Bruce McDonald's 'Hard Core Logo' 9781442660762

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BRUCE MCDONALD’S HARD CORE LOGO

Consistently ranked as one of the best Canadian movies of all time, punk-rock mockumentary Hard Core Logo (1996) documents the lastditch reunion tour of an aging rock band led by vocalist Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon). Well received by critics at the time of its release, the film continues to enjoy a devoted international cult following. This entertaining analysis of Hard Core Logo explores many of the film’s key themes, including the responsibility of documentary filmmakers to their subjects, the development of close male relationships, and the relationship between art and commerce in Canada, especially for touring musicians. Paul McEwan examines Hard Core Logo in the context of other adaptations of Michael Turner’s 1993 novel of the same name, as well as against other films from McDonald’s celebrated career. Featuring interviews with McDonald himself and others involved in the film, Bruce McDonald’s ‘Hard Core Logo’ provides an engaging look at one of Canada’s most mythologized movies. paul mcewan is an associate professor in the Department of Media and Communication and the director of Film Studies at Muhlenberg College.

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CANADIAN CINEMA 7

BRUCE MCDONALD’S HARD CORE LOGO PAUL MCEWAN

UNIVE RSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn: 978-1-4426-4452-6 (cloth) isbn: 978-1-4426-1273-0 (paper)

Printed on acid-free and 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McEwan, Paul, 1972– Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo / Paul McEwan. (Canadian cinema ; 7) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-1-4426-4452-6 (bound). isbn 978-1-4426-1273-0 (pbk.) 1. McDonald, Bruce, 1959– – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Hard core logo (Motion picture). I. Title. II. Series: Canadian cinema (Toronto, Ont.) ; 7 pn1997.2.h365m34 2011

791.430233092

c2011-904002-6

Part of the discussion of the film Highway 61 appeared previously as ‘Satire as Magnifying Glass: Crossing the U.S. Border in Bruce McDonald’s Highway 61,’ SymplokeF 15 (1–2), 2008: 115–24. Reprinted by permission of University of Nebraska Press. TIFF and the University of Toronto Press acknowledge the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

3

1 Adaptations

9

2 Punk Rock Nation

55

3 Easy Riders, Raging Fools

95

Epilogue: Hard Core Logo II

117

Production Credits Further Viewing Notes Selected Bibliography

119 123 125 129

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to everyone who gave their time for interviews by phone or email: Michael Turner, Noel S. Baker, Bruce McDonald, Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie, Nick Craine, Michael Scholar, Joe Keithley, Colin Brunton, Ben Kowalewicz, Moe Berg, Bill Baker, and Matt Smallwood. I would like to single out Patrick Whistler, Bruce McDonald’s assistant, who has been helpful from start to finish, and Nick Craine, who provided artwork and key ideas. My editor at the University of Toronto Press, Siobhan McMemeny, has been endlessly encouraging, as have the editors of the Canadian Cinema series, Bart Beaty and Will Straw. Doug Hildebrand at University of Toronto Press had the idea for this book in the first place. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Media & Communication and the Film Studies Program at Muhlenberg College, who have provided a supportive environment for research and helped me carve out time to write. Muhlenberg also awarded me a summer research grant for this book in 2009. I would like to thank the bright students in my Masculinity in Film seminar in the spring of 2010, who helped me hone some ideas. I have been blessed with a supportive family who have encouraged my writing. My parents and my sister have been my cheering section since the days when I was trying to be a rock star rather than writing

Acknowledgments

about them, and it has been fun to talk about this book with my in-laws, since my father-in-law’s name happens also to be Bruce McDonald. Inspiration to do anything and everything comes from my children, and from my wife Eileen, to whom this book is dedicated.

BRUCE MCDONALD’S HARD CORE LOGO

Ramona: It was just an act! Russel: It was an act of violence. And you loved it. – From Roadkill

Introduction

A hilarious rockumentary in the laugh-packed tradition of This is Spinal Tap – critics everywhere are howling the praises of Hard Core Logo! The punk rock band Hard Core Logo is back – reunited and hitting the road on a last-gasp tour across the western part of the nation. As magnetic lead singer Joe Dick holds the whole tour together through sheer force of will, all the tensions and pitfalls of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle come bursting hilariously to the surface! Featuring a memorable appearance by Joey Ramone of the Ramones – settle in and enjoy this offbeat comedy as it really cranks up the laughs! – Marketing copy on the US DVD cover of Hard Core Logo

Not much of the above is true. Hard Core Logo is a great film, but it does not seem fair to say that it ‘cranks up the laughs!’ Joey Ramone’s appearance in the film lasts for less than thirty seconds and is one of the least memorable things about it. And while it is actually true that the band is ‘hitting the road on a last-gasp tour across the western part of the nation,’ this is a lie by omission, since American audiences would assume that this refers to the United States, when in fact it refers to Canada. Should we pity the poor viewers who get the film home only to experience something much darker than they were expecting, or congratulate an enterprising copywriter who found a way to sneak another Canadian film into

