Masarykova univerzita Filozofická fakulta

Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky

Magisterská diplomová práce

Andrea Valenová

2014 Andrea Valenová

Hřbet

20

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Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Andrea Valenová

Cowards, Bullies and Clowns, or Crippled Victims and Born Losers: Behavioural Characteristics of Male Heroes in Selected Canadian Films

Master‟s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr.

2014

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

…………………………………………….. Author‟s signature Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1. Definition of “the nation” 2

2. National Cinema Definition 4

2.1 Aesthetic and Production Movement 4

2.2 Critical Technology 5

2.3 Civic Project of State 8

2.4 Industrial Strategy 10

2.5 International Project Formed in Response to the Dominant International

Cinemas 11

3. Rooted in Realism 12

4. Technology – Response to Realism 14

5. Nationhood, Gender and Masculinity 15

6. Victimization Thesis 17

7. Goin‟ Down the Road by Donald Shebib 20

7.1 Plot 21

7.2 Main Characters 22

7.2.1 Pete 24

7.2.2 Joey 25

7.2.3 Other Male Characters 26

8. Mon Oncle Antoine by Claude Jutra 27

8.1 Plot 27

8.2 Main Characters 29

8.2.1 The Coward and the Clown 29 8.2.2 The Bully 29

8.2.3 The Victim and the Loser 30

9. Family Viewing by Atom Egoyan 30

9.1 Elegy 31

9.2 Ethnicity 32

9.3 Technology 33

9.4 Tragedy of Patriarchy 34

9.5 Memory and history 35

9.6 Loss of Mother 36

9.7 Plot 36

9.8 Main Characters 38

10. Videodrome by David Cronenberg 39

10.1 Genres 39

10.2 Anti-realism 40

10.3 Narrative Notion Resistance 40

10.4 Individual vs. Community 41

10.5 Victimization 42

10.6 Plot 43

10.7 Main Characters 48

10.7.1 Max Renn 48

10.7.2 Other characters 49

10.7.2.1 Scientists/Fathers 49

10.7.2.2 Villains 50

11. Comparison of Male Characters 51 11.1 The Coward 51

11.2 The Coward Incarnating into the Clown 52

11.3 The Bully 52

11.4 The Bully Incarnating into the Clown 55

11.5 The Semi-Bully Incarnating into Victim 57

11.6 The Loser and the Victim 58

11.7 The Coward/Loser Incarnating into the Clown 61

Conclusion 64

Introduction

In 1972, under the influence of Margaret Atwood‟s Survival: A Thematic

Guide to Canadian Literature and Robert Fothergill‟s essay “Coward, Bully or

Clown: The Dream Life of a Younger Brother”, the thesis of victimization emerged in criticism of Canadian film, making Canadian cinema a negativist one. According to Atwood, this negativism is manifested through gender, with male heroes being depicted as crippled victims and born losers. In Survival,

Atwood raises a question if it could be that Canadians have a “will to lose” which is as strong and pervasive as the Americans‟ will to win. She comes to a conclusion that Canadians have an ingrained “will to lose” which makes Canada a “collective victim”. Atwood argues that Canadians could overcome this “will to lose” by identifying “the real cause of oppression”. Fothergill considers the main oppressor the United States, i.e. the stronger brother, and urges development of an energetic resistance. Similarly to Atwood, Fothergill concentrates on weaknesses of the main male protagonists around whom, as Fothergill claims, the narratives revolve. He comes up with two different interpretations of the function of men in the narrative structure: a coward, bully or clown on the one hand, and an envious younger brother on the other. Canadian film characters, according to Fothergill, are doomed to “dreams of failure and defeat”.

This thesis is to deal with behavioural characteristics of male heroes in selected Canadian films, namely Goin‟ Down the Road, Mon Oncle Antoine,

Family Viewing, and Videodrome. It is Atwood's “will to lose” that is projected in the films and a search for revealing “the real cause of oppression” that drives the main characters of the films. Hence Atwood‟s Survival is a crucial source to derive the conclusions from, as well as Fothergill‟s essay, whose ideas are to be compared and confronted with those of Atwood‟s. The thesis is intended to be built up upon the following four pillars. Firstly, it should support Fothergill‟s thesis and label the male characters either cowards, bullies and clowns; or envious younger brothers. Secondly, based on the sorting, the main protagonists are to be compared to one another in order to discover the forces which drive them to doom. Then, these forces are to be confronted with what

Atwood calls Canadians‟ “will to lose”. Thirdly, reactions of the main protagonists to the above analyzed dooming forces are to be researched, and subsequently qualified as either “dreams of failure and defeat” or an energetic resistance. Fourthly, it is to be proved that each main male character in the examined films may receive one of the labels proposed by Atwood and

Fothergill, namely the Coward, the Bully, the Clown, the Victim or the Loser.

Finally, their possible resistance is to be assessed.

1. Definition of “the nation”

In his book Theories of Nationalism, Anthony Smith claims that “every society has to face the familiar „problem of meaning‟” (236). “Western societies,” Christine Ramsay explains, “have historically addressed the problem of social and personal identity through the concept of „the nation‟ as an ideal imagine of an ordered universe.” According to Ramsay, the nation is “that place where the collective and individual questions of belongings and self-definition get „solved‟, sewn-up, stabilized”. The nation, in Ramsay‟s opinion, “fixes limits

[…] to secure identity”. Nevertheless, Ramsay discovers a drawback of “the nation”, namely the non-existence of “a neutral and transparent or absolute „nation‟ that easily and naturally provides a source of identity for all members of a society and makes their lives meaningful”. Referring to Christopher Faulkner‟s lectures on nationhood in French national cinema of the 1930s, Ramsay claims that “the myths of national unity and national identity are always secured at someone‟s expense” because “with the formation of nations; borders are drawn in the construction of geographic, social and personal identity, setting up a dynamic of centre and margins”. The problem, as Ramsay sees it, is that “the centre is always an ideal, ordered universe to be gained, [while] the margins are variously coerced, disavowed, disallowed, or ignored”. The nation imagines sovereignty and freedom for itself, and must incorporate and/or dominate its peripheries. In this way, the nation is imagined as what Benedict Anderson calls

“a community of horizontal brotherhood”, despite conflicts, inequalities and exploitation.

For Benedict Anderson, the nation is “imagined because its citizens will never individually come in contact with, let alone know, each other; nevertheless, they live together mentally in an image of shared communion”

(15-16). Homi K. Bhabha adds: “The nation as an imagined community works to fill the voids and emptinesses it creates for the margins by turning the loss into metaphors, narratives, representation which work to empower the controlling centre. […] Centres construct affiliation to stable social knowledge through cultural activity, [i.e.] through texts” (292). Examining the novel as a central apparatus in the creation of national cultural fictions, Timothy Brennan writes in his “National Longing for Form”: It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by

objectifying the „one, yet many‟ of national life, and by mimicking the

structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and

styles. Socially, the novel joined the newspaper and the major vehicle of

the national print media, helping to standardize language, encourage

literacy, and remove mutual incomprehensibility. (49)

“As a „mass ceremony‟”, Brennan adds, “the novel allowed individuals in isolation to imagine the nation”. The explanation Brennan proposes is as follows: “one could read alone with the conviction that millions of others were doing the same, at the same time”. Then, Brennan expands on the impact of the novel: “What the novel affected in its rise throughout the nineteenth century was the location and narration of the subject within the field of imaginary identification and meaning called „the nation‟” (52). In the twentieth century, this role of the novel has been taken over by the cinema, which, as

Stephen Heath claims, has got in charge of “mapping twentieth century subjects onto the fictional construction we call the nation through each nation‟s set of standard representations and their determining social relations” (8).

2. National Cinema Definition

Tom O‟Regan defines national cinemas as “an aesthetic and production movement, a critical technology, a civic project of state, an industrial strategy and an international project formed in response to the dominant international cinemas (particularly but not exclusively Hollywood cinema)” (41).

2.1 Aesthetic and Production Movement As far as the aesthetic and production movement is concerned, the

Canadian film has moved from the dogmatic insistence on documentaries production to feature film production acceptance as a legitimate way of formulating the Canadian experience. Both genres, as well as other areas of

Canadian culture from painting to literature, have resulted from the realist tradition, which, according to Piers Handling, “deserves a great deal of attention when one approaches Canadian cinema” (81). “Those who have worked against the dominant practice, [i.e. the realist tradition], have suffered the ignominy of total rejection,” Handling claims (82), being supported by Robert Fothergill:

“Canadian filmmaking has been artistically most successful when it has sailed close to the wind of realism” (“A Place Like Home” 348). Realism is simply at the root of the Canadian psyche that is why the embryonic Canadian national cinema was based on the documentary tradition and has grown into a world leader in various non-fiction formats. Handling perceives the wind of realism as a national cultural heritage, considering realism the fundamental artistic tradition which Canadian artists work within. Realism, as Handling sees it, has enlightened Canadian literature, painting, theatre, television and filmmaking. In many people‟s minds, as Handling does not forget to point out, Canadian cinema is practically identical to documentary film. “Even [Canadians‟] fictive creations are born out of this soil,” Handling claims, adding that “it is a heritage that has an extensive history, and […] stretches back through most of

[Canadian] filmmaking endeavours.”

2.2 Critical Technology Canadians have never been perceived as dreamers. Globally, they have always been appreciated as grounded realists and non threatening world citizens. As a nation, however, they have experienced hard times loving themselves. Historically, Canadians have always been afraid of two skeletons in the closet, namely the Canadian identity crisis and a younger brotherhood complex. Katherine Monk expands on the Canadian identity crisis:

Well, I never said we were well adjusted. To be blunt: We‟re absolutely

batty. We‟re all children of a dysfunctional family. Born together in the

wilderness when two European cultures squatted in dense underbrush

and gave birth to fledgling colonies […], Canada‟s twin identities have

been at each other since the day they were born. For more than 200

years, they‟ve been threatening to break up – not realizing that […] you

can never escape your own twin. He‟s always there – an amniotic

consciousness to remind us of our other half. No wonder we‟re a bit

screwed up. We deny we‟re even related. Neglect begets neglect. Abuse

breeds abuse. Ignorance spawns ignorance and so we have developed

this bizarre love-hate relationship with our own reflection as it‟s

communicated through our cultural industries.

Cultural identity crisis is a skeleton in the closet which Canadians cannot get rid of, an inseparable part of their “cultural luggage”, as Monk calls it, which they have lugged along throughout the history.

Regarding the other skeleton in the closet, the younger brotherhood complex, Fothergill comes to a conclusion that Canadians live “the dream life of a younger brother” that is envious of the more successful domineering big brother, i.e. the Unites States of America, and that is hence doomed to

“anxiety-dreams of failure and defeat”. Fothergill explains:

Aware of his most powerful brother as a feature in the landscape, in a

way that has never been reciprocated; the younger brother has grown

up with a painfully confined sense of his own capacity for self-realization.

An abiding sense of himself as inescapably diminished, secondary,

immature, has become second nature, has indeed shaped his nature and

bred into it a self-thwarting knowledge of personal inadequacy.

As Katherine Monk states, “somewhere in the depths of the colonized Canadian psyche – colonized not by our European ancestors, but by American popular culture – [Canadians] have come to believe [they] don‟t measure up to the

American watermark”. Margaret Atwood, very much aware of the Canadian culture being deformed by the American counterpart, personifies in her allegory

Canada as the female backdrop to the American cowboy. Standing for the

American popular culture, the cowboy signifies a violating force that drives indigenous cultures out and rubbishes the Canadian imagination. The cowboy, as Atwood sees it, as “innocent as a bathtub full of bullets”, is “sauntering out of the almost-silly West, leaving behind him “a heroic trail of desolation”, confronting the backdrop on that border which he is always trying to cross and desecrating the space as he passes through. Nevertheless, Atwood expresses in the poem a hope for Canada, depicting the backdrop “the horizon [the cowboy] ride[s] towards, the thing [he] can never lasso”. The only option for Canadians to break out of the American dominance is, according to Fothergill, “to identify the stronger brother unequivocally as [their] oppressor – psychic, economic, political, cultural – and to develop an energetic resistance”.

2.3 Civic Project of State

The Exhibits and Publicity Bureau, established by the government in

1918, doomed Canada into documentaries production which promoted tourism and trade. When the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, founded in

1923 as a successor to the Exhibits and Publicity Bureau, failed to increase the quality of the Canadian film production, John Grierson, the British documentary movement founder and a man in charge of the film unit of Britain‟s Empire

Marketing Board, was invited by the government to examine the condition of the Canadian film production and introduce measures to recover it. His recommendations were as follows: firstly, the government film production should be centralized, secondly, the film distribution should be centralized, and thirdly, propaganda should be developed. In 1939, Grierson initiated the

National Film Act passing, which authorized the National Film Board to “initiate and promote the production and distribution of films in the national interest and in particular to produce and distribute and to promote the production and distribution of films designed to interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations”.

