Patricia Gruben
It is a truism that film and television genres both reflect and affect the values of the cultures that produce them. Some scholars frame genre as a means of ideological repression and containment imposed on viewers through stereotypes that endorse conservative social and political imperatives such as marriage, consumerism, and parenthood (Moine 74). Others argue that our attachment to the ritualized repetition of genre values derives from our more fundamental need to address unconscious or unarticulated fears and desires. Jim Leach writes that “popular genres can … be interpreted as symptoms of collective dreams and nightmares, whether these are seen as determined by the human condition or by specific cultural environments” (Leach 50). Wherever our genre attachments originate, film studios are in the profitable business of tapping into unconscious desires and anxieties and temporarily resolving them.
The detective film is a formally and psychologically complex form that can reach deep into our psyches to question social and personal values and challenge the corruption of authority. Like most genres, it has been defined and refined through the Hollywood production cycle—from the dapper mid-Atlantic sleuths of the 1930s, through noir, neo-noir, and the cop-action films of the eighties, to the criminalist sub-genre of the current decade. It is a style with internationally recognized and enunciated codes, developed more or less simultaneously in the United States and Britain and amplified throughout Europe, East Asia, and beyond (Gates 60).
What identifiable role does the detective genre play in the Canadian film and television environment? Is this a style with particular relevance to either our “national psyche” or our export economy? Are our sleuths merely iterations of Hollywood models, or do they reveal values intrinsic to Canadian society? What forms are supported by public funders and private broadcasters? To what degree do the strategies of finance and social engineering, rather than the psyches of Canadian viewers, determine what projects are produced, regardless of whether they are seen or admired? As Matthew Hays writes in Cineaste, “It could be argued … that attaching larger, collective attitudes and feelings to English Canadian movies would be impossible, seeing as these films are not popular, and thus aren’t really conducive to sociological genre analysis” (21).
In this chapter I will survey Canadian crime films and television series in search of stylistic coherence, ideological or psychological enunciation of cultural identity, and any relationship this may have to values expressed in contemporary American crime genres. I will explore these questions more deeply in four areas: the myth of the Mountie; the TV mystery comedy; the social investigative drama; and, finally, a group of independent Canadian feature films that use the mystery form to explore larger metaphysical questions.
While scholars dispute definitions and systems, the audience is already a genre expert; it enters each film armed with a complex set of anticipations learned through a lifetime of movie-going. The genre sophistication of filmgoers presents the writer with a critical challenge: he must not only fulfill audience anticipation, or risk their confusion and disappointment, but he must lead their expectations to fresh, unexpected moments, or risk boring them. (McKee 56)
Detective films have been with us since the early days of the silent era, though they did not coalesce into a major genre until the coming of sound enabled writers to articulate complex plots requiring verbal exposition. According to Philippa Gates (8), the detective form has outlasted many others because the issues it deals with (crime, politics, law, morality, justice, sex, family secrets) are central to contemporary society, and because the genre is exceptionally flexible. The detective may be a private eye, a police officer, a reporter, a friend or relative of the victim, even an innocent bystander. The mystery to be solved may be a crime of passion, a political conspiracy, or an act of greed or of deep psychosis. The genre has been successfully grafted onto comedy, romance, and international intrigue and even onto art-house and experimental films.
Gates traces the evolution of the Hollywood detective character through its origins in the upper-class British sleuth—witty, brilliant, and sophisticated—exemplified by Sherlock Holmes. In 1930s Hollywood, actors such as George Sanders and William Powell shifted from playing British villains into new incarnations as debonair transatlantic detectives with dazzling powers of deduction—Powell initially as detective Philo Vance, and Sanders as international crime fighter Simon Templar, “The Saint.” Powell’s apotheosis was in the Thin Man series of films (1934–47) as Nick Charles, whose analytical skills were largely overshadowed by his witty, alcohol-imbued banter with his wife, Nora.
In North American feature films, except for the odd nostalgic tribute, the traditional sleuths of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle have largely given way to more active detectives and genres. In postwar Hollywood, the hard-boiled distinctly American type emerged as a durable persona that evolved from Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry to the rogue action-hero cops played by Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon (1987) and Bruce Willis in Die Hard (1988). Gates sees the rougher masculine model exemplified by gumshoes and action heroes as the heir to the frontier hero of nineteenth-century America in popular culture. She notes an underlying anxiety that, if the forces of evil were to overcome this character, “progress in American culture would halt” (32). American detective films since the 1960s are more likely to be thrillers or crime dramas than whodunits. In Robert McKee’s generally accepted definition, a thriller is a film in which the protagonist’s investigation puts his or her own life in danger, the second act sets up a cat-and-mouse game, and the third act escalates into a life-and-death crisis.
As Gates notes, each of these filmic sub-genres reflects the zeitgeist of its time. The classic hard-boiled detective epitomizes tough masculinity but lives on the periphery of society, suffering from postwar disillusionment and guilt over his association with evil (44–45). Some of the neo-noir films of the 1970s such as Klute (1971) and Chinatown (1974) reflected American cynicism and confusion over Vietnam. The hard-bodied “musculinist” action heroes of the 1980s typified by Willis and Gibson overcompensated for the demoralizing effect of both the war’s failure and the simultaneous rise of feminism by recreating the detective as a superhuman fetish object through his physical suffering. Though the heroes of the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon films are both police detectives, they spend far less time solving the mystery than enduring, and surviving, the physical ordeals inflicted by the villain. In addition Gates argues that “the detective film tends to offer conservative messages about race, class and gender, bringing closure to anxieties raised about white masculinity’s place in today’s society, and about social fears of crime and disorder” (24). The values of the social order may, through these heroes, be conservative, but the fictional pattern of disruption has still adapted to reflect the current social and political crises around masculinity in the real world. Shifts in political climate, gender relations, and other social values affect the cultural products of a specific society at a specific time.
