Immunize-Nation: Hollywood Contagion and the Biopolitics of the Canadian Nation-Building Project

Peter Hodgins Carleton University

Dr. Peter Hodgins, School of Canadian Studies, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 5B6 [email protected]

Abstract This exploratory essay investigates the fruitfulness of thinking about the intersection of fears of contagion and the construction of national cultural boundaries in relation to cultural nationalist discourse in general and to the specific Canadian nation-building project. It begins by tracing the rise of biopolitical discourses on contagion in the 19th century, explores how these discourses took on a moral-cultural character with the rise of fears of “moral contagion” and “moral degeneracy” and demonstrates how the latter fears were central to early formulations of the cultural policy/media literacy apparatus in the Victorian period. It then investigates how this Victorian fear of cultural contagion continues to animate contemporary Canadian cultural policy discourse and, through a reading of some of the Heritage Minutes, contemporary Canadian cultural nationalist texts.

out of feminist-inflected cultural studies on In their introduction to a special the discursive construction of the Canadian nation as an anthropomorphized and issue of American Literary History titled sexualized body (cf. Atwood 1972; Berland “Contagion and Culture”, Priscilla Wald and 1995; Mackey 1999) as well as a growing her co-editors make an interesting argument: interest among media scholars in applying “Cultural margins and national borders are some of Foucault’s work on often summoned, if not articulated, through governmentality and biopolitics to the study the figure of specific contagious of Canadian cultural policy and institutions diseases…contagion and (national) culture (Dowler 1996; Druick 2007). Furthermore, were [thus] mutually constituted terms even those familiar with Canadian cultural before late-nineteenth century bacteriology” discourse will recognize the manner in (Wald et al. 2002, 617). In this exploratory which the language of cultural contagion essay, I want to investigate the fruitfulness and pollution can even find its way into of thinking about this intersection of fears of contemporary accounts of Canadian cultural contagion and the construction of national development. Ryan Edwardson’s recent cultural boundaries in relation to Canadian : Culture and the Quest cultural nationalist discourse in general and for Nationhood, for example, seems to in relation to a specific nation-building playfully reproduce the biopolitical project. undertones of Canadian cultural policy discourse: “Simply put, if left unrestrained, While, to my knowledge, there has mass media polluted the body politic, but if been no systematic research done on this brought into accordance with nationalist relationship in the Canadian context, there interests, they could be used to disseminate does exist a small body of research coming cultured Canadian content that would

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 25 contribute to the nation’s moral and spiritual Canadian culture as closer to nature, constitution.” (Edwardson 2008, 41). This aesthetically highbrow, non-violent, essay is offered, therefore, as an attempt to uncorrupted, committed to public good but begin to fill the gap in the Canadian powerless before the masculinized figures of literature on culture and biopolitics by start external authority” (Berland 1995, 520). drawing on some of the existing literature in order to better articulate the relationship While Berland asserts that this between discourses of contagion and nation anthropomorphization of Canada as a in Canada and to demonstrate how those passive and dependent body has typically discourses work to structure a specific gendered Canada as a woman, the quote project of nation-building. from the CCOP report suggests another possible reading. In its deployment of the term “perverse” to describe the effects of “opening the door” to “foreign penetration”, Canada as a Sexualized Body the particular articulation of the sexualized discourse of Canadian dependency links up In the final report of the Canadian with traditional medical-psychiatric Culture Online Program’s Advisory Board discourses of male homosexuality as a titled “A Charter for the Cultural Citizen pathological “perversion”. If we accept Online”, an ominous warning is sounded: Cynthia Enloe’s contention that “While broadband networks may connect “nationalism has typically sprung from more to each other, they also masculinised memory, masculinised have the perverse effect of opening the door humiliation and masculinised hope. Anger at to domination by foreign content, which being ‘emasculated’…has been the natural could happen all the more rapidly if fuel for igniting many nationalist Canadian content is a limited choice. movements” (Enloe, 1990: 44) and if we Federal and provincial governments have bear in mind the long history of given priority to the pipes—hence allowing homosexuality being identified as the penetration of foreign product—while “unpatriotic” and antinationalist (Kinsman paying far too little attention to the funding and Gentile 2009; Peterson 1999), then the of our own cultural content” (Canadian full ramifications of this equation of the Culture Online 2004, 11). perverse effects of American penetration on the Canadian nation becomes manifest. In its All of this talk of “perversion”, construction of Canada as a “perverted” “pipes”, “connecting”, “domination” and male body that repeatedly opens itself to “penetration” suggest the extent to which penetration by contagious American content, biopolitical metaphors of the sexualized it warns of that body’s imminent body can find their ways into even the most emasculation, degeneration and death. otherwise banal Canadian culturecratic documents. In “Marginal Notes on Cultural Studies in Canada”, Jody Berland argues that such sexualized metaphors have A Brief Genealogy of Cultural traditionally underpinned Canadian cultural Contagion nationalist discourse. She writes that: “the metaphor of the woman seeking to protect a Accompanying this biopolitical fertile but vulnerable body from the figuring of the Canadian nation as a imperialist ravages of a powerful neighbour sexualized body that must be protected from has long been a staple of Canadian penetration and contagion is a set of models culture…the feminized Canadian has been for intervention into the cultural lifeworld an instrument in the circulation of fictions, taken from public health discourse. In metaphors and interventions which render

