect the same haunting sense of ―the loss and absence‖ that tends to dominate the works of other diaspora artists. She further observes that unlike the first generation immigrants, whose works reflects the trauma caused by the loss of the place of origin directly, the post-exile authors and filmmakers substitute the original grief over the loss of their homeland for the grief over the loss of their family members (194). Hogikyan explains this shift in the following way:

In the absence of the permanence of connections, as distances grow larger between individuals and peoples, and in the absence of continuity of filiation due to migration, immediate family becomes the only possible imagined community. (196)

5 Armenian Genocide refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and after the . The total number of resulting Armenian deaths is generally held to have been between one and one and a half million. Even though Armenian Genocide has been recognized by most of the countries, the Republic of Turkey and the Republic of Azerbaijan denies its existens (―Armenian Genocide‖).

87 7.1. Identity

―I am attracted to people who are lost in the world that I can navigate. I have to be able to show the characters` attempts at gaining aspects of personality and engage the viewer in a concomitant process of discovery‖ (qtd. in Egoyan, ―Emotional‖ 10).

Since the offsprings of the first generation immigrants no longer identify themselves with their parents‘ homeland and ―dissociate [themselves] from the nation,‖ they do not resist the influences of the new culture (Hogikyan 196). Hogikyan observes that: ―This position neutralizes plurality and heterogeneity and renders the future of one‘s identity unpredictable‖ (196). Since the ethnicity is no longer the

―fundamental organizing category of [one‘s] identity;‖ the voices of the post-exilic artists, unlike the voices of their exilic predecessors, who were often silenced, have now a chance to be heard (196). As a consequence of the breaking of this silence and of mixing with other Canadians, the children of the first generation immigrants have found their own ―ways of identifying‖ and they ―address their origins from new perspective‖

(198).

The second and the third immigrant generations which Hogikyan refers to are no longer directly connected with their parents‘ homeland and at the same time they do not completely deny their parents‘ ethnic origin, therefore their identities becomes somehow ―fluid‖ and ―hybrid‖ (198). The existence of these uncertain and ―hybrid‖ identities also implies that identity is malleable and can be changed.

It is this malleability of identity that has fascinated Egoyan in particular, and it has always been a rich source of inspiration for him. He recalls that he first became aware of the fact that identity is not a fixed concept based on nationality or descent but rather something that is acquired and constructed throughout one‘s life, when he moved

88 with his parents to Canada. In an interview with Brad Balfour, Egoyan described his own experience in the following way:

I was an Armenian raised on the west coast of Canada. We were the only Armenians in a very "WASP" sort of town. So, I was always aware of being outside of it. English wasn't my first language and I remember what it meant to actually take on this culture and learn it, but always being aware of the construction of it and what a culture meant. All of those things I find very fascinating. When does somebody have entry into a culture? When do you get that passport? When do you actually allow yourself to be called a person from this place?

The film that most closely parallels Egoyan‘s own personal history is probably

Family Viewing. The film‘s main topic is the construction of the main character‘s identity without having an access to his family history. Only after he escapes his oppressive father, he is able to reclaim his memories and develop his own identity. The topic of identity as a malleable concept has pervaded in various forms throughout all

Egoyan‘s subsequent films.

As was noted above, Egoyan‘s personal experience fueled his interest in the exploration of human identity that is in today‘s post national world, where the

―borderline between the nations are blurred‖, unstable (Hogikyan 198). He believes that identity is not a fixed or static concept but rather a subject to change and development.

Typically, the main characters of his films are young people who are reaching adulthood and searching for their own identities. However, in order to be able to form them, they have to escape the influence of an abusive father figure.

The main character of Family Viewing is eighteen-year-old Van, whose father is

Canadian and mother Armenian. Van lost almost all the access to his Armenian roots, because his mother abandoned the family when he was a child, and this led to his father‘s denial of the existence of Van‘s mother and thus also of Van‘s Armenian origin.

Stan ―attempts to obliterate the Armenian in his son by consciously eradicating all

89 visual evidence, all traces — physical and material — of his son's Armenian origins‖ including Van‘s maternal grandmother Armen who is placed into a nursing home

(Baronian 150).

Egoyan says that he designed the characters to be archetypal figures, such as a forbidding patriarch, Son, Stepmother, Grandmother and the absent Mother, rather than real human beings (Egoyan, ―Interview by Burnett‖). This makes, according to

Romney, their personal identities appear very ―unstable and elusive‖ and in the most extreme cases even ―interchangeable‖ (Romney 47). However, it is not only their identities that are impoverished; the world they inhabit is also not a ―coherent real world but a fragmented mediatised one‖ (47). This lack of psychological dimension of the characters and the mediatisation of their world is enhanced by the ―constant and omnipresent‖ flow of television broadcast (47).

Even though Van‘s mother is of Armenian origin, after she left the family, Van has been brought up as the ―quintessential Canadian boy‖ without a slightest visible trace of his Armenian roots in his life (Romney 53). In Stan‘s world there is no space for his son‗s ‗Armenianess‘ and he keeps Van trapped in his and denies him access to the other essential part of his identity. Van feels there is something important missing from his life, but he is unable to identify what exactly it is. He only feels that he has a special bond with Armen and starts spending more time with her, because, as he says, she makes him feel good about himself. Marie-Aude Baronian believes that Armen is the only ―symbolic link to Armenia‖ in Van‘s life (153). Van is at the stage of his life when he needs to explore both parts of his identities to be able to form his own independent identity. Therefore he wants to reestablish the nuclear family in which both parts of his origin would be represented. However, his father is so obsessed by denying Van‘s Armenian origin that he will never allow that. Baronian

90 further claims that Van‘s experience is to a significant degree a reflection of Egoyan‘s own experience. His grandmother was also ―essential in the concretization of his origins‖ for him, because his parents wanted to assimilate, and they did not encourage his identification with Armenian culture (155). Egoyan recounts:

I had a very complex relationship with my grandmother, who came to Canada but only spoke Armenian. She was sent to a terrible nursing home when I was a child and I never understood why she had to be there. It was a very traumatic thing for me to accept. She passed away in this nursing home, and I've never quite forgiven a lot of people close to her for having done this. Because when she left, so much of my culture left. Loss is a part of the Armenian experience, of course, thanks to the genocide of this century. (qtd. in Baronian 155)

The discovery of the old family videotapes6 that his father has been erasing is the major breaking point of Van‘s life. When he sees images of his mother and of himself as a child, he realizes what the missing part of his life was. The videotapes facilitate the restaging of his childhood memories and help him to define his own identity. Romney notes:

On the video, he rediscovers this repressed part of his self: as he gazes at the screen, a wide-eyed child gazes back, as if pleading to be rescued from a psychic and cultural oblivion. . . . Van‘s childhood self appears on the video as a lost soul, trapped in the past until restored as a living part of Van‘s adult psyche: Van fully achieves adulthood by at last absorbing the forgotten child. (44, 53)

Van realizes that if he wants to rescue his Armenian identity, he has to escape the control of his oppressive father and actively take control over his own narrative

(Wilson 23). Otherwise, he would remain stuck somewhere between his father‘s

Canadian identity and his unfulfilled desire for his Armenian identity. He steals the tapes and uses the death of Aline‘s mother to swap her dead body with Armen. The exchange of identities of Armen and Aline‘s mother is the most extreme manifestation

6 See page 45

91 of the fluidity and uncertainty of identity in the whole film. Egoyan deliberately blurs the boundaries between individual characters in Family Viewing to the point that their identities become literally interchangeable.

After Van gets hold of the tapes and moves Armen to Aline‘s flat, his alternative nuclear family is complete. However, when Stan discovers that his tapes are missing and learns that Armen might be still alive, he is suddenly robbed of all his power, and he becomes obsessed with the idea of finding her. He believes that when he gains control over Armen, who is a symbolic link to Armenia for Van, he would be able to reassert his former control over his past and over Van‘s identity. That can jeopardize

Van‘s identification with his mother‘s culture and thus also the affirmation of his own independent identity. Therefore he has to protect Armen against Stan‘s last desperate attempt to find her before he can fully identify with his ‗Armenianess‘. Only after he proves that he is able to protect Armen, he can fully ―restore his own fragmented self‖

(Romney 55). This is symbolically represented in the final scene where the viewer can witness Van‘s reunion with Armen and his mother. The texture of the scene makes its authenticity highly suspicious. It is shown from a point of view of a surveillance camera and is interwoven with the images from the family video and therefore could not be taken literally as an actual family reunion but rather as a metaphor for the definition of

Van‘s own identity.

Although the characters of Egoyan‘s film Sweet Hereafter are much more psychologically complex than the characters of Family Viewing, their sense of self is violently shattered after the tragic bus accident. Similarly to Van in Family Viewing,

Nicole in The Sweet Hereafter struggles to construct her own identity. Prior to the accident, she had a quasi-consensual sexual relationship7 with her own father, and to

7 See page 59

92 make the traumatic experience more bearable, she romanticized their relationship.

Ironically enough, the subsequent tragic bus accident that leaves her confided to a wheelchair enables her to realize the true nature of the relationship she has with her father, to find enough strength to rebel against the exploitation, and to take control over her own narrative.

After the tragic bus accident, the paralyzed daughter is no longer the object

Sam‘s sexual desires. Sam‘s reaction to her ‗damaged body‘ fuels Nicole‘s anger; however, in combination with the post-traumatic emotional detachment, she feels she is able to recognize that the dreams about becoming a rock star, her father promised her, were only lies. As Romney notes: ―[S]he is the first to see through the lie, to declare the dream over: having lived through extremes that Sam can never know, she has a new autonomy and breaks off the incestuous pact‖ (134). However, once she realizes that she is no longer the same person she was before the accident, and that she is no longer able to identify with her fantasies, she suddenly finds herself without anything or anyone to identify with, and she has to form her own independent identity. Therefore the accident can be perceived as some kind of a rite of passage for Nicole. In an interview with Porton, Egoyan comments on the impact of the accident on Nicole: ―The reality is that if the accident hadn‘t occurred that relationship would probably have continued until Nicole was in her twenties and she would have been even more messed up‖.

