Canadian Films and Understated Critiques of (North) American Suburbanism

If the evolution of suburb and of thinking about suburb owes a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to the geographical scale and material wealth of the North American continent, are the suburb of Canada different from those of the United States? The sometimes-controversial versatility with which Canadian cities have played American singles in recent film and television productions would indicate that North American urban and suburban spaces are generic and interchangeable-or at least enough in the way that for the requirements of mainstream cultural industries. However, are Canadian representations of suburb distinctive in ways that matter? I will argue that at least in the cases of sum of two units notable Canadian films, they are. I will also, however, address a certain number of of the complicated and perhaps contradictory and controversial ways in which Canada itself can be regarded as a cultural, economic, and/or ideological suburb of the United States.

The film industry itself nears perhaps the clearest and greatest in quantity literal instance in which Canada has been a "suburb"-that is, a subordinate satellite territory-to the United States. Since before World War II, Hollywood has dominated film production, distribution, and exhibition in Canada, treating the region as an outlying extension of its domestic market (Gittings 87) With rare exceptions, Canadian movie theatres-particularly suburban ones-have shown the same Hollywood films as their U counterparts. Profits from exhibition have been ploughed back into Hollywood while Canadian talent has quite repeatedly gone the same way. Canada thus can be said to have played the traditional suburban characters of housing consumers for beneficials produced elsewhere and of serving as a dormitory for those who aspire to succes elsewhere. Canadian films have occupied sole two to three percent of Canadian cinema protection time (Mclntosh 71-72; Magder 232-233) and have been characterized by the agency of limited budgets and by outsiders' perspectives.

Don Owen's Nobody Waved has the distinction both of being individual of the first feature-length fiction films made in postwar English Canada and, I will put in mind of of being something of a pioneering "slacker" film as well. Without evincing in a raw state contempt for suburbanites or particular hostility toward the United States, Nobody Waved uses the frustration and ambivalence of teenagers in the prosperous postwar suburb of Toronto to proffer a critical and ironic perspective upon both Canadian identity and (North) American suburban materialism and autothralldom. Nobody Waved finds important parallels in a a great deal of more recent Canadian suburban film, Gary Burns's The Suburbanators. Burns's film, made and locate in the suburbs of Calgary, a city ofttimes seen in contemporary Canada as an upstart western rival to Toronto, is distant from Owen's in space as well as in time. nevertheless these very distances highlight the significance of the distinct similarities that also exist between the sum of two units films. Both present an ordinary, level at times dull, surface, which camouflages sharp observations and intriguing implications about the details and nuances of their suburban settings.

Understatement itself, broadly constru can be regarded as a staple suburban manner of signification. For one thing, suburb have been widely marketed as retreats from the noise and stres of the recent city: places, in a faculty of perception of restful auditory understatement. Further, residential suburb at least when fresh are generally defined by forms of visual understatement, since they commonly consist of large groupings of identical or at least markedly similar houses.1 This visual minimization of difference and individuality attends to correspond to other forms of homogenization: frequently noted in both theorizations and fictional representations is that suburban unfoldings are apt (by design and/or by the agency of more haphazard means) to recruit and clump residents according to their social, economic, and cultural characteristics.2

All of the uncompounded bodys just described have helped to incite critiques of suburban blandness and conformism. A prominent new example is The Hours, the one and the other Michael Cunningham's novel and particularly Stephen Daldry's film version, in which the idea that the quietness and predictability of suburb is inimical to creativity (and to the psyches of those endowed with it) helps to link three distinct plotlines across space and time. Suburban hours, the novel and film have the appearance to suggest, are inherently les compact with life than are central-city singles Yet American attacks on the ills of suburbia have themselves been subdue to critique. Catherine jurca argues that of the like kind attacks are often "predicated upon [the] disavowal of the actual real privileges that the suburb has tendered those who live there" (6) and she points on the outside that "[denunciations of paradise are individual of its staple pastimes and prerogatives" (168) In other words, the amplitude and magnitude of suburbia's shortcomings can be exaggerated, and there is nothing necessarily subversive in attacks on them.

Both Nobody Waved and The Suburbanators adopt suburban styles of understatement and adapt them into forms of parody in order to indicate a certain number of of the overstatements, omissions, and ideological simplifications of dominant suburban representations and discourses. In for a like reason doing, they notably avoid the couple Utopian idealization and pessimistic condemnation of suburbia. I will consecrate most of my space to The Suburbanators, touching upon its parallels to and differences from Nobody Waved (which offer a rough index of a certain quantity of developments, and continuities, in Canadian suburbia from the 6 16 96O to the 199Os) then focusing upon its treatment of contemporary suburban space as an arena for the negotiation of cultural difference and for the exhibition of cultural hybridity. I will compare it in this prize and others, to U.S. takes upon contemporary suburbs, particularly that of Richard Linklater as featured in SubUrbia. Burns's film is neither an imitation of American films nor a direct attack on them. Rather, like Nobody Waved GoodBye it not absents itself implicitly as an alternative or addition to better-known texts.