When I told Jeff that Lauren had said I should do my media class documentary on Durham, he told me it was a good idea. We were in the kitchen after school. He was making a peanut butter sandwich and I was still raiding the cupboards, looking for something better, without much hope of finding it.
It’s weird, but some days it is difficult for me to remember Jeff’s face or voice. I know what he looked like — there are pictures everywhere — and I know what his voice sounded like, but it’s one thing to know something and another thing entirely to have that thing available to you, easily accessible, which you take for granted until it’s gone.
But on this day, for whatever reason, it wasn’t hard. He was right there in front of me, like he had never gone.
“It’s not a good idea,” I said. “Durham sucks.”
Jeff agreed that Durham sucked, but he said there were lots of ways I could do it, anyway. For instance, I could just set up the camera on a tripod in the centre of town and leave it running for twenty minutes.
Last year the documentary only had to be a maximum of seven minutes (maximum! ) and Mrs. Scala (now on maternity leave) baked cookies for the final presentations. If I could remember now who told me that media would be a cakewalk, I would egg their house.
“That sounds like it would be horrible,” I said to Jeff.
He said that it would be “conceptual,” and that I would seem “deep.”
It was a good joke, but I knew that Wright would never buy it. He wanted something with a “traditional” narrative and at least four cuts. At least, he had said. Bare minimum. And music, too. (We were supposedly being tested on our editing skills, but I wondered if he had foreseen himself watching twenty twenty-minute documentaries of twenty intersections.)
I also had my potential audience to consider.
“I want my documentary to be good,” I said. “I mean, at least okay.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“That’s your problem,” said Jeff.
Jeff stopped getting decent grades after middle school, even though he was probably the smartest kid I’d ever known. Or at least it sometimes seemed that way to me. His effort cratered after that. Or maybe it had never been very high to begin with, and it was just that school was asking more from him. He claimed that he didn’t care. That it wasn’t worth putting in the effort to do well, to be liked, to not to stick out. That he was fine with the way things were. Sometimes I believed him.
I’d heard Mom whispering to her friends on the phone that she thought he had “emotional problems,” but I always thought he was just misunderstood. That he’d find his way in some other fashion, although not as radically as he hoped. It was too easy to say he had problems and to leave it at that. If he had a problem it was that he wanted to turn the world to do his bidding, to fold it in half in order to solve a geometry question that only required drawing a line from one point to another.
“Why don’t you start with what you know?” he told me. “Isn’t that what they always say? ‘Start with what you know’?” He had a mouth full of peanut butter and Dempster’s soft whole wheat and some of it flew out and landed on the counter. He reached his hand out past me, toward the sink, letting it hang mid-air, and I interpreted his motion and threw him the rag hanging around the faucet.
The problem was that I didn’t know what I knew.
According to an article I read a while back in the Durham Enterprise, Durham is the fastest-growing small town within two hundred kilometres of the city of Toronto: “small town” being defined as containing less than twenty thousand people and “fastest-growing” determined via an aggregate score of year-to-year population growth, that population growth relative to the previous year’s population, and relative growth of infrastructure.
After I showed the article to Jeff and told him that we finally had something to be proud of, he laughed and said that their criteria basically meant nothing. It was just a way to get people who live in Durham to feel like they’re important. Which they’re not, he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Duh.”
But he looked at me like I was stupid and I knew then that I was, in a deep way, at my very core.
I was probably fourteen and I remember feeling that way all of the time.
It’s been two years since he died and I miss him a lot, enough that sometimes I pretend he’s with me, even to the point of making up conversations with him about what I have to do for school.
If Jeff were still around he probably wouldn’t be at home anymore; he’d be working at some crap job and living on his own somewhere far away, or he’d have figured his shit out and be doing some kind of mathematics or science degree at a university downtown. Or in another province, or country, or on another planet.
We were different in a lot of ways, but we had a lot of things in common, too. He wanted to get out of Durham by any means necessary.
So do I.