Though she is no longer the object of Sam‘s sexual desire, he becomes obsessed with Stephens‘ lawsuit through which he could financially profit from Nicole‘s

‗damaged body‘. Nicole starts to be suspicious about her parents‘ intentions when she discovers that Stephens attempted to bribe her with a new computer. The tension between Nicole and her father grows even higher during Nicole‘s first meeting with

93 Stephens. She feels that her parents are trying to manipulate her into the lawsuit and even though she clearly states that she does not like thinking about the accident and that she does not want to be an object of other people‘s pity, no one listens to her. Nicole needs to preserve some sense of autonomy and during her conversation with Stephens she warns Stephens that she does not need his help and that she is the only person who will decide whether she testifies or not.

Nicole: What exactly do you want me to do for you? . . . I won‘t lie. Stephens: I don‘t want you to lie. Nicole: No matter what I‘m asked, I‘ll tell the truth. (looks at her father) Stephens: Of course. I need you to tell the truth.

At the same time, she warns her father that if he forces her to testify, she will

―tell the truth‖ about their relationship. When she later overhears Sam‘s argument8 with

Billy Ansel, Nicole feels bitterly betrayed. Egoyan says that after ―seeing her father in such an extreme state of denial, and then seeing him bartering her broken body for a reward, she becomes outraged in a quiet but very determined way‖ (Egoyan,

―Family‖). She realizes that unless she escapes the oppression of her abusive father, she will not be able to reclaim her own identity.

On the day of the deposition Nicole ―overplays the good girl‖, and she passively allows Sam to carry her limp body to the town hall without any resistance (May, Ferri).

However, when she is asked to recall the accident, Nicole looks at Sam and says: ―I was scared. . . . Dolores was driving too fast...I remember clearly now. We were going too fast down the hill. I was scared―. When the depositor asks Nicole why she did not tell something to Dolores when she noticed that they were driving too fast, she says: ―I was scared. . . .There was no time‖.

Through her whole testimony she maintains the eye contact with her father and, judging from his expression, he realizes that she is not talking about the accident but

8 See page 110

94 about their relationship. Egoyan explains that Nicole ―succeeds in producing her own history‖ when she uses the deposition to tell the truth and then subverts it (Egoyan,

―Family‖). In other words, Nicole uses the testimony as a way of subverting her father‘s and Stephens‘ control over her.

Egoyan also incorporated the last verse of The Pied Piper, which he added to the original poem9, recited in voice-over by Nicole. Through the poem and an extreme close-up of Sam‘s lips Nicole identifies Sam as the piper who seduced her (My, Ferri):

And why I lied he only knew, But from my lie this did come true, Those lips from which he drew his tune, Were frozen as the winter moon.

Landwehr argues that the verse plays an important role in the scene, since it replaces the ―images of the accident with an alternative (trauma) narrative that depicts death metaphorically‖. The metaphor allows Nicole to confront the past and at the same time maintain the ―necessary distance from the trauma‖ that she needs to be able to transcend her grief and become an ―active agent‖ instead of a ―passive victim

(Landwher). After the deposition, Nicole calls her shocked father ―Dad‖ instead of

―Daddy‖ and pushes her own wheelchair for the first time. That signifies that ―she will no longer be either his rock star or his little innocent wheelchair girl‖ and that from now on no one else has control over her life and identity (May, Ferri).

The main character of Where the Truth Lies, Karen, is in many respects similar to Nicole and Van who are also young and naive victims of a cruel exploitation by predatory father figures. Over the course of the film, Karen is confronted with the painful truth about her childhood heroes her illusions are shattered, she‘s identity transforms from a child to a woman.

9 See pages 59-60 and 109

95 Following the death of her father, driven by a strong need for a substitute father figure she could adore and by her ambition to follow her father‘s footsteps, Karen decides to write a book that should exonerate Lanny and Vince from the murder of a young waitress, Maureen O‘Flaherty, who was found in their hotel room fifteen years ago.

In one the flashback scenes of the telethon, the viewer can see Karen as a twelve-year-old girl in a blue Alice in Wonderland dress on a stage recounting her experience with polio, when Lanny comes up to her and with tears in his eyes and says:

―You are a special girl. Forgive me‖. Egoyan comments on the similarities between

Karen and the heroines of his other films:

[It] falls into a pattern of film like The Sweet Hereafter, and certainly Felicia, and now Karen, these women who have to completely renegotiate their relationship with people who have provided them a degree of guidance, but who have abused that situation. The idea that these three days of the telethon were somehow magical to her, that her life was changed by those three days, and especially by this exchange, this thing that was said to her by Lanny. (Egoyan, ―Finding‖)

When Karen meets Lanny fifteen years after that she recollects how she felt at that moment: ―Fifteen years ago, ha had, for one brief moment made me feel like the most special person in the world‖. Fifteen years later, Karen still desires to be that little girl again and to restore that magical moment, and she believes the book about Lanny and Vince will help her to achieve that. However, the more she knows about real Lanny and Vince, whose private personas are very different from their public ones, the more disillusioned she becomes. Egoyan says that when Karen ―opens up a lid on a Pandora box, all [the] darkness [of their lives] comes out‖ (qtd. in Wilson 138). However,

Karen‘s childhood infatuation with both men does not allow her to see them as real people but rather as the men who saved her life. The moment she meets them in person

96 she suddenly changes to the twelve-year-old girl she was when she appeared with them on the stage as a ‗miracle girl‘. However, Lanny‘s personality seems to be even more complicated. In his memoirs, he presents himself as a self-absorbed, insensitive womanizer, but that seems to just another façade he creates in order to keep Karen off the case.

Karen‘s tendency to put herself in the stories of the people she writes about is briefly mentioned at the beginning of the film; however, in case of Lanny and Vince‘s story, her emotional involvement soon grows into sexual involvement. Wilson claims that she uses her sexuality to ―act out her desire for both men and the desire to be part of their story‖ (130). She also suggests that in the way Karen ―places her body between these men‖ she resembles Noah (the main character of The Adjuster) and other

Egoyan‘s characters who to a certain degree ―adapt their persona and slip into other characters‖ (Egoyan, ―Finding‖), and then are unable to separate their intimate and professional lives10 (130). Even though Noah is portrayed as less psychologically complex character than Karen, they both lack any stronger sense of self. Karen‘s profound ―affective investment‖ in the stories of other people makes her own identity seem unstable as she symbolically morphs into identities of other characters in the film.

In the first half of the film, Karen‘s identity is mainly defined by her relation to her father and Lanny and Vince (as her heroes and substitute father figures). When she reads the chapters of Lanny‘s memoirs, she completely transforms into him and the action is mediated through her eyes.

Karen loses herself completely in her childhood memories. One of her memories literally comes alive when she attends the pageant at the Wonderland children‘s clinic

10 In an interview with Balfour, Egoyan says that he is fascinated by professions that allow people to deal with their neurotic tendencies and ―to gain access to other people‘s lives in a way that might otherwise be transgressive . . .‖ These characters appear in almost all Egoyan‘s films and they usually work as lawyers, insurance adjusters, custom officers or journalists.

97 where she was treated with polio fifteen years ago. The atmosphere of the scene is surreal. The viewer can see children and staff all wearing bunny ears while a singer, dressed as Alice in Wonderland, sings ―White Rabbit‖ on stage. Karen, later in the film, symbolically reunites with her ―childhood self‖ during the staged sexual encounter11 with Alice, the singer from Wonderland dressed in Alice in Wonderland dress. In a voiceover, during her drug-induced sexual encounter, Karen comments on the moment of transcendence: ―I‘d always been fascinated by how some women could cross the line between who they were and who they would let themselves become. Maureen, Alice, and now me‖. The shock Karen experiences after she learns that Vince drugged her and took photos of her and Alice to blackmail her breaks her illusions about one of her heroes and she partly realizes that she might not be in control of the story. The whole experience propels her further towards adulthood.

In the final part of the film, Karen appears more grown up as she becomes more suspicious of Lanny and Vince. Her perspective changes and she closely identifies with

Maureen O‘Flaherty (the girl who was found dead in Lanny‘s and Vince‘s bathtub). As

Wilson suggests the striking resemblance between Karen and Maureen creates the impression that the film ―explores the same story is twice‖, as if Karen reenacted

Maureen‘s story fifteen years later. Wilson also believes that the investigation of

Maureen‘s murder helps Karen to discover and understand some new ―aspects of herself‖ (132). The distinction between Karen and Maureen becomes increasingly blurred. Egoyan says that by the time Karen receives the third chapter of Lanny‘s accounts, Karen is ―completely transformed to Maureen [and] through Maureen, she is watching the scene. . . .‖ (qtd. in Wilson 138). As she is watching the scene of the fatal

11 See pages131

98 night from Maureen‘s perspective, she can now see Lanny in a completely different light just like Maureen did that night she died.

The effect of fusion of Karen‘s and Maureen‘s identities is even enhanced when a close-up of Maureen‘s dead face dissolves into a close-up image of Karen‘s face at the end of the scene

When Karen realizes that Lanny is the person responsible for all the manipulations she needs to confront him. However, when he tells her that the words he told her after her performance at the telethon had nothing to do with her, her entire world is shattered and the final confrontation with Lanny in his office could be seen as a rite of passage for Karen, because after most of the illusions she has believed in are wrecked, she has to finally grow up to be able to deal with that situation.

Nevertheless, her version of the truth does not seem very reliable (the clues she recalls were most likely a part of Lanny‘s plan) and she does not find Lanny and Vince guilty of Karen‘s murder after all.

7.2. Avoidance, Repression and Denial

Avoidance and repression of disturbing memories of trauma are a common response to the loss of a loved one. They can take many different forms: avoidance of the stimuli associated with the traumatic event, numbing of ―the distressing emotional states with drugs, alcohol and other means that help to reduce the anxiety or dissociation that helps to keep the traumatic experience ―from conscious awareness‖. All these forms of avoidance helps the grieving person to avoid unpleasant experiences in the short term, however cannot help the affected person reach recovery (Cohen 24).