In the 1990s, even action heroes like Willis and Eastwood took on more sensitive roles. The detective’s talents began to shift back from brute force to the mental dexterity of the criminalist stalking depraved serial killers in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Seven (1995), and The Bone Collector (2002). Unlike the Doyle/Christie crimes, these mysteries were perverse and horrific, probing the darkest labyrinths of the human psyche; the consequent danger to the detectives stalking these Minotaurs was psychological as well as physical.
The current decade is characterized by the spread of the horror crime into television in “criminalist” forensic investigation programs represented by series such as the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation franchise (2000–present, CBS/CTV), and its many imitators. The attraction of forensic science derives from the viewer’s sense of mastery in reconstructing the crime along with pathologists and police. We share the investigator’s point of view and often discover information at the same time as s/he does, in contrast to the old-fashioned sleuth stories in which the detective usually outsmarts the reader as well as the other characters through superior powers of deduction. In solving the crime along with the hero, we participate in constructing a coherent narrative that restores the social order (Gates 12–16). Most of the current forensic programs do include an element of suspense, either by cutting away to the criminal/victim plot or by threatening the investigators themselves.
The intelligent “soft-boiled” sleuth survives on British television, not only in perennial Doyle and Christie remakes but also in adaptations of Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, P. D. James, and Minette Walters mysteries made for television, often exported to North America, and particularly aimed at female audiences. These, and the popular Prime Suspect BBC series (1992–2006 in seven installments) starring Helen Mirren, explore disturbing crimes, but with less emphasis on gore and a bit less of the “detective in jeopardy” motif prominent in the American fiction of Patricia Cornwell, John Grisham, and Tony Hillerman. Surprisingly, many of these action-oriented American novels, except for those of Grisham and Tom Clancy, have not been adapted to television or feature films.
A database of Canadian film and television (Latta) reveals less than two dozen theatrical features since 1963 that fit the classic investigative genre, starting with Blood Relatives (Claude Chabrol, 1977) and Murder by Decree (Bob Clark, 1979). Both were products of the Capital Cost Allowance era (1975–82), an initiative of the federal government to grant 100 percent tax deductions for investment in Canadian film, which was quickly dominated by American-controlled genre films with American stars and settings. Since the CCA encouraged international co-production, it is not surprising that detective films made in Canada did their best to look like glossy Hollywood productions.
Blood Relatives and Murder by Decree typified the American/British categories of film noir versus sleuth or police procedural. Blood Relatives, starring Donald Sutherland, Stephane Audran, and Donald Pleasance, was adapted from an American crime novel by Ed McBain, directed by the “French Hitchcock” Claude Chabrol, and set in Montreal. Sutherland plays a police detective who investigates the brutal murder of a teenaged girl. The film’s style is reminiscent of Klute and other American neo-noirs of the seventies that explored the dark crevices of society as a corollary to the moral decline of American values in the aftermath of political scandal, assassinations, and war. This American malaise was not particularly relevant to the new sense of national identity in English Canada, with its progressive prime minister Pierre Trudeau and its legacy of McLuhanesque media sophistication from Expo 67, nor even to the violent enthusiasm of Quebec separatists. Rather it was intended as a product for the international market, made in Quebec only to take advantage of the tax credits and the picturesque atmosphere. Murder by Decree was a “Holmesian pastiche” about Jack the Ripper in Victorian England, with a cast dominated by British actors James Mason, John Gielgud, and David Hemmings along with Anglo-Canadians Donald Sutherland and Christopher Plummer (Latta). In both films, Canada provided a setting but not a psyche.
Among the few memorable feature films from this type are Bon Cop, Bad Cop (Eric Canuel, 2006) and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007). Bon Cop, Bad Cop is a comedy-thriller that teams a detective from Ontario (Colm Feore) with another from Quebec (Patrick Huard) in a race to solve a series of murders on the border between the two provinces. The film earned $12.2 million at the Canadian box office, making it the highest-grossing film in Canadian history (Hays 20). In its mixing of thriller elements with action and comedy, as well as the cultural jokes deriving from the “mismatched partners” plot, Bon Cop/Bad Cop is clearly inspired by its twin appeal to commercial entertainment and government funding agencies. At the same time, its humour was a powerful outlet for the stereotypes and tensions of francophone–anglophone relations.
Eastern Promises is much less recognizable as a Canadian film. It is set in the murky world of Russian gangsters in London, and features international stars Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, and Armin Mueller-Stahl, with a screenplay by British writer Steven Knight. This was the first entirely foreign setting for director David Cronenberg, known for his loyalty to his Toronto home and crew, but his films have always transcended Canadian archetypes. Another cross-border production, Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies (2005), is a disturbing, hypersexualized mystery about the murder of a college student in the hotel suite of two American comedians, investigated years later by a thrill-seeking Hollywood reporter; the script came from British novelist Rupert Holmes. Like Eastern Promises, it was produced by Robert Lantos of Toronto, made for an American studio with American stars, and shot outside of Canada. This internationalizing trend is currently influencing Canadian film and television at every level, from auteur cinema to boilerplate television series such as Flashpoint (CBS/CTV 2008–present), The Bridge (CTV/CBS 2010), and Shattered (Canwest Global 2009–present).
