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Canadian Journal of Film Studies (2013) - It's not always that black and white: Universalism, feminism, and the monochromatic worldview of polytechnique

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Abstract

Perhaps the most famous film to use black and white cinematography to diminish the effects of the gore onscreen is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (I960). Like [Denis Villeneuve]'s film, Psycho is a fictional recreation of the story of a real murderer (Ed Gein) and the psychotic actions of a man who feels utterly oppressed by women.

Article

I.

I begin with a note on what this essay attempts to do, and what it does not. In considering the discourses and intertexts that surround Denis Villeneuve's Polytechnique (2009), I continue a line of analysis developed in much of my previous work: I consider the reverberations of Villeneuve's film within the public sphere and examine some of the ways in which its stylistic and political choices shape the discourses that surround the film. I do not provide a "reading" of the film per se; others in this issue do so with a great deal of intellectual rigour and finesse. Instead, what concerns me is how the ideas in the film and, as importantly, of and about the film, can be understood within a fairly well delineated public sphere, which includes those who know of the event to varying degrees, mostly located in Québec and Canada.

When I first discussed writing this essay with the editors, I was given a remit 1 have not explicitly had before: namely to write from "a man's point of view," offering an account of the "crisis of masculinity" that underpins Polytechnique. What immediately became clear was that writing about the crisis of masculinity depicted in Polytechnique foregrounds my position as a man writing about a film inundated with broader questions of gender, feminism, and representation. It is therefore important to set the stage and outline the kinds of debates around masculinity, feminism, and the "crisis in masculinity" that were in circulation in the late 1980s at the time of the Polytechnique massacre. For instance, the role of men in feminism was a fraught academic topic at the time, analysed by a number of theorists. For example, in 1987's Men in Feminism, Stephen Heath argues that the role of men in feminism is to provide salient examinations of why men behave the way they do‑especially in relation to pornography‑instead of simply offering (often paternalistic) support of the feminist cause.1 In the same book, Elaine Showalter critiqued male academics' use of feminism as a "tool" of analysis of bigger, more "important" questions.2 And Terry Eagleton, in response to Showalter's essay, talks about his own marginalisation as a working class male in the UK academe as an imperfectly parallel experience to that of feminists.3 To summarise this debate, one could do worse than paraphrase Freud and ask, "what should men do?"

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, while academics debated the role of men in feminism, at the very same time, males "fighting back" against the "crisis in masculinity" became a part of the public sphere through popular media. Two notable books that gained much popular attention at the time were Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and the highly absurd Robert Bly's Iron John.4 Why did this crisis arise at this time and what exactly constituted this "crisis"? There are a number of points that need to be raised to answer this question. The "crisis in masculinity" often unproblematically codified masculinity itself as white and straight. Moreover, the crisis ought to be understood as a response to the gains made by women in light of second wave feminism. Furthermore, this so‑called "crisis" is often seen to be provoked by the way in which feminism had challenged conventional gender roles, accompanied by the fact that a massively transforming economy‑de‑industrialisation, urbanisation, and the rise of a knowledge economy‑could be seen to marginalise classically masculine roles. In light of high divorce rates and the changing definitions of the family, some men felt that "traditional" masculinity was under siege, despite the fact that women still lived with male violence, unequal pay, and political and economic elites that were largely white, largely straight, and largely male.

These kinds of debates still permeate contemporary culture and the discourses surrounding Polytechnique and, as noted above, masculinity itself is as diverse and contradictory as any other descriptive paradigm. As such, the discourse of malecrisis that I shall contend surrounds Polytechnique is one that, in and of itself, eradicates difference between genders and within masculinity. And the eradication of difference and the replacing of that difference with a universalised form of humanism is one of the underlying problems of Polytechnique, as I shall argue.

The diverse and contradictory problems that underlie the use of masculinity as a totalising descriptor can also be understood in terms of what it means for a (straight, white, queer friendly, feminist [or, if one prefers, feminist‑friendly], middle class [but from a working class Scots‑immigrant family], universityeducated, Anglo‑Québécois) man to be writing about this film. Am I writing from a singular male experience ("a man") or from a male "point of view" (where that point of view implicitly stands in for all men, which, as noted above, it can in no way accomplish)? Also, writing "as a man" could mean writing from a position of experience ("what did the event and Denis Villeneuve's Polytechnique mean to men?") or from a position of affinity ("what, as I man, can one say about the event and the film? Does a man have anything new to say?"). One obvious thing it does ...

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SCOTT MACKENZIE teaches film and media at Queen's University. He is coeditor of Cinema and Nation (Routledge, 2000), Purity and Provocation: Dogma '95 (BFI, 2003) and The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (McGillQueen's University Press, 2013), editor of Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures (University of California Press, forthcoming 2014) and author of Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester University Press, 2004) and Guy Debord (French Filmmakers Series, Manchester University Press, forthcoming).