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unsuspecting American hands? Like a struggling band on the road with too far to go between pay cheques, the film industry in Canada faces some pretty brutal economics that make it hard to preserve our vision of how creativity should be shared. Sometimes it takes a fake benefit show to get people to come to your gig, and sometimes it takes some slightly misleading copy to get people to watch your film. As long as no one actually loses a limb, then all is fair, right? The point of the description on the case of an independent release like Hard Core Logo is traditionally to convince people to take it home from the video store. This of course assumes that people still go to video stores – a reasonable assumption at the time of the film’s release, but less so in the age of Internet-based DVD services and the shift towards direct downloading. Now that a growing number of a DVD ‘rentals’ are from services like Zip.ca and Netflix, who are in turn facing challenges from a number of legal and illegal download sites, the emphasis on consumer-created reviews means there is a chance for customers to either undermine or rectify the marketing of any film. At the time of this writing, nearly all of the most highly rated reviews of Hard Core Logo on American site Netflix mention that the film is much darker than the Spinal Tap comparison would imply. Some refer to it as a black comedy, or as drama rather than light entertainment. One review compares it to darker music films like Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols documentary The Filth and The Fury and Penelope Spheeris’s Decline of Western Civilization series of music documentaries. The reviewer then calls Hard Core Logo ‘Unsettlingly real. Not like “Spinal Tap” at all, more like Scorsese than SNL.’ While Hard Core Logo is indeed too dark for Saturday Night Live, it might seem a bit too light for Martin Scorsese. What it has in common is that a number of Scorsese’s films feature protagonists using whatever skills they have to escape the life situations into which they have been born. Sometimes they succeed for a while, but they are never really

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free of where they come from, and their own demons and the society around them keep them in place. Joe Dick may not be Jake LaMotta from Raging Bull, but he would rather blow his brains out than be a sideshow attraction. And while Joe has a self-destructive streak, he is far from his own worst enemy, as LaMotta is. Rather, Joe Dick is a striver whose ambitions outstrip his abilities and his environment. If he is to have any type of success at all, he will need to depend on others to help him achieve it, and it is those others who betray him, primarily his friend Billy Tallent, with whom he has been making music his whole life. Even if Joe Dick can keep the band together, they have an entire nation against them. It is not just indifference or their own personal demons that Hard Core Logo need to overcome, it is the very structure of their country – thousands of miles of empty space that make success nearly impossible. Hard Core Logo are divided over whether or not to pursue fame and fortune or to remain true to the independent spirit of punk, but in Canada at least, it is a false option. Canada is inherently a punk rock nation, where you might as well embrace your authenticity because you cannot sell out no matter how hard you try. The variety of significant themes in the film – the relationship to nation, the friendship between Joe and Billy, the nature of artistic integrity, and the responsibility of a filmmaker to his subjects – are what make this an object worthy of study so many years after its release. More importantly, it is these themes that have inspired a range of reinterpretations of the story. Along the way, the film has become both a cult object and a part of Canadian mythology, with a narrative that is proving surprisingly resilient, flexible, and popular. It is these many re-imaginings of Hard Core Logo that provide the focus for the first half of this book. All the versions of Hard Core Logo discussed in the first chapter are in dialogue with both Bruce McDonald’s film and Michael Turner’s book.

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By considering each of them in turn, we can of course enrich our understanding and appreciation of the film. More than that, we can better understand the nature of adaptation itself, since each new adaptation has built on many of the versions that have come before, rather than returning to the source text to begin anew. In this way, it might be fairer to say that Hard Core Logo has become mythologized over time, as details change and the central story is clarified depending on who is doing the telling. Each person who has taken on the characters has had to decide how to tell the story in his or her own medium, and in the process has provided a commentary on what the characters were about in the first place. This process is particularly interesting for a Canadian text, since Canada has so little of its own mythology. Considering the many interpretations of Hard Core Logo thus allows us to think about the kinds of stories that Canadian artists and fans might find appealing and why. Most of the themes in Hard Core Logo are not exclusively Canadian, but the entirety of the narrative is delineated by the range of options the band members have, options that are in turn determined by the challenges of trying to be a touring band in a vast and sparsely populated country. Geography is destiny to some extent, but more than that, geography affects choices and values in ways that we cannot always see. This is perhaps why Joe Dick cannot see the futility of his tour, even though it is as plain as the endless highway in front of the van. As an audience we want to believe, as Joe does, in the transformative power of the road and in the possibilities of success and redemption it provides. Deep inside, though, we know that the Canadian landscape is one that punishes such hubris. Since Joe is dependent on Billy Tallent, their relationship is the other key element of the narrative. The two men are friends, rivals, business partners, and ‘brothers’ whose interactions have been the sources of much speculation in both fictional adaptations and scholarly apprais-

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als. This book tries to move the discussion of Joe and Billy’s relationship away from the sexual and towards the emotional, with dual purpose. The reading of Joe and Billy’s interactions as homoerotic has a lot of appeal, but this has a way of masking the complexity of their bond. Homoerotic readings occasionally run the risk of overshadowing, rather than illuminating, the relationships between characters. Thus, by resisting the temptation to see the two men as simply desiring one another, we might be better able to understand the depth of their emotional relationship, one that would have been forged in moments both private and public. This knowledge might, in turn, allow us to better understand the construction of filmic masculinity. The last theme of this book is the stealth theme of Hard Core Logo – the relationship between the documentarian and his or her subject. At the beginning of the film, it seems as though the mockumentary style is simply a comic device. Bruce McDonald is playing himself, and the documentary feel gives us a sense of immediacy and authenticity that fits the punk ethos. As the film progresses, questions of documentary move from background to foreground, and it is no accident that the film becomes darker as this happens. For much of Hard Core Logo, Joe Dick is the only character who seems mindful of the power of the camera, which is no surprise since he is also the most aware of his own façade as a rock star. There are numerous moments in the film where he battles with ‘Bruce McDonald’ for control of the documentary and his own image, and these conflicts increase towards the end of the film as the stakes are raised. A thorough comprehension of the film thus depends on a consideration of this struggle for control over the band’s image. In the end, Hard Core Logo becomes a thoughtful exposition on the responsibility of the documentarian, even as the fictional Bruce McDonald fails just about every test of that responsibility.