99 Concepts of the denial, disavowal and repression were first described by

Sigmund Freud in 1884 as defense mechanisms that are based on the ―subject‘s refusal to recognize the reality of a traumatic perception‖ (Cohen 25). Freud claimed that ―[the] ego rejects the unbearable idea together with its associated affect and behaves as if the idea had not ever occurred to the person at all‖ (25). Forty years later, he described the concept of denial in connection with ―infantile genital organization‖ (25). He claimed that when a little boy accidentally sees a naked woman for the first time the fact that women have no penis is so traumatic for him that ―he refuses to accept what he sees, he disavows the fact and believes that he sees the penis all the same‖ (25). Two years later he described how denial works for girls. He claimed that after a girl discovers that she does not have a penis her first reaction is envy. Sometimes a girl does not accept the fact that she does not possess a penis and that she has been castrated and ―she might harden herself in a conviction that she does possess a penis‖ and thus remain in denial of her own lack (26).

The manifestations of denial in Egoyan‘s films range from dissociation12 from the traumatic loss, inability to acknowledge the loss, enduring delusional attachment to the time before the traumatic loss and attempts to numb anxiety through the use of various tranquilizers such as drugs or television viewing. In Family Viewing the main character‘s father Stan desperately wants to deny his loss, his past and his son‘s

Armenian origin. He not only refuses to talk about his past and about Van‘s mother who abandoned the family, but he also dissociates himself from the loss by getting rid of all the reminders of the family past and Van‘s ethnic origin. In addition to that, Stan also deploys media technology in his process of denial and bargaining in order to assert

12 ―Dissociation is a crucial survival mechanism that protects you during a crisis and afterwards. It helps you stay on task so you can protect yourself. If you are able to function without fully experiencing the emotional impact of an event, you can accomplish tasks until it is safer to deal with your emotions‖ (Henrie)

100 control over the memories that keeps haunting him. Namely, he uses television as a tranquilizer for his and Van‘s anxiety and video technology for manipulating the past and to gain control over his and his son‘s loss. As a result of his father‘s denial Van has no access to his childhood memories, his lost mother and his Armenian roots. The family history is simply a taboo in Stan‘s new family and all its members seem to have

―no substantial psychology‖ and no deeper sense of their histories or rather, as Romney puts it, ―the little they do have is buried, memory having failed them‖ (46).

Interestingly enough, it is not only Van and Stan, whose past is rejected deliberately by Stan, but also Sandra, Stan‘s new lover, seems to lack memories of her past. In one of the dialogues with Van she mentions that her father fought in WWII and that he used to tell a lot of stories about war, however when Van asks her about the stories, she cannot remember them. In the commentary Egoyan explains that for Van, who himself has no access to his memories and who thirsts for knowledge of his own past, it is something he cannot understand (Egoyan, Family Viewing, ―Commentary‖)..

One of the means of denial that Stan employs is television and its numbing effect. Egoyan depicts television as the ―soul-sapping‖ medium that numbs the feelings of the characters. The anesthetic effect of TV is used by the characters literally as an anti-anxiety and pain-alleviating medication. Marie Winn discusses the anesthetic effect of television in her book The Plug in Drug. She explains that television viewing requires slight defocusing of the eye in order to fixate attention to moving images on the screen. The same defocusing of eyes also accompanies states of drug-induced states of altered consciousness. Therefore, the experience of television viewing could be likened to the experience of a user of psychoactive drugs (28). Winn notes: ―Not unlike drugs or alcohol, the television experience allows the participant to blot out the real world and enter into a pleasurable and passive mental state‖ (32). Television thus enables Stan to

101 enter the unreal world full of fascinating images that distracts his attention from the painful reality.

Stan, however, does not use television only to sooth his own feelings, but he also uses it as an ―avoidance mechanism‖ to avoid dealing with Van‘s questions (Winn 159).

In the scene where Van tries to directly confront Stan about Armen and his feelings towards her, Stan seems to be so absorbed by the television that any meaningful dialogue between father and son is simply not possible. The loss of his ex-wife is so traumatic for Stan that he is literally unable to talk directly to his son about his mother or about his need to explore his Armenian origin

Van: ―I feel good about myself with Armen.‖ Stan: ―You spend too much time with her, it is not healthy.‖ Van: ―She was happy at the house.‖ Stan: ―That was then... You've got better things to do... getting settled.‖

Van is obviously a victim of his father‘s denial. He does not only lack memories, but he is denied access to his partly Armenian origin. The family past is extremely traumatic for Stan and he wants to forget everything that is connected with the loss of his ex-wife. However, his past keeps haunting him and he feels a need to deny it actively by erasing the family video tapes with his home porn13.

One of the symptoms of denial is the inability of the bereft people to talk about their loss. Therefore the specific circumstances of Van‘s mother‘s departure are never explained by either of the characters. The only direct link to Van‘s mother is his grandmother; however as a result of the loss of her daughter, who was probably the only person in Canada with whom she could talk in Armenian, she is virtually mute. The fact that Van‘s mother left when he was a child is mentioned only once. Van has probably never been told anything about it either. Only after he discovers that the home video contains a shocking image of his mother gagged from behind by Stan, the viewer may

13 See page 127

102 assume that Stan‘s abusive behavior might have forced his wife to leave the whole family.

Baronian argues that one of the causes of Stan‘s denial of the family past is also his desire to erase all the signs of Van‘s partly ethnic origin and the need to maintain the illusion of a ―perfect WASP‖ family and conformity to the dominant culture (151). As

Robert Neuburger asserts:

What dominates is a desire for conformity: to look like a normal family, ordinary, beyond reproach, corresponding to the social myth as it is recommended by society: to be a spotless family, with clear roots, a legitimate family in all senses of the word. But words do not translate all this because words leave room for alternatives. The child is not simply told: ―don't be different‖, because that might be dangerous, you are not allowed to show that you are different! The work of family memory will be to erase the tokens of remembrance, those differences that carry negative connotations (qtd. in Baronian 151)

As far as Van‘s denial is concerned, he, as a child whose mother abandoned the family, denial is the natural reaction. However, as he matures he is not willing to accept his father‗s denial any longer. He does not want to deny his mother‘s loss nor his

Armenian origin. The breaking point comes when he discovers the family videotapes14 his father has been systematically erasing. Suddenly, as Wilson puts it, Van is reminded of an ―entire range of sleeping life experiences15‖ of his childhood and his mother (25).

The color of these images is almost bleached-out and they look distinct from the other video and film material. It shows Van as a little child in a beautiful garden with his mother and grandmother talking to each other in Armenian. As Wilson suggests, the images seem like ―images of another era and another country, mingling nostalgia for the mother with nostalgia for another home‖ (30). The idyllic images are clearly idealized and their ―desecration‖ with Stan‘s home porn makes them even more ―sacred in Van‘s

14 See pages 45 15 Wilson uses Lageira‘s term ‗sleeping life experiences‘ that refers to ―events and memories that are still present (qtd. in Wilson 25).

103 eyes‖ (Romney 52).The moment Van discovers his father‘s betrayal he has to wake up from his denial and save the rest of his history from his father‘s erasure.

Van‘s childhood images reappear several times over the course of the film either as projection of Stan‘s paranoid anxiety when he realizes the lost control over his past and Van or as a part of Van‘s and Armen‘s rediscovery of Van‘s lost memory.

However, since Van gets hold of the videotapes he treats the image of his mother almost as if it could substitute for real memories of his mother. Baronian claims that Van‘s relationship to video is ambiguous. Despite the fact that he rejects the way Stan asserts control over ―certain events and experiences‖ (153), he does the same. Baronian says:

On the one hand, he wants to keep the tapes as visible memories. On the other hand, he is a victim of the substitutive power of the medium, and we even see that he repeats in some ways his father's manipulating techniques. ‗Van has come to accept the capacity of video too seriously, as he does not understand that simply to view is not to experience‗. (153)

In other words, just as Stan used the tapes to deny his past and existence of his wife Van uses the same tape as a transitional object for his mother and a way of denying her absence (Wilson 29).

Baronian draws a parallel between the histories of Armenia with Van‘s family history. She says that just like the history of Armenia, Van‘s Armenian origin is kept in secret and exists only in the fictional world of the family tapes. Once Van discovers the old family tapes he does not want to conform to his father‘s vision of a ―normal family‖ and he needs to connect with his Armenian roots. However, as is further pointed out by

Baronian, the mere discovery of the tapes that exist only in the fictional realm cannot provide Van with the true sense of his family history; it can only initiate his search

(151)

The Sweet Hereafter deals primarily with the loss of children or more precisely with the process of mourning after the traumatic loss. Death of a child is certainly the

104 most traumatic loss in one‘s life, because children represent the future and when parents lose their children they also lose their future and a part of themselves.

In The Sweet Hereafter Egoyan explores both personal responses to loss as well as the reactions of the whole community. As was already mentioned, the film‘s structure is based on the contrast between life before and after the loss. According to Tod Lippy, the juxtaposition between the scenes of life before and after the loss evokes the

―desperate nostalgia bereaved people constantly employ-as if constantly returning psychologically to ‗life before‘ can somehow bring it back‖ (qtd. in Romney 131). The dissociation from the traumatic experience and the enduring attachment to the time before the trauma are the major symptoms of Egoyan‘s characters‘ denial.

Romney claims that there are two crises in the story, the bus accident and the incident from Stephens‘ past when his daughter Zoe was bitten by a spider16 (131).

Another traumatic event in the story is Sam Burnell‘s incestuous relationship with his daughter Nicole. The characters of the film respond to all three traumatic events with emotional dissociation from the event and their inability to talk about the trauma.

Egoyan‘s treatment of the critical scenes of the film reflects the psychological state of the trauma victims. Just like the traumatized characters of the film are unable to talk about their traumatic experience, ―the film too refuses to approach this moment of catastrophe[s]‖ (Wilson 93).

As far as the tragic bus accident is concerned, there had been three witnesses of the accident: Dolores, Nicole and Billy. Billy witnessed the crash from his car while driving behind the bus. The viewer sees the accident17 partly through his eyes and can experience the moment of frozen shock when he cannot do anything else than just helplessly watch the bus with his children slide off the road and plunge into the frozen

16 See page 55 17 See page 65

105 lake. Egoyan portrays the unspeakability of the trauma by presenting the crisis with a ―frozen emotional impact‖. As Romney notes: Egoyan rejects spurious vividness: the crash is presented strictly from a viewpoint of a distant observer‖ (132).

Dolores, who drove the bus, is the only survivor who is able to talk about the accident. However, from the scene in which she recalls the day of the accident, it is clear that she is only able to talk about it, because she is under the influence of strong anti-anxiety medication and she is still in partial denial of the permanence of her loss.

