Chapter Two: Eh, Canada
By Brett Ballard-Beach
December 29, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
“There is a girl named Spike from Degrassi High/?She had a baby when she was real young?/Her best friend is a skinhead chick/ She knows an Asian boy named Yick” --From the song “I’m in Love with a Girl Named Spike” by ‘90s ska band Skankin’ Pickle
A belated Merry Christmas (and Happy Boxing Day, to boot!) and a pre-emptive Happy New Year! I hope everyone is finding time to be with family, friends, and/or enjoy a little alone time as needed.
With the final Chapter Two column of 2011, I will once again step aside from the usual consideration of movie sequels for an extended jaunt to the Great White North. I will be pondering the concept of nostalgia (definition above supplied by dictionary.com) vis a vis my life in relation to two sequel-based exemplars of Canadian pop culture: Degrassi Junior High, the second in a seemingly endless progression of series built around the lives of Canadian adolescents and/or teens, revolving around their academic and social lives in junior and/or high school; and Souvenir of Canada 2, a 2004 coffee table-esque book by Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland that was a sequel to his 2002 book. Both are part of an art project of sorts that he initiated in order to answer his own question of “What is uniquely Canadian?” or “What makes Canada, Canada?”
The fact that this may strike some (most likely those from the United States) as a ridiculous query testifies not to any seeming silliness for a question of nationality and nation pride to be broached, but rather the stereotype that Canada is some sort of extension of the USA, or a distant family member - maybe second cousin on the mother’s side - that one remains just aware enough of to take for granted but never cognisant of to consider separately in the scheme of things. (Coupland discusses these and many other misconceptions, preconceptions, and plain old lack of conceptions concerning his native country in great detail.)
I may fall prey to such behavior on occasion, but if anything, I tend to romanticize Canada more than almost any other country (outside of New Zealand). It remains one of only two countries I have ever visited, and this was with my elementary school grades K-6 for the World Exposition on Transportation and Communication - Expo ’86 in British Columbia - a quarter of a century ago. I remember very little about the event, outside of standing in line with my classmates for about an hour and a quarter to have my name signed in Arabic, and some particulars involving nightly stays in youth hostels where all 22 of us kids and the several teachers and adult chaperones would be plunked down inside sleeping bags on auditorium floors, fitful nights of sleep remedied by having (being stuck with?) first dibs on the communal showers before the water had had a fighting chance to upgrade much past brrrr from its resting state of goose bump inducing liquid frost.
Perhaps there was something magical about those few days that I have reduced to a subconscious impetus for the inner glow I get when I think about Canada. Perhaps there’s something poetico-mythical I find in its geography and terrain, a Pacific Northwest that flies far above the one where I have spent the greatest percentage of my life. What I can say for certain is that a fair number of Sunday afternoons of the early 1990s of my childhood were spent watching Degrassi Junior High and its successor Degrassi High. This was as much by force as design, as with only three other channels to choose from at the time, and Sunday programming consisting of either sporting events or infomercials (both of which could occasionally have some sway over me, but never consistently), it was what I had to settle for.
(This may be as good a time as any to briefly address the issue of how exactly Degrassi Junior High is the Chapter Two. Unbeknownst to me until several years ago, there was a series entitled The Kids of Degrassi Street that began as one-off specials in the late 1970s and early 1980s before becoming a weekly event around the mid-‘80s. Several of the future cast members of DJH/DH were among the ranks here, but playing different characters, although the series did end with graduation from elementary school, setting the stage for what would follow.)
The show generally aired from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays on Oregon Public Broadcasting, and if, I remembered to set the VCR to tape it, I would watch after I was done working for my parents. I am having a hard time placing whether OPB ran back-to-back eps of one series or did one from each. I believe that the first episodes I may have seen were the series openers from Degrassi High which, uncommon for a teen series then or now (or really most television series), crafted a serious storyline in which one of the lead characters, pregnant from a summer fling, decides to have an abortion. But this isn’t just a hastily thought–out action that the series milks for an episode or two and then drops. And in this example rests the unique (in my eyes) appeal of the show.