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1

Adaptations

Hard Core Logo has likely inspired more significant textual material than any other imaginary band. In addition to Michael Turner’s original book and Bruce McDonald’s film, there is Noel Baker’s screenwriter diary (Hard Core Roadshow), a Hard Core Logo tribute album, a comic book (Portrait of a Thousand Punks), a stage play (Hard Core Logo: Live), numerous academic articles, and a slew of online fan fiction and remix videos. Hard Core Logo is the third chapter in Bruce McDonald’s thematic road trilogy that began with Roadkill (1989) and Highway 61 (1991). It is the odd film out for a number of reasons. The other two have the same stars (Don McKellar and Valerie Buhagiar) and the same cinematographer (Miroslaw Baszak), and are shot in a relatively straightforward narrative style. (There is also a film in between that was shot before Hard Core Logo, called Dance Me Outside, released in 1994, which is the story of two young native men on a reservation in Northern Ontario and is based on a series of short stories by W.P. Kinsella. It also features Hugh Dillon, in a smaller role.) While there are a lot of ideas that circulate among the three road films, none of the characters do. Instead, the three films reflect a conscious attempt to make a set of Canadian myths out of what are often thought of as American archetypes. The fact that Hard Core Logo has now become embedded in the nation’s creative culture seems to indicate that, to some extent, the myth making has been

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successful. As just one example, the comic-book and theatrical versions of the story that have appeared since the film both credit Turner’s novel and the work that McDonald and screenwriter Noel S. Baker did on the film. Thus, the story really does start to become a myth that gets rewritten over time, rather than a series of adaptations of the same source text. And while it is Hard Core Logo that has inspired the remakes rather Roadkill or Highway 61, it seems as though Hard Core Logo is the culmination of what McDonald had been thinking about, and learning, while he was making the other two films. According to screenwriter and actor Don McKellar, the idea for Roadkill actually came after he had already been hired to write Highway 61. What became Roadkill started out as a documentary about a real band called A Neon Rome, whose singer disrupted shooting plans by taking a vow of silence. From this obstacle came the decision to make a narrative film in which part of the plot focuses on a singer who takes a vow of silence as part of a spiritual reawakening. McKellar says the original script was about forty-five pages long and was written in a couple of weeks.1 The new plot primarily centres on a woman named Ramona, played by Valeria Buhagiar, who is the assistant to a Svengali-ish rock promoter, and is sent into Northern Ontario to track down a wayward band called The Children of Paradise. Since Ramona cannot actually drive, she is dependent on a range of eccentric personalities who take her where she needs to go, including a gregarious taxi driver, a documentary film crew helmed by Bruce McDonald, a wannabe serial killer played by McKellar, and a teenage boy who eventually gives her his father’s car. The film was shot on location in black and white 16 mm, and is indie filmmaking at its most resourceful. Crowd shots were filmed illegally on the streets of Toronto, crew members and friends fill in minor roles, and Buhagiar’s actual parents play her character’s parents as she leaves home at the beginning of the film. For all its economic efficiencies, the film packs a lot of ideas into its

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85 minutes. McKellar has talked about the motivation for shooting in Northern Ontario as a desire to feature Canadian places and to make them mythical in the way that so many American places are.2 To that end, Ramona travels through a number of real cities and towns, and on-screen maps show us exactly where these places are located in relation to one another and to the endless wilderness that surrounds many of them. The relationship to that wilderness is mocked in the first few minutes of the film, which parodies the Hinterland Who’s Who films that were a feature of Canadian television for many years. These were short films featuring particular animals and their habitats, with a sonorous voice-over describing their lives and behaviour. Everyone who grew up in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s is familiar with the theme music, played by a lone flute, and the particular style of the films. In the parody, the featured rabbit is described as being threatened despite its fabled fertility, although no one apparently knows why. We then cut to a shot of the documentary film crew’s van bearing down on a rabbit in the middle of the road. The conflict between wild Canada and urban Canada is central to this film, and to Highway 61. In the case of Roadkill, Ramona is the city girl finding her way in the wilderness of the north, where none of the usual rules apply. Rabbits aside, her encounters are primarily with a social wilderness populated by eccentrics who are both of this culture and not. Her funniest interactions are with McKellar’s character, Russel, whom she meets after inadvertently spending the night in his house. Russel has chosen to be serial killer because he needs a career goal, and he discusses it nonchalantly in both professional and nationalist terms as he teaches Ramona how to drive: RUSSEL: Usually people in my line of work have to drive long distances by themselves. RAMONA: What is your line of work?

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Ramona’s lesson in driving and American colonialism. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

Adaptations

RUSSEL: I’m a serial killer. RAMONA: A what? RUSSEL: A serial killer. It’s a person who commits a series of apparently unmotivated murders based on personal compulsions. It’s more of an American thing, traditionally, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s like everything else. There’s this colonial attitude about it, that if you want to make it you’ve got to go down to California or something, but I’m going to change all that.

The satirical tone here both mocks a certain kind of provincial Canadianness and then celebrates that Canadianness with genuine affection. It is a tough line to stick to, and that tension will become central in Highway 61, when McKellar and Buhagiar reunite to play very different characters. This film ends as a very dark satire, after Ramona has successfully reunited the band for their final show in Thunder Bay. As Russel prepares to make the Children of Paradise’s lead singer his first victim, the promoter shows up with his own gun and turns the place into a bloodbath, killing all the band members and a number of others. The film treats this violence nonchalantly – Ramona is told to be in the office the next day at 9 a.m., and she reunites with a number of her other acquaintances as if nothing has happened and she has suffered no trauma at all. Thus, Roadkill establishes some of the ideas that will pervade the other two films in this thematic trilogy – an emphasis on Canadian identity, the idea that the open road represents both freedom and futility, and a sense that satire allows us to deal with questions of nationalism without getting bogged down in the complexities of actual citizenship. The particularly Canadian identity with which the film deals is dependent on an idea borrowed from American road movies (and from American westerns) – that the road is a place where you learn about yourself. It is clear that Canadians, both in the films and in the audience, are people