Notes

  1. Stephen Heath, "Male Feminism," in Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (London: Routledge, 1987), 1‑33.
  2. Elaine Showalter, "Critical Cross‑Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year," in Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (London: Routledge, 1987), 116‑132.
  3. Terry Eagleton, "Response," in Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (London: Routledge, 1987), 133‑135.
  4. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1987) and Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading, MA: Addison‑Wesley, 1990).
  5. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
  6. Patricia Bailey, "Reliving the Tragedy," CBC News Art and Entertainment, February 4, 2009, http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/film/story/2009/02/04/f‑polytechnique‑villeneuve.html (accessed 11 November 2011 ).
  7. Mark Steyn, "Excusing the Men Who Ran Away," Maclean's 5 March 2009, http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/03/05/excusing‑the‑rnen‑who‑ran‑away (accessed 4 January 2012).
  8. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" in Language, Counter‑Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca: Princeton University Press, 1977): 139‑140.
  9. Patricia Bailey, "Reliving the Tragedy," CBC News Art and Entertainment, February 4, 2009, http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/film/story/2009/0 2/04/f‑polytechnique‑villeneuve.html (accessed 11 November 2011).
  10. Katherine Monk, "Polytechnique Finds Beauty Amid Tragedy," Calgary Herald 20 March 2009, www2.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=b96447332042‑49f6‑bac8‑ded8631d2504&p=l (accessed 11 November 2011).
  11. Peter Howell, "Polytechnique: Silent Witness," Toronto Star 20 March 2009, http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/605272 (accessed 11 Nov. 2011).
  12. See Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997) and Scott Mackenzie, "Lists and Chain Letters: Ethnic Cleansing, Holocaust Allegories and the Limits of Representation," Canadian Journal of Film Studies 9.2 (2000): 23‑42.
  13. Pierre Vallières, "Témoignage d'un otage privilégié des « orders ». Brault a manqué son coup," Cinéma Québec 4.1 (1974): 18‑20.
  14. Indeed, both films are about the psychotic imagining of effect of domineering women and how this supposed domination leads to violence.
  15. Carol J. Clover, Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 35.
  16. Ibid., 40.
  17. The day after I submitted the final draft of this essay, yet another shooting took place, this time in Newtown, Connecticut on 14 December 2012, leaving 27 people, including the shooter, dead. The same process of debate started immediately, this time over gun laws. The N.R.A. responded to the demands for tighter gun laws by making the incredulous statement that the only way to stop school shootings was to have armed volunteers in every school in the USA.
  18. George Lakoff, 'Arena: Politicizing the Tragedy In Arizona?" Politico, 9 January 2011, http://www.politico.com/arena/archive/reactions‑to‑the‑tragedy‑in‑arizona. html#E6790930‑A422‑4A2C‑A444‑267035F2D4C3 (accessed 11 November 2011).
  19. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980): 6.
  20. See Denys Arcand, "Cinéma et sexualité (1964)" in Hors Champ: Écrits divers 1961-2005 (Montréal: Boréal, 2005), 24‑38 and Jacques Godbout, Le réformiste: textes tranquilles (Montréal: Quinze, 1975), 24.
  21. Diane Lamoureux, 'Nationalism and Feminism in Quebec: An Impossible Attraction" in Feminism and Political Economy: Women's Work, Women's Struggles, ed. Heather Jon Maroney and Meg Luxton (Toronto: Methuen, 1987), 51‑68.
  22. See Scott Mackenzie, Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 165‑168.
  23. This history remains largely ignored in Anglophone feminist accounts of the Massacre, where many Anglo‑Canadian feminists subsume what happened in Montreal into a pan‑Canadian, if not pan‑North American narrative. For more on the specificity of Quebec feminism, see Janine Marchessault, "The Women's Liberation Front of Québec," Public 14 (1996): 36‑48 and Marchessault, in this issue. See also Francine Pelletier's recent important writings on Polytechnique in relation to la révolution tranquille in Mélissa Blais, Francis Dupuis‑Déri, Lyne Kurtzman et Dominique Payette, eds. Retour sur un attentat antiféministe (Ste‑Therèse: Les éditions remu‑ménage, 2010).
  24. For instance, one glaring difference is that Québécois feminism had little, if any, interest in the Canadian cultural nationalism debates that flourished in all aspects of the Anglo‑Canadian left, especially in the 1970s, around the unyielding influx of American culture.
  25. The term "humiliation" comes from former PQ leader Lucien Bouchard's description of the Constitutional repatriation and the subsequent failure of the Meech Lake Accord, during the second referendum campaign of 1995.
  26. After hearing arguments on 8 August 1989, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in Daigle's favour on 16 November arguing that the rights of the fetus were not protected under the Quebec or Canadian Charter, after Daigle had obtained an abortion in The United States.
  27. Indeed, in contemporary North American culture, these debates have not abated. For instance, a battle has just been waged in Mississippi to amend the State's constitution, to say that personhood begins at conception, an idea so preposterous, and which would open up so many legal problems, that even many on the right were wary of it. It was defeated in a statewide vote, with 58% voting against the amendment on 8 November 2011.
  28. Indeed, one sees this in many of the accounts of the state of mind of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin. His undying commitment to the Confederacy (although he didn't volunteer) and slavery became the fixation through which his mental disease channeled. See, for example, David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995), 585‑588, and Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004).
  29. For more on this issue in contemporary Quebec, see Tim Nieguth and Aurélie Lacassagne, "Contesting the Nation: Reasonable Accommodation in Rural Quebec," Canadian Political Science Review 3.1 (2009): 1‑16.
  30. Adam Kelly, Anorak (2007). Play supplied courtesy of the author.