* * *
Here are some facts about Durham.
Durham, the municipality, counts about fifteen thousand residents. We have an arena, a hospital, three strip malls, a bus system, multiple hamburger places, two cemeteries, a newspaper, a Tim Hortons, a Pete’s Donuts, and a large chunk of real estate on Highway 89. We also have a single high school which is shared with all of the surrounding towns, including Saffronville, which is notable because students who live in Saffronville are often made fun of because it’s one of the few towns that is an even bigger hole than Durham. We take a lot of pride in saying so. (Saffronville: half an intersection; one decrepit grocery store; an off-brand donut place; three sneering teenagers on the main drag at all times, in basketball shirts without sleeves; scary dogs barking somewhere; an old man heavy in a torn white T-shirt lying on someone’s lawn, burping.)
In honour of our namesake, the late John George Lambton, first Earl of Durham, the high school is named Upper Canada Secondary School and the K–8 elementary school is Lower Canada Junior Middle School. Old Lord Durham was the one who drafted the report recommending the unification of the two Canadas (hardly rocket science) back in the heady days of BNA (British North America, for the uninitiated). The symbolism is idiotic. Not only because our great pride is in being accidentally named after a man who helped destroy French and Indigenous culture in the service of our British colonizers. The sports teams for both schools have the same name, the “Canadas,” which, if you’re following carefully, you know means that the full names of each team contains the semantically ridiculous repetition “Canada Canadas,” as in “Upper Canada Canadas.” No one actually says that, of course, because they’d sound like morons if they did (instead, they eliminate the first “Canada”), but it’s there, lurking underneath the scores on the morning announcements, cheers on Spirit Day, and the sentimental hoo-rahs in the Enterprise (“Bobby Booby, son of David and Liz Booby of Booby Auto, north Saffronville, scored the lone goal in the Canadas’ hard-working loss.”)
Barring some miracle, the only teams our teams will ever play are teams from Canada, and so in that light, “Canada Canadas” becomes even more meaningless, both humiliating and demoralizing at once. At least if we were the Badgers or something we could claim exclusivity until we met another team from podunk-nowhere with the same spirit animal: at least a badger is fearsome, at least there is some menace in that name. And what if, say, the Lower Canada Canadas did ever make it to a national tournament and ended up playing a team from Quebec? The Upper Canada Lower Canada Canadas vs. the legitimately Lower Canada Kanata Canadiens —?
The problem with doing a documentary on Durham is that teachers don’t usually like it when you’re too negative, even if you’re being realistic. I don’t know why. Maybe they get nervous about the world they are about to throw us into, and they’d like to keep us insulated from all of the shit we’re going to eat as soon as we get out.
But maybe it should be a documentary about how Durham is a hole and we are all trapped. Or about how I am going to get out of here somehow. Or about how if you live here for too long the hope in you dies and you become one of those walking corpses working at the Canadian Tire their entire lives. My cousin Peter told me last Thanksgiving that he saw an old friend of his there the last time he visited, and that when he said hello his friend looked right through him as he passed carrying a fresh shipment of lacrosse sticks. There are teenagers and there are capital-A Adults with serious jobs and in-laws and mortgages and everyone else is dead, dead.
Can I put that in a school project?
Let me do you a favour.
When you pass through the pines flanking Highway 89 on the approach to Durham you might feel light and cheerful driving in the sun, and when the town rises up in front of you, imagine that this is a place like any other, that we have lives here, that there is life, that in some haunted past or nostalgic future you might settle down in the sun and the grass and the asphalt and build a home and have children …
But please don’t be deceived — keep driving.
* * *
My best friend Walid told me that I should do the documentary on sex. I don’t know anything about sex — I mean, nothing first-hand — and he knows that. That’s the reason he suggested it as a topic. He is a dick. I said I wasn’t sure what that documentary would even be and he said, “Are you kidding?” and started thrusting his hips at a locker. “You could make it, like, a nature documentary.”
I told him to fuck off.