At one point during the interview with Stephens she points at the photo of Bear and she talks about him in present tense as if he was still alive. She says: ―He was their

[Wanda‘s and Hartley‘s] little treasure. He is such a wonderful boy. He is one of those children that bring out the best in people‖. Then she suddenly realizes that Bear is dead and she adds: ―He would have made a wonderful man‖ and she bursts into tears.

Nicole, who is the only child to survive the accident, is apparently also in denial.

Not only does she lack all the memory of the accident, but she also seems to be emotionally dissociated from her traumatic experience and she lives in some kind of emotional limbo.

In fact, all the citizens of Sam Dent seem to be in a partial denial over their loss.

Romney argues: ―The children are not the story‘s only ghosts. The adults of Sam Dent themselves become living phantoms bereft of past and future, haunted by their own lost selves‖ (137).

The delusional attachment of the trauma victims to the past that can be never restored is portrayed in different ways in the film. In the scene of Dolores‘s testimony, she shows the photographs of the dead children and recalls the moments when these snapshots were taken she returns to the time before the accident when she was happy with her beloved children and she is able to forget about the accident for a moment as if

106 it never happened. The past is also incorporated in to the film as some kind of auditory hallucination of laughing children that can be heard several times during the film.

However, the most prominent manifestation of the character‘s attachment to the past before the loss or traumatic experience is Stephens‘ memory of his family. Just like the scenes from Van‘s childhood, it is a beautiful image18 of a naked young couple sleeping on a mattress with their baby daughter. The whole scene has certain dream-like quality that indicates a high level of idealization. This image reappears in fragments several times throughout the whole film and thus imitates the way the past memories keep haunting Stephens and reminding him of his loss.

Unlike most of the citizen‘s of Sam Dent Mitchell Stephens seems to be stuck somewhere between the stages of anger and bargaining over the loss of his daughter

Zoe. As Katherine Monk suggest, the ―stuckness‖ of his feelings is symbolically represented in the scene from the car wash19. She says: He cannot move past his guilt, and as a result, the love within him grows harder- and more painful to express‖ (32).

Stephens feels he has to find someone to blame to gain control over his loss. He channels his sense of helplessness and despair, caused by his inability to save his drug addicted daughter, into the tragedies of other people. He foolishly believes that if he helps other people gain control over their loss he will also assert control over his one.

Instead of helping anyone he only interferes with the grieving parents‘ natural process of mourning and keeps them further from accepting their loss.

Yet his denial gives him also a certain level of emotional detachment that enables him to manipulate people into the class action. Just like it enabled him to keep

Zoe calm after she was bitten by a spider. When he deals with the grieving parents in

18 See page 57 19 See page 58

107 Sam Dent his profession offers him the distance he needs so that he does not get overwhelmed by his feelings

Egoyan also explores how Nicole‘s emotional dissociation after the bus accident helps her to move from her denial of the true nature of the abusive relationship with her father. In order to make the sexual abuse more bearable Nicole created a fantasy world in which she was going to become a rock star and had a romantic relationship with her father with whom she shared passion for music. The actual degree of Nicole‘s denial is apparent in the barn scene that is presented from her skewed perspective20. After she return‘s from the Ansel‘s dressed in adult woman clothes that belonged to Billy‘s wife,

Nicole follows her father into the barn where they passionately kiss. The unrealistic atmosphere of the scene is heightened by tens of burning candles and Nicole‘s voice- over narration of the Browning‗s poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

The poem appears for the first time when Nicole reads it to Billy Ansel‘s children the night before the accident. According to Egoyan, Mason‘s question about

Pied Piper‘s motives is the most crucial question of the whole film and Nicole‘s answer to that question foreshadows and clarifies her decision to lie at the deposition.

Mason: Nicole? Nicole: What Mason? Mason: Did the Pied Piper take the children because he was mad that the town didn‘t pay him? Nicole: That‘s right Mason: Well, if he knew magic-if he could get all the children into the mountain- why couldn‘t he use his pipe to make the people pay him for getting rid of the rats? Nicole: Because...he wanted them to be punished. Mason: The people in the town? Nicole: Yes. Mason: So he was mean? Nicole: No, not mean. Just very... angry.

20 See page 59

108 The Pied Piper theme then returns in Nicole‘s voice-over during the barn scene and then again by the end of the film. According to Melanie Boyd, ―trauma takes place when there is no referential language for the event‖. She suggests that the unspeakability of trauma does not lie only in the victims‘ inability to talk about the traumatic event but also in the limitation of the language itself (276). Therefore, the poem in The Sweet Hereafter is, in fact, the story of Nicole‘s abuse ―in the language of a near-child struggling to articulate the inexpressible‖ (Romney136).

After the accident when Nicole returns home from the hospital, she is confined to a wheelchair and her dream of becoming a rock star is shattered and together with the dream also the façade she had created to deny trauma of the sexual abuse. Her feelings towards her father dramatically change after the accident and she demonstrates her unwillingness to be abused any more immediately after she returns from hospital by requesting a lock on her door (May, Ferri 10).

After she learns that her father wants to use her to get compensation in the class action lawsuit initiated by Stephens, she feels betrayed. But what really fuels Nicole‗s anger is his complete denial of their past. The night before the deposition, when Billy comes to confront Sam and Mary Burnell about the lawsuit, they tell him that they need money, but when he offers them his money, Sam tells him that it is not enough.

According to Egoyan, that is the moment Nicole, who is secretly listening, realizes that her father‘s motive behind the lawsuit is not the money but his need ―to give a closure to the past they had together‖ (Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter, ―Commentary‖). When

Sam comes into Nicole‘s room in the following scene, we realize the degree of Sam‘s

―denial over his and Nicole‘s history‖ (Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter, ―Commentary‖).

He tells Nicole that she has become ―distant‖ and ―hard to talk‖. From Nicole‘s response we realize that Nicole is not so angry about what Sam did to her but about his

109 denial of it. Nicole gives her father one last chance to address the relationship between them.

Nicole: "We didn't used to have to talk a lot, did we, Daddy? About all the things you are going to do for me" "I'm a wheelchair girl now and it's hard to imagine I'm a beautiful rock star." Sam: What do you mean? Nicole: I am wheelchair girl now. It‘s hard to pretend that I am a beautiful rock star. Not like you used to tell me. Remember Daddy?

When Nicole realizes that Sam is not going to address their relationship, she decides to use the deposition not to tell the truth about the accident but the truth about the abuse and indirectly confront him about their past leaving him shocked into silence. As a result of her lie, Nicole also destroys the lawsuit and thus also offers the people of Sam Dent a sense of catharsis. Ironically enough, she also helps Stephens. In the flash-forward scene where he meets Alison, Zoe‘s childhood friend strongly resembling Nicole, he eventually expresses his frustration and he also is able to experience catharsis.

Stephens: I've done everything the loving father of a drug addict is supposed to do. . . .I've sent her to the best hospitals, she's seen all the best doctors. It doesn't matter. Two weeks later she's on the street. New York, Vancouver, Pittsburgh, Toronto, L.A. The next time I hear from her, it's a phone call scamming for money. Money for school, or money for a new kind of therapist, or money for a plane ticket home. 'Oh Daddy, just let me come home...Please, Daddy, I have to see you. . . .' But she never comes home. I'm always at the airport, but she's never there. Ten years of this, ten years of these lies, of imagining what happens if I don't send the money, of kicking down doors and dragging her out of rat-infested apartments, of explaining why that couldn't be my daughter in a porn flick someone saw. . .well, enough rage and helplessness, and your love turns to something else. Alison: What does it turn to? Stephens: It turns to steaming piss.

The main character of Where the Truth Lies Karen is just like Stan, Mitchell

Stephens or Nicole, unwilling to accept the unpleasant reality. Therefore, she creates her

110 own fantasy. Egoyan said that Where the Truth Lies is a film about ―how we have access to histories and how we make judgments about what stories we want to tell‖ (qtd. in Wilson 128). Karen knows how her story about Vince and Lanny is going to end even before she starts her investigation. From the beginning Karen knows that her story will clear Lanny and Vince from all suspicion of being involved in the mysterious death of Maureen O‘Flaherty, who was found in their flat fifteen years ago. Although, Karen claims that she wants to find the truth about what happened that fatal night before the telethon, her motives are predetermined. In her denial, she is not able to see Lanny and

Vince as murderers. She truly believes that Lanny and Vince are innocent, and she is not willing to accept any other possibility, because the idea that her heroes might have murdered Maureen is simply too disturbing for her. After her first meeting with Lanny and Vince since the last telethon, she admits that she does not believe that either of them could be a killer. She says: ―It was unthinkable for me that Lanny and Vince could have had anything to do with it. They were my heroes‖.

As Wilson points out Karen is ―deeply involved‖ in the story of Lanny Morris and Vince Collins. Her infatuation with Lanny and Vince began when she was twelve years old and appeared in their telethon show as a ―miracle girl‖, who was cured from polio at the Wonderland clinic they supported. Since then she has adored both men and she has considered them to be her saviors (129).

Since the viewers see the story through Karen‘s eyes they are unable to differentiate between the reality and Karen‘s illusions. Wilson argues that even though the viewers may be aware of a certain level of contamination of Karen‘s childhood memories in the telethon scenes, even as an adult the reality that is mediated through her eyes seems heightened (129). Especially the sequence in which Karen accidentally meets Lanny on a plane seems implausible. The scene where she later meets him in

111 a Chinese restaurant and spends a night with him in a hotel is according to Wilson also,

―shot with an extraordinary tenderness ... It is a dream fulfilled―(129). Likewise, the

Wonderland sequence with its hypnotic soundtrack and muted colors seems more like a dream than reality.

Karen is also the character through whom the viewer accesses Lanny‘s written accounts; therefore, even if Lanny‘s version of history was truthful it might be contaminated by Karen‘s imagination. In fact, the chapters from Lanny‘s memoirs are, according to Egoyan, ―being told to us by Lanny [, however,] there is some sort of conflation between what Lanny is visualizing, or wants us to visualize, and what Karen reading this material is visualizing at that time‖ (qtd. in Wilson 138).

