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...to die"). In short, it's either someone getting shot or someone getting license to shoot them. Its emotional effects tend not to be lingered on, as that would hinder action instead of promoting it, and the only fate worse than death in contemporary Hollywood-think is stasis, the suspension of interest caused by even the slightest lapse in action. That's why death is reduced to a form of spectacle in most of our current mall movies, shorn of consequence and shrugged off with a winning wisecrack, instead of stopping anything--let alone anything so abstract and irrelevant to a contemporary action movie as a life--it adds momentum.
In many Canadian movies, death tends instead to be a process, something that exerts an effect that shapes the emotional trajectory of the drama itself. When it descends over a drama--as it tends increasingly to do in our movies--it becomes inescapable and pervasive, and so no easier to shrug off than a winter that seems to sprawl from the end of one Canadian summer to the beginning of another. When death occurs, it is an issue, in the same way that weather itself is a real, honest-to-God issue for any Canadians living outside of the shovel-free oasis that is Vancouver. It cannot be ignored, for its effects over us are so of bad weather has played an active role in defining who we are and what we do, the influence of death in our movies is profound and all-encompassing. In American movies life continues until--like a bullet-shaped punctuation mark--death stops it. In Canadian movies, it is defined by it. It would seem there is no life without it.
Another revealing expression of this shift in perception is the fact that death, for all its influence over Canadian movies, so seldom plays out on screen. It's true, in the same way that gunplay is such a rare spectacle in Canadian movies--there are, for example, no cop movies in our cinema--we appear to be less interested in watching death than prbing its effects. Thus, while three of the most talked about and widely seen Canadian movies of the past year--David Cronenberg's Crash, Lynne Stopkewich's Kissed and now Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter--are hopelessly entangled in an infatuation with the impact of death on the living, the physical fact of death is pretty well irrelevant. The bodies lusted after by the dead-eyed carnage fetishists in Crash tend to be long vacated by the time we see them, as are those...
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More articles from Take One
Letters to the editor about Take One no. 49.(Back Page)(Letter to the ..., June 01, 2005
Robert Lepage's: Le Confessionnal & Le Polygraphe: a Rumination.(Repri..., June 01, 2005
Paradox and wonder: the cinema of Peter Mettler.(Reprint), June 01, 2005
A director in his prime: Denys Arcand's: Les Invasions barbares.(Repri..., June 01, 2005
Crash test.(Reprint), June 01, 2005
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