During the war years, the National Film Board succeeded in a national audience creation, one of the most important components of a national cinema.

Rural travelling cinema circuits were established with a clear mission: to bring the Board‟s films to small communities across the country. By 1945, ninety-two such circuits managed to reach around a quarter of a million people a month. Moreover, by 1942, the Board founded twenty regional film libraries, which contributed significantly to the national audience construction, as well as alternative exhibition windows did, built by the Board for individuals and groups and made accessible through volunteer projectionists. This project of a diverse and dispersed population linked by cinema accomplishes the ideas of horizontal comradeship promoted by Benedict Anderson: the cinema gathers a community of spectators sharing a language and a culture, hence evokes an idea of a provisional nation made by spectatorship. The nation, as Anderson sees it, is

“an imagined political community […] because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (7).

Nevertheless, by the mid-sixties, the attempts at a cinematic construction of the nation as a possibly homogenous entity had got shattered and replaced by a gradual acceptation of the idea of one‟s cultural plurality and diversity.

“The representation of differences from an Ottawa-centred vision of a homogeneous national community began to receive funding with the establishment of the French-.language production unit in 1964 and the development of regionalization, a decentralization of production at the NFB

[National Film Board] that began in 1965” (Gittings 89). The philosophy behind the decentralization of production in summarized in the Annual Report for 1976-

7 issued by the National Film Board: “the objective of this policy, in keeping with the role of the NFB, is to provide each region the opportunity to interpret a regional subject to a national audience or national subject from a regional point of view”. 2.4 Industrial Strategy

The crisis of Canadian film industrial strategy is best captured by

Katherine Monk. “When we compare our small, young, hand-crafted industry to the glitzy assembly line productions being pumped out of Hollywood, we assume there‟s something broken,” Monk points out. On the one hand, she finds it absurd to suppose that Canada could produce multi-million-dollar blockbusters. Monk admits that Canadians have come to believe that they

“don‟t measure up to the American watermark”. Film, Monk laments, is not the only branch of Canadian cultural industry that has become choked with bombastic expectations. “Bashing Canadian culture has become a sort of cottage industry in this country, spawning pamphlets about the perceived waste taxpayer dollars to a chorus of rent-a-quote popup talking heads, who appear on the face of national newscasts like pesky cold sores, spewing blistering critiques for the pus-filled purpose of self-promotion,” Monk depicts. The key drawback of the Canadian film industry, as Monk sees it, is the Canadian audience since they do not watch the Canadian films, do not respect them and do not know how to love them. “Why are we happier throwing money at The

Phantom Menace that the work of our own countrymen and women?” Monk asks and appeals to the Canadian audience: “If you want to support Canadian culture, support Canadian cultural industries.” Monk is persuaded that

Canadians must be tired of watching “mind-numbing formula films flushed out of Hollywood” and recommends to go for a Canadian movie, which, even if it sucks, provides something unique and human and reflects the Canadian own self. “Canadians,” Monk sighs, “happily spend money on bad Hollywood films all the time, but get despondent after seeing a mediocre home-grown effort.” The

Canadian film production, as Monk perceives it, does not include “sugar-coated serials”. It consists mainly of “challenging, cerebral, ambiguous and decidedly offbeat films”, which might be more difficult to swallow than some of the

“schlock” coming from Hollywood. No matter how cold or depressive the

Canadian films are, the key point for Monk is that they reflect who Canadians are, “not someone else‟s bogus myth”. The following conclusion of Monk‟s can be grabbed as a recommendation on how to revive the Canadian film industry strategy and make it profitable: “If we spent a quarter of what we spend on

Hollywood entertainment, and put it back into Canadian film, we would have a viable – if not thriving – industry tomorrow.”

2.5 International Project Formed in Response to the Dominant

International Cinemas

As mentioned above, the only option for Canadians to get out of the

American supremacy is, according to Fothergill, to recognize the stronger brother clearly as [their] economic, cultural, psychic, and political tyrant and to begin an active fight against. This was started in the sixties. Since the late sixties, it has been taken for granted that Canadian film criticism should primarily deal with the clarification of the Canadian cinema distinctiveness as precisely Canadian. The assumption of nationalism was quite exactly summarized in the Preface to Canadian Film Reader in 1977, where the editors requested an examination of “the unique characteristics of Canadian cinema” and the “popular construction of national cinema” as that rooted in “the pleasure of recognition”. This is what Fothergill calls “A Place Like Home” in the Canadian Film Reader and what he comments on as follows: “Where milieu is concerned, this entails a conscientious exercise of the sociological imagination, to plant the fiction in those social facts that largely condition it.” Peter Harcourt supports Fothergill by appealing in the Introduction of the Canadian Film

Reader: “We have to recognize that [Canadian films] are trying to tell us something about ourselves and the world we live in – not the world we are surrounded by but the world we actually live in” (376). Harcourt was convinced that Canadians were beginning to think that way, i.e. helpfully about the

Canadian cinema. He was right. The identification of film with Canada‟s national self-image and identity became deeply rooted in that period as an assumption shared unproblematically by many. “By 1978,” Peter Morris points out, “this nationalistic assumption had already conditioned a critical approach that emphasized that Canadian films should speak to and from the Canadian milieu, and should address the essential characteristic of being Canadian.”

3. Rooted in Realism

“Canadians have never been accused of being big dreamers, [they are] grounded realists,” Katherine Monk argues. “Realism is at the root of the

Canadian psyche and so it is that Canadian film began in a documentary tradition and continues as a world leader in a variety of non-fiction format,”

Monk continues. Canadians are, according to Monk, regarded as world leaders in news and broadcast journalism. She depicts Canadians as pragmatic and realistic, checking the weather forecast before getting dressed for the day. In

1984, Piers Handling wrote: The overwhelming artistic tradition within which the Canadian artist

functions is realist. Realism has informed our literature, our painting, our

theatre, our television and our filmmaking. Cinema in this country is

virtually synonymous in many people‟s mind with documentary film. Even

our fictive creations are born out of this soil. It is a heritage that has an

extensive history, and it stretches back through most of our filmmaking

endeavours. […] With their particular form of narrative construction,

rejection of studio shooting and use of actual events (historic and

personal), they are thinly veiled documentaries, portraits of real people

living in a recognizable world, as remote from the celluloid fantasies of

Hollywood […] as can be imagined. [Canadians] have become highly

adept at making docudramas, fictional works based on real events.

“With our feet firmly planted on the ground and our eyes drawn to unmediated images of the people,” Monk elaborates, “our initial steps toward narrative fiction were, quite logically, steeped in documentary technique.” According to

Monk, one look at Mon Oncle Antoine, Claude Jutra‟s key Canadian feature film, is enough to recognize how similarly it looks and feels to a documentary. The only thing Monk misses is “talking heads”. “Shooting on location without cranes, dolly tracks or klieg lights, Jutra wanted,” as Monk understand it, “to capture the essence of life in industrial, small-town Quebec in a very real, unmediated way.” “As a result,” Monk expands, “few of the scenes were tightly scripted, the film is grainy and several scenes are so dark – particularly the night scene in the sleigh – that you can barely make out the figures on the screen.” As far as films in English are concerned, Monk feels the same sensibilities in Don Shebib‟s classic Goin‟ Down the Road:

Grainy and packed with unflattering images of the pasty-faced lead

actors, artifice is hard to find in this seminal Canadian road movie –

which explains why a lot of early Canadian features left audiences with a

bit of a hangover and no buzz. They didn‟t have all the high-key lighting,

slick camera moves, special effects and casts of thousands of Hollywood

movies.

Handling reveals also drawbacks of realism claiming that “in its faithful adherence to reality it can lapse into positions that verge on determinism”. In other words, as Handling formulates it, “it depicts social and political relationships as they are, not as they can be, and there is often something immutable about the reality”. Handling perceives that “change, or the possibility of change, is significantly not felt within the majority of these films.” “Reality,”

Handling is convinced, “seems fixed within patterns that are beyond the power of the individual to influence. Powerlessness is often the feeling that we take away from these films.”

4. Technology – Response to Realism

According to Arthur Kroker, technology is a response to realism. As well as realism, it is rooted in Canadians, as Cameron Bailey claims, adding that

“technology is Canada‟s alphabet, [their] first and last resort. “Nowhere is technology more fragile than in the Canadian context,” Bailey is persuaded. The reason, according to him, is that “it is all communications technology, moments meant to connect an impossible country”. Bailey expands: It is in part that fragility, that spider web sense, that has compelled

Canadian artists and academics to approach technology with a

maddening absence of hostility. Excoriating the technical realm is difficult

in a country born into (and out of) technology, a country whose

strongest links have historically been machine-tooled ones –

broadcasting and the railway.

Nevertheless, Kroker warns: “Central to the human situation in the 20th century is the profound paradox of modern technology as simultaneously a prison-house and a pleasure palace.” Taking Kroker‟s reflections on modern technology into consideration, Bailey attempts to compare Family Viewing and

Videodrome, coming to a conclusion that David Cronenberg‟s Videodrome functions “as anatomy of technological life” while Atom Egoyan‟s Family Viewing

“follows in the tradition of the elegy”.

5. Nationhood, Gender and Masculinity

Canadian national narrative films are essentially gendered, expressing mostly the masculine desire. This desire, as Heath argues, “is spoken through the field of social relations, such as region, class, culture, race, and ethnicity, that work together to variously determine each nation”. “In the modern world,”

Anderson claims, “everyone can, should, will „have‟ a nationality, as he or she

„has‟ a gender” (14).

Masculinity, like “the nation”, is an imagined community that seeks for

itself the ideal, ordered stability of the centre in order to contain the

threats of difference, disorder and death from the margins. Omnipotent

masculinity is “imagined” because it does not exist in “reality” as a quality of maleness. Masculinity, as the imaginative assertion of an

eternally stable phallic identity (an identity based in an ethic of male

power and domination) means that men (and women) live mentally in

the phallic image of a shared communion around empowered maleness.

(Anderson 14)

On the one hand, as Michael Kaufman argues, “masculinity is power”. On the other hand, as he warns, it is dangerously brittle:

But masculinity is terrifyingly fragile because it does not really exist in

the sense we are led to think it exists, that is, as a biological reality –

something real that we have inside ourselves. It exists as ideology; it

exists as scripted behaviour; it exists within “gendered” relationships.

[…] Boys and men harbour great insecurity about their male credentials.

This insecurity exists because maleness is equated with masculinity; but

the latter is a pigment of our collective, patriarchal, surplus-repressive

imaginations. (13-14)

As Ramsay concludes, “masculine identity, like national identity, is not an innate, natural, eternal characteristic of men; rather, it is a product of imagination, a fantasy [… and as such] it is always potentially unstable, fragile and insecure”. According to Ramsay, nation and masculinity have the following three common features: Firstly, in their strive for absolute autonomy, they both imagine “exclusivity and highly defined limits” for themselves. Secondly, they both draw up “borders and the myth of complete independence from others, while asserting complete rights, sovereignty and freedom for [themselves] in dominating and mastering others”. Thirdly, both nation and masculinity “suffer great emotional pain and human sacrifice in the name of brotherhood, fraternity, and „equality‟”. In the words of Christopher Faulkner, “masculinity is a site of struggle between connection and independence, as nation is a site of struggle between community and homogeneity”.

6. Victimization Thesis

It is worth pointing out that the pre-1972 Canadian film criticism did not touch upon the victimization thesis at all. Even the most respected critics of the sixties dealt merely with the nationalist assumption and the realist tendency acceptance. They did not dismiss the central characters as doomed victims but discussed them from various perspectives in terms of their roles in the plot. It was not until 1972 that the issue of victims and losers emerged in the thematic criticism of the Canadian cinema. Two works initiated the birth of this victimization thesis: Margaret Atwood‟s Survival and Robert Fothergill‟s

“Coward, Bully or Clown: The Dream Life of a Younger Brother”. Both Atwood and Fothergill claim that the thematic structures they identify result from a socio-political colonial mentality, labelling Canada as either a “collective victim”

(in case of Atwood) or an envious “younger brother” (in case of Fothergill).

Considering them the central characters around whom the narrative revolves,

Fothergill focuses mainly on male protagonists of Canadian films and their weaknesses. Having examined their behavioural characteristics properly,

Fothergill comes to a conclusion that Canadian movie heroes may be divided into three groups, namely cowards, bullies and clowns. “Especially in relationships with women,” Fothergill points out, “the unprepossessing English

Canadian male appears on the screen in several guises, which I have labelled Coward, Bully, and Clown” (235-6). Atwood points out that the Canadian cinema is a negative cinema concentrated on victims and losers, while she uses the terms victims and losers interchangeably in spite of the fact that some characters do not have to be both necessarily. She draws conclusion that

Canadians have an ingrained “will to lose” and asks herself if it could be “as strong and pervasive as the Americans‟ will to win”. John Hofsess seems to have found an answer to this question of Atwood‟s. He claims that Canadian male characters are always victims and losers compared to their American counterparts whose masculinity is usually glamorized, even in cases of death confrontation.