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who need to learn about themselves. McDonald’s road movies are an attempt to make both the land and its people into part of our own cultural mythology, rather than simply borrowing our cultural mythology from someone else. It may seem strange that we borrow an American form, the road movie, in order to develop our distinct identity, but much of Canada is even more defined by the road than is the United States, since this is a country of vast spaces and small cities, where there are a lot more in-betweens than there are places. Canadian roads allow Canadians to learn about themselves, but in a pinch, American roads will also do just fine, as we learn in Highway 61. The second film in the trilogy continues to develop all the ideas that McDonald and McKellar first explored in Roadkill, and it is the most clearly satirical of the three films in the series. The film was released in 1991 and is named for the north to south road that connects northwestern Ontario to New Orleans. It is the story of Pokey Jones, a barber and occasional trumpeter in the small northern Ontario town of Pickerel Falls who is briefly a local celebrity when he finds a dead body behind his shop. Pokey meets Jackie Bangs, a roadie who has stolen some drugs from a rock band and claims the body Pokey has discovered as her brother’s, so that she can use the corpse to smuggle the drugs from Ontario to New Orleans. She convinces Pokey to drive her on this road trip, and Pokey gets to live his lifelong dream of seeing America. They are pursued by a man who believes himself to be Satan, and wants the body because it is the first of the many souls he has ‘purchased’ to actually die and he is ready to collect the young man’s soul. Most of the satire in the film is based on broad stereotypes of Canadian and American culture. In this film, Don McKellar, who plays Pokey, is still the northern innocent and Valeria Buhagiar, who plays Jackie, is again the city girl. In this case, though, their morality is reversed. Pokey is the moral centre this time, albeit one who needs to let loose a little bit. As they journey into the United States, they confront an overeager

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border guard, played by punk singer Jello Biafra, and a single father who has formed a singing group with his three spectacularly untalented daughters and who aims to bring good-time music to America. The film culminates with Pokey and Jackie’s confrontation with Satan himself, who lives in Louisiana and is tolerated by his neighbours as a harmless and amusing eccentric. It can be tempting to see Pokey as a relatively straightforward representation of a mild-mannered Canadian who triumphs in the face of American crassness and excess. Such metaphorical readings are a temptation in all discussions of national cinema, and Highway 61 is in some ways an exemplary text for considering the ways in which we think about the idea of ‘national’ cinema. Figuring out what is Canadian about Canadian cinema was an ongoing struggle for many years. Many scholars, myself included, were tempted to read elements of Canadian identity in particular films, especially films that featured ‘outsider’ protagonists like Highway 61 and the film that was one of its obvious influences, Don Shebib’s 1971 classic Goin’ Down the Road. Shebib’s story of two Maritimers who arrive in Toronto full of hope and short on skills is a classic tale of outsiders, and seems the perfect metaphor for a nation on the periphery, even if, in this case, the division is within the country – Toronto is the centre and the Maritimes are the periphery. There are obvious problems with these types of metaphorical readings of national cinema. The first is that not all films are going to fit into an archetype that can be read as Canadian. Very quickly the readings become more and more outlandish as we try to divine the Canadian essence in films by directors as disparate as David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, and Denys Arcand. In the end, various attempts to define the essential characteristics of Canadian cinema could never get past the bar established by film scholar Will Straw, who pointed out that most of the filmic elements that were being characterized as Canadian –

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non-traditional protagonists, lack of narrative closure, stylistic restraint – were actually ‘typical of art-house cinema practices generally, rather than the expression of a national character.’3 It is much more productive and interesting to think of Canadian cinema as being occasionally part of the dialogue about Canada, but in a complex sense. Writing about Indian national cinema, the film critic Sumita Chakravarty introduced the notion of ‘imperso-nation.’4 Her concept starts with something relatively obvious – that films are not a direct reflection of a culture – but extends to provide a framework for considering the ways in which films are already taking part in the dialogue about national identity. Simply put, films are not simple reflections of the culture in which they are made, and it is not the scholar’s or the critic’s job to examine the film and the culture side-by-side to figure out the points of contact. Rather, the directors and creative people who make films are already well aware of the competing notions of Canada and what it means, and also of the common perception that Canada’s national identity is considerably more fluid than that of many other nations. So films are already part of the discussion of national identity, and often represent a complicated and thoughtful response to questions of Canadian identity. In some cases that response is relatively direct, as it is in Highway 61. In other cases it is a tiny part of the film, and even the decision to choose to ignore the discussion of nationhood might be a conscious choice rather than a happenstance of production. There are many reasons why it is difficult to define Canadian identity, but the key challenge is that to do so is to attempt an essentially modern project in a postmodern age. Most of the nations that we compare ourselves to, particularly the United States, were able to define their national identity in a period where there was little worry about who was being excluded from the definition. Once there was a fundamental definition, the great struggles of American history have been about who deserves to be fully counted as a citizen, and in each of these

