The Moose Jaw Postmodern by Arthur Kroker

Originally published in a catalogue: Richard Hancox (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1990)

Rick Hancox’s Moose Jaw is already a Canadian class, not only in

experimental filmmaking but also as a prophetic analysis and re-creation of the Canadian discourse. In this film, there is everything: Moose Jaw itself as a privileged scene for understanding the big crash that is postmodern society; a daring reversal of the usual practice of documentary filmmaking into a personal, and deeply existential, journey into the interiority of Hancox’s mind; and a seductive and violent reversal of all of the big categories of contemporary culture-nostalgia, childhood, voyeurism, and history. In Hancox’s cinematic imagination, we are simultaneously at the end of all things-the ten-year period that the film traces parallels the economic decline of Moose Jaw-and at the beginning of something new. A meeting point of autobiography and history, Moose Jaw also speaks deeply and profoundly of absurdity as the very essence of the Canadian identity. Moose Jaw, then, as the first of the really existentialist cities where economic impossibility is met with stoicism, and sometimes with maniacal boosterism. A Don Quixote-like city on the prairies that likes to boast, “There’s a future in our past,” and where, in a fit of promotional enthusiasm, a gigantic moose (vandalized with fluorescent red balls) is placed on the Trans-Canada highway (three miles outside of Moose Jaw), with the predictable result that passing tourists stop for the obligatory Canadian Moose statue shot (like the Goose in Wawa or the Big Nickel in Sudbury), and then immediately get back in their cars to zoom on to the next photo opportunity. Tilting at windmills, therefore, as also part of the Canadian prairie sensibility, which is to say, part of the Canadian absurd, a nation founded on the impossible dream of always living on the edge of its own contradictions.

There’s a Past in Our Future

Moose Jaw is not about Canada’s past, but about its future. That point where all the people have finally fled, but still the empty machinery of neon signs on Main Street whirs on in an indefinite circulation of images; where the economy has disappeared, just imploded, but the local “Moose Boosters” suddenly intensify their advertising efforts on behalf of Moose Jaw as a new economic mecca (the biggest gambling casinos for a new Las Vegas of the North, the biggest retirement centre, the biggest transportation museum); and where the Canadian passenger railway (the famous “Canadian”) may have been terminated, but leaves in its wake powerful memory traces, a whole railway museum culture.

Everything here has its final destiny as a museum specimen. Not just the transportation paraphernalia, particularly the railroad cars with their frozen wax figures of conductor and passengers, but the abandoned and shuttered Eaton’s store with its two mythic dead crows rotting on the floor (“one crow sorrow. Two crows joy…”) an even the disappearance of Temple Gardens into yet another empty parking lot with a flashing neon sign (“This building will soon be gone, but the memories linger on”). Nothing is safe from “museumization,” Western frontier homes are carted down the highway to the Prairie Pioneer Village Museum. The school still operates, but half of its window are bricked up as in impatient anticipation.

When Hancox began the film ten years ago, there was a beautiful wooden sign in the railroad station that announced arrivals and departures of all the trains. By the summer of 1989, the very same sign had already made its retirement home as yet another fossilized item in the transportation museum. Indeed, even the filmmaker (most of all?) is not safe from the virus of museumization. In the latter part of Moose Jaw, Hancox actually becomes one of the wax figures in the railroad car in the museum. Caught perfectly in the pose of the grotesque, his face is smeared against the window. Here, the museum has finally come inside; and the living bodies on the outside are only trompe l’oeil deflecting attention from their actual body possession by broken dreams, kitsch memory traces, and ghost stories from childhood.

So, then, Moose Jaw as a hologram of Canadian culture, that point where the destiny of the whole can be read in the density of this one special part.

Eating Moose Jaw

It is a curious but persisting feature of Canadian society that its most advanced cultural transformations often appear first in rural areas: sometimes in the Far North (in writing about the Inuit, Peter Kulchyski mdescribes eloquently “Paleolithic Postmodernism”); sometimes in isolated single-industry resource towns (pulp and paper mill towns, mining communities), which, with their direct access to the international empire of communications through satellite dishes, are simulacra of our coming fate of living at the violent edge of deterritorialized images and dependent economy; and sometimes in fading prairie cities, such as Moose Jaw.

It is this cultural trait that lends Hancox’s Moose Jaw such a prophetic quality: a reading of the Canadian mind under the sign of the Moose Jaw post-modern. Here, Canada’s primal rhetoric of technology-what the communication theorist Maurice Charland calls “technological nationalism”-has, with the disappearance of that great railroad icon, the Canadian, simply dissolved as a sustaining ethos of the Canadian community. What is left is the detritus of technological society: a devastating and profoundly disturbing vision of cities in ruins, places of broken dreams and schizoid buildings. It is appropriate that the music of Moose Jaw alternates between kitschy nostalgia and the menacing electrode score of synthesizers, because Moose Jaw is like a sampler machine: a site of fantasized identities, floating snatches of disconnedcted conversations, fragments of music flotsam as if to provide a veneer of coherency over the reality of an imploded city. Empty restaurants, abandoned hotels, fading snapshots, decayed newspapers, a Las Vegas city council chamber: a whole city which has actually been eaten by its parking lots and museums.

This is also a film about eating Moose Jaw, about, that is, the

disappearance of the contents of Moose Jaw-the detritus of the

transportation industry, houses, signs, whole streets-in to a cavernous museum of Western culture; and the disappearance of the identities of the “Moose Boosters” most of all into an always fictionalized past dinosaurs with skin like throbbing gristle; reveries of what might have been (Hancox’s father says that when he first arrived, “They called Main Street ‘the Flash’”); and panic schemes for what still might be-the recently announced revival of the Sulphur Springs for a new Banff on the prairies.

