Masculinity, Affect and Death in Recent Canadian Cinema

Christine Ramsay
Department of Media Production and Studies

6 December 2002

Death is ubiquitous for male protagonists in recent Canadian cinema. David Cronenberg, our most famous auteur, has returned to it obsessively throughout his oeuvre and in none of his films is it more poignantly rendered than in his 1987 masterpiece, Dead Ringers. But several other directors in the 1990s working across narrative, documentary, and experimental forms—seem to have followed his lead: directors such as Atom Egoyan in Felicia’s Journey (1999), Jean-Claude Lauzon in Leolo (1992), David Wellington in I Love a Man in Uniform (1993), Bruce McDonald in Hard Core Logo (1996), John Greyson in Lilies (1996), Mort Ransen in Margaret’s Museum (1997), Lynne Stopkewich in Kissed (1998), Frank Cole in Life Without Death (2000), and Phil Hoffman in What These Ashes Wanted (2001). The objective of my research is to contextualize this striking trend toward death in broader terms of masculinities and the problem of affect in North American film culture of the last two decades.

As Lawrence Grossberg has observed, the extreme affective force of many postmodern cultural statements marks a crisis in the “historical form of our dialogical relation to the social world of people and things.” Affect has become a dominant mode of communication, expressing a new attitude of “empowering nihilism,” particularly in Hollywood films from the hard bodied action hero to the ubiquitous serial killer. But rather than dismiss or condemn this sometimes ironic yet nonetheless disturbing mood of hyper-violence and emotional crisis, we can see it as a condition of possibility—particularly from a dialogic feminist perspective—for understanding our heightened contemporary cinematic environment and the dynamics of hysterical masculinity underlying it. Apocalyptic violence and death are decidedly masculine forms of what Christopher Sharrett calls “mythic speech” that make North American gender values and relations intelligible at the turn of the millennium—a time in which, as Chris Faulkner writes, our “Europeanized consciousness” and its totalizing belief in fictions of white male wholeness, rationality, stability, and omnipotence are called into question.

However, in this clearly alienated North American cultural landscape where male nihilism, anxiety, rage, and violence have indeed come to characterize both American and Canadian cinematic representations of the social world and human relations, the Canadian films nevertheless seem different. As gendered forms of “mythic speech,” all of them emerge in the context of a North American mediascape of “empowering nihilism.” All of them show a variety of white male characters at the limit of their ability to control their environments, their emotions, the others around them, themselves, and their fate. And all of them use death as the ultimate symbolic horizon that their protagonists are forced to negotiate.  But where nihilism, violence, and death are typically visited with a sadistic vengeance on others by American protagonists struggling to preserve the masculine illusion of absolute power to control life and death (their own and others’), in the Canadian films their affective force is largely expressed reflexively and masochistically, with ultimate challenge—and risk—to the male self. Many of our most celebrated directors of the last two decades share an uncannily similar interest in facing and exposing the emotional problems suffered by men in confronting both the shifting gender and power relations in North American society, and their own mortality. In Canadian cinema, an affective aesthetics of pain and mourning gives the lie to the American fantasy of ‘empowering’ nihilism. To what extent this scenario is a continuation of the tradition of the “male loser” figure in the history of Canadian cinema, and to what extent it is an effect of the more subversive concerns of art and experimental cinema compared to the recuperative thrust of mainstream American genre cinema are the kinds of questions this research will attempt to explore.

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