Make It Dangerous

MAKE IT DANGEROUS Canadian Film’s Punk Sensibility ROB BENVIE Mark L. Lester’s Class of 1984. am the future. So warns Peter, leader violence. Watching it now in all its in failure, whether out of naiveté, failed I of the nihilist punks controlling revved-up paranoia recalls a certain ambition, or sheer absurdity. The narra- Lincoln High School, the devastated, fervour of its time – the fear that such tive forms of punk cinema typically cul- graffiti-drenched site of the unhinged untameable scum might be society’s minate in tragedy or farce (or a hybrid Canadian film Class of 1984 (1982). future. It also prompts consideration of the two). As Greil Marcus notes in These slovenly, racist ne’er-do-wells of what might constitute a “punk sen- Lipstick Traces, his foray to contextual- sneer at authority, sling angel dust sibility” in cinema, and how such an ize punk within a broader avant-garde to sophomores, and mosh joyously to insurrectionary spirit (whether genuine tradition, “nihilism can find a voice in Teenage Head. After menacing their or posed) has been filtered through a art, but never satisfaction.” music teacher, Andrew Norris, into a distinctly Canadian perspective. The form’s easy signifiers have been murderous rage, they meet untimely Punk comprises many modes: a well-recognized since the seventies: ends via buzzsaw, via steering wheel, musical genre, a criterion, a stance. It’s hacked-up leather, overheated miscre- via skylight. Order once again prevails. regularly self-contradictory, frequently ants slamdancing to rudimentary rock, Shot in recognizable locations around self-negating, often quite stupid, and sloganeering of a smash-the-system bent. downtown Toronto, Class of 1984 pres- perpetually facing the pronouncement British punks donned bondage-lite garb ents as a statement on escalating teen of its own death. It’s a sensibility rooted to rattle conservative sensibilities, while 37 Benvie.indd 37 4/11/2017 1:53:54 PM Goin’ Down the Road uses a documentary-like, rough-hewn aesthetic (the film actually began as a documentary project) to tell the story of a pair of down-and- out Maritimers travelling westward in pursuit of lucre and lager. Its bump- kin heroes, Pete and Joey, arrive in a scrappy Toronto brimming with proto- punk energy. Tragically out of step with the unyielding city in a transitional, post-sixties cultural climate, they prowl record shops and Yonge St. bars, cat- calling at women and bathing in booze. With their prospects dimming, they even- tually awaken to the futility of the cap- italist machine: “Everything keeps going around in the same circle,” Pete laments, “the same stupid thing over and over, and there ain’t nothing happening.” The linkage of work and identity, and a rejection of this ideal, foretelling punkish stances to come, also lies at the heart of Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Goodbye Goin’ Down the Road (d. Don Shebib, 1970). (1964), a coming-of-age story à la The America’s disaffected youth rejected disco eschatological cues and Wizard of Oz Graduate (though arriving three years glitz for hard-core skateboarder grubbi- riffs heavy with the blasé stance toward earlier). Its hero, Peter, is an obnoxious ness. Canadian incarnations, meanwhile, death that would define punk’s later yet charming Toronto kid daunted by have often adopted a vulgar, quasi-work- resurgence as nineties grunge (trench- a world of conformity and allegiance ing-class hoser persona fuelled by beer coats, cigarettes). Its baffled heroine, to “the almighty buck.” While his ges- and fuck-the-man disaffection. Bands Ramona, tracks the errant punk band tures of rebellion are tame – shoplift- like DOA, and later SNFU and No Means The Children of Paradise, the plot not ing, swiping his father’s car for a 401 No, reveled in unpretentious Canadiana so much unfolding as occurring – a joyride, mouthing off to his probation draped in flannel and toques. dream logic in tune with a certain breed officer – his worldview is prototypically Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo of punk negation and its recusant punk (even if plinking his banjo on the (1996) champions this vibe as it follows stance; the band’s leader, breaking his TTC is about as rockin’ as Peter gets). its titular group through a dismal reunion vow of silence, asserts there is “nothing The punk sensibility is invested in rough tour, faithfully depicting the rock circuit’s left to say.” Yet in fleeting moments of determinations of justice, i.e., not “sell- beer-stained stages, bleak stretches of connection, Ramona tastes liberation. ing out,” rather than moral valuations. highway, and subzero post-show parking Following the film’s climactic carnage Resigned to a parking-lot-attendant job, lots. Centred on the shaky homosocial at the Apocalypse Club (subtlety, not a Peter’s tragedy is that he might become camaraderie of Joe Dick and Billy Tallent, thing here), she enjoys a vague awak- precisely