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cases, the excluded group has sought to point out how normal it is, and how much its members represent core American values like respect for personal freedom and the primacy of family. That comparison has been the mode of entry for African-Americans, and for gay and lesbian people, even as it is a ticket that does not come without costs in terms of the group characteristics and culture that must be checked at the door. The key idea, though, is that there is already an established identity that newcomers, internal and immigrant alike, must accept. Because English Canada did not shake off the weight of its British identity until about the 1960s, the subsequent attempt to define a Canadian identity has taken place in the post-sixties era, when we are all too aware of the ways in which definitions of identity reinforce exclusions. We are trying to invent a Canadian identity now, but we are too aware of the complexity of our differences. We’re not just English and French, but Aboriginal, immigrant, majority and minority, and facing divisions of region, politics, race, gender, and class. Highway 61’s reliance on satire is what allows it to work as a commentary on Canadian identity without falling into the usual difficulties of trying to define Canadian identity first. Playing with stereotypes in a satirical fashion allows the film to both comment on Canadian and American identity and maintain its distance. Satire allows one to choose from the pool of available images without needing them to be accurate, and it succeeds best when its targets are stereotypes. Part of the joke is the idea that there is any group of people who really act like this, so the lack of accuracy can actually be a help rather than a hindrance. In other words, Pokey is not a stand-in for all of Canada in its relations with the United States, even if he fits some of the stereotypes. Pokey in Highway 61 is very much the emasculated Canadian male, a type who features in a lot of Canadian cinema. He is rarely assertive, cannot really play his trumpet, and has to be forced to have sex at gunpoint. Jackie is the one who drives the action for much of the movie,

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and who goads Pokey into taking the trip in the first place. Even as he eventually learns to be more assertive, he never loses his core innocence completely, nor does he ever fully become the active male protagonist. He makes it to Satan’s house on his own, only to be knocked out and imprisoned in the coffin he has carried all the way from Canada. From this impotent position, Jackie has to free him once again. In addition, it is not just characters that are being stereotyped here – McDonald also makes full use of conventional ideas about the differences between Canadian and American landscapes. In the opening scenes of the drive, northern Ontario is an idyllic wilderness. As soon as they cross the border, they find themselves in a post-industrial landscape of decline and decay, even though northern Minnesota has plenty of unspoiled forests. The point of all this exaggeration is to allow the film to talk about Canadian and American identity while sidestepping the question of whether these differences are real or perceived. Canadians have a notion of themselves as being outsiders in American culture, and an idealized concept of their relation to the natural environment. Highway 61 is about both of these ideas while simultaneously being sceptical about the truth status of either. Satire gives the film the freedom to deal with ideas about Canada without having to be about actual Canadians. Benedict Anderson, in his influential book on the idea of nationalism, Imagined Communities, argues that nations are inherently imagined ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’5 He clarifies that he not contrasting ‘imagined’ communities with ‘real’ ones: ‘Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.’6 We might use this idea in the case of Canada and Highway 61 to assert that the ideas about Canada identity are not distinguishable from actual Canadian identity. We are

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thus free to imagine the nation we wish to be, and in some sense, imagining it makes it so. In Hard Core Logo, the imagined communities of Canada, and of punk rock, are central to the conflict. The relationship to landscape and geography is somewhat more direct. Geography is a metaphor in Hard Core Logo, as it is in Highway 61, but at the same time the distances that the band must travel are real and concrete, and cannot be imagined away. Hard Core Logo – The Novel The genesis of Hard Core Logo is Michael Turner’s 1993 book. Like much of Turner’s work, it is an experiment with the form of the novel.7 The book is constructed out of written snippets that tell a story as much by what is missing as by what is there. Instead of reading a modernist narrative that fills in plot and dialogue, we are reading set lists, song lyrics, phone messages, and diary entries. As the band slowly comes apart on their western Canadian tour, their divisions are reinforced by the fact that we are only rarely reading anything that could be called a dialogue between them. Each of the band members is recording their own thoughts in various ways, so there is little chance for them to work out their differences. Thus, the form of Turner’s book models the atomization of the band – they are by now a collection of fragments themselves and there is little chance of them ever coming together. Towards the end of the book there are numerous sections where band members do address each other directly, but these tend to be one-sided lists of accusations and recriminations. The inclusion of contracts and budgets also reinforces the cold hard facts the band is up against. Their hopes of making some money are undermined from the outset by the lists of expenses, and by the fact that Joe has optimistically spent much of their money on demo tapes and T-shirts, a fact that is downplayed in the film. There are numerous other significant differences between the book

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and the film. In the book, the band’s reunion gig and tour are acoustic, which means that they are sonically only an echo of their former selves, even as they occasionally enjoy the new sound. The reunion gig is an environmental benefit rather than a ‘Rock against Guns’ show, so Bucky Haight and his invented injuries do not figure in that part of the story at all. Haight himself does appear towards the end of the book, but only to act as a cautionary tale of rock stardom, recounting his horrific experiences trying to make an album for a major label in New York City. Only a handful of words in the book ever come from characters’ mouths on screen, and most of these are incidental moments like Joe’s discussion of how they sold 100 T-shirts a night ‘at the peak of our fame.’ Pipefitter’s threat to urinate in the back of the van contains his film dialogue, but the film also adds the detail about the hole in the van floor that he nearly falls through and the important moment of his humiliation as he wets himself. Adapting a novel for the screen is obviously a challenging task, but Hard Core Logo is challenging in a particular way. Any adaptation involves decisions about what the core ideas of the novel are and how these might translate into pictures. Internal dialogue and motivations must be acted out, as must omniscient narration, usually with little or no use of voice-over. In most cases, the act of converting a novel into a film involves cutting away most of the book to make the film a manageable length. Most literary adaptations, even the epic films, have to cut out the vast majority of their source material. The risk is that too much is lost, that characters become flat and one-dimensional, that their actions become unmotivated and random. Hard Core Logo presents the opposite challenge. While there is enough plot for a movie, anyone who tries to adapt it has to invent the scenes that go between what Turner has given us. In this way it is something like adapting a short story, in which we have to fill in the gaps rather than pare away material. It is not that the characters are one-dimensional on the page – far from it – but Turner