As Canadian funding agencies strategize to win 5 percent of the national box office, the embrace of genre cinema has become decidedly more prevalent. In 2001, only two of fifty-two feature films financed by Telefilm Canada could be termed crime films. By 2005, seven of forty-two government-funded productions fit this category, reflecting Telefilm director Richard Stursberg’s drive to increase the popular audience. Meanwhile Telefilm’s new policies allowed Canadian service producers to access government funding of up to $3.5 million per year to bankroll international genre films backed by Hollywood distributors (Johnson 1).
Clearly many of the psychic states described earlier in this essay transcend national and cultural boundaries. Other emotional conflicts, however—for example, guilt and confusion over the failure in Vietnam—are specific to the American experience. Although in Canada the crises over Vietnam and Iraq have had less impact, some would argue that Canadians feel an equal sense of impotence through their very relationship to the United States. The essential question is whether Canadian cultural difference is reflected meaningfully in its detective films—or whether they are simply attempts to imitate or parody American models.
At the same time, one must be mindful of the pitfalls of reductionism or simplistic thinking regarding the Canadian national psyche. Current scholarship on national cinema resists reductive, allegorical interpretations and instead explores “the complex and unstable relationships between the films and the already complex and unstable idea of the nation” (Leach 6). Our quota of soft-hearted, morally upright Mounties is countered by, and exists at the same time as, the tough cops and drug dealers of Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998–2005) and Intelligence (2005–2007); and perhaps this diversity itself reflects multiple perspectives of Canadian society.
Pure genre films in Canada, as Jim Leach noted in 2005, have been contested in both conception and reception because of Canadians’ suspicious yet admiring relationship to American popular culture. Leach agrees with Christian Metz that film genres are primarily American. Citing Graeme Turner’s writing on Australian cinema, he notes that filmmakers seeking to tap into genre’s popular appeal struggle with “the difficulty of adapting formal and structural devices from another culture without taking with them the meanings they most easily generate” (50). This struggle can be seen in detective novels/films such as Howard Engel’s The Suicide Murders (Parker, 1985). Furthermore, Canada’s cinematic output has historically featured one genre that seems to reflect the national psyche with clarity: the coming-of-age story or maturation plot. It can be argued that Nobody Waved Goodbye (Don Owen, 1964), Mon Oncle Antoine (Claude Jutra, 1971), My American Cousin (Sandy Wilson, 1985), and St. Ralph (Michael McGowan, 2004) express a search for identity as the “little brother” next to the American (or English-Canadian) behemoth. Yet, although examples of hybrid maturation/detective films appear in American films such as Blue Velvet (1986), Stand by Me (1986), and River’s Edge (1986), this combination is not a notable Canadian sub-genre. We must explore further afield to determine whether this or any other element particularly marks Canadian detective films. At the same time, an individual viewer’s attraction to a specific genre can of course be a personal preference rather than a symptom of our national culture. The fact that detective films are made in Canada does not necessarily suggest a particular relevance to Canadian culture; they may be made for commercial reasons with the expectation of international marketing.
In Canada, television has provided more outlets for crime dramas than the cinema. The Great Canadian Guide to the Movies and TV lists forty-eight detective-driven TV movies and twenty-six series dating back to 1967. The two formats are related; a quarter of the movies-of-the-week are pilots for or spinoffs from series such as Blue Murder (2001–4), Due South (1994–99), Wojeck (1966–68), Intelligence (2006–7), and North of 60 (1992–98). As spinoffs they are too widely disconnected to benefit from the momentum of brand development; Blue Murder came sixteen years before the series of the same name, the Wojeck movie-of the-week came twenty-one years later, and the second Intelligence movie was broadcast several months after the original series was cancelled.
Another twenty-eight of the TV movies, slightly more than half the total, are components of feature-length series, usually adapted from novels. These include three Detective Murdoch mysteries, based on the books by Maureen Jennings, Except the Dying (2004), Poor Tom Is Cold (2004), and Under the Dragon’s Tail (2005), and a TV series Murdoch Mysteries (CityTV 2008–present); three Dick Francis co-production movies; Jinnah on Crime (2002) written by Canadian Donald Hauka; two of Howard Engel’s Benny Cooperman novels that were made for TV, The Suicide Murders (1985) and Murder Sees the Light (1986); four Spenser: For Hire co-productions based on novels by Robert B. Parker; and six of Canadian Gail Bowen’s Joanne Kilbourn mysteries, Love and Murder (2000), Deadly Appearances (2000), The Wandering Soul Murders (2001), A Colder Kind of Death (2001), A Killing Spring (2001), and Verdict in Blood (2002); along with the ubiquitous Sherlock Holmes, the source of three co-produced TV films in 2000–1. The shows based on British or American novels tend to be co-productions; the Canadian mysteries have purely Canadian financing. The marketing allure of a recognizable brand is one of the attractions of genre films in general, and clearly there is an advantage to broadcasters in selling to an audience already familiar with the product.
The other twelve movies-of-the-week are failed pilots, low-budget oddities, true crime stories, or free-standing novel adaptations; for example, in the case of Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride (2007), a generic detective character and mystery plot were grafted onto a “literary” novel. According to the review in Variety, it was “a solid mystery that delivers its thrills at a swift pace, but as an examination of the complex relationships between women on issues of sex and empowerment, it falls short of making any kind of real statement” (Fries).