Karen is a victim of cruel manipulation from both men from the very beginning, but despite that she still cannot help but to see them as heroes almost till the end of the film. When Vince drugs her and orchestrates an erotic scene21 to blackmail her, Karen feels disappointed by his betrayal, but nevertheless to a certain degree she is still able to justify his action as an act of sheer desperation and even after that she wants to exonerate him. Likewise, when Lanny disappears without leaving a note for her after the night in a hotel, she rather believes that Reuben took the message than that Lanny would disappear without a word. Even though she eventually realizes that Lanny and

Vince are not exactly the heroes she believed they were, she is still not able to see them as killers. In an interview with Brad Balfour Egoyan explains that the way Karen is exploited by the characters to whom she looks up to and whom she perceives as father figures is similar to the parental abuse examined in Family Viewing or Sweet Hereafter.

21 Se pages 131 and 132

112 He says:

Again, it's about our relationship to parental figures - people who we expect to give us some sort of moral guidance and, ultimately, aren't up to the task or are not able to maintain a sense of moral authority. They find out that they have been either abused or that they were taken advantage of in a certain way. They have to then respond to that. (Egoyan, ―Finding‖)

Karen‘s response to the abuse remains ambiguous. Although, she realizes that she has been exploited and by the end of the film her objective seems to shift from exoneration of Lanny and Vince to finding the person who is responsible for Maureen‘s death. However, her solution of the murder seems unconvincing. When Karen confronts

Reuben recalling all the clues that were carefully set by Lanny from the beginning, it is not clear whether Karen accepted Lanny‘s version, because she realizes that the revelation of the truth might not be worth all the pain it would cause the people involved, or whether she is still blinded by her fascination with Lanny to be able to see him as a murderer.

Karen is not the only character who is in denial in the film. Both Lanny and

Vince struggle with the truth that has been buried fifteen years ago and that separated them. Egoyan likened their relationship to marriage (Wilson 131). They used to be the closest people to each other and yet the secret they are hiding must have been stronger than their love for each other. Even though the trauma remains unspoken in the film and the viewer never really learns what the secret Lanny and Vince have been hiding is, it must be traumatic enough to haunt them even fifteen years later and eventually leads one of them to suicide.

Both men‘s reaction to the traumatic event differs. While Vince decides to live in seclusion and even 15 years after Maureen‘s death he is still visibly tormented and not able to talk about that night at all, Lanny, on the other hand, tries to deny the truth by constructing his own version of the truth in his memoirs, where he describes himself

113 as a reckless womanizer who remained unaffected by Maureen‘s death. Although at the end of the film, we learn that the very opposite is the truth and that the he almost broke down during the last telethon. Egoyan notes:

What fascinated me about the story was that Lanny finds that by creating this version of himself where he is vulgar, voracious individual, he diminishes the importance of this one person [Karen] who did affect him and ultimately destroyed their career. He does quite an efficient job of being able to tell this story in an entertaining way and it becomes this bible for the rest of the public to read. (Egoyan, ―Splitting)

Karen‘s interest in the case must have terrified both men. They both attempt to

―sugar her off the case‖ (Hoberman). Vince agrees to cooperate in hope it will help him to keep Karen‘s story under control and Lanny starts sending her his manuscript where he presents Vince and himself in such negative light that, he hopes, it would disillusion

Karen and stop her digging into their past. The secret they have been hiding seems to be so painful that, as it once separated them, now it has brought them together again in their common effort to keep their dark secret buried forever.

7.3. Substitution

Another feature that is common in all three Egoyan‘s films is his characters‘ strong attachment to objects that represent their past and commemorate their lost loved ones. These objects function as transitional objects22 that allow them to symbolically preserve the souls and memories of the absent people. These objects can take the form of a videotape, photograph or even recorder. Nellie Hogikyan attributes high dependence on media technology of Egoyan‘s characters, ―especially within family

22 Winnicot descibed the concept of a ―transitional object‖ instead as an object that stands for mother‘s breast. She argues that most children from the age of 4 to 12 month sometimes attach significant importance to an object (blanket, toy) they use to sooth their anxiety. This transitional object is for a child an object somewhere between ―me‖ and ―not-me‖. In other words, ―it represents to a child a part of himself and yet also a possession to which he gradually attributes ―not me‖ (Fisher)

114 context‖ to the separation of family structures and nation ―due to the original dispersion‖ of Armenians (during and after Armenian Genocide) together with a global migration (209). As a result the missing characters of Egoyan‘s films are replaced with family photographs and portraits. Moreover, Egoyan claims that the missing characters of his films are represented by the camera. He says: ―When a character is absent, the camera can provide a very subtle substitute, representing the gaze of this absent person who is a witness of his/her own drama‖ (qtd in Hogikyan 210). In an interview with

Emma Wilson, Egoyan recalls that early on in his career he became ―exited by the idea of the camera‘s point view as being that of a missing person‖. He notes: ―Each of the early dramas, and even up to Where the Truth Lies, there is some person whose absence is felt through the camera gaze‖ (qtd in Wilson 141).

In Family Viewing the transitional object takes the form of videotapes. These videotapes play a crucial role especially for Van to whom they represent his forgotten childhood memories and enable him to reconnect with his lost mother and his Armenian roots. Despite the fact that these tapes are used by both Van and his father Stan as a tool for dealing with their loss and they both appreciate the possibilities of video technology that enables them to erase, rewind or fix images. Therefore, it also provides them with an opportunity to manipulate people and situations, each of them projects very different sets of emotions into these video images. While for Van, as was already noted, they provide a link to his lost mother and precious memories he has been denied access to, for Stan they provide, or at least he believes that they can provide, an ability to assert control over his loss and the past.

115 Del Río argues that only Stan employs these video images fetishisticaly23. He does so in order to ―deny the losses and limitation that threaten to diminish [his] sense of power over reality‖ (30). Van uses the very same tapes auraticaly, which means that they ―allow [him] to dwell in a memory of things and events that cannot be recovered‖

(30). Del Río further explains that aura is not an object but rather a ―subjective mnemonic event that is only accidentally triggered by a particular object or medium‖

(31). A crucial difference between aura and fetish is that, unlike fetish, aura ―never claims full apprehension of reality‖, but insists on the impossibility to transform reality to a static image that would become a ―malleable picture‖ (31). Moreover, fetishism is based on ―denial of absence and distance‖, while aura creates an ―appearance of distance‖ between the viewer and the image (42). Therefore, Stan‘s and Sandra‘s fetishistic employment of the videotapes during his staged erotic rituals presupposes the ability of the video technology to ―substitute for formerly unmediated actions‖ (31). He uses the family tapes during his rituals to assume control over women by ―substituting his fetishistic fantasy‖ for his lover Sandra, who is an object within his control. (41).

On the other hand, Van and Armen use the very same tapes with nostalgic images of the family past to ―re-establish contact‖ with Van‘s mother and Armen‘s daughter (del Río 42). According to del Río: ―the aura of these images resides not merely in their reference to the past, but primarily in the way they effect the viewer‘s memory with the recognition of distance that the images themselves refuse to bridge or deny‖ (43). The ―feeling of temporal distance‖ and thus the auratic quality of Van‘s videotapes is even more enhanced by the specific setting where they were shot that is distinct from Van‘s 'overtechnologized' surrounding and texture of their image (43).

23 See pages 126-127

116 What is particularly striking about both Stan‘s and Van‘s treatment of the videotapes is the value they assign to them – as if they very closely corresponded to the actual person or the actual reality. Their inability to distinguish between reality and a mediated image is most likely a result of the 'overtechnologized' environment that the family lives in. Van‘s concept of the world seems to be extremely distorted and simplistic. Influenced by his father‘s obsession with media technology, he regards the videotapes as an adequate substitute for real life events and real people. Egoyan points out that the degree of Van‘s distorted vision of the world is illustrated in the sequence where Van exchanges Armen with the dead body of Aline‘s mother. He notes:

[The] whole action of switching the bodies is such a detached, contrived, manipulated gesture and yet as a character we know he doesn‘t really understand the full implications of what he is doing, that mentality of things just being switched and ‗plot points‘ being added to one‘s life is something that is obviously derived from his television watching. These sorts of things can happen, identities can be switched, the emotional implications are something that he has not been trained to feel. (Egoyan, ―Interview by Burnett‖)

Similarly, to Stan the deletion of the tapes corresponds to the actual deletion of his memory, even though he never manages to completely erase either. To Van the recorded images and his grandmother can fully substitute his mother and memory of his childhood. This naive belief in the ability of recording media becomes the most apparent when he arranges the funeral of Aline‘s mother without her and he genuinely believes that having the video-recordings of the funeral is better than being there in person and he is puzzled by Aline‘s negative reaction:

Van: I thought I was doing you a favor. Aline: A favor? Van: Yes Aline: That was my mother. Van: I‘ve left the stone blank. So you can put down whatever you want. Aline: You‘re sick.

117 Van: I would have called you. But you didn‘t leave me a number. I was a good funeral. Aline. Believe me. You wouldn‘t have done it any differently. Aline: I would have been there. Van: But you weren‘t. You were out of town. And now, you are watching it. Aline: On television. Van: Sure. You are not in the right mood. But when you are you can play it...any time you want.

Despite Aline‘s original reluctance to adopt the video images as her video images as her own memory, as del Río notes, she eventually ―submits to the virtual continuity between the video image and the memory image‖ and through the images of her mother‘s funeral she comes to terms with the sense of guilt she felt at her absence from her mother‘s death (44).

After Van forms a new family with Aline as his substitute sister and Armen and the videotapes as substitutes for his mother and manages to save them all from his father‘s control in the final scene, we can see Armen and Van reunited with Van‘s mother in a homeless shelter. However, the texture of this image and the fact that it is seen from the point of view of a surveillance camera makes the viewer suspicious about its authenticity. Therefore, this scene carries a disturbing implication that Van‘s uncritical belief in the full correspondence between images and reality enables him to create an illusion of the family reunion where his real mother is substituted only by the video images.

Despite the fact that the characters of The Sweet Hereafter also keep various transitional objects that reminds them of their lost children, their belief in substitutive functions of media and images is less extreme than in the previous film. Some of these objects in the film are made more prominent, but an attentive viewer can also notice a number of these objects are in the background as a part of the film‘s mise-en-scene.

118 The scene in which they are made a centre of the viewer‘s attention is the scene in Dolores‘s house in which she refers to the lost children in the photos24 on the wall.