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has left a lot of material to the reader’s imagination, including physical descriptions of the characters and the details of their motivations. Billy, in particular, is sparely drawn. He has the least to say about himself, and the others primarily describe him as a drunk. It makes sense that he is the least reflective character in the film. Of course, Turner’s Hard Core Logo is a different book now than it would have been before the movie was made, as the physical descriptions of the characters have now been filled in by our images of the actors. Unless you haven’t seen the film, or haven’t seen it in a long time, it is impossible to get the picture of Hugh Dillon out of your head as you read about Joe Dick, no matter how much the character on the page differs from the one on screen. If the novel offered us a distinctly different physical image of Joe, then we might be able to imagine Joe as someone different, but the spaces Turner leaves for his reader are inevitably filled in by McDonald’s pictures rather than the reader’s own. One of Turner’s later books, American Whiskey Bar, seems influenced in some ways by his experience watching Hard Core Logo be adapted for the screen. American Whiskey Bar is apparently the screenplay for a film that Turner wrote for an eastern European director named Monika Herendy. In a foreword to the book, he explains that he had little interest in films or in writing screenplays, and that Herendy talked him into it over the course of a few months, and encouraged him to create a script for a film concept she was calling A Bunch of Americans Talking. In the end, he ended up submitting a first draft of the screenplay under pressure and was horrified later when that draft, which he considered notes towards a film rather than a complete screenplay, was turned word-for-word into a finished film, albeit one that barely saw the light of day. Reading Turner’s explanation of the film’s creation, one is struck by the immediate irony that a screenwriter is complaining that his screenplay made it to the screen unaltered. He must be the only screenwriter in history to have had this experience, let alone the only one to com-

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plain that he expected his work to be adapted more. His foreword is followed by one from the director herself, which begins by asserting that she only agreed to write an essay for Turner’s book if she was able to correct his mistakes about the creation of the film that became American Whiskey Bar. She contradicts his claim that he was a reluctant participant in the film process, and writes that there is a lot about the production that he did not understand. As she begins to recount the details of her own background, including time at a pre-1989 Soviet film school and a stint making fetish pornography for a shadowy German producer, you find yourself thinking two things: (1) This is the best description of a film production disaster I’ve ever read and (2) I’ve got to see this film. As Monika’s story gets stranger and stranger, though, you begin to realize the true brilliance of the exchange. In actuality, all of what you are reading – Turner’s introduction, the director’s response, an afterword from another participant, and the script itself – are fiction. American Whiskey Bar is not actually the script to a never-released film accompanied by notes from the screenwriter and director; it is a novel that plays on our expectations of novelistic form and drama. The descriptions of the stop/start creation of an independent film are completely convincing, and what gives the illusion away in the end is not that Turner gets some of the details wrong, but that the story is actually too perfect to be real. Of course, if you read the back jacket copy, you would probably be alerted by the blurb that calls the book a ‘faux memoir’ but then goes on to describe the film as if it were real. To add to the potential confusion about American Whiskey Bar, it actually was made into a TV movie in 1998 by Bruce McDonald. Again the adaptation was handled by Noel S. Baker, the Hard Core Logo screenwriter, and the structure of the film was something of an experiment. It was shot and broadcast live from the CITY-TV studio on Queen Street West in Toronto. Turner himself played the bartender in the film, and says it was a ‘meta’ moment because during the live broadcast he could look

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out across the street to the Beverly Tavern and see the show playing on one of the bar’s televisions while he was in the middle of making it. Michael Turner has had one other intriguing collaboration with McDonald, on a short film that McDonald made in 1998 with Don McKellar and writer Michael Ondaatje. The film, Elimination Dance, is based on a poem by Ondaatje. An elimination dance is one in which couples dance until one of them is eliminated by a particular criterion. Traditionally, this might be something like ‘anyone wearing a bowtie.’ Ondaatje’s much more creative list consists of such things as ‘Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail,’ ‘Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law,’ and ‘Any person who has had the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice.’ The film takes place at a dance and we watch as the couples are eliminated one by one. Turner plays the caller, and reads the elimination criteria from a stack of cards he holds in his palm. But while most of the film is a relatively literal interpretation of the poem, the fact that it is presented visually changes the meaning substantially. In isolation, Ondaatje’s list of criteria is intriguing and compelling but inevitably abstract. When it is acted, the context must be filled in – dancers, the caller, and a band are all performing their customary roles. But now, dancers look extremely embarrassed and leave the floor as Turner calls out, say, ‘Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman’s stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs.’ We start to wonder about things that were not apparent on the page. The realism of the scene makes us want to come up with an explanation: How did these secrets about people get onto the cards? Is this about social surveillance and control, or random chance? The fact that Turner’s character seems to be merely a channel for the insights the cards reveal means that it is

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not about him, that there is some sort of larger social phenomenon at work, even if we have no idea what it is. In this way it becomes reminiscent of a story like Jorge Luis Borges’s famous ‘The Lottery in Babylon,’ in which it is not clear whether we are controlled by men or by fate, and it is impossible to tell the difference. One story that Turner tells about his experience on the film set of Elimination Dance is revealing of his views about adaptation and authorial authority. Since the poem was written to be read on the page, some of the items sounded a bit strange when read aloud. Struggling with one passage, Turner asked Ondaatje if he would mind rephrasing the line slightly, and Ondaatje complied without complaint. As Turner himself points out, approaching Ondaatje in this way, to get an authorial rewrite, completely contradicted what Turner believes about the importance of the author. As his characters from Hard Core Logo have been rewritten and reinvented by numerous people, including screenwriter Noel S. Baker, McDonald and the actors on set, comic-book artist Nick Craine, various stage-play adapters, and writers of online slash fiction, Turner has maintained the view that his version of the characters is not primary, and that the readings of others are interesting and equally valuable. Claiming that he read too much post-structuralism and postmodernism in university to cling to a traditional notion of the author, he points out that since everything is a reading anyway, then it makes no sense to value his in particular. So seeking out the approval of Ondaatje to change a few words runs contrary to the free rein he has encouraged others to take with his work. Hence the imaginary ‘Michael Turner’ of American Whiskey Bar, who claims to be annoyed that his screenplay was not changed enough. Of course, it is one thing to disavow your own authorial privilege, and another to disavow someone else’s. It is hard to imagine many people would take liberties while performing Michael Ondaatje’s words, particularly while he is standing a few feet away watching them do it.