Along with commissioned productions based on well-known foreign detectives such as Nancy Drew/Hardy Boys (1995), Nero Wolfe (2001–2), and Philip Marlowe (1986), Canadian producers developed typical police procedurals such as Wojeck, Sidestreet (1975–79), Night Heat (CTV 1985–89), Urban Angel (CBC 1991–93), and Cold Squad (CTV 1998–2005). During these years, several series with recognizable Canadian settings and subject matter appeared, usually on Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC. An early example was The Great Detective (CBC 1979–81), which featured a nineteenth-century inspector from the Ontario Provincial Police. Another was Tom Stone (CBC 2002–3), in which an ex-cop/ex-con is recruited by a female RCMP detective to tackle corporate crime in Calgary. North of 60 was a long-running ensemble series set in northern Alberta, in which mysteries were mixed with character-driven social drama. Chris Haddock’s trilogy Da Vinci’s Inquest (1998–2005), Da Vinci’s City Hall (2005–6), and Intelligence (discussed in more detail below), were distinctively Vancouver-based.
Given an opening by the interruption in U.S. series production during the Writers Guild of America strike in 2007–8, Canadian producers have increasingly aimed for sales to U.S. broadcasters. Predictably, these products recycle familiar genres and disguise or minimize their Canadian settings. The first of this group was the crime thriller Flashpoint (2008–present), inspired by Toronto’s Emergency Task Force but set in an unnamed city. It was followed by The Bridge (2010–present), which focused on political conflicts within a big-city police force. The Bridge was created by Da Vinci veteran Alan Di Fiore but unlike its predecessors effaced all references to Canada. Rookie Blue, which combines action and personal dramas among five young cops, is another recent generic series; it premiered on Canwest Global and ABC in the fall of 2009. The Listener (CTV 2010), which ran for three episodes on NBC, features a paramedic who solves crimes with his secret telepathic powers. Shattered, built on the implausible novelty of a police detective with multiple personality disorder, was produced for Canwest Global and picked up by NBC Universal for broadcast in 2010. This trend reflects the continuing economic exigencies of producing big-budget drama, which must compete with American products for viewers even in its country of origin.
Despite ongoing pressure to broaden the audience by imitating American styles, four distinctive forms have emerged in the Canadian detective genre: the virtuous Mountie; the comic detective series; the social investigative TV drama; and a group of auteur feature films that use the detective genre as a means of enunciating deeper mysteries. They represent only a limited sampling in comparison to the range of generic productions, but they do reveal some noteworthy patterns in Canadian social identity.
Many outsiders have been struck by the oddity that one of Canada’s most powerful national symbols is its police force (although recent scandals have greatly diminished its prestige). Mounties were popular heroes of Canadian (and even American) cinema in the silent days, tending more toward muscle power than brainwork in fighting crime. According to Peter Morris, more than 250 Mountie films were made in the first half of the twentieth century. Mounties were known for their bravery and incorruptibility, unlike the villainous sheriffs portrayed in numerous American films from the same era. Morris notes that “Mountie movies show a marked penchant for last-minute confessions, which helped portray [them] as being more noble than intelligent, since they were constantly shown capturing the wrong people.” After nearly 200 such examples made between 1909 and 1922, however, audiences were saturated; the entire Canadian silent film industry collapsed in the following year, overwhelmed by Hollywood. The heroes in red serge returned after World War II in movie serials such as Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders, which continued to focus on action more than detection.1 In the same period, U.S. broadcaster CBS did its bit with the family adventure series Sergeant Preston of the Yukon (1955–58), again subordinating detective work to two-fisted heroics.
Such earnestness eventually begets parody. From 1959 to 1964 the iconic figure of Dudley Do-Right appeared on the ABC cartoon series Rocky and His Friends, endlessly rescuing the heroine, Nell, from his nemesis, Snidely Whiplash. Red Serge, a short-lived Mountie comedy (CBC 1986), revolves around the romantic entanglements of a garrison of officers and three local farm girls. Eight years later in Due South (CTV/CBC 1994–99), Paul Gross played a Mountie in full regalia working out of the Canadian consulate in Chicago with his deaf wolf “Diefenbaker” and a streetwise American partner. Gross’s character was a mockery of the noble Mountie of the 1940s—guileless, gallant, and relentless, in uniform even at home in his dingy apartment.
Jim Leach notes that generic conventions in Canadian film and television are often used ironically or self-reflexively (56). Irony is clearly at work in Due South, referencing the general American perception of Canadians as upright, hearty, and dull. Irony is also apparent in the feature film The Grey Fox (Borsos, 1982). When the Mounties finally catch up with the endearing train robbers in a B.C. forest, the awkward and bloodless roundup is intercut with a jumped-up Wild West version of the scenario inspired by Porter’s 1903 The Great Train Robbery. The RCMP as a Canadian icon is mocked more sharply in Srinivas Krishna’s Masala (1991), in which a polite but dim-witted female Mountie on horseback stumbles onto a scheme to export inspirational toilet paper to the Punjab.