Almost every 30-minute installment was what could be derisively called a “Very Special Episode” and yet, there was an unironic earnestness at the heart of the series (and Kids of Degrassi Street/Degrassi High as well) that helped gloss over the stiltedness and the breathless attempt to cover almost every hot-button and potentially controversial issue imaginable in a fair and even-handed manner. It wasn’t just the fact that Degrassi Junior High made its dramatic livelihood with scores of things “you can’t do on television” - to reference another Canadian television series that targeted adolescents - but that sincerity oozed out of its pores like angry eruptions on a teen’s hormone-ravaged face (apologies for the icky simile).
It was this sincerity - a trait one might also associate with public broadcasting in general - that set off the tripwires in my brain and made me regard it with not a little wonder and some puzzlement, viewing something that should be entirely familiar, even rote, as somehow just... slightly... askew. I would ascribe this sincerity as part of its uniquely Canadian DNA, even if, as one Degrassi fan site I came across noted, apart from the accents and inflections, the vibe of the show is “more 1980s Toronto Rust Belt than anything else.” I am not entirely sure if I agree.
In the first Souvenir of Canada book, Coupland provides an amusing spotters’ guide to locating the hidden Canadians among the populace of their neighbors to the south (i.e. the U.S.): they will occasionally let slip with metric measurements, and, if hit by a car, they will apologize to the driver. As self-effacing as he may mean it to be, there feels to me a kernel of truth in that evaluation that ties directly back into the ingenuousness of Degrassi Junior High: What would translate into overheated soap opera WB melodrama on our airwaves remained remarkably well-modulated, even polite, on theirs.
Degrassi Junior High never worried about being cool, or stuffing its casts with teen models, singers hyphenate actors, or soundtrack album tie-ins. And yet for all its grittiness, I don’t think I would say it subscribed to realism entirely. In trying to put it into words, I would have to say it created a genre of idealized realism, where issues were dealt with in a serious manner and matters were not routinely wrapped up in a neat bow at the half hour, but a constant flow of integrity permeated everything such that you couldn’t help but believe that eventually everything would be okay, even if parental deaths, abusive boyfriends, junior high pregnancies, and molesting teachers seemed to lurk around every corner. I almost feel the pull of nostalgia at work as I am typing this, but for what precisely, I am not sure.
My relationship with novelist Coupland (who turns 50 tomorrow) is a lot more complicated, complex and aggravating than that with Degrassi (which I say even as I fall further and further behind in my well-meant goal to catch up with the latest series iteration - Degrassi: The Next Generation - which has now reached its 11th season, the prior 10 of which sit unwatched, filling up major real estate on my DVD towers). If you know only one thing about Coupland, it is probably that he wrote a novel in 1991 entitled Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that is more or less responsible for popularizing that categorization, one so stigmatic and tenaciously sticky it has ensured a perpetual well of jokes among comedians, critical studies among cultural anthropologists, and a deep pool of loathing among those who fall in among its chronological boundaries.
The first work of his I read was actually his second novel Shampoo Planet, which I happened to encounter in a small bookstore in Sisters just days after reading a particularly eviscerating capsule review in the state newspaper. It took me many, many false starts and stops to be able to finish, an act that has been repeated several times over the last 20 years, involving at least one out of every two of his books. I go through a recurring phase where I suffer a strange kind of cultural amnesia in regards to Coupland, wiping the thought of him and his works like a spot off my brain. Then like clockwork, I think to myself, “ I wonder what’s up with Douglas Coupland” and more often than not, he has just come out with something new.
I think his greatest consecutive stretch of writing occurred in the mid-to-late ‘90s and involved the short story collection Life After God (1994), the nonfiction essay/pictorial Polaroids from the Dead (1996) and the Silicon Valley satire Microserfs (1995). Life After God in particular is a deeply moving series of mini-portraits of the loss of (and search for) spirituality among a generation struggling to create their own faith. Coupland is among the most emotionally sincere (that word again) of writers which is the element that always pulls me back in again, but he can strand his stories in off-putting apocalyptic violence/visions, purple prose, and narrative gambits that don’t hold up to repeated readings. I can think of no other current writer who both moves me and exasperates me in fairly equal measures.