However, there are also other photos and objects in other scenes of the film. Wanda

Otto, who is a mother of one of the victims, is a photographer and her photos can be spotted in several scenes. The first of her photos that appear in the film is the backdrop of the stage where Nicole performs. Wanda‘s other photos are in almost every house

Stephens visits. When he checks in to Risa and Wendell‘s motel there is a notice board full of family photos and after they move to the living room we can see a small monument with flowers, candles and the photo of their son in the background.

According to Egoyan, an enlarged film negative photo of Bear is an essential part of the, ―most disturbing composition‖ of the film, where Stephens and Hartley Otto talk facing each other and are both being looked at by Bear from the photo on the wall behind them as if he was ―confronting‖ both of them (Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter,

―Commentary‖). Probably the most touching composition is in the scene where Nicole is reading the Pied Piper poem to Ansell‘s twins‘, and when the camera pans towards

Mason Ansel‘s bed there is a photo of his dead mother Lydia on the wall just next to his bed so that his mother can ―watch‖ him while he sleeps.

In Where the Truth Lies Karen also has a transitional object that links her to her father. Even though the whole father theme is almost cut out of the film, it is included in the bonus features on the DVD and it helps the viewer to understand Karen‘s motivation. In one of these deleted scenes, the viewer can see Karen‘s father, who was also a journalist, in the audience during the telethon as he dispassionately records his daughter‘s speech on a reel-to-reel recorder. A very similar recorder is also used by

24 See pages 106- 107

119 Maureen, but most importantly, fifteen years later Karen still uses her father‘s recorder for her interviews.

When Karen visits Maureen‘s mother she says that all she has of Maureen now is an apple tree in her garden. Then, she recounts the day her husband, who could not bear the loss of his daughter anymore, took the urn with Maureen‘s ashes and spread them around the roots of the tree Maureen and her mother had planted together and committed suicide.

Hogikyan claims that while technologies such as the video camera, the tape recorder or photographs substituting for the lost family members can forge an impression of a ―virtual closeness‖ - in fact they establish distance (210). The distance created by mediation of relationships is then filled with surrogate family members.

Hogikyan asserts that with Egoyan‗s strategy of ―substituting one member of family for another, [he] destabilizes the traditional family institution, displacing biological filiation as the ultimate foundation of familial unity‖ (213). Frequently, this strong desire for reconnecting with lost members of family and for gaining a direct physical contact, which cannot be substituted with inanimate objects, is in Egyoan‘s films metaphorically represented by incestuous, semi-incestuous and other taboo relationships (213).

As far as the substitutes for lost family members in Family Viewing are concerned, for both Stan and Van Sandra represents a substitute for their lost wife and mother. Stan is obsessed with his sense of control and his sense of control had been seriously violated by his first wife‘s abandonment. He naturally needs someone extremely submissive that would tolerate his abusive behavior. As will be later discussed, he is attracted by the sense of control over his past that Sandra helps him achieve. In other words, Stan is not so much attracted to Sandra as to her submissiveness. He perceives her rather as a prop for his elaborate sexual rituals than

120 a real partner. As Wilson points out, on the home porn videotapes she looks like a ―puppet‖ and not like real a woman and that is exactly what Stan appreciates the most about her (29). During one dialogue with Van he says: ―I appreciate her simplicity. I am tired of complications. She is not a burden. I want things to be comfortable‖. Stan offers her a comfortable life and she submits to his abusive behavior in return.

For Van it is natural that the role of his biological mother, who left the family when he was only a child, is substituted by his stepmother. Together with his grandmother Armen Sandra represents a mother figure for Van. There seems to be a quasi-incestuous relationship between Sandra and Van. In one of the first scenes of the film Van is watching television when Sandra enters the room. She sits next to Van and as they talk they move closer to each other and a second before they actually kiss the image is frozen and rewound suggesting that the scene took place only in Van‘s imagination. Whether there is an actual relationship between Sandra and Van or not, the scene, as Wilson points out helps the viewer to realize that video throughout the film reflects mental processes of the characters and thus also ―allows us to more clearly to correlate his relation to Sandra with his relation to his absent mother‖ that is ―poised between the nurturing and the erotic‖ (29). Van seems to be also a strong motive for

Sandra to remain with abusive Stan irrespective of whether she is romantically involved with Van or her feelings towards him are purely maternal. Sandra however, cannot provide Van an access to his Armenian origins; therefore, Van gradually shifts his affection to Armen and the video images of his mother.

In The Sweet Hereafter Mitchell Stephens deals with his loss indirectly by his desperate attempt to find someone the people of Sam Dent could blame for their loss.

By helping them Stephens channels his own anger and sense of helplessness he feels about the loss of his own daughter Zoe. After the initial investigation he focuses on the

121 Burnell‘s family, whose daughter Nicole is the only child that survived the accident and who remained partially paralyzed. He feels that if he can help Nicole and his parents to get compensation from the bus manufacturer, it will help him to come to terms with his own loss. In other words, Stephens perceives Nicole as a substitute of his own daughter

(whom Nicole reminds him of) and whom he can thus indirectly save. Nicole‘s case is something he knows how to deal with unlike his own personal problem with Zoe that seems to be insoluble for him. Despite the fact that Nicole resents his efforts to be ‗saved‘, driven by his obsession Stephens believes that he knows what is best for her. Much of his persistence might stem from his feeling that if he had been able to force Zoe to be helped before it was too late, he could have saved her.

Even though Stephens‘ efforts might appear to be financially motivated at first, the nostalgic memories of the times when Zoe was just a child together with the disturbing calls from Zoe he keeps receiving reveals that he is himself in a similar situation as the bereft parents of Sam Dent. Yet his denial gives him also a certain level of emotional detachment that enables him to manipulate people into the class action.

Just like it enabled him to keep Zoe calm after she was bitten by a spider25. When he deals with the grieving parents in Sam Dent his profession offers him the distance he needs so that he does not get overwhelmed by his feelings.

Similarly to Stephens, who perceives Nicole as a substitute for his own daughter,

Nicole, who was sexually abused by her own father, is in a way also a surrogate mother for Billy Ansel‘s children. In the scene preceding the incest scene, the viewer realizes how close Nicole was to Billy‘s family. When she baby-sits Mason and Jessica she reads them a bedtime story she provides them with the sense of safety and nurturing care their real mother used to provide them with before she died. After the children fall

25 See page 57

122 asleep, Nicole steals into the bedroom and tries on some clothes that belonged Billy‘s dead wife Lydia. Some critics perceived that as Nicole‘s attempt to take on an identity of an adult woman that would make her incestuous relationship with her father more acceptable. In my view, she dreams about becoming a part of Billy‘s family and experiencing the safety she cannot feel with her own father. The special bond she shares with Billy is evident from the look they exchange when Billy comes to confront

Nicole‘s parents26 about the lawsuit the night before the deposition. It is not clear whether Nicole perceives Billy as a father figure or as a potential partner, but he is the person whom Nicole sees as a ―moral center‖ and who has the major impact on her decision to sabotage the lawsuit (Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter, ―Commentary‖).

Similarly to Van and Nicole Karen in Where the Truth Lies is also one of the

Egoyan‘s ―characters that are at a point in their lives when they are emerging from childhood‖ (Egoyan, ―Finding)‖) and, like Van and Nicole, she still feels strong needs for a substitute parental figure. Despite the fact that, as was already mentioned, the family theme is significantly underplayed in the final cut of the film, Karen‘s relationship to her late father is developed in the deleted scenes and in Holms‘ novel.

The special relationship she has had to Lanny and Vince since she appeared in one of their annual telethon27 as a ―miracle girl‖ and the fact that she decides to pursue their story soon after her own father‘s death indicates that one of Karen‗s motives stems from her need for a substitute father figure and her need to win her father‘s approval.

26 See page 109 27 See pages 69

123 In one of those deleted scene, Karen is conducting an interview with Vince and she recalls how she felt during the telethon when she was a subject of her father‘s story:

My father was a journalist and he was writing a story on the telethon. I never forget the expression of complete concentration on his face. That night I transformed from the daughter he loved into his subject he was reporting on. Being the object of observation changes everything. As I watch the reel spinning around, I remember the mixed emotions I felt at that time. The profound sense of gratitude to Lanny and Vince combined with the sense that I have never had this much attention from my dad as when he was recording my story.

During a lecture at the European Graduate School Egoyan explains that the scene helps to clarify the reason of Karen‘s infatuation with the duo and reveal the connection between them and her father. He says that that scene shows the greatest moment of Karen‘s life. She is delivering her speech about her recovery and the

―audience is erupting in applause‖, while her father is just dispassionately recording it and he seems removed at that moment. Therefore Karen ―feels that she never gets this approval from him and that is why the moment with Lanny is so much important‖.

In an interview with Brad Balfour, Egoyan confirms that ―the relationship between parents or parent figures is something that has really marked a lot of [his] work‖. He says that even though Where Truth Lies is about famous stars and is very entertaining, it is primarily about ―relationship to parental figures – people whom we expect to give us some sort of moral guidance and, ultimately, are not up to the task or are not able to maintain a sense of moral authority‖ (Egoyan, ―Finding‖). Karen‘s life was significantly affected by Lanny and Vince and she perceives them as the men who saved her life and to whom she has looked up to. Her illusion about both men makes her particularly vulnerable to their manipulations and her sexual involvement with Lanny gives the film an incestuous undertone.

124 The eerie physical resemblance between Karen and Maureen makes Karen a haunting reminder of Maureen‗s death. Moreover, just like Maureen, she is young, ambitious journalist who wants to write a story about Lanny and Vince. Both Lanny and

Vince do not want her to delve into their past, but on the other hand, they are fascinated by her, because, at least for a moment, Karen makes them feel that Maureen‘s death was just a nightmare and when they wake up everything will be all right.

7.4. Gaining Control

The sense of loss is frequently accompanied by a profound sense of helplessness.

Especially if the loved person died suddenly or in an accident, the surviving members of the family may feel an urgent need to find some sense in the tragedy and to gain control over the situation. John Archer believes that especially for people who tend to overestimate their belief in the personal control of the outside world, irrevocable loss is like a sudden death of a loved one. The initial phase of bereavement is particularly devastating, because they have not only lost the person, but their ―core schemas have been the most deeply violated‖ (135). These people also display an increased tendency towards blame or self-blame, because it ―can provide [at least some] meaning for the loss‖ (142). As Archer argues, even the sense of guilt is often more tolerable then the idea of world out of their control (142).