Even when people fail in American films, they do so spectacularly, and in

terms that are larger than life so that they seem heroic in spite of death.

Their failure has been glamorized, whereas in Canadian films, the

characters are usually grubby and more-that-a-little dumb. They just

can‟t cope, they‟re pathetic even when (in a number of Quebecois films)

they rebel and shoot it out with authorities. (Hofsess 77)

The emasculated Canadian male has been pointed to by numerous critics.

Hofsess raises an inquiry why Canadian cinema does not handle “stronger egos and more confident people, people who can because they think they can”.

Fothergill argues that the Canadian condition reflects “the depiction, through many different scenarios, of the radical inadequacy of the male protagonist – his moral failure, especially, and most visibly in his relationships with women”.

Atwood is persuaded that the Canadian national identity lies in the survival concern – both cultural and personal. In the light of the utopian American dream driven by the “will to win”, the hardly surviving colony called

English Canada has acquired a desperate “will to lose”. This negative attitude is, according to Atwood, shown through gender, depicting heroes as losers and crippled victims. She claims that Goin‟ Down the Road, an English Canadian feature film which has had much success so far, is simply “dramatization of failure”. “The heroes survive, but just barely,” she argues in her book Survival.

“They are born losers, and their failure to do anything but keep alive […] is pure Canadian, from sea to sea.” This is how she expands on the issue of survival:

A preoccupation with one‟s survival is necessarily also a preoccupation

with the obstacles to that survival. In earlier writers these obstacles are

external – the land, the climate, and so forth. In later writers the

obstacles tend to become both harder to identify and more internal, they

are no longer obstacles to physical survival but obstacles to what we may

call spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human

being. Sometimes fear of these obstacles becomes itself the obstacle,

and a character is paralyzed by terror (either of what he thinks is

threatening him from outside, or of elements in his own nature that

threaten him from within). It may even be life itself that he fears and

when life becomes a threat to life, you have a moderately vicious circle.

According to Handling, the sense of victimization is “pervasive” in Canadian cinema. “Some have argued,” Handling expands, “that it expresses a colonized mentality.” Canadians see themselves “as the exploited – historically and culturally,” Handling claims. What contributes to this idea of victimization is “a feeling of entrapment,” as Handling calls it, which appears especially in

Cronenberg‟s cinema.

7. Goin‟ Down the Road by Donald Shebib

Goin‟ Down the Road is a 1970 Canadian feature film directed by Donald

Shebib. In spite of a shortage of production costs, it is widely considered one of the best and most influential Canadian films ever. It has been praised for its true-to-life performances. In 2002, it was voted by readers of Playback the fifth greatest Canadian film of all time. Since it was released on July 2, 1970, this

“low-budget saga about two down-and-out Maritimers who journey to Toronto in search of big money jobs and the Good Life” (Lanken) has been perceived as the milestone in the history of English Canadian national cinema. Piers Handling sees it the “first step, tentative perhaps, but opening the floodgates to self- expression”. Jim Beebe of the Toronto Star labels the film “the first real English-

Canadian movie; not a semi-documentary, not an art film, not an embarrassing piece of double-bill fare, but a real movie”. Marshall Delaney considers the film

“the beginning […] not only of a new independent talent in feature filmmaking but perhaps also of an era in which English-speaking Canadians, like French

Canadians and scores of other peoples around the world, will finally be able to make a cinema of their own”.

7.1 Plot

Pete and Joey leave Nova Scotia, their home, and drive a 1960 Chevrolet

Impala to Toronto, hoping to meet their relatives who will find them what

Lanken calls “big-money jobs” and “the Good Life”. Anyway, their relatives fail to help, leaving Pete and Joey at the mercy of the city. The men get themselves minimum wage jobs, which on the one hand still pay much better that any other jobs they could find back home. On the other hand, however, their wages are far from what they expected. The men soon realize that “the Good Life” is to be reached only by well-scrubbed Canadians, i.e. well-educated, male

WASPs, not by unsophisticated manual labourers as they are. Both men soon start romances. While Pete goes through many shallow relationships, Joey finds a steady girlfriend, gets her pregnant and marries her. The lifestyle Joey and his wife try to keep surpasses all expectations Joey had back home.

Nevertheless, it is also far beyond their financial abilities. With the baby‟s birth approaching, the expenses mount. The crisis culminates when Pete and Joey are made redundant. Having run into no proper job, the men come up with a crazy plan to steal foods from a Loblaws supermarket. Unfortunately, the plan results in a disaster as they beat up a shop-assistant who chases them.

7.2 Main Characters

“As men,” Ramsay explains, “Pete and Joey originally imagine and construct themselves as empowered beings – as conquering heroes who, although they are from the margins, can penetrate the centre and win its spoils simply because of their maleness, their masculinity.” “Their sense of mastery,”

Ramsay further argues, “is rooted in two basic assertions – sexual prowess and social power”. Nevertheless, having reached Toronto, the men soon realize that their dream of empowerment and independence gets dispersed and the process of their emasculation starts. That is why Fothergill places Pete and Joey strictly in the group of cowards and clowns, wherein cowards are timorous, vulnerable, sensitive and mild, and clowns are irresponsible and reckless. When times are good, Joey and his friend Pete […] caper about with

childish irresponsibility, drinking and frolicking in a fashion that is likeable

enough but rather trying to the women who have to put up with it.

Pete‟s repertoire includes a humiliatingly unsuccessful attempt to

ingratiate himself with a sexy French lady, Nicole Morin. In their antics,

the Canadian male as Coward can be seen shading into another

incarnation: the Clown. (Fothergill 237)

Atwood considers Goin‟ Down the Road an evidence of her supposition that

Canadian men are always depicted in Canadian cultural representations as victims and losers. As Tony Wilden formulates it, “this prototypical image of the

Canadian male as victim/loser translates across the terms of gender identity into the even broader notion of Canada as a „feminized‟ nation” (111).

Ramsay stands up for Pete and Joey, criticizing Atwood, Fothergill and

Hofsess. According to Ramsay, Pete and Joey “fail, rebel, and steal groceries for

Christmas, not because of some abstract, flawed masculine „Canadian essence‟, but because of real regional, class, cultural, and gender differences in the structure of „the democratic nation‟ called Canada. Ramsay continues:

Pete and Joey are used to display – to make intelligible – differences

within the „strong and cohesive‟ Canadian imagined community, but from

the peripheral perspective of the margins, and thus suggest that the

reasons for marginality are not simply „innate‟ but are buried deeply in

regional, class, cultural and gender struggles. Indeed, as things get

progressively worse because of regional, class and cultural tensions,

sexual difference comes to the fore: Pete, as the dominant male, is called upon to play the traditional masculine gender role of breadwinner

for the pseudo-family of Joey, his wife Betty and himself.

Opposing Atwood and Fothergill, Ramsay advocates Pete and Joey, claiming that they are not “merely two prototypical Canadian male losers”. She rather recommends understanding them metonymically, “as marginalized parts of the Canadian whole” because “theirs is not the commanding and gratuitous violence typical of male mastery and the American cinematic spectacle of empowered masculinity; rather it springs out of a pathetically bungled attempt just to get some food for Christmas dinner”.

Martin Knelman defends Pete and Joey too, pointing out the importance of the theft in the Loblaws supermarket. In his opinion, the film is “practically a case-study of how people get to be criminals”. Knelman charges the country with “failure to make one region as prosperous as another”. The people find themselves “uprooted [and] stripped of the social customs and institutions that have always given them their bearings”, as Knelman laments. “In the big city,”

Knelman argues, “the dream that lured [the people] away from home – the prospect of material heaven suggested by slick magazines and TV commercials

– proves to be cruelly beyond their reach.” Such people are not able to “blend into the background; out of their element,” as Knelman defines it. They are

“forced to exist as freaks in a ghetto culture for displaced Maritimers”, Knelman concludes (101).

7.2.1 Pete

Pete‟s dream of social power is as follows: “a job in an office, some chick for a secretary, company car and my name on the door”. However, it is in clash with the reality he experiences. As an unsophisticated manual labourer, he fails to find a job of his dreams, hence does not manage to win the social power he imagined. Consequently, he fails to achieve sexual mastery as well. Pete keeps on being forbidden from the world of trendy and sophisticated middle-class women who like literature and listening to classical music. He is after Nicole, a sex-pot working in the same bottling factory as Pete. He does succeed in getting a date but he fails to hit the jack-pot. She leaves him horny outside her door, dooming him to hide in the shadows so that his accomplices do not witness his failure. Finally, trying to gain some sense of identity and belonging,

Pete and his friends luxuriate in lewd Eastern forms of entertainment. However, they are laughed at, labelled publicly unacceptable and humiliated as marginal by the barman who represents the centre. Unlike Joey, Pete grows “reflective enough to see that he and Joey just don„t belong” (Ramsay). While Joey seems to be blind, Pete feels that “the sense of their rightful Canadianness is naïve and mistaken” (Ramsay). Frustrated, he suggests Joey should escape with him back into the naïve juvenile fantasy of masculine empowerment and independence which, he has realized by now, is achievable only through boozing.

7.2.2 Joey

Joey‟s response to Pete‟s proposal is an over-excited suggestion of a night out. Anyway, Joey is not allowed to get carried away. Rather, he is supposed to keep feet on the ground because his wife Betty is pregnant.

Nevertheless, when Betty is no longer able to work, Joey fails to provide for her, sinks into indifference and lets Pete take over the role of breadwinner. Unlike Pete, Ramsay points out, “Joey blindly tries to fit in to the middle-class

English Canadian dream by getting married and consuming on credit a houseful of furniture he saw advertised on the back of TV guide”. Anyway, he is not able to earn enough to keep such life standard. With Pete having failed as a family provider, their common quiet despair results in crime. Joey,” Fothergill argues,

“has a good deal of the Coward about him. Bewildered by big-city life, and with a tendency to get maudlin drunk, he finally runs out on the whole mess, leaving a pregnant and newly-evicted wife to fend for herself” (237).

7.2.3 Other Male Characters

Other Canadian male characters in Goin‟ Down The Road are neither victims nor losers. The bottling factory foreman who watches Pete and Joey closely, monitoring strictly every move of theirs, and the barman who degrades them are much more powerful than Pete and Joey. Their role within the movie is the Bully one, contrasting the two victims and losers. The most significant clash is then symbolized in the job interview Pete undergoes. The sleek and polished ad executive, the most noticeable bully in the film, recommends Pete to return home and get a high school diploma. What follows from the interview is that while this diploma is absolutely crucial when looking for a good job in

Canada‟s imperial centre, Toronto, it was unavailable and unnecessary to Pete when carrying out the only accessible job back home on the docks, in the canneries or mines of Cape Breton. Pete applies for a job in an advertising company being taken in by an encouraging advertisement saying “It‟s all right here – all you have to do is go out and get it.” The problem is that Pete lacks both style and education to “make it” in the centre. “Pete‟s very being visibly annoys and disgusts the condescending big city ad executive whose middle- class livelihood ironically consists in creating the fantasy of belonging for people like Pete” (Ramsay). Pete‟s encounter with the ad executive is a clear indicator of the difference between the marginal Maritimes and Toronto, Canada‟s imperial centre.

8. Mon Oncle Antoine by Claude Jutra

Mon Oncle Antoine is a 1971 French language drama film of National

Film Board of Canada directed by Claude Jutra, considered by many film critics to be the greatest Canadian film ever made. It won eight Genie Awards, which is a Canadian analogue of the American Oscar, and was honoured at seven international film festivals. In 1984, a TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) poll of Canadian film writers voted it the Best Canadian film of all time. The same votes ten and twenty years later found the film still within Canada‟s Top

Ten Films.

8.1 Plot

The central plot of the film takes place within 24 hours, beginning on a

Christmas Eve morning and closing on Christmas Day‟s dawn. It is placed in a poor backward asbestos mining town of rural Quebec in the era of Maurice

Duplessis, prior to the Asbestos Strike of the late 1940s. The film opens with a quarrel between Jos, a French-speaking mine labourer, and his English- speaking superior. What follows from the quarrel is that Jos hates the English, is fed up with the job and decides to give it up: “I dunno speak English. […]

The hell with them, the English. I won‟t go on licking their ass. I quit.” The main story, however, opens with a funeral of a man who died of lung disease caused by the work in the mine. Sitting in a pub later on, talking to his mates and finishing a beer, “another one the English won‟t get”, Jos comments on the funeral as follows: “twenty-five years of rotting away here. The same thing will happen to you, bunch of idiots.” The funeral is a demonstration of the desperate poverty of the region: the deceased body is naked, covered only with a suit-front, which is rented anyway, as well as the rosary, which is after the ceremony taken back by the undertaker to be re-used.