When the RCMP are not portrayed as comically virtuous, they are usually competent, colourless detectives, as in Cold Squad. American films are far more likely to portray their police detectives as violent and/or corrupt, beginning in the noir era with films such as Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Detective Story (1951), and Touch of Evil (1958) (Gates 92). Similarly cynical Canadian detectives can be counted on one hand. Claude Fournier’s Alien Thunder and Jean Pierre Lefebvre’s On n’engraisse pas les cochons a l’eau claire (Pigs Are Seldom Clean) both appeared in 1973, perhaps in response to a loss of faith in the police prompted by the FLQ crisis of 1970. The former is the story of a nineteenth-century Saskatchewan Mountie (Donald Sutherland) who is tracking a Native cattle rustler and transforms into a rogue cop when his partner is killed. The latter is a portrait of an undercover RCMP narcotics agent who makes shady deals, cheats on his girlfriend, and is ultimately murdered by another dealer. According to Lefebvre, he “realizes and lives the profoundly contradictory aspirations of an apparently free man in a democratic country” (Canadian Film Encyclopedia). More recently, in Murder Most Likely (1999), Paul Gross, the blandly handsome star of Due South, played an undercover RCMP officer accused of murdering his estranged wife; and Intelligence portrayed corruption as well as competence in the CSIS Organized Crime Unit. Recent real-life revelations about the RCMP continue to taint its Dudley Do-Right image; perhaps more new films and series revealing police wrongdoing will reflect this disillusionment—or, yet again, the influence of American genres.
As noted above, Due South (1994–99) partnered a parodic “do-right” Mountie (Paul Gross) with a cynical Chicago cop (Callum Keith Rennie). It was an early co-production success, running simultaneously on CTV and CBS for three years and continuing for several more years on CTV. It was so popular in Canada that when its American co-producer dropped it after three seasons, it found a new partner in the BBC and was revived for another three years. The mixed comedy-mystery genre exemplified by Due South had precursors on American television with such popular series and movies-of-the-week as Columbo (intermittently 1971–2003), McMillan and Wife (1971–77), The Rockford Files (1974–80), and Moonlighting (1985–89). Canadian television jumped on the bandwagon fairly early with Seeing Things (CBC 1981–87), starring Louis Del Grande as a goofy psychic crime reporter, followed by Mom P.I. (CBC 1991–92), in which waitress and single mom Rosemary Dunsmore doubled as a private detective. The genre has dwindled in the United States, with its most popular example, Bones (2005–present), conceived and produced by Vancouverite Hart Hanson, who imbues it with the distinctively Canadian sensibility discussed above, although it is produced in Los Angeles for Fox Network (2009). The genre remains popular in Canada, currently exemplified by Endgame (Showcase, 2011) with Shawn Doyle as damaged but wisecracking Russian chess champion Arkady Balagan who solves crimes while confined by agoraphobia to a luxury hotel; and CBC’s Republic of Doyle (2010–present), starring Allan Hawco as a private investigator who leaves his father’s agency to join the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary in season 3. The Globe and Mail critic John Doyle frames it thus in relation to its American cousins:
While set firmly in St. John’s, it’s set in a Canada of the mind. The violence is very limited, more shenanigans than murderous mayhem. The humour is low-key but sharp, the people are essentially decent and most of the criminals are closer to being rogues than they are the violent serial killers who populate U.S. network crime shows. Instead of the grim forensics scenes of those shows, we get the sunlight of St. John’s and sudden leaps into absurdist humour.
From 1998 to 2008, three series created by Chris Haddock and broadcast on CBC presented a darker and more morally complex world than other Canadian police procedurals. Haddock, who had previously worked on such conventional 1980s cop shows as Adderly (Global 1986–99), Night Heat (CTV 1985–89), and MacGyver (1985–92), sought a new approach to the familiar genre by combining detective work with two other TV drama staples, medicine and the law, resulting in Da Vinci’s Inquest. The show was set in the city coroner’s office, where staff worked with the police to investigate unnatural deaths. Haddock came up with the concept after meeting Vancouver’s coroner Larry Campbell at a forensic science conference. He was intrigued to learn that in British Columbia the coroner need not have a medical degree, thus providing a “common man’s” point of view with which the audience could bond. Many of Da Vinci’s plots were based on current issues and events, including the investigation of a serial killer who targeted prostitutes and a lengthy debate about whether prostitution should be legalized.
Da Vinci’s Inquest appeared in 1998, two years before the CBS series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–present), and has been credited with inspiring what is now the most popular series on U.S. television. Yet the true distinction of Da Vinci is less in its spawning of the forensic procedural sub-genre than in its exploration of the complex threads of urban life. Haddock’s interest in social themes inspired him to leave stories largely unresolved; he felt it would be “foolish and false to the audience” to do otherwise, because the social questions at their core are unanswerable (Haddock interview). After a first season of jangled nerves at CBC over the slow-moving and ambiguous plots, network executives recognized the show’s appeal to audiences and critics alike and gave Haddock a relatively free hand.
Haddock says that the process of oral narrative defines the style of his writing, which he describes as
a cup of water from the river—a history of our story, a saga, neverending. Everything rolls on, everybody gets up and carries on. The satisfaction of tying things up neatly is a moment—then everything continues. There is no ultimate resolution. Storytelling is a process of passing on human vitality. You wind people up, create tension, then release them. (2)
In their research the show’s writers learned that many of the conventions of medical examination, like pinpointing the time of death, were, in Haddock’s words, “extreme bullshit.” They decided to question the credibility of details as part of the show’s style, structuring the plot through situational accuracy rather than dramatic convenience. The debunking of generic conventions extended to the character of Da Vinci himself, whose authority and expertise were often challenged.
