Ruin
Nation: Richard Hancox’s
Nationalism
serves contradictory ends. It can preclude differences in the interests of
imposing a fictitious homogeneity over diverse regions and identities. Yet, it
can also mitigate against such an imposition of universality by articulating
precisely those histories the concept of unity occludes. The question of nation
necessitates both a consideration of the ways in which nationalism is mobilized
in the interests of established power, as well as an exploration of how
articulations of the specificities of identity and place can resist those
imperatives. Richard Hancox’s experimental
documentary
That
identity is inconceivable outside of place is suggested from the outset of the
film. The first image in MJ is of overhead highway signs directing the way to
the city and points beyond. Hancox also uses this signifier of place for the
title and director credits, grounding his film in the particular. His authorial
presence is clearly suggested by the title “Rick Hancox’s MJ,” but his identity
is also inscribed by place; the other title reads “with
The
intercutting of old family photographs with public places (like the train
station and a national park), as well as the commentary by Hancox and his
parents which emphasize the place depicted in the photographs, suggest a fusion
of the autobiographical with social places and events. This is particularly
prominent in the commentary heard over an image of the building where Mr.
Hancox once worked. Recollections of private significance about knowing Molly
and Jack who used to live in the back, and Molly hanging out laundry, turn into
a story about her witnessing a mid-air crash. Private events collide with the
publically significant.
Using
fragments of his autobiography as the vehicle, Hancox suggests that identity is
site specific and therefore contingent on the system of signs that constitute
that site. He invokes himself as directorial presence in point of view shots in
which his hands are often seen, as well as in shots of him with his camera
taken from another perspective. But, he also demonstrates that this identity,
as filmmaker, is constructed in relation to cultural landscapes. It is
significant that when Hancox positions himself in the frame—that is, when we
see him in the “third person”—is it in relation to cultural discourses (reading
a book, watching TV, going through an archival filing cabinet, posing in front
of an antique car with his camera as if part of a museum display, and pressing
his face against a train window in what could be read as a parody of the
tourist, the ultimate consumer of culture.)
In fact,
the two stories Hancox’s parents tell about his childhood frame him within the
parameters of consumer culture: his mother and father recount stories about
Eaton’s and the Super Market respectively. The first time we hear the name
“Richard” called—this is a recurring aural motif—is in the context of his
mother’s Eaton’s story about calling him in the women’s department when it was
time to leave. Later in the film, Hancox’s identity is still attached to the
now deserted Eaton’s, this time by his father’s voice. When his mother calls
“Richard” Hancox cuts to a young male and an adult female in a store display,
unabashedly linking his identity with the culture of consumer capitalism. This
shot is followed by an image of a store display window in which reflections of
Hancox, as well as the Super Market sign, are visible. Soon after, Hancox’s
father recounts that the Super Market manager, significantly, threatened to
pull his advertising from the newspaper for which Mr. Hancox worked, if he
didn’t come down and stop his son from rolling cans in the aisles. Hancox’s
childhood, and by extension his identity, is consumed by signs of consumption.
The image
of Hancox lying in the berth is the only time he is shown not in relation to
culture (either as maker or consumer); he immediately turns out the light-this
subject cannot be seen outside of the
culture which surrounds him. In fact, his name is even turned into music at the
end of the film when he combines it with a techno-beat. “Richard” (and the
abbreviated “Rich”) is repeated to the point of meaninglessness; even his name
is no guarantee of an individual identity outside of cultural constructions.
MJ’s point that identity is formed in relation to culture is underlined by
Hancox’s construction of himself as a tourist: he goes “home,” but home is, to
paraphrase Ursula Le Guin, a place he’s never been (the town has changed). He
visits the tourist sits and reads travel brochures on the train ride into MJ.
As a tourist his goal is not just to see the sites, but to consume the sites he
sees.
MJ weaves
this concern with identity as not only cultural recollection, but of cultural
collection, into the context of historic and contemporary Moose Jaw. Hancox
suggests that the past (like identity) is only retrievable as signs (memory is
a photograph, a newspaper article). He also reminds us that the same is true of
the present. Actual business signs are a dominant image in the film but Hancox
generally constructs MJ as a collection of signs primarily through the motif of
tourism. MJ is introduced as a tourist site through Mac the Moose and a
voice-over commentary that explains how the community hosted dinners to raise
money for a “spanking new tourist information booth.” Reference is also made to
a visitor who b ought a souvenir cap and went looking for tourist attractions.