In Egoyan‘s films the overwhelming feeling of loss frequently leads the characters to attempts to regain control over events that cannot be changed. They perform various ritualistic re-enactments of the original trauma in a hope of being able to take control over the situation, find some meaning in their loss, and in the most

125 extreme cases, even to prevent the tragedy from happening. Christine Bourchier claims that a ritual, as a symbolic act performed in order to get some sense of control over the uncontrollable events, ―allows people to ‗do something‘ and overcomes feelings of powerlessness.‖ She notes: ―Engaging in ritual offers collective reassurance that, while we cannot control the tragedy itself, we have reasserted control in the aftermath‖.

Rituals and ―traumatic plays‖ (re-enactments of the original traumatic experience) have been successfully used as a therapeutic mean of dealing with a traumatic experience by various theories of counseling for many decades (Miller 207).

However, these trauma re-enactments might also include ―fantasized actions of intervention or revenge fantasies‖ and instead of healing and sense of closure they may become a painful reminder of the loss (Sadock 261).

One of Egoyan‘s archetypal characters that have been portrayed in all his films is the extremely manipulative character, who after having suffered the loss of the loved one becomes obsessed with regaining his/her sense of control the loss. In his/her irrational need to change the past he or she performs various elaborate re-enactment rituals that should sooth his/her pain. However, instead of healing it only results in an intensification of anxiety and in an absolute loss of control over his/her obsession.

In a conversation with Emma Wilson, Egoyan notes that as the rituals of his characters intensify they often begin to ―consume so much energy and planning that they become all-consuming― and the person no longer has time to mourn. The original process of mourning thus transforms to a pure and uncontrollable obsession, which no longer has anything to do with the lost person (Egoyan, ―Senses‖ 254).

One of the most extreme cases of obsessive use of ritualistic re-enactments occurs in Family Viewing when, Stan, stages elaborate sex rituals involving his submissive lover Sandra and the Armenian sex phone operator Aline. The whole ritual

126 is recorded over old family videotapes. Stan‘s rituals mainly function as a method of regaining control over his traumatic past and over his son‘s identity. Stan seems to be obsessed with control. Even before his ex-wife left him, he probably had almost absolute control over her life. The fact that she was an immigrant in a foreign country naturally made her more susceptible to his abuse. However, the moment she left him he lost the sense of control that entirely shook his whole world. In his desperate attempts to regain the control he lost, he became obsessed with his sexual ritual through which he attempts to regain his sense of control.

During his sexual practices with Sandra, Stan combines video images of himself and Sandra that are being recorded on the old family videos and voice of the sex operator. Del Río believes that the split between video image and sound -―bodily image and aural image‖- ―is crucial in advancing Stan‘s orchestration of video images along fetishistic lines‖ (40).

What is ―crucial to the particular fetishistic economy of video in this scene‖, is the fact that it is Stan and not Aline or Sandra, who is the author and director of these precise scenarios (del Río 43). By using Aline‘s voice together with an image of Sandra he creates a ―split between the image and sound‖ and thus also a split ―upon the female subject‖ 41). As del Río claims:

In depriving Sandra of a synchronized action between body and voice, Stan suppresses her possibility of agency—her capacity to desire without coercion. Aiming at securing control over his female sexual partner, he substitutes a fetishistic fantasy for the embodied Sandra sitting in front of him. Thus . . .the asynchronization of visual and aural registers results here in a regressive tactic based upon the unequal distribution of power between man and woman. (41)

Since Stan‘s manipulations are not directed at either of the women involved in his rituals, del Río believes that, his actions stem from ―a fear of castration and death that he sees in female subjectivity as a whole‖. The aggressive fragmentation of the

127 female subject cannot itself help Stan to achieve control over the threat and therefore

―his gesture of disavowal‖ requires equally aggressive reassembling of the fragments.

―What the scene emphasizes,‖ says del Río, ―is this reordering or recreating of the terms—the aspect of the fetish that provides closure and reassurance‖ (41).

Another crucial aspect of Stan‘s rituals is the choice of the participants. He not only records the sessions over his ex-wife‘s videotapes, but he uses a body of his new lover Sandra and the voice of an Armenian sex phone operator, who has a strong

Armenian accent. He thus creates a new woman from the fragments of Sandra and Aline who together represent his absent wife and whom he wants to have a total control over.

When he finds out that Van has stolen the tapes and moved Armen out of the nursing house, it is not Van, Armen or the tapes he misses, he never visited Armen nor he ever watched the tapes anyway, but it is the sense of control he lost again that literally drove him to insanity. As long as Armen was in a nursing home and the tapes in his bedroom he believed he had full control over his own and Van‘s past. However, after Van took the tapes and kidnapped Armen it is Van who has now gained the control. That is something Stan cannot live with and he becomes obsessed with tracking

Armen down. Moreover, he starts losing control over his rituals as well. In one of his sex sessions taking place after Van‘s departure, the viewer witnesses how Sandra is so emotionally devastated that she is completely unresponsive to Stan‘s instructions.

Similarly, Aline, who has been watching the tape of her mother‘s funeral, bursts into tears during the call with Stan and hangs up the phone and thus ruins the whole ritual.

When Stan, in his last desperate attempt to find Armen, dashes into the hotel having missed Armen only by seconds, he collapses in the hotel room. When he looks at the television screen he sees the face of Van‘s mother smiling amusedly at him, which

128 is, according to Romney, a mere projection of Stan‘s deranged state of mind after he realizes that he definitely lost control over his loss and his son‘s identity.

In The Sweet Hereafter the character who, similarly like Stan, desperately tries to assume control over his past and over his daughter‘s life by manipulating other people is Mitchell Stephens. Egoyan withholds the information about Mitchell‘s personal connection with the Sam Dent citizens‘ tragedy until the second half of the film when it is revealed that the young family that has already appeared in the film is Steven‘s family about 20 years ago. The flashback28 picturing a nostalgic memory of the family holiday returns and we learn that peaceful atmosphere was followed by drama when Zoe got bitten by a spider and her face and throat started swelling is in fact a story told by

Stephens to Zoe‘s childhood friend, Alison during a flight. Since the hospital was far away Stephens had to keep Zoe calm to avoid the poison spreading too fast into her body and to be prepared to perform Zoe a tracheotomy in case she would have stopped breathing. In a haunting flashback image Stephens holds Zoe on his lap holding a penknife in his hand prepared ―to go all the way‖. He recounts: ―It was an unforgettable drive. I was divided into two parts. One part was daddy, singing lullaby to his little girl and the other part was a surgeon with a knife ready to cut into her throat‖.

According to Patricia Gruben, Stephens‘s primary motive for involving himself in the class action lawsuit is ―to attack on the unknown evil forces that have turned his own daughter, Zoe, into a drug addict‖ and the memory of the old incident reminds him of his own helplessness against these unknown forces (256).

It could be argued that this old memory keeps haunting Stephens partly, because it also reminds him the time when he had control over Zoe‘s life. No matter how frightening this experience was for Stephens, he still had at least a slight chance of

28 See page 56 7

129 saving his baby, because even if she would have stopped breathing he had the knife that could have saved her. However, over the time he has lost his control over Zoe‘s life and he does not posses any ‗knife‘ he can use to save her life again.

Like Stan who used his erotic rituals to regain the control over his loss, Stephens is obsessed with control he once had over Zoe‘s life and he believes that he could regain it by channeling his own personal pain into the pain of other people. Whenever he wants to help his clients find the cause of their loss, he hopes it will also help him to find the

‗knife‘ that would give him control over Zoe‘s life again. And similarly like Stan‘s rituals Stephens‘s rituals have become an all-consuming compulsion that absolutely overwhelms his life.

The true extent of his obsession is vividly illustrated in a sequence of his visit of

Wanda and Hartley, whom he wants to persuade to join the class action suit. As he enters their A-frame he is immediately confronted with Wanda‘s hostility towards him.

The Otto‘s have no desire to blame anyone they just want to mourn the loss of their adopted son Bear. As Egoyan notes in his commentary, Stephens is determined to get them on his side and he uses different techniques to persuade them. Egoyan even likens him to a ―terrier‖ chasing a prey (Egoyan, The Sweet Hereafter ―Commentary‖). When

Wanda expresses her skepticism about his claim that he knows what is the best for them, he kneels down on the floor and literally crawls to the couple sitting on the floor and says: ―If everyone had done their job with integrity, your son would be alive and safely in school this morning‖. The mention of Bear being alive completely crushes them both and in this moment of vulnerability they decide to sign Stephens‘s contract.

Stephens‘s presence in the town has a significant impact on the whole community whose feelings he stirs. Due to his own obsession he does not allow the others to forget.

130 In Where the Truth Lies appears another of Egoyan‘s characters obsessed with their sense of control. In this film it is a member of a comic duo, Vince. As Egoyan points out, Vince represents the controlling ‗ego‘ while Lanny the untamed ‗id‘

(―Serendipity‖). His drug addiction, however, lead to incidents he could not control.

Karen‘s intention to publish a biography that should help to reveal what really happened to Maureen, his control is in danger. In his desperate attempt to reassert his control over the story again, he asks Karen to come for a dinner on his terrace. During the dinner he drugs Karen to make her give up her control so that he can reassert his. After Karen swallows the pill she says in voice-over: ―All my life I have had this idea that I can always be in control. Ever since I was sick I had the sense I can make my body do anything I wanted. If I could will my polio away I will certainly be able to will away effect of any drug‖.

In a following drug-induced hallucination accompanied by the ―White Rabbit‖ song Karen sees her own split image sitting on the sofa. While she is being undressed by Vince, a silhouette of Alice, the singer from Wonderland can be seen through the curtain. Vince undresses Alice and tells her: ―She‘s all yours‖. The following shots of

Alice making love to Karen shift to the shots of Vince watching them. As Wilson says:

―[T]he film takes on the heady, unreal appeal of a dream or fantasy. This is a psychedelic world of heightened sense of impressions and unleashed prohibitions‖

(134).

The whole erotic scene Vince stages is eerily reminiscent of the night of

Maureen‘s death, the physical resemblance between Alice, Karen and Maureen is substantial. For Vince the scene he stages is a ritual through which he is taking control over Karen and the events of the fateful night fifteen years ago, however this time he is in the role of an observer.