After the funeral, Antoine, the undertaker, and Fernand, his assistant, return to the general store owned by Antoine and his wife Cecile. Two more characters are introduced soon: Benoit and Carmen. Benoit is a 14-year-old orphan who helps in the store and lives with Antoine and Cecile. Carmen is a teenage store clerk boarding with them. Benoit and Carmen are decorating the store for the forthcoming Christmas Day while the grumpy owner of the mine, hated by all, is running through the village in his carriage flinging contemptuously little cheap Christmas presents to the doors of his employees.

This is the moment when the gap between the centre and the margins seems to be the deepest, similarly to the job interview scene in Goin‟ Down the Road.

Suddenly, the store‟s phone rings. It is Jos‟s wife calling to say that her son, barely older than Benoit, has died and to ask Antoine to come to collect the body. Benoit begs his aunt into letting him go with Antoine. The journey back home changes in a terrifying experience, firstly due to the snow storm, secondly because of Antoine‟s breakdown. When Benoit brings to Antoine‟s attention: “We lost the body. We‟ve got to get it,” Antoine refuses to return for the coffin: “I can‟t, Benoit. Sometimes, you just can‟t.” At that moment, Benoit takes over the role of the dominant male, encouraging his desperate drunk uncle: “Sure, you can. I have a cast and I can. We‟re almost there. Don‟t give up.” Anyway, Antoine does give up and it is up to Benoit to bring him home.

When they arrive, Antoine is too drunk to get in. When looking for help, Benoit catches his aunt Cecile making love with Fernand. Cecile forces Fernand to wake up Benoit and set off to find the coffin. Having arrived at Jos‟s house,

Benoit finds Jos and all his family mourning over the opened coffin.

8.2 Main Characters

Mon Oncle Antoine provides a wide range of characters, covering all the above mentioned prototypes listed by Atwood and Fothergill, namely the coward, the bully, the clown, the victim and the loser.

8.2.1 The Coward and the Clown

Like Pete in Goin‟ Down the Road, Antoine grows from a coward into a clown. The primarily publicly stoic Antoine breaks down completely on the way from Jos‟s house and confesses to Benoit that for the last thirty years he has been a hen-pecked coward: “What am I doing here? I‟m not happy. I‟m not made for this country. I hate it here. I wanted to buy a hotel in the States. Your aunt wouldn‟t let me. I‟m afraid of corpses. For thirty years I‟ve been terrified.”

What he does not know is that at the moment when he, an old wolf, is pouring out his heart to Benoit, a cub, his wife Cecile is cuckolding him with Fernand. In

Benoit‟s eyes, a respected uncle changes into a clown who admits his long-life cowardice.

8.2.2 The Bully Working in the store as a clerk, Carmen, a teenage girl, boards with

Antoine and Cecile. Nevertheless, all the money she earns ends up in the pocket of her father, who is an abusive bully. He appears just to collect her wages, not even wishing Carmen a merry Christmas.

8.2.3 The Victim and the Loser

All asbestos mine workers are actually victims and losers. Their despair, hopelessness and resignation are reflected not only in the realism of their

“grainy” and “pasty” faces, as Monk mentions above, but also in the realistic depiction of the countryside “packed with unflattering images”, in Monk‟s words. The poor town of Black Hawk is surrounded by slag heaps of asbestos mines. Their largeness only emphasizes the smallness of the losers and victims who, as Jos points out bitterly, are doomed to rot away, i.e. die of lungs diseases caused by work in the mines. At the beginning of the film, Jos seems to be the only winner out of the “bunch of idiots”, a hero brave enough to refuse to “go on licking their ass”, to send the English to the hell and to quit his job in the mines. He decides to leave the shabby and polluted town and to try his luck in the north, working as a lumberjack outside in the sun and clean air.

Nevertheless, Jos soon turns out to be a coward leaving behind all his family and asking his oldest son to take over the role of the head of the family. At the end of the film, however, Jos appears to be the greatest loser of all as Benoit finds him bending over the coffin of his dead oldest son.

9. Family Viewing by Atom Egoyan Family Viewing is a 1987 low-budget drama film directed by Atom

Egoyan. Cameron Bailey argues that the film is “an urban elegy”. According to him, the film is about the triumph of recording technology, about video, about the tragedy of patriarchy, about memory and history, and about the loss of the mother. In an interview by Ron Burnett, Atom Egoyan claims that “the film is about control; it‟s about how people exercise control over others but, on the other hand, [he] wanted to make sure that the environment of the shooting itself was not that controlled.”

The limitedness of the budget had a great impact on the film, as Egoyan explains in the interview: “When you‟re working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind is when you are writing it that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum; you have to be able to deploy the themes that you want to address with a minimum of means.”

According to Egoyan, “one of the real joys of working with a small budget [is] that you have to determine exactly what it is that you need and want to say”.

Being forced “to keep the characters down to a minimum” is, as Egoyan points out in the interview, “a great starting point because you are able to deal with the central archetypes in our society. They can be reduced to Father Figure,

Mother Figure, Figure of the Child, the Figure of one generation against another generation. That ties in so neatly with the generational texture [he] was trying to use in Family Viewing”.

9.1 Elegy

As mentioned above, Bailey argues that Family Viewing “follows in the tradition of the elegy”. Nevertheless, as he specifies, “if Family Viewing is to be read as an elegy, it is as an urban, not a pastoral one”. “Egoyan‟s urban landscapes,” as Bailey perceives them, are “still muted compared to the way many of us experience them”. Anyway, they are “new to Canadian film, and new to Canada-propre”. Egoyan‟s concerns and methods seem to Bailey “on one level to be textbook „Canadian‟”. However, “the films have expanded the frames of reference,” as Bailey points out, “if only to force Canadian critics to engage with ethnicity, to make that one more factor in the technology- voyeurism equation”.

9.2 Ethnicity

Family Viewing is Atom Egoyan‟s “response to the centre/no-centre paradox in ethnicity and technology, […] where ethnicity, both dominant and marginal, is problematized” (Bailey). Indeed, the ethnic differences make the father-son relationship complicated, with the troubles being “played out on the bodies of the two „fully‟ Armenian characters, Van‟s mother and his grandmother, Armen,” as Bailey points out. The clash of ethnicities climaxes in the scene where Stan, the father, congratulates Van, his little son, on learning a song in English. By rooting the Armenian out of his son, Stan succeeds in enforcing his WASP culture. The central ethnicity steamrollers the marginal one.

In fact, the victory is presaged in a family pornographic spectacle in which

Van‟s mother, tied up and gagged, looks in the camera setting her face in a gesture of silent sorrow. Alike the grandmother, who is Armenian too, the mother is silent throughout the film.

Nevertheless, according to Bailey, the WASP ethnicity is questioned in the film as well: WASP ethnicity is […] made strange [and] the home is the site of

strangeness. […] Collapsing TV upon habitual TV watchers makes one

point about the connections among technology, the family and WASP

ethnicity; choosing a detached, anti-television acting style makes

another. Much of the meaning of these scenes in the family home is built

in the pauses between lines of dialogues, and by the actors‟ inexpressive

faces. […] The dialogue interrupts „unnatural‟ pauses (or vice versa),

taking the form of a predetermined game, as if technique had invaded

conversation.

9.3 Technology

As Kroker argues, “it is a distinctively modern fate to live technology as a kind of second biology which, whether in city architecture, chemically processed foods, sound production or the zooming lens of the camera eye, defines and limits the human condition” (128). According to Kroker, technology is able to sweep away the borders between the centre and margins because, according to him, “everyone is peripheralized by the systemic logic of technological society”

(129). Nevertheless, Egoyan disproves this argument by employing technology to create borders and underscore differences, as Bailey notices and expands on: “Video images in the condominium and film images elsewhere suggest, by virtue of image texture alone, that the film constructs an opposition between the mediated nature of this family‟s existence (also shot in colder, blue colours) and the warmer, more „real‟ environment of down-to-earth Armenian women.”

Moreover, Egoyan employs various nature documentaries in the film in order to underline the difference between innate schemes of the Nature and artificial schemes of the family, a WASP social unit.

9.4 Tragedy of Patriarchy

The family structure in the film is patterned on a strict patriarchy model, following the Western tradition, “as do most of the Western family‟s institutions,” Bailey argues. What he means is the following: “patriarchy, strict sexual taboos, simultaneous misogyny and mother-worship, division of women into wives and concubines, and the notion of children as capital investment, maturing over 15 years or so and turning a tidy profit for the father”.

As mentioned above, in Family Viewing Egoyan deals with “the central archetypes in our society […] reduced to Father Figure, Mother Figure and

Figure of the Child”. Actually, as Egyoan claims, “the whole film is about people being convinced that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes. And this is what the tragedy of patriarchy lies in, as Egoyan expands:

The father‟s folly is that he really believes he can be a much more simple

person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity

as a human being, and that is where the irony of the film comes off, in

terms of the language it employs – where he tries desperately to be “TV

Dad”, to give advice and it‟s so pat it becomes ridiculous.

It is his interest in technology that finally forces the father to simplify his life and trivialize himself to complete the process of tragedy of patriarchy.

9.5 Memory and history

On the one hand, photography reconstitutes the family; on the other hand, it encourages its disintegration. As Bailey argues, “photography […], as the first domestic-image producing technology, seems [to have] been instrumental in reconstituting the family, in maintaining it, and in reinforcing technical society”. “Modern image technology,” Bailey continues, “has […] created something of a memory industry within family systems. Snapshots, home movies and home tapes commodify family memories, creating the notion of an empirical domestic history, as well as concretizing the notion of progress.”

Opposing Bailey‟s theory of the reconstituting function of photography, Roland

Barthes claims in his book Camera Lucida that photographs are testimony, i.e. material products, rather than elusive memories. “A family photograph,”

Barthes argues, “constitutes the family outside of itself. It demarcates it, formally in the case of studio photographs, informally in the case of snapshots.”

According to Barthes, “not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory

[…] but it actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory”. In order to illustrate this theory of his, Barthes gives the following example: “One day, some friends were talking about their childhood memories; they had any number; but I, who had just been looking at my old photographs, had none left.” This is exactly what happens to Van. Upon the disappearance of his mother, Van desperately tries to put together the pieces of the family‟s jigsaw to realize what has happened because he does not remember anything himself.

What helps him is just technology, namely videos recorded by his father.

Anyway, these tapes reveal the terrifying truth about his father‟s despotic and abusing behaviour towards Van‟s mother. Hence, it is technology that encourages the decay of the family in the film.

9.6 Loss of Mother With his biological mother having disappeared, Van starts a hunt for the truth. What he finds out from videos recorded by his father is that his mother was messed over by Van‟s cruel father. Besides the biological mother, however,

Van has other three “mothers”, namely Sandra, Aline and Armen. Sandra is his stepmother and lover in one. Aline is his lover but also a kind of “step- stepmother” because she is involved in sex trade with Van‟s father. Actually, when Stan makes love with Sandra, Aline provides the voice to Sandra‟s body.

All the biological mother, Sandra and Aline are engaged in submissive sex with

Stan. Armen is Van‟s grandmother, the only woman who keeps out of Stan‟s sexual practices and the only one who provides Van with a sort of maternal affection. She is the only one who Van can physically hug.

9.7 Plot

Van, a fresh high school graduate, often sees Armen, his grandmother, who lies mute in a poor quality nursing home where she has been placed by

Stan, her son-in-law and Van‟s father. When visiting his grandmother at the nursing home, Van meets Aline, whose mother lies in the next bed. Aline works as a phone-sex worker and as such she does not earn enough to provide her mother with better living conditions. Stan, who works for a consumer electronics company, could afford to pay a higher quality nursing home for

Armen but refuses to do that. Frequently visiting the old ladies, Van and Aline become closer. Van‟s mother is absent from the family, except for old home videos. Actually, she disappeared years ago and Stan grudges visiting his mother-in-law. He does so once, but his visit ends up in a disaster as at first

Stan does not even recognize Armen and then, when he finally finds her, Armen attacks him. Van tries to persuade his father to let Armen live with them.

When Stan refuses to do so, Van tries to persuade Sandra.

Sandra is Stan‟s new wife who carries on a secret sexual affair with Van.

As far as Stan is concerned, Sandra just “provides” her body for his telephone sex with Aline. When Van reveals that Stan is re-using old videotapes of their family to record himself having sex with Sandra, he decides to swap the tapes for blank ones in order to save them. Van brings the tapes to the nursing home and shows them to Armen.