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 26 tracking this intersection of public health and (Heath 2010, 36) This early etiology of moral cultural policy discourse in Canada, recent contagion was closely linked to the neo- cultural histories of contagion can provide us Lamarckian argument that the susceptibility with important clues. In their introduction to to moral contagion and the closely related Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies, disorder - moral degeneration – were Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker describe inherited (Stern 2005). As Christopher Forth contagion in a way that closely resembles explains, the majority of those diagnosed in Canadian anxieties about the effects of the mid-19th century “as having succumbed to American culture on Canadians: “Contagion contagious influences also suffered from requires contact, but it also implies more than hereditary degeneration, nervous disorders, or this: it implies absorption, invasion, some other acquired affliction, all of which vulnerability, the breaking of a boundary fostered a special receptivity in the person.” imagined as secure in which the other (Forth 2001, 63) becomes part of the self. Contagion connotes both a process of contact and transmission, However, the emergence of the and a substantive, self-replicating agent, and disciplines of psychology and psychiatry in is centrally concerned with the growth and this period reoriented the etiology of moral multiplication of this agent.” (Bashford and contagion away from physical to Hooker 2001, 4) Because contagion raises the psychological factors. The discovery of possibility that the national body has been hypnotic suggestion and the recognition that breached, that it has been made vulnerable so-called “normal” and “healthy” individuals and that it has become “infected” with were as susceptible to its effects as “viruses” (or, in cultural nationalist terms, “degenerates” created widespread anxiety “alien” aspirations, affects, ideas, images and among those who envisaged the development impulses) that have the capacity to self- of a “rational” moral order in western replicate and eventually take over the societies (Goldstein 1984; Bartholomew national body, Bashford rightly observes that 1990; Forth 2001; Falconer 2002). It also “Quarantine and nationalism imply each created renewed anxieties over the future of other because both are about the creation of masculinity in the modern world. As Forth spaces. Through the administration of a explain, medical concerns over suggestibility boundary they determine an internal and an focussed almost exclusively on men because, external, nominated as clean and dirty.” at the time, it was assumed that women and (Bashford 1998, 389) children were always already at the whims of their passions and open to “penetration” by As Deana Heath, Christopher Forth external influences. Men, on the other hand, and Jan Goldstein have all detailed, by the possessed willpower—the power to control late 19th century, the discourse of “contagion” their passions and to police their psychic had spread beyond the physical body into the borders so as to ward off the penetrative psycho-moral sphere. As Heath explains, powers of external pressures and seductions. moral contagion was originally seen as It was this identification of masculinity with having a physical basis: “The term ‘morality’ willpower that made the possibility of moral served as a referent for a series of codes and contagion through suggestibility so practices around the art of government, in threatening: “The ideal man constructed in particular for the conduct of the individual. these medical discourses was one capable of ‘Immorality’ thus signified practices that sustaining his mental autonomy through fostered ungovernable behaviour, such as sheer willpower. Men who succumbed to lack of self-reliance, ignorance, dishonesty, moral contagion therefore exempted disloyalty or sexual impropriety, all of which themselves from the ranks of such men to were deemed attributes of working-class take their place alongside women and life…Immorality, it was believed, could be children…” (Forth 2001, 69) absorbed into the skin through corpuscles…”

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These concerns about suggestibility of moral contagion, degeneration and hygiene and moral contagion were exacerbated by the and the emergence of a global trade in rise of what we now call the “mass media” in cultural products led to the creation of a new the late Victorian period. Growing literacy legal and governmental apparatus designed to levels created a burgeoning market for the quarantine “obscene” and “immoral” cultural mass press, dime novels, crime fiction, comic products and facilitate the circulation of books, pornography and romance novels and “healthy” products. Deana Heath forcefully many of the consumers of these new cultural demonstrates how that this new apparatus products were the groups who were seen to should be seen as part of a larger be the most susceptible to suggestion— governmental project of public health: women, children, working-class, immigrant, and indigenous men. The mass media was That by the late nineteenth century seen as a conduit for moral contagion for regulating obscenity had become three reasons: 1) it could reach far larger viewed as a hygienic project is clear numbers than word of mouth; 2) it has the from the language used to denote capacity to vividly narrate or visually the danger of publications deemed represent criminal, seditious or sexually to be obscene or simply ‘immoral’ transgressive activities that “could generate (such as that they were a ‘moral powerful nervous sensations” in its epidemic’ or ‘a contagious disorder audiences; 3) its powers of suggestion caused of soul and body’ that served to vulnerable populations to identify with and ‘[undermine] the sense of imitate criminals, traitors and deviants continence and self-control in the (Goldstein 1984). Anne-Marie Kinahan individual which is essential to a nicely describes the latter anxiety in her sound and healthy state’); in the account of 19th century campaigns in Canada type of material targeted for against the dime novel. The powers of regulation (such as contraceptive suggestion of these cultural products, it was and sexology literature and believed, “were even more persuasive on the advertisements); in the agencies impressionable and ill-formed minds of responsible for carrying out such children, who “are either stimulated to regulation (such as health agencies admire and imitate high and noble characters, and customs departments, which or they are weakened and dwarfed by the bad drew upon their powers of detention example of the people set before them and and quarantine to keep ‘unhealthy’ who have been absorbing their attention”. literature outside of the geographic Since novels had an unquestionable boundaries of the nation-state); and influence, both for good and evil, the careful in the means to regulate it (such as cultivation of good taste was an important the need for a censorship system prophylactic against the potentially that functioned in the nature of a “dangerous seed” of impure literature.” ‘sanitary system’ or, as one (Kinahan 2007, 165; see also Adams 1995, proponent described it, as a Heath 2010). ‘quarantine to prevent plagues which would interfere with the As Kinahan’s language of moral health of the people’) (Heath “prophylactic” suggests, public health 2010, 86-7). initiatives provided those who wanted to protect the nation from moral contagion with While much of the research on both models for intervention and with a cultural contagion focuses on the mid- to late language with which to “capture” this 19th century, Emily Martin demonstrates in emerging threat to the nation. As Heath, “Towards an Anthropology of Immunology: Falconer and Kinahan all describe, the the Body as a Nation-State” how the hygienic conjunction of this new biopolitical discourse strategy of quarantine was supplemented by