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McDonald and others involved in the film version of Hard Core Logo seemed to have exactly that issue with Turner. Turner recalls being shown the script before it was shot, and being invited to view a rough cut of the film in an editing studio. In both cases, he says, the others present wanted him to approve of the changes they had made. Obviously, he liked some of them more than others, but recognized that it was now someone else’s vision. McDonald’s version of the story was darker than his, more ‘existential,’ but he loved it at the time and still does. His only complaint is about one of the side-effects of adaptation in general. Most people have had the experience of watching a film adaptation of a favourite book and realizing that their mental pictures of the story and the characters are being overwritten by the film’s images. Filmic images are so powerful that they tend to overwrite your own images forever, so that the lonely and hapless protagonist you have been picturing now looks forever like the Hollywood star who portrayed him or her on screen. It does not occur to most of us that the same thing can happen to the person who wrote the story, and Turner reports that this is exactly what happened to him. His original images of the characters have been permanently erased, with Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie, and the other actors filling those roles permanently. This seems like a genuine loss to him, and it is a little-discussed but inevitable byproduct of filmic adaptation, assuming of course that the author views the final product. Despite the influences of post-structuralism, and a society in which everyone is an amateur critic, the romantic notion of the author/artist still has considerable force. Part of that notion is the idea that the author’s version of the story is more valuable than that of a reader. Our justification for literary biography is that the author’s life can reveal something about the work. We attend readings to hear the author read what we could read ourselves, and interview authors and artists endlessly about their ideas, their motivations, their secrets. It seems to fol-

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low from all this attention that the mental images an author carries of his characters and a story’s action have intrinsic value. We are curious and want to be allowed inside. But what happens if a film erases some of that memory? Is that not, is some sense, the loss of some valuable piece of the art? We think of adaptations as speaking back to the original source, as critiquing them, as entering into a dialogue that we can enjoy on its own terms. But such metaphors are not technological enough to describe what also happens – that adaptations also write over original ideas, erasing and obscuring them forever. The Making of Hard Core Logo Before the imaginary band Hard Core Logo could begin their quixotic quest around the country, Bruce McDonald had to begin his. By 1994 he was the director of three critically acclaimed features in a row, having diverted from the road films after Highway 61 to adapt some W.P. Kinsella short stories into the film Dance Me Outside. McDonald first heard about Hard Core Logo from Keith Porteous, a manager of bands like 54-40 and Mae Moore, and one of the first steps was to hire screenwriter Noel Baker, whom he also heard about through Porteous. Funding independent films in Canada is challenging, and often fundamentally different than in the United States. Government funding agencies in Canada essentially fulfil part of the role of a movie studio – they provide money, but also offer advice and demand changes to scripts and plots in order to increase their odds of seeing a return on their investment. McDonald submitted an application for a development grant to the Ontario Film Development Corporation, which would have provided money for scriptwriting and other upfront expenses. The OFDC were ambivalent about the film, and about the prospect of McDonald making another road movie, and turned it down at first. Despite this setback, writing and casting continued towards the

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end of 1994 and the beginning of 1995, with Julian Richings being the first person cast, as punk legend Bucky Haight.8 The next people cast, during a west coast scouting trip, were Callum Keith Rennie, who plays Billy Tallent, and Bernie Caulson, who plays Pipefitter, the band’s drummer. Finding someone to play Joe Dick was obviously of central importance, but none of the candidates seemed like a good fit, and McDonald eventually suggested Hugh Dillon, the lead singer for Canadian band The Headstones, who were popular at the time and had scored several hit songs throughout the 1990s from the albums Picture of Health (1993), Teeth and Tissue (1995), and Smile and Wave (1997). Dillon had been cast in a small role as Clarence Gaskill in McDonald’s Dance Me Outside in 1994. Neither screenwriter Baker nor Dillon himself was enthusiastic about the prospect of him playing Joe Dick. There was the obvious question of whether Dillon, as a relatively inexperienced actor, could carry a lead role like this. For Dillon, there was a concern that if the movie was terrible it would ruin his credibility with The Headstones’ fans. He says he turned it down five times. In the end, two things led to him being cast. The first was that Dillon would be allowed to make changes to the script to better reflect his own experiences in a band. As he puts it now, they ‘allowed me to bring the reality to it.’ Part of that reality is that some of the politics were dropped, so that the character became more like Dillon himself. ‘You don’t have to take just what’s on the page,’ he says, having spent the intervening years doing more acting than music. ‘Otherwise you’re just limiting yourself as an artist – just trying to colour within the lines.’ The second important component was the rapport between Dillon and Rennie. McDonald says now that it was ‘the first time I understood the casting notion of chemistry.’ He also says that the two of them were both ‘a bit cagey and suspicious of each other’ at first, in part because they had very different backgrounds in acting and music, ‘worlds they didn’t know that came with a lot of hard-earned chops.’ Over the course

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of rehearsals and shooting, though, McDonald says the two developed a ‘mutual respect society and then a mutual need society’ since they had a lot to learn from one another. Rennie describes it thus: Hugh is phenomenal. He hadn’t had a huge amount of [acting] work up until that point, but to work with him was to be electrified because you never knew exactly what he was going to do. He was coming from rock and roll, and I was respecting that. He was using me for guidance on ‘how do we get through this movie?’, ‘how does this stuff work?’ So there was a great back and forth of covering each other’s asses and watching each other’s backs, to make sure that we were in the right place.