This commentary, with its reference to dining and shopping, clearly emphasizes
consumption but it is, particularly, the consumption of signs of MJ (moose
burgers were even featured at one of the diners). The museum exhibits and gift
shop (with their rows of MJ paraphernalia) further code the city in relation to
a tourist economy and the production and circulation of images of itself. Even
the residents of the city are constructed as tourists in their own town: they
can eat at the “Café Arizona” and gamble at “Las Vegas of the North.” The only
time Hancox actually shows people, they are spectators at a parade: promotional
culture for the community which allows visual consumption of it for its
members.
Yet, Hancox
reminds us that the signs which constitute place cannot necessarily be trusted.
Interestingly, a shot of the crowd at the parade taken from above the
street-the parade is out of sight-constructs them as spectators of nothing.
Like Mac the Moose, “Las Vegas of the North” and the “Café Arizona,” the parade
is a sign of place which is out of place, literally out of the frame. While
these representations can be read as an expression of a desire to be somewhere
else through the appropriation of other cultures, they also point to the
artificiality of signs generally. For example, a white friend of Hancox informs
the viewer that his band has to “pretend to be Mexican for three days” for the
opening of the Café Arizona; Hancox later focuses on the poster for the events
which promises “Live Latin Entertainment.” These signs are suspect, they don’t
hold water: Mac the Moose, we are told, leaks.
The signs
of place Hancox foregrounds are empty, they refer to nothing-this is especially
evident in the frequent images of signs (many in disrepair) on the buildings of
closed businesses. In some cases, all that literally remains is the sign. The
Temple Gardens ballroom was demolished for a parking lot but, as Hancox points
out, “The sign’s still there.” As if to emphasize “nothing,” Hancox focuses on
a building and zooms out so that the parking lot in front consumes the frame.
This image belies the sense of plenty invoked in the voice-over which lists a
variety of products manufactured in MJ. Similarly, a voice-overreports of the
closing of a Robin Hood mill “that gave MJ its mill city nickname.” The
nickname remains but it drained of its meaning as the material relations and
economic potential suggested by the mill vanishes. A grain terminal is turned
into a complex with many facades and the train station is literally empty:
we’re told, “It’s like a dungeon in there.” It, too, is just a façade: Hancox
is unable to get inside to film. As one voice-over comments about the effects
of the rail cuts on MJ, “Now it’s an air town.”
More
particularly, the railway, as an icon of regional as well as national identity,
is shown to be rooted in economic imperatives (“They watch out for themselves;
their decisions are made in Toronto;” they’re only interested in the bottom
line). It is in the disparity between the promise of prosperity offered by the
railroad and the current economic deprivation, that the train, as sign of
“national unity,” is de-railed. The railway is shown to be a symbolic currency
motivated by centralized interests generated by its historic role in making
unification, in the form of federation, possible. It is interesting that the
train which is trashed is “The Canadian,” its project in ruins. Since it no
longer serves the economy’s need it is reduced to a meaningless sign, a frozen
museum exhibit.
It is
Hancox’s concern not just with signs of place but with the material relations
that constitute that place and the relationship between the two, that prevents
MJ from slipping into a nihilistic postmodern lament about the death of the
social and the triumph of simulacra. One of the reasons that signs of place are
so clearly suspect in MJ is that Hancox is careful to draw attention to the
disparity between signs of well-being and the lived experience of economic
deprivation. It is in this sense that signs are empty. When the signifier and
the experience are irreconcilable the artificiality of the sign is more
evident, its relation to nothing more apparent. This is most poignantly
expressed in the relation drawn between Mulroney’s official discourse about
economic prosperity (“Canada has one of the highest standards of living and one
of the best qualities of life”) and images of rural poverty and a defunct
business. The business is, ironically, named “Comet Transport.” Despite
Mulroney’s declaration of progress, this business has come to a full stop (we
see a shot of one of its abandoned trailers). Similarly, the city council
chambers are luxuriously renovated (for the third time since 1961) but the
public sites to which Hancox refers are barren and deserted. MJ draws attention
to the economic effects of budget cuts to the railway through recurring images
of closed businesses with boarded windows and voice-over commentary about how
the town is hurting. For example, when asked what she would do with a five
hundred dollar shopping spree by a radio host, a caller replies that she has
“two boys at home” and would buy groceries. This is followed by a sign
advertising “all you can eat” and images of Hancox in an otherwise empty
restaurant with a half-eaten dinner he seems to have abandoned. Again there is
a disparity between the promise of consumption (in excess) and the reality that
there is no one dining. As if to underline the disparity, Hancox signals his
own privilege in his choice not to finish his meal. Signs of consumption
(physical sustenance) are undermined by the lived experience of economic
disenfranchisement the film foregrounds.