And yet when I click with his point of view, it opens up a world of feelings and insight that I don’t experience with many other writers. Such a connection is innate with the Souvenir of Canada series (non-fiction seems to either open up a side of him that fiction keeps repressed, or it simply allows unfettered access to those traits of his writing and personality of that are the most meaningful for me.) Both installments of Souvenir of Canada could have easily wandered into lowest common denominator jingoism and celebrations of nationhood padded out with a lot of (very engaging) photos. Organized from A to Z, each book contains about 144 pages and 60 “chapters” - a word or phrase followed by a written essay of a few sentences or a couple of pages (complete with visual accompaniment) that literally or emotionally captures/defines/encapsulates the word or phrase. But as Coupland himself states, and his even-handed writing bears him out, he comes neither to praise Canada unequivocally nor to bury it, but to examine with a clear eye Canada’s fairly unconventional history, its long road to nation status, and what it has to offer to its citizens. For visitors to the country, he hopes that the books would serve as a “very personal x-ray of Canada.” (He also confirms that it’s perfectly fine to use the word Canuck, which is reassuring since I could never imagine giving it up.)
What Coupland most effectively conveys, through the anecdotes that involve travel (by train, plane, car, boat, or foot), or the consideration of time zones, is the vastness of his homeland, particularly in the northern areas that still remain relatively unpopulated/uninhabitable. He shadows a convincing portrait of the type of personality it took to survive in those climes in the early 20th century, or at least before the communication advances of the last several decades have helped to bridge that distance considerably. He uses this strategy to similar effect in his most recent work, a quirky, engaging, and quite unconventional biography on culture theorist Marshall McLuhan, amusingly given the in-joke title “You Know Nothing of My Work” in markets outside of Canada.
There isn’t very much that distinguishes Souvenir of Canada 2 from the first. It is still enjoyable, though at times it has the feel of an unnecessary sequel rushed into production to strike while the iron is hot. The centerpiece (pages 40-70) is an art installation, titled Canada House, in which Coupland was allowed to create a representation of the country through cultural artifacts, furniture, and found objects arranged and photographed in a house slated to be torn down, kind of like Burn to Shine with art instead of bands.
But SOC 2 does contain two of my favorite essays, both more than just a little sentimental. One concerns Terry Fox, a young man in the early 1980s who, having lost a leg to cancer, attempted a run across the country (effectively jogging the equivalent of a marathon every day for four months straight) to draw attention to and raise money for cancer. The other, which ends the book, involves a young Coupland, his siblings, and some baby geese that need nurturing. Only the hardest of hearts will be unmoved.
So as I did with Degrassi, I turn back to how I began this column, and once again ask “Wherefore nostalgia?” Coupland’s childhood was not my childhood. I don’t have grandiose notions of finding a Manifest Destiny by carving out a piece of Canada’s rugged terrain. And yet, Coupland’s prose evokes the heart of the universal with its laser-pointed specificity about his childhood and his geography, conversely allowing me to place myself as the protagonist in his first-person accounts, and feel as if I am re-experiencing them. The books are not even a decade old and yet I rent them religiously from the library and feel as if I have been reading them forever.
As I have written this, my mind keep returning to a pair of images from Francois Girard’s 1993 film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (which is this week’s viewing recommendation; if you only know The Simpsons parody, see what inspired it). An unconventional biopic on the Canadian classical pianist, it begins and ends with Glenn (Colm Feore) stepping out of and then back into the frozen Canadian distance. It is a moment both tender and sad and yet defiant and optimistic. In a way, it stirs my heart like Degrassi Junior High (even if it hasn’t aged terribly well) and Souvenir of Canada (even if it is just a coffee-table book) do. And for all my reasoning and rationalizing, I must simply conclude that they all pull at something indefinable in me.
Next time: Chapter Two 2012 edition kicks off with the first of a two-part series I am playfully calling ZAZ (Not ZAZ). And, in a little bit of self-promotion, check out my new BOP column Sole Criterion which debuted last week, and which I will be alternating with Chapter Two.