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 28 notions of vaccination and inoculation by the by a sound bite, bewildered by a film clip, early 20th century. According to Martin, stampeded by a phone-in show or a pundit's models of the immune system are overcoded column… We in Canada have not only by the militaristic trope of the body as a impaired the links to the past, we have police state in which surveillance and impaired and severed the arteries that memory play a central role in warding off connect us in the present.” (Starowicz 1999: threats. As Martin explains, each “native” n.p. ) cell carries in it a special arrangement of proteins described as “identity papers” or a According to many, this “stroke” or, “common language” that allows other more commonly, “national amnesia” has “native” cells to recognize it as one of their occurred due to the omnipresence of own. Cells that lack this protein strand are American cultural products in Canada. As identified as invaders, attacked and Jack Granatstein has sardonically noted: destroyed. Furthermore, T cells are able to “The ordinary Canadian citizen, inundated archive the characteristics of those invading by American media and Fourth-of-July rah- cells for years so that “the intruders’ rah patriotism, scarcely knows that Canada descriptions are stored in the vast criminal has a past.” (Granatstein 1998, 4) For his records of the immune system. When a part, Starowicz argues for a more substance matching one of the stored complexity causality. As his metaphor of descriptions makes a new appearance, the “arteries” suggests, he argues that the memory cells see to the swift manufacture of perennial Canadian problem of living in a antibodies to combat it.” (quoted in Martin, country whose airwaves are saturated by 1990: 412). American media has been compounded since the 1980s by cutbacks to public broadcasting, the proliferation of specialty cable channels and the rise of the Internet. The Canadian Memory-Crisis The result, he argues, is that the “arteries” such as the CBC which once connected What is significant for our purposes Canadians together in a shared “public about this description of the immune system space” have now been severed or is that it closely matches the now-dominant fragmented. He then offers what can only be Canadian discourse about the relationship called a therapeutic intervention designed to between memory, the capacity for self- “save” the Canadian body politic: “The recognition and the “problem” of Canadian antidote to an ever fragmenting information identity in light of the omnipresent threat of spectrum is context and history…” American penetration and contagion. (Starowicz 1999: n.p.) Beginning in the late 1980s, many prominent Canadians have argued in a Underpinning this discourse of “the medicalized language that strongly evokes Canadian memory-crisis” (Hodgins 2004) is the discourse of moral contagion, the assumption that a shared collective degeneracy and suggestibility that many of memory is the wellspring of a strong and the threats to Canadian culture could be vigorous national identity. As Emily West traced back to a lack of collective memory. has argued, this discourse endows Canadian For example, Mark Starowicz, the head of public or collective memory with a quasi- the CBC’s documentary division, has argued magical character as a “heal-all” that will that “There is a crisis in the transmission of serve both as a prophylactic against the our society's memory. In fact, there is no seductions of American culture and as a real memory. Canadian society has had a suture that will stitch together all of the tears stroke that has virtually eliminated long- in the national fabric (West 2006). However, term memory, leaving us with flickering this optimism about the heal-all powers of short-term memory, our emotions buffeted national memory is offset by the anxiety that

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 29 the Canadian audience (especially the the contents of the collective imagination by suggestible youth upon whom the future of means of a small inoculation of the nation depends) has been fully drawn acknowledged evil, one thus protects it into the American interpretive community against the risk of a generalized subversion” and has thus lost its sense of own distinct (Barthes 1957, 150). heritage and identity. In order to (re)introduce young Canadians to their own cultural heritage, a predictable solution is often offered: make Canadian history “more New Strategies for Building exciting” for young Canadians. Many argue Cultural Health that the only way to reach young Canadians is through the codes of American media This strategy of using parts of culture. In other words, recent attempts at American culture to “heal” Canadian culture popularizing Canadian history operate with marks an important shift from the Canadian a grounding assumption that in order to national(ist) pedagogical strategies which attract and entertain young viewers, prevailed for much of the 20th century. As Canadian history must be narrated using Charles Acland and many other Canadian Hollywood codes, conventions, plots and film historians have pointed out, these genres and that their success in provoking traditional strategies emerged as a response Canadian pleasure will be directly linked to to the curious political economic history of how closely they approximate Hollywood the North American audiovisual market in standards of “excitement” and which Canada was successfully claimed by “significance”. Hollywood as part of the American domestic film market and Canadian television Such cultural interventions are networks rely heavily for revenue on the clearly designed, in the first instance, as broadcasting of American shows (cf. therapeutic measures. Assuming that the Harcourt 1978; Magder 1993; Acland 2001). Canadian “bodily politic” is at risk due to Acland argues that the American domination the “penetration” of American culture, that of the Canadian film distribution and that “penetration” has “severed” the exhibition circuit “is perhaps the single most “arteries” between the Canadian past and its influential factor in the idea of cultural present, productions like the Heritage absence in Canadian film…domestic film is Minutes and Canada: a People’s History largely missing from traditional commercial were designed as therapeutic interventions exhibition channels; it occupies only 2 to 3 that would “reconnect” Canadians with their percent of the theatrical market.” (Acland past. In the second instance, they were 2001, 276) Because of this political probably also designed to provide their economic history, if Canadians were likely audiences with a certain immunity to the to see Canadian films at all, it was generally future seductions of American culture and, “in parallel locations—the school, the film more specifically American television. Two festival or retrospective, the exposition, the of the defenders of the Heritage Minutes community hall, the library, the museum” makes their immunological character clear (Acland 2001, 286). when they argue that they represent an attempt to “fight fire with fire—trying to Given the institutional nature of win back a measure of our lost Canadian these sites of Canadian film-viewing, it is identity using the [media] most responsible not surprising that, for many, the experience for its loss.” (Logan and Waxman 1998, 2). of Canadian film viewing has generally been In other words, the use of Hollywood media, associated with a pedagogical mode of codes and genres seems to be intended to act address in which the preferred assigned as a kind of inoculation. As Roland Barthes subject position for the audience was that of famously explained, when one “immunizes