MJ’s
general movement from a prosperous past to a deprived present mitigates against
the notion of history as progress. Hancox’s father reminisces about a time when
the town was “alive,” as opposed to the dungeon it’s become. History is not
only not progress, it might very well signify the opposite. A voice-over
extolling modern Western societies’ technological accomplishments is juxtaposed
with reports of death by transport (one man died when his tractor overturned,
six sixteen year old boys were killed in a car crash and thirty seven died in
the mid-air collision referred to earlier-this last example is related in some
detail). In focusing on a history of technological, as well as other disasters,
Hancox avoids a nostalgic lament for the past. The city sat under several feet
of dirty and water and a house exploded with no apparent cause. Even his
childhood memories are marked by violence: bbs were lodged in someone’s chin,
he and his friends waged a “pitched battled in the street,” and suffered the
principle’s strap.
MJ is not
only no nostalgic, it reveals how signs of nation and the technological tools
that support it collude with the imperatives of colonialism. Hancox implicates
the train in the project of colonization through a drawing of a steam engine
speeding through the prairie landscape. The engine serves the dual function of
dispersing the buffalo on the tracks ahead and providing support for white
settlers to fight off charging natives. This re-signification of the train as a
tool of colonization avoids a romanticization of it and challenges the idea of
history as technological progress; the question is, progress for whom?
This
question is addressed in the sequence which follows. A Native legend about
starving brothers who turn into stars is heard over images of rows of RCAF
planes and is intercut with an account of the inauguration of the Saskatchewan
provincial government which invokes blatantly racist stereotypes in its
description of Native peoples. Technology and the discourse of colonialism
displace the native story; native history is suppressed, a fascination with
stars is turned into a fascination with instruments of empire. Natives’
explanation of their own realties (in the form of the legends) is supplanted by
the colonial construction of them as “grotesque and gaudy.” Yet, Hancox turns
the tables and assumes this identity for the colonizer as he cuts to an image
of a plane which has been turned into a monument. It is the will to master the
stars (rather than become them) that is grotesque and gaudy. The
marginalization of native histories by dominating discourses is also made
apparent as Hancox cuts from the Native legend to images of animated dinosaurs
and tombstones over which are heard a report of the Queen’s 1959 visit to MJ
and Mulroney trying to explain the reasons for the cuts to VIA train. Official
discourses replace and drown out the fainter sounds of native drumming and
chanting; the colonizer (both monarch and federalist) is associated with
death-the account of the Queen’s visit even reports on the death of her driver,
tellingly in the limo. This section ends with an out of turn version of a monarchist
song and images of photographic negatives of the royal visit. The official
discourse of Ottawa is contested as well: on a couple of occasions Hancox edits
Mulroney’s voice to repeat pat political phrases rendering it nonsensical.
That native
histories are still suppressed by colonial interests is evident as Hancox cuts
from the legend sequence to a museum brochure which invites us to “be a time
traveler” as it displays images of white settlers. A similar point is made when
he juxtaposes a voice-over which refers to a map of MJ made in 1703 by a royal
geographer with an image of a bookstore window in which a sign advertising
“Westerns” is prominently displayed. The commentary foregrounds the colonial
privilege of mapping, the thus claiming, territory, and of re-naming the
culture as well (“what he(the royal geographer) called the late moose jaw
culture”)-he even has the privilege to declare it deceased. The cut to the
store ad for Western novels suggests another example of the privilege to
construct history through images of nation and, importantly, the continuation
of this practice in the present.
While MJ is
about the interconnectedness of identity and place it also challenges those
very terms. Hancox does not posit a stable, individual identity, or subject,
but one in flux (in the final section, the landscape, seen from his perspective
from the train window, alternates direction from one shot to the next). This is
an identity inscribed by multiple (and conflicting) cultural discourses (one of
the final images of Hancox is as multiple reflections in mirrors). Similarly,
place is not the natural landscape but a museum, a collection of cultural
artifacts. In drawing attention to how certain constructions of place privilege
some identities (in this case regional and racial) over others, Hancox
demonstrates the need to dismantle a nationalism which has as its project the
suppression of differences in the interests of economic and racial dominance.
MJ challenges the authority of such empty signs as the railway and the monarchy
to signify nation and reminds us, “all that is solid melts into air.”