what he fears most: a working aging rockers losing step with time, it ening buoyed by newfound fortitude. stiff like his parents. styles itself as a punk movie (anarchy Taking the stage, Ramona entreats her Two tales of beat-generation wastrels symbols, cameos from Joey Ramone and punkish audience, “Let me hear you say bummed out by society, A Cool Sound from Art Bergmann, lots of spitting), but little yeah.” And, as punks do, they say Yeah. Hell (1959, see p. 19) and Bitter Ash (1963), distinguishes these saps as anything but Filmed in Night of the Living Dead- navigated similar concerns. The affable failed careerists, absent of any ideological esque black and white, Roadkill takes Montreal artists and smalltime crooks energy. McDonald’s heroes have more in an ambivalent stance toward its Ontario of Allan Moyle’s The Rubber Gun (1977), common with the soft-metal burnouts landscape (“This land wasn’t made to while chiefly focused on maintaining their of The Decline of Western Civilization support human life,” Ramona muses) as drug habits, also take punkish delight in Part II: The Metal Years (1988) than the McDonald indulges in corny scenes of flouting cops and indulging in boho lei- punks encountered in the first volume of the downhome Canadiana kitsch firmly sure. Out of boredom and antipathy, they Penelope Spheeris’s landmark documen- enshrined in our enduring, self-installed cultivate new styles of behaviour in defi- tary series. narrative. Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the ance of a humdrum establishment, their McDonald’s earlier Roadkill (1989) is Road (1970) serves as a progenitor of this hardscrabble existence fuelled by animus another highway movie, a mishmash of breed of dirtbag realism. Like Roadkill, similar to punk culture’s combustibility. 38 Benvie.indd 38 4/11/2017 1:53:55 PM The possibility for renewal out of captures the performativity and inward be waged in the terrain of the symbolic or trauma is a defining common feature of questioning already evident in punk- the sheerly conceptual, Aila’s struggle for Canadian cinematic narrative. With ten- rock’s nascent period (by all accounts, redemption – rooted in historic atrocities sions rooted in a multifarious, elusive Toronto punks considered the NYC scene still resonating – transcends any such “national identity,” the rough matter of tame and already past its prime). Here we doomy absurdities. history – colonialism, class strife, the see hard-core kids driven both by ardent And yet taking critical inventory of church – can be sculpted into revamped, belief in their scene’s ideals and the disil- any counterculture ultimately proves a yet familiar, forms. Denys Arcand’s qua- lusionment already settling in. futile enterprise: once codified, it loses si-allegorical Jesus of Montreal (1989), Zero-budget production values and a its potency. The subculture itself splin- Robert Lepage’s The Confessional (1999), sense of tightknit community brighten ters and auto-extirpates before the inev- and the trippy works of Guy Maddin all the art films of G. B. Jones (also of itable descent of the suited opportun- employ these historiographical, metafic- landmark post-punks Fifth Column). ists. Mainstream depictions of punkers tional tendencies to ironic effect. The Yo-Yo Gang (1992) and The Lollipop quickly became a staple of eighties But to the punk sensibility, tradition is Generation (2008), shot on recognizable Hollywood fare – a scorn for delinquency the enemy. Rather than indulge in such locations using handheld cameras, befitting the end of Reagan-era con- nuanced subjectivity, the punk impulse is exemplify, on the other hand, a choppy, servatism. Canadian incarnations and to smash, to chide, to insult. Nostalgia is punkish celebration of sex, solidarity, connections inevitably emerged. While boring, self-aggrandization via hackneyed and community. shot in British Columbia, Ladies and sentiment to be held in contempt. Against Punk has always been integral to Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (dir. Lou these pressures, the punk appoints itself queer art in the way that it allows for Adler, 1982), starring a young Diane the future, a point of nullification so a the expression of outrage through Lane and with Sex Pistol Steve Jones new history can be forged. In doing so, the irreverence and defiant co-opting of and The Clash’s Paul Simonon playing punk draws its strength from community, forms. As a mode for expression for bit parts, is a decidedly American story or at least a shared program of definition. Canada’s minorities, however, punk of mainstream commercialism. The cult The punk sensibility should therefore not has a thorny history, having typically teen romp Rock ‘n Roll High School (dir. be mistaken for coarse nihilism; rather, been the province of wound-up white Allan Arkush, 1979) begat the abysmal it’s a measure of reclaiming and sharp- males.

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