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 30 the student. As we have seen, this hoped that the government realist film will pedagogically inflected experience of act as a technology of self-knowledge that Canadian film has historically been will better allow the members of the nation reinforced by a Canadian cultural policy to distinguish between self and non-self. discourse that recurrently infantilizes Without such state interventions into the Canadian audiences by portraying public sphere, it is argued that Canada will Hollywood as a Svengali who leads be incapable of defending itself against suggestible Canadians astray through the future American penetration and contagion appeal to their “irrational” desires and because it will lack the ability to develop an appetites (Atwood 1972; Berland 1995; active, effective and autonomous national Longfellow 1998; for more general culture. In order to do the latter, it is argued, discussions of the gendered and infantilizing Canadians need their own media system that nature of the critique of mass culture upon can fulfill “the task of mirroring the nation, which the Canadian critique draws, cf. a mirroring that presumably leads eventually Huyssen 1986; Petro 1986; Bignell 2002). to better images, as those looking at themselves begin to practice self- Given that Canadian cultural help…[This] is a discourse of self- nationalist discourse/cultural policy awareness and self-improvement that discourse typically constructs commercial or anthropomorphizes and unifies the nation, popular cinema as an alien cultural deploying the search of the subject to know contagion, it is not surprising that Canadian its own body and mind in a teleological forays into popular film have been manner that glides towards the apotheosis of generally, as Acland reports, “treated competent adulthood.” (Miller 1993, 119) disparagingly and rejected by critics.” Without such a mirror that allows it to (Acland 2001, 286). Instead, that discourse recognize itself, the nation lacks both the privileges, in a minor way, art cinema and sense of where it begins and where it ends as more importantly, documentary cinema well as the adult and masculine will and produced by publically funded institutions. ability to defend that heritage. Driven by the codes of what Zoe Druick nicely calls “government realism” (Druick In this paper, I’m emphasizing the 2007)—the realistic portrayal of “ordinary rhetorical character of cultural nationalist Canadians” who serve as allegories for the discourse. In all fairness, however, this challenges, struggles and triumphs of the belief that the lack of a national technology Canadian nation, documentary films of self-recognition will weaken the national produced by institutions like the National capacity to know and protect its boundaries Film Board and the Canadian Broadcasting has many defenders in the scholarly world. Corporation carry within them an For example, in The Past Within Us: media, immunological or prophylactic logic. memory, history, Tessa Morris-Suzuki Beginning with the premise that the argues that film shares with television a high infantilization and feminization of the capacity to create audience identifications Canadian body politic has occurred due to but a low capacity to reveal the unprotected exposure to Hollywood film and argumentative, interpretative and evidentiary television, government realist films and processes by which people and events come public service media are constructed as to be represented. This is due to three basic “healthy” anticolonial pedagogical characteristics of popular film and television technologies that can inoculate the nation narrative. The first is the tendency to use against the most nefarious effects of stock characters to simplify and personalize Hollywood by showing the daily lives of a complex and contradictory social reality. “real” Canadians. Secondly, the narrative is pared down to clear lines of action that the audience can More specifically, however, it is easily follow. Thirdly, audiences are further