Aline is asked by a client to accompany him to Montreal. She asks Van to take care of her mother while she is away doing the escort job. Aline‟s mother, convinced that Aline intends to leave her, commits suicide by taking an overdose of her medicine. Van decides to swap the two old ladies so that it looks like that his grandmother has died. Van tells his father that Armen is dead. Before Aline comes back from Montreal, Van holds a funeral for her mother, having her buried in an unmarked grave. On Aline‟s arrival, Van tells her the truth, showing her a videotape of the funeral. Aline is indignant but as the time passes, she develops a closer relationship with Van. Van confides to her his plan of getting his grandmother out of the nursing home. Aline should pretend that she is taking her own mother out. The plan turns out well and

Armen is soon staying with Aline in her apartment. Aline starts working in a hotel. Having taken a job in the same hotel, Van moves in Aline‟s apartment bringing with the old tapes he has stolen from Stan. Watching them Van discovers images of his biological mother humiliated in bondage as a part of their sexual activities. In the meantime, Sandra meets Van to warn him that Stan has become suspicious and hired a private detective to track both Van and Aline. The thing is that Stan discovered Van replaced the sex videotapes by blanks and wants to get his sex ones back. Moreover, Stan walked in on Aline visiting what he thinks is his mother-in-law‟s grave. After Stan‟s visit to Aline‟s place in order to confront her, Van decides that it is necessary to move his grandmother to the hotel where both Van and Aline work as he hopes it is a place where Armen will not be discovered. Yet, Stan is on their trail. With the private detective‟s assistance, Stan searches out the room in the hotel where Armen is being kept.

Anyway, just before he arrives, Van has Armen removed from the hotel, reporting her as a homeless woman staying in a storage area. While Armen is safely moved to a new, better nursing home, Stan collapses in one of the hotel rooms, with his first wife laughing at him in a sarcastic way from the screen of a TV set in the room. In the final scene, visiting Armen in her new nursing home, Van and Aline find her sitting and talking to her daughter, Van‟s mother.

9.8 Main Characters

Stan, the main male character of Family Viewing, is a monster in many ways. In Fothergill‟s terminology, Stan is a perfect bully. His only desire is for a complete mastery over his son, his wife, and his lovers. He exercises power over all these people to enforce patriarchy and the WASP culture in his family.

His home becomes a site of strangeness. All the domestic dialogues are, as

Bailey recognizes, “laboriously, etymologically di-alogues: characters speak to each other in a back-and-forth, question and answer style that seems as artificial as a catechism”. As mentioned above Stan is persuaded that he can reduce himself to his archetype, to the Father Figure, the “TV Dad”. Anyway, his craving for a complete mastery is so “pat [that] it becomes ridiculous”, as

Egoyan admits, and finally ruins him completely. Exhausted from the chase for

Armen and his own memories, Stan ends up lying on the floor in a hotel room collapsed and laughed at by his first wife who he abused and tyrannized. As

Fothergill would describe: “the Canadian male as Bully can be seen shading into another incarnation: the Clown”.

10. Videodrome by David Cronenberg

Videodrome is a 1983 science-fiction body horror film by David

Cronenberg, being widely awarded upon its release. It shared the Best Science-

Fiction Film prize at the International Festival of Fantasy Film in Brussels in

1984, and was nominated for eight Genie Awards.

10.1 Genres

According to Bart Testa, “Cronenberg blends horror and science-fiction, he deploys expressive imagery calculated to overwhelm narrative linearity, and, more radically, he actively refuses to become a „competent‟ narrative filmmaker.

Instead he has devised a serial style of construction that is, at best, a parody of conventional narrative style”. Piers Handling agrees with Testa, claiming that

“David Cronenberg‟s films are looked upon as aberrations in the cinematic landscape of [Canada]; stylistically and imaginatively the films apparently do not belong”. “Formally,” Handling argues, “Cronenberg finds himself working within genres – horror and science fiction – that are totally alien to […] the overwhelming artistic tradition within which the Canadian artist functions,” i.e. realism. 10.2 Anti-realism

As Handling points out, Cronenberg appears to keep himself outside the realistic tradition. “His interest in the subconscious and its hidden depths has led him away from a strict observation of, and adherence to, surface reality,”

Handling argues, adding that “reality for Cronenberg is immediately divisible into two perceptions of it – subjective and objective, or internal and external”.

Nearly the entire Videodrome is based on the principle of “epistemological uncertainty”, as Handling names it. Illusion and reality grow impossible to distinguish from each other. This is how Handling describes the moment when

Cronenberg most retreats from realism: “Beneath the appearance of order, repressed forces of sexuality, passion and desire are lurking, waiting to be released on an unsuspecting society. It is at this moment that Cronenberg moves furthest away from the realist tradition. When the forces of the unconscious, the Freudian id, are unleashed, it is to ravage the world of apparent order.”

10.3 Narrative Notion Resistance

“Most commercial cinema, and in particular the American entertainment film,” Handling makes a point, “is based on the concept of narrative closure”, i.e. the films follow the traditional storytelling pattern: “problems are stated, dramatic conflict is asserted, and a resolution is achieved”. Anyway, as Handling notifies, “the concept of narrative closure has come under scrutiny recently because it is suggestive of a number of unspoken ideological implications”.

What Handling means is “that the world can be reduced to identifiable problems that are resolvable; that the resolution of these problems reassures the audience and reaffirms its belief in societal standards; that good always wins out over bad, and so on”. Still, numerous Canadian films resist this narrative notion since by the end of these films little has been sorted out and the audience are often left with more questions than answers. Open endings, i.e. endings providing the audience with no resolution, are evidently diametrically opposed to the narrative closure strategy since the open ending indicates that the world is impossible to reduce to simple schematic equations. This is especially true for Cronenberg and his Videodrome: Is Max‟s death the end or the beginning of a new life?

10.4 Individual vs. Community

In some of Cronenberg‟s films, the above mentioned tensions result in an individual-community struggle, as Handling expands: “Cronenberg‟s world is full of this continual dialectic tension, incorporating the dualities of good and evil, the mind and body, the rational and the irrational, the id and the superego, liberation and repression.” On the one hand, Handling claims that “this tension is translated structurally into themes that are commonplace in a great deal of

Canadian cinema”. On the other hand, Handling admits, “in some [of

Croneneberg‟s films], the dialectic translates into the struggle between the individual and the community”. In Videodrome, this struggle is evident: Max blunders between contradictory powers of Convex‟s Spectatular Optical and

O‟Blivion‟s Cathode Ray Mission.

10.5 Victimization

As mentioned above, Handling claims that what is “pervasive” in

Canadian cinema is the sense of victimization, which, according to some, “expresses a colonized mentality.” Canadians see themselves “as the exploited

– historically and culturally,” as Handling perceives. What contributes to this idea of victimization, in Handling‟s opinion, is “a feeling of entrapment,” which appears especially in Cronenberg‟s cinema. In Videodrome, it is demonstrated mainly at the end of the film when Max comes across an abandoned boat, which resembles a condemned vessel, and boards it in order to spend the last moments of his life in confusion.

What is also worth mentioning is how sexual entrapment is dealt with in

Videodrome. Handling finds the way Cronenberg examines sexual entrapment

“fascinating”, especially the sex roles interchange. Having got a slit in his stomach which looks like a vagina, Max becomes violated repeatedly by pushing a videotape into this slip, which Handling calls “a graphic image of penetration”.

Anyway, as Handling points out, “no freedom or liberation is achieved through this transsexual mutation”. Max becomes, according to Handling, “tormented by his newfound organ”, becoming “a victim of it in the true sense of the word”.

He fails to a greater or lesser extent. The sense of victimization is closely bound to the issue of determinism, as Handling points out: “If the films are not determinist, there is nevertheless a grim overtone of fatalism that is difficult to ignore. Society, in all its guises, conspires against the individual.”

10.6 Plot

Max Renn, the president of CIVIC-TV (Channel 83, Cable 12), a revolting and snuff Toronto UHF television station, which focuses on sensationalistic broadcasting, is dissatisfied with the current repertoire of the station, considering it too soft-core pornography. That is why he starts a quest for something hard-core which would win recognition of new audience.

One morning, Renn is called to a secret and illegal office of Harlan, who is in charge of a pirate satellite dish run by CIVIC-TV, which enables bootleg broadcasting from as far away as Asia. It is Harlan who introduces to Renn

Videodrome, a TV show broadcast from Malaysia lacking any plot and depicting cruel torture and subsequent murder of anonymous victims in a weird reddish chamber. Considering Videodrome to be the future of his TV station, Renn commands Harlan to start with the show pirating.

Renn is invited to participate in a talk show in order to defend the programming selection of his TV station. Other participants are Nicki Brand, a sadomasochistic psychiatrist, and Professor Brian O‟Blivion, a philosopher and pop-culture analyst, who is not present physically. He only appears on a television screen in the studio, with his image being broadcast from a remote location. Actually, O‟Blivion hijacks the interview in order to deliver a speech foretelling a future in which television replaces real life.

When Renn dates Nicki and plays her an Videodrome episode, she gets sexually aroused and makes him have sex with her while watching the episode.

When seeing Harlan in his office again, Renn is informed that the signal does not come from Malaysia, that Videodrome is being broadcast from Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania. When Renn recounts his discovery to Nicki, she decides to go to

Pittsburgh in order to audition for the show. Anyway, she never comes back to

Toronto that is why Renn contacts Masha Borowski, a soft-core feminist pornographer and asks her for help. He needs to realize the truth about

Videodrome. Through Masha, especially her long-term links to the porn community, Renn finds out that Videodrome is a part of political ideology, a kind of public face of it. The problem is that the movement is not specified in any way, however, evidently has violent goals.

As Masha reveals to Renn that Brian O‟Blivion is aware of Videodrome,

Renn searches out O‟Blivion‟s office and is encouraged to participate in marathon sessions of television viewing. The mission, as Renn learns, is operated by Bianca, O‟Blivion‟s daughter. The only objective of the mission is to give rise to O‟Blivion‟s vision of a world in which television substitutes reality.

Later on, Renn watches a video where O‟Blivion lets him know that “the battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena, the

Videodrome”. “The TV screen is,” according to O‟Blivion, “part of the physical structure of the brain.” “Whatever appears on TV screen,” O‟Blivion claims,

“emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. TV is reality and reality is less than TV.”

Shortly after viewing the video, Renn starts suffering from disturbing hallucinations. In one of them, he finds himself tied up to a chair with a hooded figure strangling him. When the hood comes off, Renn recognizes Nicki, her lips filling a TV screen, her voice luring Renn: “Come to me.” When Renn leans close to the screen, it sucks in his face. At the mission, Bianca explains to Renn that his hallucinations are side-effects caused by watching Videodrome.

Videodrome, as Renn learns from Bianca, is actually a carrier of an insidious broadcast signal which brings about malignant tumour in the brain of the viewer. Her father, Bianca expands, helped to create Videodrome as part of his vision for the future. Anyway, when realizing that it was to be abused for treacherous purposes, he tried to stop his partners. When he failed, however, his own invention was used to kill him.

Renn leaves Bianca with an armful of videotapes which O‟Blivion recorded in the year before his death and which now serve as the basis of his television appearances. While viewing one of the tapes and holding a gun, Renn observes his stomach opening like a vagina slit and sucking his gun in. At the same time, Renn hears O‟Blivion arguing on the tape that “there is nothing real outside our perception of reality”.

The producer of Videodrome, the Spectacular Optical Corporation, is an eyeglasses company operating as a cloak for a producer of NATO weapons.

Barry Convex, the head of the company contacts Renn, confessing that he has been cooperating with Harlan on getting Renn to broadcast Videodrome as part of a crypto-government plot in order to get North America rid of underworld fixated on extreme sex and violence. Their aim is to put a fatal brain tumour into the brain of each “lowlife”, hence to clear North America both morally and ideologically. Convex manufactures a high-tech helmet which should record

Renn‟s hallucinations, puts it on Renn‟s head and abandons him in the room.

In his hallucinations, Renn finds himself in Videodrome with Nicki, whipping an organic TV set. Meanwhile, Nicki transforms into Masha. When

Renn wakes up, he is in his own bed with dead Masha lying next to him. Renn phones Harlan to come to his place with a camera. Anyway, when Harlan arrives, he sees nothing in the bed to take a photo of. Renn, totally stressed out, suggests viewing the last night‟s Videodrome broadcast because he is in it.

In the laboratory, however, Harlan discovers that there never was any broadcast, just pre-recorded videotapes, which he never viewed. Right at that moment, Convex comes in announcing that they chose Channel 83 for the first transmission of the Videodrome signal.

Being influences by Convex, Renn makes a pulsating videotape and his stomach-slit opens to receive it. Convex commands Renn to kill his partners and give him Channel 83. When Renn draws his gun out of the slit, a black metal wire extends into his hand. Commanded by Convex, Renn goes to the boardroom of Channel 83 station and shoots dead both Moses and Raphael. By then, his gun/hand has become a single organic fusion. Renn‟s next target is

Bianca O‟Blivion. He intrudes into the Mission, but comes to a halt when Bianca plays him the scene of Nicki‟s death on Videodrome. Renn realizes that Nicki was killed on the show along with all those other people by Spectacular Optical

Corporation. Bianca inserts into Renn‟s slit her own videotape, re-programming him to pursue the ones responsible for Videodrome creation. Bianca persuades

Renn: “You have become the video world made flesh, you have to turn against the Videodrome. Death to Videodrome. Long live the new flesh.”