131 Patricia Gruben in her essay ―Look but Don‘t Touch‖ refers to two modes of spectatorship that Laura Mulvey distinguishes: voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia.

According to Mulvey, ―voyeurism results from the desire of children to see and thus control the forbidden world of sexuality‖ (qtd. in Gruben 252). She further claims that,

―as voyeurs, we take pleasure in the illusion of control over the events onscreen . . .‖

(qtd. in Gruben 254). For Vince, just like for the film spectator, the act of watching the performance he staged forges the illusion of control. Furthermore, it is important that he remains only in the role of an observer, because, as Christian Metz argues, ―[bridging of] the gap between the voyeur and the object would overwhelm the voyeur‖ and he or she would not be able to maintain his control (qtd. in Gruben 253).

However, Vince‘s act of watching provides him only with illusion of control he is not able to obtain in reality. Therefore after he realizes that he is unable to reassert his control over the story, he replays Maureen‘s death. In the same hotel room, he orders three bottles of champagne like fifteen years before, lays in the bathtub full of iced water and takes an overdose of pills.

132 8. Conclusion

The analysis of all the three Egoyan‘s films namely, Family Viewing (1987), The

Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Where the Truth Lies (2005), points to an undeniable thematic and structural persistence and development of Atom Egoyan‘s films.

Even thought all three films deal with the topics of identity and loss, they also illustrate how Egoyan‘s approach these topics changed over the course of his career.

As far as the autobiographical aspects are concerned, Family Viewing bears the most autobiographical aspects of all the films, and therefore represents the director‘s personal experience with his relationship to the family origin, and the construction of national and personal identity in Canada most directly. The other two films explore the same topics of the identity construction and the dealing with loss; however they do not address Egoyan‘s ethnic origin directly but rather metaphorically29. The are both adaptations of novels that the director found thematically and structurally close to his own work and other personal features and motifs were added to the source material.

All three films were made at different stages of Egoyan‘s career, and therefore they also represent very different financing patterns. While Family Viewing was made on a miniscule budget of only $160, 000, The Sweet Hereafter had a budget of $5 million and Where the Truth Lies had a budget of $25 million. This is naturally reflected in different level of creative freedom, production values and commercial orientation of the films.

The limited budget of Family Viewing provided Egoyan with total control over the whole project and large space for experimentation. Therefore, the film is significantly influenced by Egoyan‘s fascination with The Theatre of the Absurd and by

29 It does not mean that Egoyan has never adressed his ―Armenianess‖ in any other film since Family Viewing. He explored his identification with Armenia in Calendar (1993) and in 2001 he dealt with the topic of Armenian Genocide in Ararat.

133 his personal experience. It allowed Egoyan to explore the topic of media technology and its effect on people, family bonds and formation of identity. It also allowed him to experiment with the narrative structure, acting styles and different film textures and it marked the beginning of Egoyan‗s long time collaboration with some actors and members of his film crew. On the other hand, Egoyan, the design of the film had to be improvised and the film was released almost only on video and DVD.

The Sweet Hereafter was designed to attract wider audience, therefore the topic had to be more emotionally accessible, the narrative structure less complex, and the acting and dialogues more natural. On the other hand, Egoyan could cast Ian Holm and at the same time also his favorite Canadian actors and film crew with whom he worked on his previous films. He could afford high-quality film equipment and film design and still maintain relatively high degree of creative freedom. Furthermore, the film appealed to much wider audience than Family Viewing.

Where the Truth Lies was intended to reach even broader audience than The

Sweet Hereafter, therefore the production values were much stricter and Egoyan‘s creative freedom limited. The topic of the film had to be appealing enough to make people to come and see the film. The formal style of the film had to be much more conventional that in any previous Egoyan‘s films. The narrative structure is less complicated and the film relies on dialogues and voice-overs much more than is usual in

Egoyan‘s films. Despite the fact that Egoyan could hire the film crew he is used to work with, he could not cast his favorite Canadian actors into main roles, because they are not bankable enough and therefore the main characters are played by world-famous actors.

Due to the UK investors, the film had to be partly shot in Britain and the different shooting locations and the size of the film crew made any sense of control over the whole production virtually impossible. Moreover, many crucial scenes were deleted

134 from the final version of the film. On the other hand, there were no financial constraints.

Egoyan could afford the best quality equipment and production design with all the period details. The film could be shot in several locations in two continents and the film reached much wider audience than any previous Egoyan‗s films.

Despite the very different production values of the three Egoyan‘s films, he still managed to retain his personal style and thematic consistency.

All the three films that have been analyzed in this thesis explore the way people construct and reconstruct their personal identities. There are two main archetypal figures that tend to recur in all Egoyan‘s films: a young and very naive character, who is just emerging from childhood and an oppressive and abusive patriarch, who is obsessed with his sense of control. The young characters are confronted with certain life-changing experience that forces them to realize an unpleasant truth about the father figure they idealized. As a result, they have to escape the control of the oppressive father figure, take their narrative into their own hands and assert their own personal autonomy.

At the same time, all the three films explore the process of mourning after a traumatic of a loved person. Egoyan‘s characters frequently try to deny their loss, they search for substitutes of the missing people, and some of the most manipulative characters attempt to gain control over their loss through various re-enactment rituals.

Denial in Egoyan‘s films involves emotional dissociation from the traumatic loss and emotional repression, inability to acknowledge the loss, enduring attachment to the past before the loss that is manifested in haunting images of the idealized memories of the characters‘ past, and attempts to numb one‘s feelings.

In Family Viewing the lost family member, whose loss is denied, is the main character‘s mother. She symbolizes Armenia and Armenian origin and therefore it is not

135 only the loss which is denied, but also the main character‘s Armenian origin. Unlike the two other films, Family Viewing explores the director‘s own experience with his ethnicity and assimilation. The two other films also explore the denial the loss of the loved ones, but the sense of loss is no longer directly connected with Egoyan‘s personal immigrant experience.

As a reaction to a loss of a loved person, Egoyan‘s characters search for

―transitional objects‖ that represent their past and their missing loved ones. The transitional objects in Egoyan‘s films mainly take form of a photograph, videotape or reorder. In Family Viewing Egoyan portrays video technology as almost an adequate substitute for the lost person. Even though the characters in The Sweet Hereafter and

Where the Truth Lies employ transitional objects as well, their ability to substitute the lost characters is significantly reduced.

As the substitutive power of media technology gradually decreases in Egoyan‘s films, his characters need surrogate family members. As a result, family as a traditional institution is destabilized and Egoyan‘s characters‘ desire for reconnection with their family members is metaphorically represented by incestuous and semi-incestuous relationships.

The most manipulative character‘s of Egoyan‘s films that are stuck in the bargaining phase attempt to gain control over their loss by performing various re- enactment rituals. However, instead of providing catharsis their rituals only intensify their sense of loss and their rituals transform to all-consuming obsessions.

To sum it up, my thesis proved that despite increasing the financing patterns and commercial orientation of films by Atom Egoyan, he never abandoned his chief preoccupation with the topics of the construction of identity and dealing with loss.

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145 Résumé

This diploma thesis is devoted to the thematic and formal analysis of three films directed by Atom Egoyan, namely: Family Viewing (1987), The Sweet Hereafter (1997) and Where the Truth Lies (2005). More specifically, it is devoted to the analysis of changes of the director‘s approach to the topics of fabrication of individual identity, interchangeability of identities, traumatic loss, and a process of coping with the loss.

The main aim of this thesis is to prove that that despite the increasing commercial orientation and changing financing patterns of Egoyan's films, his chief preoccupations with the topics of identity and loss have never been abandoned. The three films that were selected for the analysis represent different stages of the director‘s career, and therefore also changing funding patterns, the increasing commercial orientation and increasing emotional accessibility of his films. These changes were often wrongly identified as changes of topics of Egoyan‘s films.

In the first two chapters of the thesis, I discuss certain biographical facts that have strongly influenced Egoyan‘s work, provide an outline of Egoyan‘s films from the early low-budget student films to his latest generously funded projects, and put his works into the wider context of contemporary Canadian cinema.

The following three chapters are dedicated to formal film analysis of all three selected films. It considers the process of pre-production, production as well as critical response to all three films.

In the seventh chapter I compare the changes of director‘s approach to the topics of identity and loss in all three films.

146 In the conclusion, I summarize all the changes of approach to Egoyan‘s major thematic preoccupation as well as the major influences on the development of his career.

147 Resumé

Tato diplomová práce se zabývá formální a tématickou analýzou pojetí témat identity a ztráty ve filmech kanadského filmového režiséra Atoma Egoyana. Pro tyto

účely byly vybrány tři Egoyanovy filmy reprezentující jednotlivá období režisérovy kariéry, konkrétně Family Viewing (1987), The Sweet Hereafter (1997) a Where the

Truth Lies (2005).

Atom Egoyan započal svoji kariéru již v 80. letech jako režisér nezávislých nízko-rozpočtových filmů. Postupně se vzrůstající popularitou jeho tvorby začal své filmy více komerčně orientovat a tudíž se také stávaly přístupnější běžnému divákovi.

Tyto změny byly často mylně interpretovány jako změny hlavních témat Egoyanových filmů.

Hlavním cílem mé práce je tedy na základě analýzy dokázat, že i přes změny v zaměření Egoyanových filmů na širší publikum a vzrůstajícím finančním možnostem produkce, se režisér ve svých filmech nikdy nepřestal zabývat ve svých filmech tématy identity a ztráty.

V prvních třech kapitolách mé práce, se věnuji některým autobiografickým aspektům, které se promítají do režisérovi tvorby, dále pak rekapituluji Egoyanovu celkovou tvorbu a posléze ji dávám do širšího kontextu současné kanadské filmové tvorby.

V následujících třech kapitolách jsou jednotlivé filmy rozebrány z hlediska finančního rozpočtu, případné adaptace předlohy, procesu produkce a následného diváckého přijetí filmu.

V sedmé kapitole se věnuji tématické analýze vybraných témat identity a ztráty a předkládám některé společné znaky Egoyanovy tvorby.

148 V závěru shrnuji jednotlivé získané poznatky o změnách v přístupu režiséra k jednotlivým tématům a hlavní vlivy, které k těmto změnám přispěly.

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