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‘helped out’ by reframing events using Heritage Minutes are 60 second historical familiar myths and narrative frameworks. vignettes/commercials about heroes from the Given that TV relies so heavily on narrative Canadian past that have aired since the early frameworks and stereotypes, it 1990s. Credited with having the high simultaneously produces two types of production values typically associated with audience identifications: one with the Hollywood films, the Minutes seek to make characters on-screen and the other with the Canadian history digestible to what is interpretive community whose constructed as an anomic and easily commonsensical myths and stereotypes the distracted audience by means of formulaic text draws upon and reaffirms (Morris- plotlines, the reduction of historical Suzuki 2005). personages to recognizable stock characters, an unapologetically celebratory tone and If we believe English Canadian subtle and overt acts of national nationalists, a major impediment to the interpellation. In an interview, Patrick Canadian nation-building project is that Watson, their creative director, makes no when Canadian film and television attempt to hide their promotional intent. He audiences “read” a given audiovisual text, relates that they were inspired by the idea they are decoding it using American myths that “If we can use 30 second or 1 minute and stereotypes in order to identify with slots on television to persuade people that American characters. In other words, both at Corn Flakes or underarm deodorant or the level of encoding and decoding, they are Cadillacs are interesting, could we not use being drawn into the American interpretive the same period on television to persuade community and the lines between self and Canadians that they have an interesting non-self are continuously blurred. This past?” (Heritage Project 1998). situation is exacerbated by fact that, as we have already seen, the English-Canadian The promotional and repetitive media market has almost always been character of the Minutes is probably, more saturated by imported American cultural than anything else, what gives them their products. As a result, English-Canadian power. One of the necessary conditions for nationalists lament that much of what the construction of cultural identities is the Canadians know about Mounties or French- possession of the economic and institutional Canadian fur traders comes from American power to repeat as often as possible to as TV and movies (Berton 1975). large an audience as possible that “you are one of us.” (Billig 1995; Althusser 1998). As we have already seen, the power of the Canadian nationalist apparatus to do so has Repatriating Canadian National historically been limited by the fact that the Memory: the Heritage Minutes English-Canadian media market has been saturated by imported American cultural This perennial fear of Hollywood- products. While most of the scholarship of induced misrecognition and the belief that the Heritage Minute have criticized their Canadians need to develop their own hegemonic politics and their presentist, mechanisms for self-recognition has exclusionary and revisionist reading of the stimulated many notable attempts, over the Canadian past (cf. Longfellow 1998; Stanley past decade and a half, to harness the power 2000; Neatby 2001; Rukszto 2002; Hodgins, of TV and film to create a revived Canadian 2003; West 2006; Rukszto 2008), it is hard public memory. However, for the purposes not to be filled with a certain amount of of this paper, I want to talk only about one grudging admiration for their tactical of the first and most prominent of these cleverness. As Michel de Certeau argued, memory projects: the Heritage Minutes. The strategy is the prerogative of the powerful who structure the networks and space-time

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 32 paths the rest of us who must negotiate development activities for teachers (cf. through the use of tactics—the devious art www.histori.ca). of exploiting gaps in the system to create one’s own space (de Certeau 1998). In their quest to use a public educational system to disseminate the The Heritage Minutes were message of the Minutes, the propagandizing originally designed to take advantage of the aims of Historica reach far beyond those of spatio-temporal gaps in the Hollywood the original Heritage Project. While the audiovisual imperium to recreate Canadian latter was content to sneak into the gaps memory, place and identity. One important between American films and TV shows to front in this war of position is Canadian remind Canadians of their identity and movie theatres where they often appear as heritage, the former seeks to use what is trailers before the typically American film. almost certainly still the most powerful Another front is Canadian TV where they ideological state apparatus—the school. As are frequently shown in the interstices Gerald Miller has noted, changing existing between Survivor: and Family Guy, identities, beliefs and responses is incredibly Simpsons and Seinfeld repeats. On both of difficult, time-consuming and expensive. these fronts, the Minutes seek to turn the This is the case because new messages, seemingly insatiable Canadian appetite for products or identities are always checked Hollywood programming and the political against an often complex and contradictory economic peculiarities of the Canadian welter of sedimented commonsense, cultural media system to its advantage. Rather than memories of previous attempts at persuasion lamenting the omnipresence of Hollywood, and “truths” repeated and reinforced by they use its lures to re-Canadianize powerful social and cultural institutions. In audiences. the case of someone who already has beliefs on a given subject, the best one can Furthermore, the Heritage Minutes generally hope for is to remind them of their are also frequently shown in non- identity and those beliefs (Miller 2002). commercial venues. The most obvious and most important venue is the classroom. However, constructing someone’s While they were originally produced by a identity, beliefs and structure of responses to philanthropic organization known as the the some part of the world from scratch is a CRB Foundation (funded primarily by the much more efficient and long-lasting form Bronfman family—the owners of of persuasion. This is what makes the shift Seagram’s, MCA and Universal Studios) from the Heritage Minutes as audiovisual and mainly intended for screening in reminders of identity and belief to the theatres and on television, they later became enlistment of schools, teachers and students the centerpieces of a much larger memory- in the dissemination and production of these project known as the Historica Foundation. memory-texts so Althusserian. Not only Funded by many of Canada’s largest does it enlist all of the disciplinary and corporations, the Historica Foundation has normalizing powers of the school to created a website (www. histori.ca) which familiarize Canadian students with Canadian makes all of the 60+ Heritage Minutes heroes and myths, it seeks to literally in- available but also provides teachers with form Canadian students with the narrative accompanying lesson plans and games and frameworks and codes of the Heritage links to other sites. Furthermore, Historica Minutes. Through the offer of a much more also promotes what it calls “Heritage Fairs” exciting alternative to everyday classroom for schoolchildren. These are aimed at activities, Canadian students will take on encouraging students to use the narrative codes and frames of the Heritage Minutes as codes and framework to create their own the lenses through which they understand Heritage Minutes as well as professional and articulate the world and their place in it.