He said, “Okay, what if the documentary was about sex, but, like, actually in nature, with animals?” I thought that could be pretty funny. But I know even less about that than I do about human sex, which I only understand on account of all the human “nature documentaries” I have watched online. But, uh, that’s a topic I doubt that Wright would let me explore. And I’m not sure I’d want to, anyway.
I didn’t know what my documentary was going to be about, but I wanted it to be good. I wanted it to inspire the same kinds of feelings in others that my favourite movie, Evie of the Deepthorn, did in me. I wanted to make people feel like there was something urgent rising up out of them, something beyond themselves that was scary and insightful and beyond their control. I think it’s important for you to understand, too.
I probably never would have even heard about Evie if it wasn’t for my old job at Joe’s, which isn’t around anymore, but used to be the only place where you could rent movies in town. Joe was an old Chinese guy whose kids were all grown up and having kids of their own. He owned the dry-cleaning place on Main, too, and still owns the Sunoco on 89, and I’m pretty sure he owns the buildings and the lots all these businesses are in outright, and that he’s basically set for life money-wise, even though yes, admittedly, he has lived through most of that life already.
Working at Joe’s Movies & Convenience was a pretty sweet gig, and it was through working there that I was able to discover a lot of films that I probably never would have seen otherwise. Real classics: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; The Third Man; Throne of Blood. But what really stands out to me, of course, is Evie.
The first time I saw it, it was late on a Thursday, which was usually a good night for Joe’s, but on that day we were totally dead. I mean, I think one person may have come into the store, picked up a bag of Cheetos, walked around the store, and put it back down again. No one was renting or buying anything.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if there was some kind of important hockey game on — the Leafs or the Olympics, most likely. Probably the latter. Since if the Leafs were playing you could count on at least their detractors to show up on purpose just to talk about how much the team sucked. It was stupid and it drove me crazy because I never, ever, cared about hockey, except for a six-month period in grade six when I became inexplicably infatuated with Mats Sundin (I created a narrative in which he was the polar opposite of Maple Leaf enforcer Tie Domi, predicated on the idea that Sundin somehow transformed Domi’s hooliganism with his elegance and skill). (But now that I think about it, maybe Sundin wasn’t even really elegant — just European.)
I was working with Michael and neither of us thought we could make the call on whether we could close early or not, even though we both knew it wouldn’t have been a big deal to Joe either way. I had school the next day, of course, but I needed the hours, and Michael was older and needed the hours, too. I also sometimes had the impression that Michael liked taking time out from his girlfriend and his infant daughter. He was older than I was, but he wasn’t that much older and he seemed exhausted and I thought he was probably upset, inside. I imagined he thought he had screwed up and was going to be a Durhamite for life.
He never said anything about that at all to me, and for all I know he loved Durham, loved going home, loved his girlfriend and his daughter and hoped to stay in town forever. That was just the impression I got from him or maybe something I invented based on how I thought I would feel in his situation. What’s that called — projecting?
Anyway, it was dead quiet, but we stuck it out. There was always the off chance that we’d be greeted by a flurry of customers once the whistle blew on the final period — or whatever it was — and we might have told ourselves that we couldn’t miss out on them, although I don’t remember that happening and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had.
We usually had something playing on the TV across from the cash registers, but when it was quiet we could turn up the volume and really focus our attention. It seems to me — although it couldn’t have been true — that the lights were dimmer in the store that night, as if in preparation for what we were going to see. Maybe there wasn’t a hockey game after all and we were just waiting out some monster storm that was flickering the overhead banks and blotting out the sky. But no, that can’t be right, because that would mean that the television would be struggling, too, since they all ran on the same power. It’s probably just that I got so wrapped up in the movie that it seems that way to me now, as if nothing else existed during that short, ninety-minute span.
Whatever the case, looking back it almost feels like the movie was waiting for me. Now I’ve seen it so many times that it’s hard to believe there was ever a time I didn’t know it, like when you look back and try to evaluate your impressions and prejudices when you were first introduced to your best friends, and how it’s really hard to do that without bringing what you know about them back with you from the future.