Back at the Channel 83 studios, Harlan praises Renn for the well-done job, intending to change his program. Instead, Harlan realizes in horror that

Renn‟s hand has become a ticking grenade. The explosion which follows kills

Harlan and makes a hole in the wall of the studio. Renn dispassionately steps out and finds himself at the Spectacular Optical trade show at the Toronto

Convention Centre, just at the moment when Convex introduces the new spring collection of the company. Coming closer to the stage, Renn shoots Convex dead with his gun/hand. Convex‟s lifeless body drops on the floor, erupting in a bloody and disgusting mess of tumours. As the audience yell in horror and panic, Renn waves his hand/gun to the crowd declaring: “Death to Videodrome.

Long live the new flesh.”

Finally, Renn takes shelter on an abandoned boat in a desolate harbour, where Nicki appears to him on the screen of a TV set, lecturing him that he has made Videodrome weaker, however, in order to vanquish it completely, he is supposed to “leave the old flesh”. Afterwards, the television offers Renn an image of him shooting himself in the head with his gun/hand. This action brings about an explosion of the TV set, leaving the boat deck stained with bloody human intestines and mess of various colours. Following the image which has just been shown to him on the TV screen, Renn, declaring “Long live the new flesh”, pulls the trigger.

10.7 Main Characters

10.7.1 Max Renn

As Bart Testa writes in “Panic Pornography: Videodrome from production to seduction”, “Videodrome is firmly rooted in the tradition of the

Kammerspielfilm, the single-character drama in which the inner state of the protagonist controls the dynamics of composition and the mood of the piece as a whole”. According to Testa, “the character‟s state becomes the whole enunciation of the work”. “From the very beginning,” Testa argues,

“Videodrome extends to Max‟s point-of-view this sort of extreme enunciatory potency.” “Even when scenes do not begin with Max, “ Testa expands, “the camera‟s trackings, zooms, dollies and pans obediently return to him; all the film‟s movements through space and time are obsessively centred on his screen presence.”

At the beginning, as Testa perceives it, “Max […] seems to hold pride of place, the place of pure „production‟: his potent gaze enjoys a conjuring mastery over erotic spectacle. At his command, porn images appear; they are gathered, distributed, according to what Max sees and wants”. Handling agrees with Testa claiming that “Max Renn in Videodrome has a real energy that so many of his counterparts lack.” Anyway, as Handling continues, Max “soon becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue that results in his death/suicide. Finally he, loo, is as powerless as the others”. He gets under the control of the scientists/fathers to such an extent that he grows into a massacring monster.

Nevertheless, “in terms of sequence, narrative space and system of point-of- view,” Testa argues, “Max has not simply become the monster, his slit means he has become the obscene spectacle he, as the holder of the pornographic gaze, had stood outside of.”

In the words of Atwood, Max is a victim and loser. In the words of

Handling, he “fall[s] into a time-honoured tradition of Canadian men, [i.e.] uninteresting, particularly when contrasted with the scientists, hav[ing] certain flatness as [a] character and finding [himself] consigned to the periphery of much of the action”.

10.7.2 Other characters

10.7.2.1 Scientists/Fathers

As far as the other male characters in Videodrome are concerned, Testa points out the following: At the segmental level, Cronenberg replicates in Videodrome the

favoured narrative design of his later films: set piece spectacular scenes

alternating with sequences in which secondary characters (here O‟Blivion

and Convex, and usually, like them, paternal figures) tell the hero-

monster the origins of his monstrosity, which is always the secret history

of his body as a technological product.

The other – paternal – male characters in Videodrome serve to underscore the

Oedipal structure on to which the film is mapped. This is where an American male character distinguishes from his Canadian counterpart, as Fothergill explains: “The American male fought the Oedipal battle in 1776 to assert his autonomy, while his Canadian brother refused the combat and stayed dutifully at his father‟s side.” O‟Blivion, for instance, informs Max that the signal of

Videodrome creates a new organ of perception, a new eye, and Max‟s stomach immediately opens to become that new eye. “At first,” Testa argues, “this might suggest only the flipping over of erotic positions from Max on top to the „father‟ whose instrument unmans the son.” Anyway, as Testa continues, “when Max‟s gun and hand slip into his lit and he struggles to pull them out, he succeeds only in removing his hand, and so experiences a sort of emasculation by the father”. “The fathers‟ punishing gift to Max,” Testa concludes, “is to ritualize panic as murder, excess of power and further spectacle – and so the shootings in the second half of the film that answer the pornographic passages of the first half.” Hence, it is the fathers‟ words that transform Max. As Handling sees it, the Cronenberg father figure, mainly O‟Blivion, stands over all the painful struggles of Max, “a benign but misguided scientist, who wants to better the world but ends up releasing nightmarish forces that he cannot control”.

10.7.2.2 Villains

Videodrome does not show any individual villain, or the Bully in

Fothergill‟s terminology. Instead, it presents collective ones of two kinds: corporations and technology. As far as corporations are concerned, there are two bullies in Videodrome: Consec and Spectacular Optical. Consec, which is officially an international security organization, illegally trades in weapons, supporting private armies. Spectacular Optical is well-known as a manufacturer of glasses. In fact, however, it produces missile-guidance systems for NATO.

Both these companies get out of control and should be stopped. In all

Cronenberg‟s films, as Handling argues, “bourgeois society is shown to be bankrupt and in retreat, using the army, the police, or its technology in attempts to restore order when it can within the hypocrisy and sterility of this society”.

Regarding technology, it is as unsafe, treacherous and antihuman as corporations. To a considerable extent, Videodrome spins around fear of the machine. Inanimate technological amenities, such as TV sets, videotapes or guns, come to life before the eyes of audience. The things “seem to have their own autonomy,” Handling points out. “The power of television is awesome,”

Handling warns, “apparently infinite and capable of great destruction. […]

Technology becomes an extension of a treacherous and mendacious universe.”

11. Comparison of Male Characters Analyzing behavioural characteristics of male protagonists in the above examined Canadian films, i.e. Goin‟ Down the Road, Mon Oncle Antoine, Family

Viewing, and Videodrome, one comes to a conclusion that each character can be labelled either the Coward, the Bully or the Clown, in Fothergill‟s terminology, or the Victim or the Loser, as Atwood tags them.

11.1 The Coward

Goin‟ Down the Road provides an excellent example of the Coward, namely Joey. He has,” as Fothergill points out, “a good deal of the Coward about him. Bewildered by big-city life, and with a tendency to get maudlin drunk, he finally runs out on the whole mess, leaving a pregnant and newly- evicted wife to fend for herself” (237). In fact, Joey fails to provide for his wife

Betty since the time she has to stop working because of her pregnancy. Instead of proving to be a real man and support for his newly forming family, Joey sinks into indifference, letting Pete take over the breadwinner role.

11.2 The Coward Incarnating into the Clown

Antoine, the main male character of Mon Oncle Antoine, changes from a coward into a clown. He loses face before Benoit by confessing to being a hen- pecked coward for the last thirty years. In a very impressive scene, Antoine asks himself what he is doing in Canada, the country for which he is not made, in which he is not happy, and which he hates. Antoine reveals to Benoit his dearest wish to buy a hotel in the United States but admits in a humiliating way that his wife would never let him do that. Instead, she makes him work as an undertaker although he is afraid of corpses. That is why he has been terrified for the last thirty years. Moreover, the act of confession changes into a performance of clown as the primarily publicly stoic Antoine breaks down completely. The transformation into a clown is intensified by the fact that as

Antoine is pouring out his heart to Benoit, his wife Cecile is cuckolding him with

Fernand.

11.3 The Bully

In Mon Oncle Antoine, there is a supporting role of Carmen, a teenager girl and a clerk working in the store who boards with Antoine and Cecile because her father is an abusive bully. He comes to see his daughter just in order to collect all the money she earns in the store. His daughter seems to be just a “cash machine” for him. When he appears to collect her wages before

Christmas, he does not even wish Carmen a merry Christmas.

Videodrome provides a wide range of bullies, coming under three labels: scientists/fathers, corporations, and technology. As far as the bullying scientists/fathers are concerned, Testa points out the following:

At the segmental level, Cronenberg replicates in Videodrome the

favoured narrative design of his later films: set piece spectacular scenes

alternating with sequences in which secondary characters (here O‟Blivion

and Convex, and usually, like them, paternal figures) tell the hero-

monster the origins of his monstrosity, which is always the secret history

of his body as a technological product.

The other – paternal – male characters in Videodrome serve to celebrate the controlling power of fatherhood and to underscore the Oedipal structure upon which the film is spun. This is where a Canadian male character distinguishes from his American counterpart, who, as Fothergill explains above “fought the Oedipal battle in 1776 to assert his autonomy”. His Canadian brother, on the other hand, was not willing to struggle and stayed obediently at his father‟s side, as Fothergill points out. When O‟Blivion, a fundamental paternal character, informs Max about the ability of Videodrome to create a new eye as a new organ of perception, Max‟s belly opens at once to become that new eye.

At the beginning, as Testa points out, this might be understood as an indicator of the turn-over of erotic positions from Max onto the „father‟ whose tool emasculates the son. Later on, however, Testa notices another sign of emasculation. When Max‟s gun and hand slip into his slit and Max, fighting to pull them out, manages to remove only his hand, he suffers a sort of emasculation by the father again. The fathers‟ penalizing present to Max, as

Testa concludes it, “is to ritualize panic as murder, excess of power and further spectacle – and so the shootings in the second half of the film that answer the pornographic passages of the first half.” To sum up, one can notice that what transforms Max is the words of his “fathers” and, as Handling formulates it, the

Cronenberg father figure, mainly O‟Blivion, is the originator of all the aching fights of Max. Handling perceives this bullying father figure as a compassionate but ill-advised scientist who intends to improve the world but ends up emitting nightmarish forces that get out of his control.

Regarding corporations, there are two bullies, two collective villains, presented in Videodrome: Consec and Spectacular Optical. Officially, Consec stands for an international security organization; illegally, however, it trades in weapons, supplying private armies. Spectacular Optical, outwardly a well-known manufacturer of glasses, actually produces missile-guidance systems for NATO. Both these corporations become even more dangerous villains as they get out of control. In all Cronenberg‟s films, as Handling argues, “bourgeois society is shown to be bankrupt and in retreat, using the army, the police, or its technology in attempts to restore order when it can within the hypocrisy and sterility of this society”.

Concerning technology, it is as antihuman and dangerous as corporations. To a significant degree, Videodrome deals with fear of the machine. Inanimate technological achievements, such as TV sets, videotapes or guns, come alive before the eyes of audience. The things “seem to have their own autonomy,” Handling points out. “The power of television is awesome,”

Handling warns, “apparently infinite and capable of great destruction. […]

Technology becomes an extension of a treacherous and mendacious universe.”

11.4 The Bully Incarnating into the Clown

Stan, the key male protagonist of Family Viewing, is in many ways an example of what Fothergill calls the Bully. He longs for one thing only: to win a complete mastery over his son, his wife, and his lovers. Stan attempts to exercise power over all these people in order to enforce patriarchy and the

WASP culture in his family. The family structure in the film is spun upon a strict patriarchy model, resulting from the Western tradition and as such based on

“patriarchy, strict sexual taboos, simultaneous misogyny and mother-worship, division of women into wives and concubines, and the notion of children as capital investment, maturing over 15 years or so and turning a tidy profit for the father”, as Bailey lists. Stan‟s home grows into a site of weirdness. What

Bailey points out is the etymologically laborious structure of the domestic dialogues since the characters in the film speak to each other in a back-and- forth, question and answer style that seems as artificial as a catechism. As

Egoyan admits in the interview mentioned above, Family Viewing presents “the central archetypes in our society […] reduced to Father Figure, Mother Figure and Figure of the Child”. As a matter of the fact, the whole film is about people who are persuaded that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes, as

Egoyan explains. And that is the point where Stan‟s bully/clown incarnation starts. The thing is that Stan is convinced that he can reduce himself to his archetype, to the Father Figure, the “TV Dad”, and his desire for a complete mastery gets so “pat [that] it becomes ridiculous”, as Egoyan admits. It is just this desire that finally ruins Stan completely. Exhausted by the chase for Armen and by his own memories, Stan collapses on the floor of a hotel room laughed at by his first wife who he abused and tyrannized. Fothergill describes the transforming process as follows: “the Canadian male as Bully can be seen shading into another incarnation: the Clown”. This degrading incarnation is, in fact, closely associated with the tragedy of patriarchy. It is Stan‟s interest in technology that finally forces the father to simplify his life and trivialize himself to complete the process of tragedy of patriarchy. This is as Egoyan depicts the incarnation process:

The father‟s folly is that he really believes he can be a much more simple

person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity

as a human being, and that is where the irony of the film comes off, in

terms of the language it employs – where he tries desperately to be “TV

Dad”, to give advice and it‟s so pat it becomes ridiculous. 11.5 The Semi-Bully Incarnating into Victim

At first, Max, the main male character of Videodrome, differs significantly from other victim-like characters since he enjoys a trickery mastery over erotic spectacle. Testa points out Max‟s enormous initial pride which he holds over the place of pure erotic production and the power he has over porn images. It is at

Max‟s command that the porn images appear, are collected and distributed.

