COUNTER-NARRATIVES, CLASS POLITICS AND METROPOLITAN DYSTOPIAS: Representations of Globalization in Maelstrom, waydowntown and La Moitie gauche du frigo

Resume: En portant une attention particuliere a Maelstrom, l'auteure considere trois films canadiens qui abordent la problematique de l'experience metropolitaine de la mondialisation pour re-imaginer la ville en terme de traditions architecturales et du libre mouvement de capitaux. Dans ce uvre la ville devient une dystopie de fonctionnalisme redondant et anonyme. Se habitants appartiennent a une ethnie uniforme, homogene blanche, tous de col-blancs proletarises dans la vingtaine ou first appearance de la trentaine. Sa weft emotive est une melancolie generalisee explicitement issue de l'impacte du capital sur la vie de tous le jours.

The metropolis is, above all, a myth, a tale...an allegory; in particular it shows the allegory of the crisis of modernity.... To advance beyond these bleak stories of exile and that grey rainy region of the anguished soul, is to establish a faculty of perception of being at home in the city, and to make of tradition a space of transformation rather than the show of a cheerless destiny.1

While an enormously disputed and internally differentiated material substance of literature, theories of globalization provide a resonant framework for reading contemporary Canadian cinema as a field shaped through international flows of money, textual influence and ideologies as abundant as by national determinations. There is, perhaps, no better place to begin than with Arjun Appadurai who has devised an expansive prototype that encompasses the cross-border pour and social integration of transnational "ethnoscapes," "mediascapes," "technoscapes," "financescapes," and "ideoscapes."2 For Appadurai, this broad-dimensional approach to globalization necessitates a reaching far down rethinking of issues of mediation and causation beyond economist approaches that privilege transnational corporate capital as the single greatest in quantity crucial vector in considering globalization. According to Appadurai, streams of capital, technology, immigrants, and ideas are not, "coeval, gradually approaching isomorphic or spatially consistent. They are...in relations of disjuncture...[and] have different make hastes axes, points of origin and termination."3 Appadurai's enormously influential type allows us to theorize the incomplete, jagged mutually contradictory histories of globalization in Canada. Separating the economic from the socio-political in relation to their discrepant histories of unravelling might go someways toward explaining the continuous vivacity of regional and sub-national cultural identities in Canada (Quebec and first nation communal formations being the paramount examples) against the backdrop of accelerated continental economic integration and American domination of mass media consumption.

In addition to Appadurai, Saskia Sassen provides a clear alternative to thinking globalization as a single integrated or unified conceptual scheme. Sassen glance ats shifting analysis from the conventional global/national axis to a consideration of by what mode globalization is actualized in thicken localized assumptions about globalization, which stres the hyper-mobility of capital or the immateriality of the information economy, Sassen places a renewed emphasis upon concrete location and place by means of arguing that even information economies require substantial, site-specific infrastructures and agglomerations of population. Introducing sub-national groupings like cities into an analysis of globalization not alone adds concrete specificity but allows for a consideration of the way in which economic globalization impacts upon everyday life, in particular, upon the lives of marginal subjects: "women immigrants, race of colour, whose political faculty of perception of self and identities are not necessarily embedded in the nation or the national community."4

Sassen's approach goe well beyond the consistent and repeatedly consistently banal evocation of the local as a situated or essentially resistant counter-ballast to the homogenizing and imperializing streams of global corporate influence. Reorienting the analysis of globalization from the macro to the micro involves a focused consideration of the specific places where the everyday reality of globalization is performed, felt and resisted through embodied subjects. Central to this shift in focus is the understanding that while the cultural dominant may have a bulky impact, its effects are circumscribed and not monolithic, and the everyday is the site where the contradictions of globalization and the tensions of registering differences or resistances are greatest in quantity apparent.

I want to direct the eye at a group of three films: greatest in quantity extensively, Maelstrom (Canada, Denis Villeneuve) and, briefly, waydowntown (Canada, Gary Burns) and La Moitie gauche du frigo (Canada, Philippe Falardeau), all produc in the year 2000 for the way in which they take up issues arising from the everyday metropolitan experience of globalization and re-imagine the city in relation to global streams of capital and architectural traditions. In each, the city has been transformed by the agency of the power of global corporate agriculture into a dystopian, soulless site of claustrophobic anonymity and redundant functionalism: chrome carburet of iron and glass, food courts and malls. In each, the city is strangely, almost uniformly ethnically homogeneous (white), and the major narrative protagonists are proletarianized white collar workers in their twenties and early thirties, i.e. that class-fraction and generation greatest in quantity emphatically effected by a post-fordist universe of globalizing capital, branded consumption, mall agriculture and mass-mediated existence. all of these films show work in relation to the globalized restructuring of the economy, whether this includes the depressed end information processing sector in waydowntown, or the de-industrialized landscape of calling impossibilities in La Moitie gauche, or the haute couture retail sector in Maelstrom, whose succes is built upon the ephemera of style. In all three cases, the emotional weft of everyday life is single of a generalized melancholia explicitly tied to the colonizing and territorializing streams of corporate capital into all aspects of life-the intimate as plenteous as the work environment.