Michael was a real movie buff, and Evie was one of his favourites, although I think he liked it for different reasons than I did, more because it was virtually unknown, especially outside of Canada, and for the weird bravado that allowed it to exist in the first place. At first I was struck by how obvious its premise seemed to me — I found it incredible that there weren’t a hundred movies like it already. But then I started thinking deeply about why I’d never heard of it before and I inhaled sharply and realized that I was essentially alone in the world, my tastes far from universal.
Before Michael put the cassette in, he told me that the funding for the movie had come from a weird (long since closed) tax dodge, in which the Canadian government briefly, if unintentionally, allowed persons of means to obtain tax credits through indiscriminately funding arts projects (hoping to reap in a share of the — always nonexistent — profits). Predictably, this led to a lot of really bad, bizarre art, which is probably the necessary result when wealthy people toss money at artists who couldn’t earn a living otherwise. If the rich knew anything about culture they wouldn’t be rich, which is something that Mr. Wright likes to say.
Michael always told me that one day he would bring in the book which contained the record of all the weirdo paintings, photographs, poetry, music groups, films, and dramatic performances funded through the tax “loophole.” (He also explained that after the Canadian government had caught wind of the project it had rescinded all credits and taken the accountants who had facilitated the arrangements to court, financially devastating everyone who had contributed.)
Of the projects, Michael said, Evie was by far the crown jewel. And he told me that it couldn’t have otherwise existed in a thousand alternate universes.
It was true.
Michael never actually brought the book in. But it didn’t matter. I was hooked before he even pressed play.
The story of Evie is basically cheap fantasy, the kind of thing you could find in any paperback in a used bookstore. But it is filmed with a restraint that elevates the material, imbuing the action with force and meaning. It is essentially a Western, set in a fantastic world, filmed in Northern Ontario. I’d recently discovered Sergio Leone (through Michael, of course) and I was crazy about Westerns, a genre that up until then I hadn’t given any thought to at all, writing them off as vaguely capitalistic fantasies for American men who refused to grow up.
Which didn’t mean that they weren’t, but I liked to think that Evie was different, even if it wasn’t, fundamentally.
I didn’t really know, either way.
The movie opens with a long shot of a rickety cabin built on the edge of a forest clearing, ringed with squat jack pines and under-painted with pink tendrils of granite and red clusters of sumac. Which is a familiar scene to Canadian audiences. But, as Michael explained, the location was chosen because to foreigners it might more easily suggest a magical and alien world, one in which the fantasy might conceivably take place. But for those used to the landscapes of the Group of Seven, of the mythos of the North, the effect is jarring, as if an alternate dimension has been overlaid over your dreams.
It’s early morning. No sound but the thrum of insects in late summer, the occasional bird call. The camera lingers on the scene, setting a leisurely pace, only broken later by short bursts of action. Despite the obviously poor quality of the cameras themselves, which Michael says were at least a decade old at the time of filming, the framing and editing is, frankly, incredible: it’s the first project from the director of photography who would later go on to work on The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Wake in Fright (Michael talked about those movies all the time, but I never got to see either before Joe’s shut down).
The silence is finally broken by the voice of a little girl inside the cabin. She’s humming to herself, playing by the fire with a little doll. She’s unspeakably dirty and her dress is torn. This is Evie. Her parents are behind her, sitting down at a table, as if for breakfast. Evie says something to the doll, and the doll replies, in Evie’s tiny voice. Then Evie does something quickly, and the doll rips. She drops the doll on the floor and leaves the shot.
“Wake up!” we hear her say. “Wake up! Wake up! ”
Finally, crying. Evie, obviously.
Shot of the mother, then the father. Both are dead. Their deaths were obviously violent, and they’ve been dead for a while. Flies buzz around both corpses. There’s no telling how long Evie has been taking care of herself alone in the house. But it’s time to go. Somehow the spell is finally broken.