Yet the three series are far from documentary in style. The images are beautifully composed and lit; Da Vinci’s Inquest was the first to use the theatrical widescreen format on television. Haddock and cinematographer David Frazee considered using macro lenses for close-ups of the evidence, but ultimately chose a more distant, less manipulative shooting style, which they later perfected in Da Vinci’s City Hall and Intelligence. Consequently, scenes tended to be longer and less interrupted than in other shows, and the actors built their performances on the same principle of ambiguity. The show is tightly scripted but feels improvised; Haddock credits the acting skills of the regular cast, particularly lead Nicholas Campbell, for creating the illusion of spontaneity.
After five seasons, Da Vinci followed his real-life counterpart, Vancouver coroner Larry Campbell, into the mayor’s office. Ironically, Campbell’s election as mayor was partly attributable to his celebrity status from association with the show. Da Vinci’s City Hall was less about solving crimes than about confronting the problems of the city, with a few murders and conspiracies added to keep the police busy with subplots. City Hall may have stretched the audience’s tolerance for strung-out plot lines and lack of resolution; it lasted only one season. Haddock quickly moved on to Intelligence, which followed a similarly convoluted multi-plot structure designed to examine the social economy of Vancouver, this time through the relationships of drug dealers, federal investigators, and the middlemen who feed off and double-cross both sides. In Intelligence the balance between story and urban portrait is tipped back toward the more active detective plot, interlaced with personal dramas involving office rivalries, family schisms, and moral compromise.
In all three series, Haddock and his writing partners used the investigative genre to explore their interest in the political and social structure of cities. It was stretched thinnest in Da Vinci’s City Hall, in which there was little or no mystery structure to drive the plot. Haddock was clearly testing the form to see how far he could push the linear conventions of the self-reflexive and metaphysical narratives found in contemporary Canadian detective films discussed below.
In his article on genre in Canadian cinema, Jim Leach writes, “It was precisely because of the close association between popular genres and American culture that Canadian filmmakers could use them to explore the impact on Canada of the powerful cultural influences from south of the border” (50). He notes that Denys Arcand used the crime film as a device for representing political tensions in Quebec after the October Crisis, and that David Wellington’s I Love a Man in Uniform (1993) critiques the American cop show and its model of masculinity through an actor playing a policeman who carries his role into real life with tragic results (55).
Beyond these political applications, several Canadian filmmakers have turned to the investigative genre as a tool for exploring knowledge itself. In Patricia Rozema’s White Room (1990), detective fiction is mixed with fairy tale in the story of a hapless, passive young voyeur who is temporarily paralyzed after witnessing the rape/murder of a famous pop star, then stalks her reclusive alter ego to discover that she is the real voice behind the manufactured image. Rozema claims that White Room is an intentional “journey through genres, from murder mystery to comedy to pastoral romance” (Austin-Smith 260). Lee Parpart defends the film, which was not well received, as a critique of narrative convention and “androcentric story structure” as embodied in its protagonist, an aspiring writer “whose unexamined investments in traditional narrative and inability to break free of the type of story that demands sadism spell fatal trouble” (295). White Room’s narrative is driven by the investigative genre as the young man, Maurice, seeks the answer to the mystery. Yet this plot device is tempered by self-reflexive fairy-tale conventions that offer alternative happy and tragic endings (Parpart 295).
Atom Egoyan’s Exotica (1994) has at its heart the devastating unsolved murder of a young girl. Her father, her babysitter, and a lonely member of the search party circle around the mystery at the centre of the film, unable to come to terms with their grief and loss. The mystery is never entirely solved; the child’s killer is never found. The story’s resolution instead comes from the reconciliation of the grieving characters, and their evolution from paralysis into some kind of acceptance of the tragedy. In John Greyson’s disruptive, Brechtian musical Zero Patience (1993), the nineteenth-century explorer Richard Burton attempts to trace the spread of AIDS back to the mythical “Patient Zero,” but his sleuthing is Greyson’s pretext for deconstructing AIDS mythology (Gittings 136). In Jeremy Podeswa’s The Five Senses, a red-herring kidnapping plot is a retrospective device to connect five eccentric characters limited by their sensory obsessions. In my own Low Visibility (1986), a disparate crew of investigators and therapists including a police detective, a clairvoyant, a speech therapist, a psychologist, and two sympathetic nurses interrogate an enigmatic near-mute, found wandering in a mountain blizzard, about a fatal plane crash in which he may have been involved. Most recently, Bruce Sweeney’s The Crimes of Mike Recket (2012) grafts a police investigation onto Sweeney’s characteristic desultory family drama, focusing more on the absurdity of dealing with a son/brother/husband accused of murder than on the mystery itself.
All of these films exploit the dialectic between the fabula (the events of the story arranged in chronological order) and the syuzhet (the plot of the film as it unfolds). This disparity is heightened in every detective story because the investigative form is based on the withholding of information. However in White Room, Exotica, Zero Patience, and Low Visibility, the fabula is interrupted; the mystery is ultimately never solved. In The Crimes of Mike Recket, the question of whodunit is never much in doubt, though the police doggedly pursue their man. In The Five Senses, the crime turns out never to have taken place at all.