Handling supports Testa‟s statements and emphasizes the great energy which

Max Renn has unlike many of his counterparts who completely lack it, hence are considered victims at first sight, such as the asbestos mine workers in Mon

Oncle Antoine. One can come to a conclusion then that at first Max is a kind of semi-bully. Anyway, as Handling continues, Max “soon becomes embroiled in a web of intrigue that results in his death/suicide. Finally he, loo, is as powerless as the others”. The proud master finds himself under the control of the scientists/fathers to such a degree that he transfers into a massacring monster manipulated by them. Although, as Testa argues, “in terms of sequence, narrative space and system of point-of-view, Max has not simply become the monster, his slit means he has become the obscene spectacle he, as the holder of the pornographic gaze, had stood outside of”, in Atwood‟s point of view, Max is the Victim and the Loser: a pure victim of technology and a manipulated loser who is not strong enough to break free of the control. In the words of

Handling, he “fall[s] into a time-honoured tradition of Canadian men, [i.e.] uninteresting, particularly when contrasted with the scientists, hav[ing] certain flatness as [a] character and finding [himself] consigned to the periphery of much of the action”. 11.6 The Loser and the Victim

As mentioned above, in Atwood‟s terminology, the asbestos mine workers in Mon Oncle Antoine are victims and losers at first sight (unlike Max in

Videodrome who turns out to be one later on). Their desolation, misery and resignation are clearly shown from the very beginning not only in the realism of their “grainy” and “pasty” faces, as Monk describes it, but also in the realistic depiction of the countryside “packed with unflattering images”, in Monk‟s words. The impoverished town of Black Hawk is surrounded with slag heaps of asbestos mines. Their largeness sharply contracts, hence highlights the smallness of the losers and victims who, as Jos points out bitterly, are doomed to rot away, i.e. die of lungs diseases caused by work in the mines. At the beginning of the film, Jos stands out of the “bunch of idiots” and appears to be the only winner out of the club of losers, a hero brave enough to refuse to “go on licking their ass”, to send the English to the hell and to resign from his job in the mines. He decides to abandon the down-at-heel and dirty town and try his luck in the north, working as a woodcutter in the open fresh air, outside in the sun. Anyway, Jos the hero soon turns out to be a coward who leaves behind all his family and asks his oldest son to take over the role of the head of the family in his absence. Moreover, at the end of the film, Jos appears to be the greatest loser of all as Benoit finds him bending over the coffin of his dead oldest son. At that moment, Benoit is a witness to a hero incarnating into the Loser.

Both Pete and Joey in Goin‟ Down the Road can be labelled the Loser, with Joey deserving the Victim tag too. As Ramsay makes a point above, at the beginning of the film Pete and Joey perceive themselves real men, empowered beings who, although being of marginal origin, are strong enough to conquer the centre and grab all the benefits it provides. Their power, as they feel, results from their maleness and masculinity. “Their sense of mastery,” Ramsay further argues, “is rooted in two basic assertions – sexual prowess and social power”. Nevertheless, having reached Toronto, the men get a cold shower which wakes them up from their sweet yet rather naive dream of empowerment and independence. Their emasculation starts, dooming both Pete and Joey to belong to the category of Losers, as Atwood defines it. Fothergill places Pete and Joey strictly in the group of Cowards and Clowns, wherein cowards are fearful, susceptible, sensitive and soft, while clowns are careless and uncontrolled.

When times are good, Joey and his friend Pete […] caper about with

childish irresponsibility, drinking and frolicking in a fashion that is likeable

enough but rather trying to the women who have to put up with it.

Pete‟s repertoire includes a humiliatingly unsuccessful attempt to

ingratiate himself with a sexy French lady, Nicole Morin. In their antics,

the Canadian male as Coward can be seen shading into another

incarnation: the Clown. (Fothergill 237)

Goin‟ Down the Road proves Atwood‟s theory according to which Canadian men are always depicted in Canadian cultural representations as victims and losers.

This prototypical image of the Canadian male as victim/loser, as Tony Wilden adds, crosses the borders of gender identity and spreads into the even wider concept of Canada as a “feminized” nation. Nevertheless, not all actors doom Pete and Joey as cowards and losers.

Some of them criticize Atwood and Fothergill for their narrow point of view and perceive Pete and Joey barely as victims. According to Ramsay, Pete and Joey

“fail, rebel, and steal groceries for Christmas, not because of some abstract, flawed masculine „Canadian essence‟, but because of real regional, class, cultural, and gender differences in the structure of „the democratic nation‟ called Canada”. Ramsay continues:

Pete and Joey are used to display – to make intelligible – differences

within the “strong and cohesive” Canadian imagined community, but

from the peripheral perspective of the margins, and thus suggest that

the reasons for marginality are not simply “innate” but are buried deeply

in regional, class, cultural and gender struggles. Indeed, as things get

progressively worse because of regional, class and cultural tensions,

sexual difference comes to the fore: Pete, as the dominant male, is

called upon to play the traditional masculine gender role of breadwinner

for the pseudo-family of Joey, his wife Betty and himself.

Unlike Atwood and Fothergill, Ramsay seems to advocate Pete and Joey, stating that they are not “merely two prototypical Canadian male losers”. She rather recommends understanding them metonymically, “as marginalized parts of the

Canadian whole” because “theirs is not the commanding and gratuitous violence typical of male mastery and the American cinematic spectacle of empowered masculinity; rather it springs out of a pathetically bungled attempt just to get some food for Christmas dinner”. Knelman appears to share

Ramsay‟s point of view and attempts to defend Pete and Joey as well. Pointing out the importance of the theft in the supermarket, Knelman considers the film

“a case-study of how people get to be criminals”. Knelman accuses the country of “failure to make one region as prosperous as another”. In his opinion, the people become “uprooted [and] stripped of the social customs and institutions that have always given them their bearings”. The dream that tempted Pete and

Joey away from home, i.e. the view of material Eden promised by insincere magazines and TV commercials, turns out to be far beyond their reach in

Toronto. Pete and Joey find themselves unable to merge into the background and get rid of their nature. They are “forced to exist as freaks in a ghetto culture for displaced Maritimers”, Knelman concludes (101).

To sum up, on the one hand, Atwood and Fothergill label Pete and Joey

Losers and Cowards; on the other hand, according to Ramsay and Knelman,

Pete and Joey are Victims, while Joey to a larger extent than Pete. The thing is that unlike Pete, Ramsay points out, “Joey blindly tries to fit in to the middle- class English Canadian dream by getting married and consuming on credit a houseful of furniture he saw advertised on the back of TV guide”. Anyway, he is not able to earn enough to keep such life standard.

11.7 The Coward/Loser Incarnating into the Clown

Goin‟ Down the Road provides a crucial clash between the reality Pete faces in Toronto and his dream of social power he had back home in Nova

Scotia and which was as follows: “a job in an office, some chick for a secretary, company car and my name on the door”. The matter is that Pete is just an unsophisticated manual labourer and as such he does not succeed in finding a job of his dreams. As a consequence, he fails to win the social power he imagined and later on also the sexual mastery. Pete is repeatedly refused by trendy and sophisticated middle-class women interested in literature and classical music. He does manage to get a date with Nicole, a sex-pot working in the same bottling factory; however, he does not succeed in hitting the jack-pot.

Finally, he is left horny outside her door and is forced to hide in the shadows in order to prevent his accomplices from recognizing his failure. Unlike Joey, who is rather the Coward/Loser incarnating into the Victim, Pete can be labelled the

Coward/Loser incarnating into the Clown. Finally, trying to win some sense of identity and belonging, Pete and his friends enjoy themselves in vulgar Eastern forms of entertainment. However, they end up laughed at, doomed as publicly unacceptable and humiliated as marginal by the barman who represents the centre. Unlike Joey, Pete becomes wistful enough to recognize that he and Joey simply do not belong. While Joey acts rather blindly, Pete grows to perceive the sense of their rightful Canadianness as naïve and misunderstood. Depressed, he proposes to Joey to escape with him back into the naïve juvenile fantasy of masculine empowerment and independence which, he has realized by now, is achievable only via alcohol.

Other Canadian male characters in Goin‟ Down The Road cannot be labelled either victims or losers. The bottling factory foreman who watches Pete and Joey closely, monitors strictly every move of theirs, and may be considered rather a bully; and the barman who disgraces them publicly seem to be much more powerful than Pete and Joey. The role of the other Canadian male characters in the film is to draw a distinction between the two marginal victims and losers, underscoring their failures, and the more powerful central characters, underscoring their success. The most noticeable clash is then symbolized in the job interview Pete applies for. The sleek and polished ad executive recommends Pete to return home and get a high school diploma.

What follows from the interview is that while this diploma is absolutely crucial when looking for a good job in Canada‟s imperial centre, Toronto, it was unavailable and unnecessary to Pete when carrying out the only accessible job back home on the docks, in the canneries or mines of Cape Breton. Pete applies for a job in an advertising company being taken in by an encouraging advertisement saying “It‟s all right here – all you have to do is go out and get it.” The problem is that Pete lacks both style and education to “make it” in the centre. “Pete‟s very being visibly annoys and disgusts the condescending big city ad executive whose middle-class livelihood ironically consists in creating the fantasy of belonging for people like Pete” (Ramsay). Pete‟s encounter with the ad executive is a clear indicator of the difference between the marginal

Maritimes and Toronto, Canada‟s imperial centre.

To sum up, one can challenge the prototypical theory of Atwood‟s according to which Canadian men are always depicted in Canadian cultural representations as victims and losers. Wilden‟s prototypical image of the

Canadian male as victim/loser is to be doubted too since the other male characters in the movie prove that the image obviously does not cross the borders of gender identity, does not spread into the even wider concept of

Canada and does not make it a “feminized” nation as a whole.

Conclusion The issue of victimization was introduced to Canadian cinema criticism in

1972 via Margaret Atwood‟s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian

Literature and Robert Fothergill‟s “Coward, Bully or Clown: The Dream Life of a

Younger Brother”. This moment was crucial for the criticism of Canadian film since it doomed it to negativism, which is, as Atwood points out, demonstrated through gender. Under the influence of victimization, Atwood argues, Canadian male heroes are described as crippled victims and born losers. Having asked herself if Canadians have a “will to lose”, which is as intensive as the

Americans‟ will to win, Atwood draws a conclusion that Canadians‟ “will to lose” is inborn, making Canada a “collective victim”. Apparently, Hofsess knows the answer to this question of Atwood‟s too. He argues that Canadian male protagonists are always victims and losers, especially when compared to their

American counterparts whose masculinity is usually glamorized, even in cases of death confrontation.

Atwood is convinced that if Canadians recognized “the real cause of oppression”, they would be able to get rid of this “will to lose”. According to

Fothergill, the main oppressor is the United States, i.e. the stronger brother.

Canada, Fothergill continues, perceives itself as an envious younger brother.

Both Atwood and Fothergill focus on the weak points of the main male characters around whom the narratives revolve. Unlike Atwood, who considers them losers or victims, using the terms interchangeably in spite of the fact that some characters do not have to be both necessarily, Fothergill labels the male protagonists cowards, bullies or clowns, dooming them to “dreams of failure and defeat”. “Especially in relationships with women,” Fothergill points out, “the unprepossessing English Canadian male appears on the screen in several guises, which I have labelled Coward, Bully, and Clown” (235-6). It is interesting to mention at this point that the Canadian cinema criticism before

1972 did not deal with the issue of victimization at all. In the sixties, even the most respected critics focused mainly on the nationalist assumption and the realist tendency acceptance, discussing the main male protagonists from various points of view in terms of their roles in the plot. It is important to point out that they did not dismiss the central characters as doomed victims and losers but discussed them from various perspectives in terms of their roles in the plot.

Besides Atwood and Fothergill, numerous other critics have touched upon the concern of victimization and pointed to the emasculated Canadian male. Hofsess, for instance, comes up with a question why Canadian cinema does not deal with “stronger egos and more confident people, people who can because they think they can”. In response, Fothergill argues that the Canadian condition reflects “the depiction, through many different scenarios, of the radical inadequacy of the male protagonist – his moral failure, especially, and most visibly in his relationships with women”. According to Handling, the sense of victimization is “pervasive” in Canadian cinema. “Some have argued,”

Handling expands, “that it expresses a colonized mentality.” Canadians see themselves “as the exploited – historically and culturally,” Handling claims.