But maybe it’s just the opposite. Not Moose Jaw in ruins, but a thriving city which can be so intensely postmodern that it has passed into another qualitative stage of contemporary cultural experience-bimodernism. Indeed, Hancox’s Moose Jaw can be so seductive because it works by tracing a logic of imminent reversibility where all of the original sign positions are flipped. Thus, the signs of nostalgia are speed-processed at the beginning of the film, as if to remind us that this is not a film about hystericized male kitsch (the old and boring search for boyhood dreams); history (the shuttered buildings everywhere and the Hopper-like Main Street) flips into perpetually blinding tourist signs (long after the Grand Hotel closed, its exterior neon signs still beamed, its telephones and lights functioned, and the rooms came alive at night, almost like the Shining); and the panoptic eye of the observing camera is, halfway through the film, itself put under surveillance by the buildings it thought it was recording. Moose Jaw, then, as a possessed city of dreams where al of the old binary oppositions of modern Canada suddenly lose their force and begin to suddenly short-circuit.

Hancox is conscious of this, and early on in the film he signals his

awareness. On the train going out West, he reads a book on crash theory. And just in time. For Moose Jaw does not exist in this film, except as a surrealistic site of the very first of Canada’s crash cities. A panic scene, that is, of our processing through technology to such a point of intensity that the catastrophe begins to slow down, to become inertial, to where we seemingly live in slow motion. And why not? Because here the surest sign of the passing violence of technology is its final appearance as the aestheticization of culture-the implosion of the city of broken dreams into a big museum. If Hancox can look so frantically and so long (ten years) for childhood memories: of his mother (the scenes of Eaton’s with the lost boy’s voice, “Only here dear”); of his old home of his friend (the musician in Hollywood/Mexico simulacra), of his landscape (the snow scenes), of the abandoned railway station; it is because there is nothing there. Hancox’s Moose Jaw has only a cinematic existence now, an empty sign onto which can be transcribed all of the flotsam of empty memory traces and dead desires. The memories have vanished into the spectral blue of the prairie sky, and what is left is a body and a time, that of a Canadian filmmaker, with no history, no autobiography, no determinate meaning. By the end of the film, Moose Jaw exists only fictionally as a parodic site for the inscription of Hancox’s lost childhood memories, for his obsessive searching for some centre, some ground, which never existed anyway. A decentered film, then, by a displaced experimental filmmaker, about a simulated prairie city in a radically disjointed Canadian culture. The particular brilliance of Moose Jaw is that here there are finally no beginnings or endings, no sure meanings, just random bursts of energy and delocalized memory traces. The mood of the film is about melancholy, sadness and pathos to such a point of mania that it becomes parodic. In the end, who is really under surveillance? Who is the detached, alienated observer? Hancox, or all those abandoned traces of buildings in Moose Jaw? Who is boosting whom? The “Moose Boosters” as cheerleaders for the flagging spirits of the people of Moose Jaw, or all of those wonderful dinosaur machines, with their glittering teeth and dull roars, serving one last function to boost the drooping egos of the “Moose Boosters?”

And finally, Moose Jaw as a brilliant contribution to the tradition of

Canadian experimental film, or something else. The body and mind of Rick Hancox, the filmmaker, as itself possessed by the enigma of Moose Jaw to such a degree of intensity that Hancox himself becomes the real subject of this film, an experimental site for playing out the existential drama of the Canadian absurd? Think about it: on the train out West, Hancox may read about crash theory, but on the way home, on the train down East, his splayed face made grotesque against the train window, the surrealistic camera movements, the flashlight searching in the dark for all the kitschy signs of history, make of him the first of all the crash cinematographers. Hancox, then, as that rarity of filmmakers: an artist who sees so deeply that his filmic craft actually does a big flip, making of his body a certain sign that there is a little bit of Moose Jaw in the very best of us.

Hancox’s Obsession

This is to say that Hancox has done what is most difficult. He has

transformed a private obsession-the fusing of personal autobiography and history-into a public project. In doing so, he has disclosed at first the past which is Canada’s future. But he has also done something else. He has spoken into the silence of an impossible gap-into, that is, the silent universe of the Canadian absurd, that gap between impossibility and survival, between the quixotic an the stoical. Moose Jaw is really a film about the Canadian absurd as our sustaining primal.

Refusing the position of detached observer, Hancox has actually made of himself, his body, his mind, and his camera, instruments of the Canadian absurd. He is a filmmaker who is so obsessed with the object of his study that even Moose Jaw, dinosaurs and all, finally responds to his challenge and takes full possession of him. At first, the possession is purely psychoanalytical, by the screen-memories of childhood-the sounds of the railroad, prairie skyscapes, the wind, childhood scenes of snow and family. Later, the possession will be physical. Those two fantastic scenes where Hancox smears his face against eh window of the train (once in the museum, and then on the train home) are just like the British painter Francis Bacon’s artistic method. Bacon once said of his work:

“I would like my pictures to look as if a human being has passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory traces of past events, as the snail leaves its slime. I think the whole process of this sort of elliptical form is dependent on the execution of detail to show how shapes are remade or put slightly out of focus to bring in their memory traces.” (Francis Bacon, The New Decade, as quoted in Hugh Davies and Sally Yard, Francis Bacon (New York: Abbeville Press, 1982).

Rick Hancox is Canada’s Francis Bacon: an artist whose films, culminating with the prophetic genius of Moose Jaw, “leave a trail of the human mpresence and memory traces of past events.” And why? To create a hologram of the Canadian absurd in such detail that Canadian “shapes are remade… put slightly out of focus to bring in their memory traces.” Moose Jaw, therefore, as an intentionally distorted image, a film that bends the curvature of prairie space and the red-shifting of prairie minds to draw out the truth of the Canadian postmodern.