Among the most literary of the makers of metaphysical mystery films is the Quebec auteur Robert Lepage who has been drawn to deconstructing the mystery genre in three of his five feature films. In his first feature, Le Confessionnal (1995), Pierre, a young artist recently returned from China, searches the underworld of Quebec City for his half-brother Marc, attempting to unravel the devastating family secrets that have led to the suicide of Marc’s young mother and then of Marc himself. The film includes extensive flashbacks to 1952 when the family tragedy is set in motion, at the same time that Alfred Hitchcock arrives in Quebec to shoot his thriller I Confess. The hero of this film-within-a-film is a priest accused of murder but bound by the oath of the confessional to protect the real killer. Thus Le Confessionnal is doubly articulated as a mystery, though technically I Confess is not a true detective film, in that the protagonist knows the killer’s identity (as we do) long before the police do. The two plots are tied together through several thematic and narrative parallels, as well as through Lepage’s virtuosic visual suturing of one image to another—as, for example, when a tracking shot through the present-day church crosses in front of a pillar on the other side of which, within the same shot, we are taken back to 1952. Both plots involve a priest bound to conceal the truth; and ironically, in the framing story, the confession that reveals Marc’s paternity is made not to a priest but to Hitchcock himself in an attempt to interest him in a possible screenplay idea. “That’s not a suspense story, “Hitchcock replies. “It’s a Greek tragedy.”2
Lepage’s second feature, Le Polygraphe (1997), is a complex, claustrophobic study of three characters connected to the unsolved murder of a young woman, Marie-Claire. Her neighbour François (Patrick Goyette) is interrogated by police and given a polygraph test with inconclusive results. Meanwhile the dead woman’s friend Judith (Josée Deschenes) hires François’s neighbour Lucie (Marie Brassard) to act in a film she is making about the case, and urges François to play a fictional version of himself as the chief suspect in the case. This incestuous circle is drawn tighter by Christof (Peter Stormare), a forensic scientist working on the case who becomes romantically involved with Lucie. Gary Michael Dault writes that “Le Polygraphe flails wildly at the truth, grasping at it with its narrative fingernails” as François struggles with his increasing uncertainty as to whether he actually has murdered Marie-Claire as the police seem to believe (47).
In Lepage’s Possible Worlds (2000), police detective Berkely (Sean McCann) investigates the murder and brain-theft of stockbroker George Barber (Tom McCamus). The film begins with the clichés of detective drama: the discovery of the body by a window washer, followed by the classic crime scene investigation and subsequent interviews with suspects, visits to the forensics lab, and ruminations about likely motives between the worldly, grizzled Berkely and his impulsive younger partner Williams (Rick Miller). But it quickly becomes obvious that this is no ordinary detective film. The investigation is interrupted by scenes from George’s life as he searches for his “real” or “imagined” lover, Joyce (Tilda Swinton). These are not flashbacks in the conventional sense; the scenes have almost no narrative coherence within the larger film, and the information the two characters share about their lives is contradictory. We soon realize that we are inhabiting the consciousness of the victim as he experiences parallel lives with the enigmatic Joyce. In each of these encounters, George remains relatively stable but Joyce’s identity shifts from neuroscientist to stockbroker to loving wife. Eventually it appears that these scenarios are emanations from George’s brain, which is kept alive in a jar by the obsessed neuroscientist (and murderer) Dr. Kleber.
Possible Worlds is based on John Mighton’s play from 1990; it is the only film by Lepage that is derived from another writer’s work and the only one in English. Play and film use the detective format as a framework for an ontological inquiry in which multiple realities are posited. Mighton was inspired by a series of neurological experiments from the 1950s that revealed that the two sides of the brain could function independently, and by the philosophical inquiries that stemmed from this challenge to our sense of personal identity: “I was intrigued by what constitutes the self and also by the role imagination plays in our world and in our relationships” (Possible Worlds press kit, 4). Mighton is a mathematics professor, and the play is very much a work of mathematical philosophy, built on the idea that at every moment our lives take a turn that could be multiplied by endless alternatives. It may be significant that Detective Berkely shares a name with the eighteenth-century philosopher who argued that objective reality cannot be proven and that therefore nothing can be said to exist except consciousness itself (Runes 38). This leads us to the contemporary philosopher David Lewis, who argues that all possible realities actually exist, not just as concepts or narratives but with as much validity as our everyday lives. This system, which he calls “modal realities,” posits that the multiple worlds are accessible to each other if they share any properties; “every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is” (Klaver 49). This is the notion on which Mighton has built his play.
Lepage notes that his own work does not originate with thematic concerns: “I’m interested in form, and I think that form eventually squeezes meaning out of what I do. It’s a question of what are the building blocks” (quoted in Richler). Lepage characterizes the detective genre as pertinent to his formal intent in that “the essence of the job of the police is to consider all different possibilities” (Possible Worlds press kit 5). Mighton sees the film as “a poem or reverie about existence,” in contrast to the original Theatre Passe-Muraille production of the play, which stressed George’s terror and disorientation (Anderson 23). In this it resembles Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961). The two films share the basic premise of a man remembering a past that seems not so much imaginary as simply parallel, attempting to continue a romantic relationship with a woman who appears to remember nothing. The nouveaux romans of Marienbad screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet and other French “new novelists” frequently reference the detective form as a device for deconstructing narrative itself. As Mullen and O’Beirne note, these writers positioned themselves outside the genre of detective fiction in order to critique linear narrative, which they considered obsolete (59).
