My Big fat Canadian identity theft

TAKE ONE, June-Sept, 2003 by Dougald Lamont

In 1975, Mordecai Richier, along with Lionel Chetwynd, was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of his novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Duddy Kravitz had been Richier's breakthrough novel in 1959, the story of a young wheeler--dealer growing up on and around St. Urbain Street, in the heart of Montreal's poor Jewish area of town. It wasn't the story of Richier's life, but it was the story of his people and his neighbourhood. Richer had a soft spot for Duddy who kept turning up unexpectedly in other novels such as St. Urbain Horseman and Barney's Version. So Richler was amused when a producer told him that if only he had set the story in Chicago, the film would have made a fortune.

Nia Vardalos, who wrote and starred in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, didn't make the same mistake. Made for $5 million US, it is now the most successful independent film of all time, having (as of this writing) grossed over $270 million. Vardalos grew up in Winnipeg's small Greek community and based (very loosely) her story on funny family conflicts from her own marriage to a non--Greek, who, like her film fiance, converted to the Greek Orthodox religion for her sake. Many of the characters, especially the father, are based on her family who still live in 'Winnipeg. A large part of the cast and all of the locations are Canadian (the film was shot in Toronto), but rather than set the movie in Winnipeg--which Vardalos said might make the movie "too specific"-the location was changed to Chicago, which is more "universal" or "generic."

Being "generic" is a luxury reserved for American cities. Los Angeles, New York and Chicago are considered "universal" or "anyplace" because they have been portrayed and mythologized so many times in television and films. They already occupy a space in the consciousness of the world film audience. So do great cities like Rome, Paris and London; however, these are also considered exotic and legitimately foreign in a way that Winnipeg and Toronto are not.

Is there an "Idea of Canada" in the global consciousness? Only the one still left over from Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald movies--mountains and Mounties. Directors such as Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg have received critical acclaim, but have done so with their own idiosyncratic vision. Their films are art--house generic and come from no place special. Hollywood television and films, on the other hand, are unabashed advertising for America. They assert America to itself and to the world. If you're a Canadian producer looking to sell your show to an American distributor, you'd better leave out the Maple Leaf and that funny--looking Canadian money. The end product has got to pretend to be American, or at least be generic in a way that viewers will understand, by default, that it is set in the United States. In response to these demands, when money changes hands, it's U.S. greenbacks. In Toronto and Vancouver, you get used to the American signiflers being shoehorned into view by film crews: American flag s are draped in the background and sidewalks are studded with U.S. post boxes. Goodbye Canada. Hello Anytown, USA.

Aside from this geographical and cultural annexation, Hollywood has always appropriated world history on behalf of the United States. The Second World War has provided America with a lot of heroic fodder. Tom Hanks has both starred in and produced films--Saving Private Ryan and HBO's Band of Brothers--whose blinkered take on D--Day makes it appear that the United States won the war single--handedly. Watching Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, you would never know that Canadians fought in the Second World War, to say nothing of having their own beach on D-Day.

In the recent submarine--thriller U-571, which is based on actual events, the nationality of the submariners who boarded a German submarine to obtain the Enigma decoding machine was changed from British to American. In Pearl Harbor, an American pilot (Ben Affleck) goes to England to fly in the Battle of Britain. Considering America's isolationist stance at the time, this distortion is outrageous. (Needless to say, there are no films in the works portraying America's isolationism. The two years between the outbreak of war in Europe, September 1939, and the American's entry into it, December 1941 after the Pearl Harbor bombing, is one big lost historical weekend.) Mel Gibson's American Revolution saga The Patriot features a scene in which British troops burn a church filled with women and children, a barbaric act that never occurred but, instead, was cribbed from an atrocity committed in the Second World War by the Nazis.

The idea of England as a place with its own character survives the Hollywood treatment. This is in part because the English have distinctive accents (the posh ones activate American class insecurity), but also because they have cranked out enough great popular music, television and the occasional film to make a dent in the American psyche. Canadians, however, are usually perfectly happy to erase themselves and churn out generic "cultural product." To paraphrase actor Bill Needle, Toronto seems incapable of putting on a decent performance, even as itself. Despite having the biggest Pride Day parade in North America and a huge gay population, the Americanized version of the British hit show Queer as Folk, which is shot in Toronto and is filled with Canadian actors, is set in Pittsburgh, which has virtually no gay community.