What contributes to this idea of victimization is “a feeling of entrapment,” as

Handling calls it, which appears especially in Cronenberg‟s cinema. As Atwood is convinced, the Canadian national identity rests in the concern of personal and cultural survival. In the light of the utopian American dream driven by the “will to win”, Atwood argues, the hardly surviving colony called English Canada has acquired a desperate “will to lose”. As an example,

Atwood picks up Goin‟ Down the Road, which is, according to her, simply

“dramatization of failure”. “The heroes survive, but just barely,” she claims in

Survival. “They are born losers, and their failure to do anything but keep alive

[…] is pure Canadian, from sea to sea.” The anxiety about survival itself, as

Atwood understands it, is also the anxiety about the obstacles to that survival.

Comparing the earlier writer with their later counterparts, she comes to a conclusion that for the earlier ones these obstacles are external, such as the land or the climate. For the later ones the obstacles grow rather internal and more difficult to identify. They are not obstacles to physical survival any more, rather obstacles to spiritual survival, to life as anything more than a minimally human being. Finally, Atwood draws attention to the fact that the fear of obstacles may sometimes become the obstacle itself, paralyzing the male character by terror of either what he considers as threatening him from outside or elements inside himself that threaten him from within. Atwood warns about the extreme when the protagonist is afraid of the life itself, making the life a threat to life and finding himself in a “moderately vicious circle”.

The negative attitude within the Canadian cinema criticism mentioned above is, as Atwood points out, demonstrated through gender. According to her, Canadian national narrative films are fundamentally gendered, expressing mainly the masculine desire. This desire, as Heath claims, “is spoken through the field of social relations, such as region, class, culture, race, and ethnicity, that work together to variously determine each nation”. “In the modern world,”

Anderson claims, “everyone can, should, will „have‟ a nationality, as he or she

„has‟ a gender” (14). Masculinity, in his opinion, is like the nation, i.e. “an imagined community that seeks for itself the ideal, ordered stability of the centre in order to contain the threats of difference, disorder and death from the margins”. Anderson doubts the existence of all-powerful masculinity, “as a quality of maleness”. Masculinity, in Anderson‟s point of view, is “the imaginative assertion of an eternally stable phallic identity (an identity based in an ethic of male power and domination)”, which means that men, as well as women, “live mentally in the phallic image of a shared communion around empowered maleness” (14). On the one hand, as Michael Kaufman argues,

“masculinity is power”. On the other hand, as he warns, it is “terrifyingly fragile” since it does not really exist, at least not as a biological reality, i.e. something existing inside ourselves. Nevertheless, as Kaufman points out, the masculinity exists as ideology, as coded conduct, within gendered relationships.

As Kaufman sees it, boys and men hide quite a strong uncertainty about their

“male credentials”. This uncertainty results from making maleness equated with masculinity. Nevertheless, “the latter is a pigment of our collective, patriarchal, surplus-repressive imaginations”, as Kaufman distinguishes (13-14). Comparing masculinity and nation, Ramsay realizes, similarly to Anderson and Kaufman, that “masculine identity, like national identity, is not an innate, natural, eternal characteristic of men; rather, it is a product of imagination, a fantasy [… and as such] it is always potentially unstable, fragile and insecure”. Ramsay discovers three features that nation and masculinity have in common: strive for absolute autonomy and imagined exclusivity, strictly drawn “borders and the myth of complete independence from others, while asserting complete rights, sovereignty and freedom for [themselves] in dominating and mastering others”,

“great emotional pain and human sacrifice in the name of brotherhood, fraternity, and „equality‟”. As Faulkner defines it briefly, “masculinity is a site of struggle between connection and independence, as nation is a site of struggle between community and homogeneity”. Both these struggles are reflected in behavioural characteristics of the main male protagonists in all the films examined in this thesis, i.e. Goin‟ Down the Road, Mon Oncle Antoine, Family

Viewing, and Videodrome. Moreover, each of the characters may receive one of the labels proposed by Atwood and Fothergill in the Introduction, namely the

Coward, the Bully, the Clown, the Victim or the Loser.

Fothergill notices that Goin‟ Down the Road provides a great example of the Coward, namely Joey: “He has a good deal of the Coward about him.

Bewildered by big-city life, and with a tendency to get maudlin drunk, he finally runs out on the whole mess, leaving a pregnant and newly-evicted wife to fend for herself” (237). Antoine, the main protagonist of Mon Oncle Antoine, is another Coward, although not a complete one since at the end of the film he incarnates into the Clown. Firstly, he disgraces himself by admitting the cowardice he has experienced for the last thirty years. Secondly, the act of confession changes into a performance of clown as Antoine breaks down completely. Videodrome provides a collection of bullies, namely scientists/fathers, corporations, and technology. As far as the bullying scientists/fathers are concerned, as Testa points out, they “tell the hero-monster the origins of his monstrosity, which is always the secret history of his body as a technological product”. Moreover, they demonstrate the controlling power of fatherhood. It is his fathers‟ words that convert Max. As Handling expresses it, the Cronenberg father figure, mainly O‟Blivion, instruct all the aching struggles of Max, “a benign but misguided scientist, who wants to better the world but ends up releasing nightmarish forces that he cannot control”. Regarding corporations, there are two bullies, two collective villains, presented in Videodrome, namely

Consec and Spectacular Optical. Both of them grow even more dangerous as they get out of control. Concerning technology, it is as antihuman and hazardous as corporations.

Besides the real Bullies, there is also a Semi-Bully in Videodrome, to be more precise, a Semi-Bully incarnating into the Victim. At the beginning of the film, Max seems to have under his control all erotic spectacles, everything happens at his command. Moreover, he is endowed with a real energy, which many of his counterparts lack and which makes him ostensibly different from the other Losers. Nevertheless, Max soon finds himself involved in a net of intrigue and becomes as feeble as the others. He gets under the control of the scientists/fathers to such a degree that he incarnates into a massacring monster on the one hand, and a victim of technology and a manipulated loser on the other. Unlike Max, who is merely a Semi-bully, Stan, the main male protagonist of Family Viewing, is a real abusive Bully in many ways, finally incarnating into the Clown. His only desire is to win a complete mastery over all his family and to enforce patriarchy and the WASP culture within it. Anyway, Stan‟s home becomes a site of strangeness where Stan himself is convinced that he can reduce himself to his archetype, to the Father Figure, the “TV Dad”. His hunger for a complete mastery grows so outspoken that it becomes preposterous and finally destroys him completely. The Canadian male as the Bully can be seen transforming into another incarnation: the Clown. This humbling incarnation is, in fact, closely connected to the tragedy of patriarchy. Moreover, it is Stan‟s interest in technology that finally forces the father to simplify his life and trivialize himself to complete the process of tragedy of patriarchy. Hence, in a way, Stan becomes the Victim of technology as well as Max.

Both Stan and Max incarnate into the Victim gradually, in the course of the film. All asbestos mine workers in Mon Oncle Antoine, however, are excellent examples of the inborn Victim and Loser, doomed to rot away, i.e. die of lungs diseases caused by work in the mines. At the beginning of the film, one of them, Jos, appears to be the only winner out of the “bunch of idiots”, a hero brave enough to refuse to “go on licking their ass”, to send the

English to the hell and to quit his job in the mines. Anyway, Jos the hero soon turns out to be a coward who leaves behind all his family and asks his oldest son to take over the role of the head of the family in his absence. Moreover, at the end of the film, Jos appears to be the greatest loser of all, bending over the coffin of his dead oldest son. In a way, Jos resembles Joey of Goin‟ Down the Road, as both renounce their maintenance obligation and cowardly leave their families behind.

Pete and Joey in Goin‟ Down the Road resemble Jos to a significant extent. As well as Jos, they are a specific kind of losers, inborn yet not aware of that. Originally, they consider themselves empowered beings, conquering heroes who, although being of the marginal origin, can break into the centre and make use of its spoils simply due to their maleness and masculinity.

Nevertheless, having reached Toronto, the men become hopeless witnesses of their gradual emasculation, losers who are not able to assert themselves.

Although Atwood dooms them as losers, Ramsay defends them as victims of

“regional, class, cultural, and gender differences in the structure of „the democratic nation‟ called Canada”. Instead of seeing them as prototypes of

Canadian male losers, she recommends understanding them metonymically, “as marginalized parts of the Canadian whole”. Knelman advocates Joey and Pete too, accusing the country of “failure to make one region as prosperous as another”.

Pete himself is the Loser incarnating into the Clown. Similarly to Joey,

Pete, as a low-educated manual worker, fails to find a job of his dreams and to gain the social power he imagined. Consequently, he does not manage to achieve sexual mastery either. Unlike Joey, who is rather the Coward/Loser and the Victim, Pete can be labelled the Coward/Loser incarnating into the Clown.

To sum up, this thesis examines behavioural characteristics of the main male protagonists in four selected Canadian films, namely Goin‟ Down the

Road, Mon Oncle Antoine, Family Viewing, and Videodrome, considering the notion of victimization which emerged in Canadian film criticism in 1972, under the influence of Margaret Atwood‟s book Survival: A Thematic Guide to

Canadian Literature and Robert Fothergill‟s essay “Coward, Bully or Clown: The

Dream Life of a Younger Brother”. This thesis proves that each main male character in the examined films may receive one of the labels proposed by

Atwood and Fothergill, namely the Coward, the Bully, the Clown, the Victim or the Loser. Nevertheless, the thesis indicates that the other Canadian male characters in Goin‟ Down the Road challenge the prototypical theory of

Atwood‟s according to which Canadian men are always depicted in Canadian cultural representations as victims and losers. Moreover, it doubts her conclusion that Canadians‟ “will to lose” is inborn and that Canada should be perceived as a “collective victim”. Hofsess‟s statement that Canadian male protagonists are always victims and losers, especially when compared to their

American counterparts whose masculinity is usually glamorized is questioned as well.

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Abstract

This diploma thesis deals with behavioural characteristics of the major male characters in four selected Canadian films, namely Goin‟ Down the Road, Mon

Oncle Antoine, Family Viewing, and Videodrome. It considers mainly the notion of victimization which was introduced to Canadian film criticism in 1972 by

Margaret Atwood and Robert Fothergill, with the most influential works being their book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature and essay

“Coward, Bully or Clown: The Dream Life of a Younger Brother” respectively.

The thesis proves that each main male protagonist in the examined movies may be labelled the Coward, the Bully, or the Clown, as proposed by Fothergill, or the Victim or the Loser, as suggested by Atwood. Nevertheless, the thesis also indicates that the side Canadian male characters in Goin‟ Down the Road question the notion of prototypes which Atwood tries to defend and which says that Canadian males are always shown in Canadian cultural representations as victims and losers. Furthermore, they also challenge her conclusion that

Canadians‟ “will to lose” is inborn and that Canada should be perceived as a

“collective victim”. Last but not least, they doubt John Hofsess‟s statement that

Canadian male protagonists are always victims and losers, especially when compared to their American counterparts whose masculinity is usually glamorized.

Resumé

Tato diplomová práce se zabývá chováním a povahovými vlastnostmi ústředních mužských protagonistů ve čtyřech vybraných kanadských filmech, konkrétně

Goin‟ Down the Road, Mon Oncle Antoine, Family Viewing a Videodrome.

Vychází především z pojmu viktimizace, který se objevil v kritice kanadského filmu v roce 1972, a to pod vlivem knihy Margaret Atwoodové Survival: A

Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature a eseje Roberta Fothergilla “Coward,

Bully or Clown: The Dream Life of a Younger Brother”. Tato diplomová práce přináší důkazy o tom, že každý z hlavních hrdinů v analyzovaných filmech může být označen buď Zbabělec, Tyran anebo Klaun, podle Fothergilla, anebo Oběť či

Břídil, v terminologii Atwoodové. Nicméně, tato diplomová práce rovněž naznačuje, že vedlejší kanadské mužské postavy ve filmu Goin‟ Down the Road zpochybňují teorii prototypů, kterou se snaží prosadit Atwoodová a podle níž jsou kanadští muži v kanadské kultuře vždy vylíčeni jako oběti či břídilové. Tito vedlejší mužští hrdinové navíc zpochybňují závěr Atwoodové, že kanadská “vůle prohrát” je Kanaďanům vrozená a že Kanada by měla být vnímána jako

“kolektivní oběť”. V neposlední řadě tyto vedlejší postavy zpochybňují tvrzení

Johna Hofsesse, podle kterého kanadští mužští protagonisté jsou vždy oběťmi či břídily, obzvláště jsou-li porovnáváni se svými americkými protějšky, jejichž mužskost je obvykle idealizována.