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The Immunologic of the mainstream texts and the circulation of Heritage Minutes counter-narratives and images through alternative cultural conduits for the production of oppositional readings. In a self-produced documentary Because they can draw on such memories titled Minute by Minute: the Making of a and counter-narratives and images, members Mythology (1998), some of the chief of subordinate groups can immunize architects use the language of myth to themselves against the ideological power of describe what I’m calling the such texts. As Bobo, this pre-existing “immunologic” of the Heritage Minutes. archive of memories and counter-narratives Contrary to his pious pronouncements on the allows them to “ferret out the beneficial and sacrosanct nature of history made earlier in put up blinders against the rest…[and] bring the interview, Patrick Watson, the creative other viewpoints to bear on the watching of director of the Minutes, makes the surprising the film, and may see things other than what assertion that the Heritage Minutes are not the film-makers intended.” (Bobo 2004, about “history” at all. As he explains: 181) “We’re not really doing documentaries here, we’re making myths. That’s what movies In the case of the Heritage Minutes, are, they’re myths and this country needs a this construction of semi-permeable mythology of its history before it can go and hermeneutic borders is reinforced and get motivated to go study its documentary doubled by explicit narratives about contests history” (Heritage Project 1998). As Watson over the Canadian-American border. puts it, the goal of the Minutes is not to “Sitting Bull”, for example, is set on the inform and educate Canadian citizens but to Saskatchewan-Montana border in 1877 and construct a Canadian nationalist interpretive begins with an aerial long-shot as we see a schema. Furthermore, he implies that once long cordon of American soldiers flanked by this schema becomes the filter through a handful of Mounties. As the camera pans which young Canadians view their past, it into the head of the cordon, we hear a voice will inoculate their viewers against with an American accent ask: “Hey, Mr. competing identity narratives. McLeod, where are the rest of your men?”. A bearded Mountie then responds in a thick In this way, the Heritage Minutes Scottish brogue: “You’ve got more men can be read as an attempt to create a cultural back there than I have in the whole of border between Canada and the United western Canada.” The American General States by providing their audiences with riding beside him then replies: “Yeah, but oppositional cultural memories and Sitting Bull held a war dance last night.” strategies of reading. In this way, they seem Finally, McLeod responds: “General Terry, to draw upon some of the theoretical Sitting Bull has kept the Queen’s peace. insights that emerged with the rise of He’s agreed to meet with you” (Heritage ethnographic audience studies in the 1980s. Project 1998). More specifically, they seemed to be inspired by some of the scholars who Right away, we can see how this investigated the conditions of the possibility Minute is founded on one of English of producing what Stuart Hall famously Canada’s central myths: the myth of the termed “oppositional readings” of peaceful settlement of the Canadian west. mainstream texts (Hall 2001). For example, As Eva Mackey argues in The House of as is the case with the Heritage Project, Difference, this myth figured the RCMP as Jacqueline Bobo’s work on the decoding bringing peace, order and good government strategies of black women stresses the to a previously lawless land and the native importance of cultural memories of peoples as grateful, “child-like, trusting and misrepresentation or invisibility in ultimately friendly to their Canadian

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 34 government invaders” (Mackey 1999, 35). present the critic of the mythologization of This myth of the “grateful Indian”, she history with an opportunity to engage in the argues, was then deployed by Canadian proverbial “shooting fish in the barrel”. Here nationalists to figure themselves as distinct we have a less than subtle attack on the and morally superior to Americans because Hollywood celebration of the Wild West and it “allowed Canadians to nurture a sense of imperialist ideologies of “manifest destiny” themselves as a just people, unlike the via the juxtaposition of genocidal American Americans south of the border who were barbarism with Canadian civility. However, waging a war of extermination against their it continues. As we watch Sitting Bull shake Indian population” (Francis quoted in hands with Walsh and McLeod, the latter Mackey 1999, 35). This continuous confesses in a voice-over that “I didn’t know comparison between Canadian and then that they would be starved out of American strategies explains why so much Canada and go back to the States. Walsh emphasis is placed upon the relative size of would resign over it and Sitting Bull would their American and the Canadian contingent be murdered.” (Heritage Project, 1998). By in this Minute. It seeks to reaffirm the introducing this new information, the Canadian faith in “soft power” as opposed to comedy of “Sitting Bull” is transformed into uncivilized America’s use of violence. This a tragedy. message is then reiterated by McLeod’s expression of his confidence that Sitting Even though it indexes the tragic Bull will keep the “Queen’s Peace”. history of the brutal and even genocidal “Indian policies” of both Canadian and As in most ads, the Minutes make American governments, “Sitting Bull” still extensive use of message redundancy. tries to preserve the myth of the just “Sitting Bull” is a particularly obvious Mountie and the bloodthirsty Yank in three example of this rhetorical strategy. After we ways. First, we are told by McLeod that he are introduced to our two main terms of was unaware that Sitting Bull and the Sioux comparison—Colonel McLeod of the were to be starved out of Canada. This flies Mounties and General Terry of the U.S. straight in the face of the documentary Army, our third major player is introduced: evidence. In a letter written by McLeod in Sitting Bull. As the action shifts indoors, the the immediate aftermath of this failed camera pans across the room filled with parley, he reports that “I pointed out to them Canadian, American and native dignitaries [the Sioux] that their only hope was the and rests momentarily on Terry. We hear a buffalo, that it would cease, and that they door open and attention shifts to Sitting Bull could expect nothing whatever from the who has just entered. Terry then says to him: Queen’s government” (quoted in MacEwan “President Hayes says you will be received 1973, 132, my italics). Furthermore, Walsh kindly and…”. He is then cut off by Sitting left the West and returned to his family Bull who replies: “The Grandmother’s home near Ottawa not out of disgust but as a medicine house is no place for lies. Not two result of poor health (MacEwan 1973). more words. This country does not belong to Finally, we are told by the Minute that you. We will stay here and keep the Sitting Bull was “murdered” as a result of Grandmother’s peace. She will let us raise his repatriation in 1881. While it is true that our children. We do not want lies. These Sitting Bull died in a gunfight with the men, Walsh and McLeod, they’re the first American Indian Police, his death did not white men who have never lied to us.” occur until 1890 during a gunfight between Sitting Bull then turns his back on the the American Indian Police and the American general and walks over to the two members of a messianic cult to which he Mounties and shakes their hands. belonged (MacEwen 1973). Given that he “died with his boots on”, the use of the term If the Minute ended here, it would “murder” to describe his death is a rhetorical