In contrast, Lepage’s work generally depends on psychological realism and finds its formal innovation not by rejecting linear narrative entirely but by drawing parallels between two or more spatially and temporally disjunctive narratives that in themselves are comparatively conventional. In Possible Worlds, however, Lepage and Mighton question reality itself. They develop no real character psychology and thus no convincing simulacrum of subjectivity, given that the point-of-view flashbacks contradict each other, and thus fail to anchor us in any semblance of a stable character or reliable narration. Closure does seem to be found in the conclusion of the framing story with the police investigation, which pays lip service to investigative procedure. In the penultimate scene, Joyce visits Detective Berkely, who tells her that they have found the murderer and located George’s brain; Dr. Kleber is keeping it on life support. Joyce supplies biographical details that corroborate certain aspects of George’s multiple realities: they were married, they were deeply in love, and George was going to “give up his job at the market for me; I was going to quit my research and travel around the world with him.” Berkely assures her that the brain is only in a “rudimentary dream state,” but “I’m sure he’s still thinking of you somehow.” The film ends with a declaration of George and Joyce’s love on the beach where several of their previous encounters have taken place, an apparent affirmation of Berkely’s understanding of George’s ontological state.
Yet this ending is undercut by earlier scenes, in which George carries on a dialogue with his murderer, Dr. Kleber. Most curious is a sequence fairly early in the film, which begins with the detectives arguing about evidence. George’s apartment caretaker and discoverer of his body anxiously confides that he saw a “flying saucer” in the sky the night before: “Now they’re stealing our brains … they’re gonna kill me.” He rushes out, leaving the detectives amused; but later Berkely visits the morgue to see the caretaker’s body, frozen to death in a pool of melted water. The alleged alien intervention is never explained but it is clearly another “possible world” with its own logic in which George’s imagination is not involved.
Directly after the scene in the detectives’ office comes a sequence with Dr. Kleber entering his inner sanctum, where he retrieves a metal box. We cut to George’s POV of a stormy night at a beach house familiar from other scenes. The door is opened by a silent man as distorted gospel music plays; George enters a larger version of Kleber’s metal box, where people clap and a woman dances like a chicken, all out of focus. Kleber waits for George in a room that is revealed as the upper storey of a lighthouse. They emerge onto a rocky, undulating beach resembling the surface of a brain, to watch two guttural men inserting bricks into the folds of the rocks while muttering “block” and “slab” like refugees from a Beckett play. George and Dr. Kleber discuss them in a conversation that sounds like a mix between a mathematical theorem and a Chomskian linguistic game:
G: What are they doing?
K: Building.
G: Building what?
K: I’m not sure.
G: Why don’t you ask them?
K: They wouldn’t understand me. Their language only has three words.
G: I know two of them: “block,” “slab.” What’s the third?
K: “Hilarious.”
G: What can you do with that? How can you have language with only three words?
K: Some say they were an advanced civilization. Somehow their memories were selectively destroyed—only three words survived. Others say they are a very primitive civilization who learned their first words by trial and error and somehow stumbled upon a third—a tourist perhaps. Others say they are an ordinary civilization, but very concise. It would take fifty encyclopedias to translate the meaning of “slab” and “block” into our language.
G: What do you say?
K: Someone tampered with their brains.
G: Why?
K: Some biologists believe that mental processes create a field of information.
G: I don’t understand.
K: I’m going to kill you in every world.
G: But I haven’t done anything.
K: You will.
This cuts to a morning scene in which George makes coffee in Joyce’s ultramodern kitchen, gazing at a brain-shaped rock on the counter that may have come from the previous beach. He takes the coffee up to Joyce in bed; in this context it seems that the previous scene could be interpreted as a dream. Yet none of George’s several conversations with Dr. Kleber can be reconciled with Detective Berkely’s comforting conclusion that his brain is in a “rudimentary dream state,” unable to function rationally. This undercuts Elizabeth Klaver’s claim that the ending reveals one of the six possible worlds portrayed in the film as the “right one,” as confirmed by the widow Joyce’s statements in the framing story, “the one together with P (the detective story) that is actualized as the virtual or global ontological ground” (60). Although this is the version that seems to supply a tidy ending, the final scene of George continuing to dream in his suspended brain leaves us with a sense that all possible worlds can be encompassed within the imagination, with none ultimately privileged as a container for all the others.
These Canadian art films use the detective-film structure as a vehicle for asking questions about what is real, what we can know, what it means to us. Stylistic connections between the metadetective films of Egoyan, Rozema, Podeswa, Greyson, and Lepage and the European art cinema of Resnais, Robbe-Grillet, Kieslowski, Ruiz, and Roeg complicate the question of whether their films express a distinctively “Canadian” world view. The interrogation of an existing genre does not necessarily create a new one—yet it is noteworthy that so many Canadian auteurs, both anglophone and francophone, are working with the investigative form. Perhaps this complies with Leach’s notion that deconstructing genre reflects our overall ironic relationship with the United States; he quotes Denys Arcand’s argument that “genre conventions bring with them ideological implications that must be contested at the level of ‘the cinematic apparatus itself’” (51).
“In [the conceptual space of genre] issues of text and aesthetics intercut with those of industry and institution, history and society, culture and audiences,” writes Christine Gledhill (221). Government financing has supported both the metaphysical auteur films that interrogate the detective genre and the derivative productions that try to replicate it for marketing at home and abroad. Judging by the projects financed by Telefilm Canada since 2002, it is the latter that now commands the attention of producers and investors at all budget levels. Yet perhaps the most recognizably “Canadian” detective films are those metaphysical investigations that ask the ultimate questions at the heart of all mysteries: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?
1 See http://canadianfilmencyclopedia.ca/.
2 Robert Lepage, Le Confessional (1995).
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