She gathers her things and sets off into the forest — the Deepthorn, vast and primeval, “a continent unto itself,” according to text that runs on the screen following her departure. I don’t know why, but it chokes me up: something about the way that her little body disappears into the woods, stumbling through the underbrush, slipping and falling in the stream. Sometimes I’ll pause the tape there and get out of my seat, look out the back window or get something from the kitchen, maybe, because I find that part so affecting, I don’t know why. That first night, Evie dreams about a bear who speaks to her in a deep, booming voice, rendered clumsily but to great effect through an uncanny editing technique. Over the course of several nights, the bear teaches her how to survive and tells her, in a final dream, that it is her destiny to kill Llor, the ice queen. Llor’s troops have overrun the Deepthorn, and it’s she who is ultimately responsible for the death of Evie’s parents. This dream upsets Evie and she is shown moaning and turning in her makeshift bed. But in the morning she finds food outside her shelter, a cache of berries and root vegetables, and she accepts the gift, and with it, her destiny. The bear’s voice echoes as she gathers up the food.
Ten years later Evie emerges from the Deepthorn leading her horse, Excalibur, whom she ties to a post beside her parents’ wrecked cabin, overgrown with greenery and collapsed in on itself. Evie has come to pay her last respects before embarking on the journey that will finally lead her to Llor.
There’s a lot of buildup for that final action, and in lesser hands, in a lesser movie, it’s very possible that it could all have come undone. It’s a blessing in disguise that the film had such a low budget: instead of elaborate costumes and effects, which would have undoubtedly looked cheap with time, instead of dragging out the final action unnecessarily, Evie just stabs an old woman in an ice-grey dress. An old woman who commands an army but who spends her nights alone. Who stands up from her bowl of porridge when Evie walks into her tent. With a book open beside her on the table.
Evie has to pass through a camp of guards to get at Llor, quietly, quickly, and the simple and abrupt climax works in the movie’s favour, highlighting the irrevocable nature of action and the desolation that follows it. It even seems, for a second or two, that some flash of recognition occurs between the two players, wherein each understands and simultaneously rejects their role. I read that in a cult movie magazine that Michael brought in one day, but I think it’s true. Evie has killed before, but regardless you can see that she wants — even for a brief moment — to undo the thrust. And Llor, maybe, wants to undo everything, for her life to be the book and the porridge and the table, nothing more. To not have to be responsible for whatever she has done to Evie, not to escape her fate, but to free her killer from hers. At least that’s how it seems to me.
When Evie leaves the tent, limping, and stands before the guards waiting outside, it’s impossible not to reflect on the fact that every action has its consequence, and that the consequences of all actions are necessarily dire, because they bring us one step closer to where we are all going. That’s super dark, I know, but I think it’s true. Somehow it is immediately clear to the guards what has happened, as if Llor was a sense that they lost after she died. Evie just stands there, and they just look at her, and no one has any idea what to do. Evie’s lost a lot, and maybe she has even found a kind of glory, but it’s unclear what that glory means. Maybe she’s going to die. Maybe she’ll claim a reward. It doesn’t matter. The price has already been paid, and I don’t mean Llor’s death. It’s more complicated than it seems, and it gets more complicated with each viewing.
I love Evie not just because it shouldn’t exist but does, not just because no one knows about it, not just because it feels so Canadian, awkward and so earnest at times that it verges on sentimental despite how much it tries to come off as cold. I love Evie primarily because the movie is about growing up. It is about being abandoned by those you love and being forced to fend for yourself.
When I watch Evie I feel like my brain is expanding, like I am ready to be dispersed into space and to become part of all of the possibility that I see before me. I wanted to put that feeling into my documentary. I wanted to create a work of art that would raise myself and all my peers together into a kind of holy ecstasy. But I didn’t know how to do that. And whenever I sat down and thought about it I got scared, really scared, like I was a scrap of paper about to blow away in the wind.