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 35 sleight of hand designed to keep alive the 1992). In other words, by ending the Minute good Mountie/bloodthirsty Yank dualism. with a scene of the boisterous Yankee being led back to the border, this Minute acts as In “”, the figure of the both a celebration of so-called “Canadian Mountie is deployed once again as a means values” and as a prescription for future of producing by actions: like our heroic Mountie, Canadians marshaling Canadian cultural differences should expel Americanism, individualism, from the all-too-similar Americans. While racism, greed, violence and ignorance from “Sitting Bull” suggests that the Canadian- the Canadian body politic. American border acts as a cordon sanitaire from American racism and injustice, “Sam “Sitting Bull” and “Sam Steele” are Steele” tries to enforce the line between among several Heritage Minutes that seek to Americans and Canadians in a more obvious immunize Canadians through the assertion manner. It is set on the Alaska/Canada of prophylactic physical and cultural borders border in 1898 and begins with a lone that allegedly distinguish them from the prospector with a heavy American accent Americans. While these Minutes emphasize muttering to himself. The scene then cuts to the impenetrability of the Canadian border, the interior of a log cabin where the other Minutes reveal it to be a prospector sits at a table facing a stern semipermeable membrane. “Underground Mountie. After the prospector reveals his Railroad”, for example, begins with a shot plan to go the Klondike, the seated Mountie of a young black woman anxiously peering tells him that he cannot wear pistols and out a church window. She then begins to bring gambling gear into Canada. The shout in a panicked voice: “They should prospector then draws his gun and points it have been here by now. He’s three hours at the seated Mountie and shouts: “I’m an late already. Paw ain’t gonna make it. One American, you can’t do this to me!”. The of them slave catchers caught him…”. As Mountie remains ice-calm and replies: “In she continues to panic, a white woman that case, I’ll be lenient. We’ll keep the emerges from the background and rushes gambling gear and you’ll be back in the over to calm the young woman by United States by sundown.” In the final physically restraining her and telling her scene, we watch as the prospector is that: “Liza, you both [nodding towards a escorted back across the border while young black man standing in the muttering to himself: “Why didn’t I shoot background] made it past the border him?” (Heritage Project 1998). yesterday. We’ve done this before.” She then tries to lead the young woman towards This Minute falls within a long a pew in order to pray. The young black Canadian tradition of favourably comparing woman, however, breaks free and runs out our national personality with that of the into the street and the white woman follows. Americans (New 1998). In the Canadian After a few seconds, they both come to a nationalist imaginary, the so-called “average halt and the white woman gives a knowing American” has the characteristics of our smile. The camera then shows a wagon Yankee prospector: cowardly, self- laden with church pews. Liza is then calmly aggrandizing, bombastic, individualistic and led back to the church where we watch as violence-prone. The seated Mountie, on the the bottom is removed from one pew. As other hand, represents the heroic virtues that this occurs, a voiceover tells us that this imaginary holds dear: bravery, calm, “Between 1840 and 1860, more than 30000 rationality and the commitment to the American slaves came secretly to Canada protection of peace, order and good and freedom.”. When the pew is opened, an government. Such comparisons, Anna older black man crawls out and embraces Makolkin argues, act as “sign systems Liza and her brother. As they celebrate their controlling group behaviour” (Makolkin reunion, the father shouts “We’re free!” and

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 36

Liza responds: “Yes, Paw. We’re in portrayed in true colonialist fashion as Canada” (Heritage Project 1998). incapable of policing herself—she shouts, she panics, she seems to have little control The myth of the Underground over her bodily impulses. The white woman, Railroad has always been cherished as an on the other hand, represents the “civilized” important index of Canadian moral self. Her words are careful and her superiority vis-à-vis the Americans. In this movements are controlled. Like the myth, the Canadian border acts as a refuge missionary, she takes it upon the “white from American racism. However, as with all (wo)man’s burden” of settling Liza by myths, its rhetorical power is based as much physically restraining her, leading her to the on its silences as on its historical reality. pew and verbally reassuring her that the While it is true that many escaped American superior self-control of the white Canadians slaves did take refuge in Canada in this will keep their secret safe. When the child- period, they were hardly accepted with open like Liza initially rejects her reassurances arms. As Douglas Francis et al. detail in and bursts out into the street, we then see her Origins: Canadian History to get her epistemic comeuppance as the Confederation, most of the escaped slaves wagon pulls into view and the knowing returned to the United States “after the smile flashes across the white woman’s face. passage of the Emancipation Act of 1863, With the superior moral and intellectual having found temporary refuge, but no more qualities of white Canada thus reaffirmed, tolerance than they had experienced in the we are then treated to a celebration of the United States” (Francis et al. 1988, 283). glorious justice of Canada under its wise Furthermore, this myth also suggests that white leadership. slavery was a solely American problem. This is also untrue. From the earliest periods In some of the other Minutes, the of settlement until the late 18th century, traditional Canadian image of the Canadian blacks were employed as slaves for white body politic being penetrated by American settlers in Canada. When slavery was finally popular culture is reversed so that the more abolished in the late 18th century, the salubrious aspects of the latter are rationale was as much economic as it was represented as being secretly Canadian. In moral (Francis et al. 1988: 202). other words, rather than being a vector of Americanization, popular culture becomes a All of these historical details about vector of Canadianization. As Frank the experience of blacks and other minority Manning has argued, Canadian artists have groups in Canada are left in the shadows by become masters at taking American popular this and other Minutes because they are not culture, Canadianizing it and then selling it really about their experience. It is almost back to Americans (Manning 1993). For inevitable that when a clearly marked Canadians, this produces two types of member of a minority group shows up in pleasure. First of all, American recognition one of the Minutes, they are almost always is often necessary to reassure Canadians of represented as passive victims of racism their own distinct existence and global who have been saved by the agency of white importance. As a result, it is never enough Canada. In other words, in spite of the fact for that they identify a that they suggest that they are inclusive of given individual as a hero, true satisfaction subaltern memory, these Minutes constantly only comes when the colonial master reaffirm the centrality of white heroes to the recognizes her as a hero (Keohane 1997). Canadian national narrative (Hodgins 2003). Another frisson is produced through the construction of Canada in which while it is We see this in the implicit accepted that it might be economically and comparison between Liza and the white militarily weaker, its intellectual and moral woman. From the beginning, Liza is superiority is reaffirmed. For many

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Canadians, the omnipresence of Canadians ignorant to know that these things are really in Hollywood in itself is a source of Canadian, the “we” of “our heritage” knows tremendous nationalist pride. Furthermore, better. once you throw in the perception that most Americans are more than likely unaware of that fact, the pleasure doubles because it reaffirms the ressentiment-laced Canadian Conclusion construction of themselves as creative, knowledgeable and cosmopolitan and I began this essay by outlining a Americans as unimaginative, ignorant and longstanding Canadian discourse the frames narcissistic (on anti-Americanism and the Canadian nation as a body that is Canadian ressentiment, cf. Dorland 1998, constantly subject to American penetration Wilmott 2001; Hodgins in press). and contagion. I then argued that one of the consequences of figuring the Canadian We see this dynamic at work in the nation in this manner is that the discourse of Minute titled “Superman”. It begins with a public health and its strategies of young man and a slightly older woman interventions into the everyday lives of walking along the siding of a train station. A Canadians is taken up into Canadian cultural caption tells us that this scene in set in policy discourse in sometimes subtle and, at Cleveland in 1931. As they walk, he says in other times, overt ways. In the case of the an excited tone: “…And he can lift anything, Heritage Minutes, this interpenetration of anything at all. He’s that strong, Lois.” As cultural and public health discourse gives he continues, he describes a superhero who them a “governmental” character which poses as a mild-mannered reporter but who equates the creation of a semipermeable has a secret identity as a crime fighter. As he cultural membrane between Canada and the speaks, his companion (identified as Lois) United States with a form of cultural reacts superciliously by saying things like hygiene that will produce a “healthy” and “Honestly, you Canadian kids…” or “No “vigourous” Canada. However, it is not clear one is going to read a comic book about a how successful they have been in this superhero in tights, it’ll never fly.” The mission. Their solemn piety has been young man then gets onboard a train. As it’s recurrently parodied in Canadian popular pulling out, he hands Lois a folded piece of culture (Rukszto 2005), dismissed as paper through the window. When she propaganda by Canadian journalists unfolds it, we see a pencil sketch of the now (LeDoyen 1998; Pétrowski 2000; Lester familiar character of Superman. 2001: Webster 2002), and are typically Significantly, another caption appears over described by the young and media-savvy as the sketch: “A Part of Our Heritage”. This artless and embarrassing residues of a caption seems to be addressed primarily to waning WASPish cultural nationalism (cf. Canadian audiences in that it interpellates Glenn @ soapboxfrequent.blogspot.com them, in Tim Stanley’s words, “to see 2008). themselves as connected to the chief protagonists of the video, extending this While the nationalists would likely connection from the “our” of the viewers, see such responses as further proof of the the film makers and the broadcasters, back need to protect Canadians against the in time” (Stanley, in press). In this case, Hollywood contagion, that alleged however, the “our” is as much a gesture of “contagion” and the way in which it has exclusion as inclusion. To stamp Superman constantly reminded Canadians of the as “ours” is to claim that the best parts of existence of the world beyond their borders American popular culture have actually been might well have strengthened Canadian invented by Canadians. While the culture. In other words, Hollywood might Americans might be too narcissistic and well have inoculated English Canada against

Southern Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 4, 1 (June 2011) 38 what Gianni Vattimo has described as ephemerality of closure and the contingency cultural nationalism’s “deep-seated nostalgia of “home”. More importantly, if we follow for the reassuring yet menacing closure of the logic of immunology, perhaps we’ve horizons” (Vattimo 1992). Our full exposure also learned that exposure to a few bugs and to the gales of the global cultural economy a little dirt makes the national body stronger. constantly reminds Canadians of the

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