Both actors describe themselves as friends to this day. For his part, Rennie says that ‘Hugh and I have had an up-and-down relationship for many years, much like the movie. And that was captured in the making of the film. It’s a great friendship and it’s endured a lot of things, so we were filming real life.’ Shooting finally began in Vancouver on 25 October 1995, about six months behind the initial schedule. Various pools of public and private money had appeared and then evaporated, before funding from the British Columbia Film Commission made the film possible. Most of the film was shot in and around Vancouver, including all of the interiors that take place in the other western Canadian cities. The cast and crew then drove east to film some of the road sequences, with principal photography finished in mid-November. Screenwriter Noel S. Baker describes the editing process as one where the film ‘found its feet.’ In some early versions, it wasn’t clear enough what the stakes were for these characters, and the film seemed to drag near the beginning. The addition of screen titles, maps, and other documentary effects managed to give the film much more momentum, while preserving the documentary feel.

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The completed film debuted at the Cannes film festival in May of 1996, and earned good reviews, including a rave from industry magazine Variety. More enthusiastic reviews followed the release of the film on 18 October, including one from the Montreal Gazette that called Hard Core Logo ‘The best rock ‘n’ roll movie in the history of rock ‘n’ roll movies.’ The film was nominated for a number of Genie awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Achievement in Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but lost in most of these categories to David Cronenberg’s Crash, winning the Genie for Best Song, an award shared by Peter Moore, the band Swamp Baby, who performed the music, and Michael Turner, who wrote the lyrics. The film fared better in a Take One magazine film critics’ poll at the end of the year, and was chosen as the best Canadian film of the year, over a strong group of films that included, in addition to Cronenberg’s Crash, Robert Lepage’s Le Confessional, Mort Ransen’s Margaret’s Museum, and David Wellington’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, which had been made with an award-winning cast from the Stratford Festival. In terms of box office, McDonald says that Hard Core Logo ‘was never that wildly successful when it came out.’ In the years since it has become a cult film, finding its audience one referral at a time. ‘It’s something people have been allowed to discover,’ McDonald says. ‘They’ve found it and it’s become theirs, rather than something that’s been sold to them.’ Hard Core Roadshow: A Screenwriter’s Diary Hard Core Logo is one of the few films for which we have a detailed production diary, because the film’s screenwriter, Noel S. Baker, wrote a book about his experience on the film. The appeal of the book goes far beyond our ability to learn something about this particular film – it is also a compelling account of the economic and creative challenges of

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being a screenwriter, challenges that are particularly acute in Canada, but that occur anywhere. Baker begins his book with the declaration ‘I am so fucking broke,’ and begins to describe how a number of happy coincidences allowed him to meet Bruce McDonald after a friend had recommended him as a screenwriter and how he began the task of adapting Turner’s book. His account of this process alone makes the book worth reading, because it illustrates some of the complexities of adaptation. At first, his instinct is to fill in the spaces in Turner’s book as gently as possible, but eventually he realizes that he needs to change some elements to make the film more cinematic. The band’s acoustic tour becomes electrified, and Billy’s chance at fame in the United States appears sooner and becomes central to the plot. Baker is repeatedly torn between his love for the source book and respect for Turner as a fellow artist on the one hand, and his need to follow his own narrative instincts and the demands of the screen on the other. Because Baker was involved in the film’s extensive and drawn-out pre-production, he also manages to chart the draining process of trying to get a film made. As with many films, there are numerous points when the project seems dead in the water, only to be resurrected again and again. By the time the film began shooting, about a year and a half after his first meeting with McDonald, Baker had been through extensive rewrites. Reflecting his common practice, McDonald had Baker on the film set when shooting finally began, a situation he describes in the foreword to Baker’s book as ‘kinda like inviting the priest to come along on your honeymoon,’9 since screenwriters are more often exiled from the film production process once the script has been turned in. Baker ends his book happy with his film but distressed at the state of filmmaking in Canada, where so many artists end up looking south, as Billy Tallent does, to try to earn some financial success. The other option, Joe Dick’s, is not so appealing. Confronting Margaret Atwood’s famous assessment of Canadian stories as being fundamentally about

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survival, he writes that ‘at the end of the road, mere survival doesn’t cut it any more.’10 The Tribute Album Before the traditional soundtrack album was released, McDonald decided to continue the pretence that Hard Core Logo were a real band by releasing a tribute album, with a number of actual bands recording Hard Core Logo songs. The liner notes are part of the joke too, with the bands writing fake tributes about how Hard Core Logo changed their lives or influenced their music. Some write about memorable gigs they shared with the band. Almost all of the artists on the CD are Canadian, from popular rock bands like The Pursuit of Happiness, 54-40, and the Odds to indie bands like The Super Friendz and Cub to rappers like the Dream Warriors. The first track is one of the most interesting, since it is Hugh Dillon’s real band, the Headstones, covering a Hard Core Logo song, so that Dillon is now his real self covering his fake self. The Headstones were a punkinfluenced rock band, so the gap between the two is not that large, but it is clear that they are two different bands, and that Dillon significantly changed his vocal style to perform as Joe Dick on the Hard Core Logo songs he recorded for the film with backing band Swamp Baby. As Joe Dick, Dillon sings in a punk semi-yell, throaty and urgent. With The Headstones, his voice is much more bluesy, even as guitars chug along in the background. The song that The Headstones perform on the tribute, ‘Son of a Bitch to the Core,’ is not on the soundtrack album, nor in the movie, so one cannot do a track-to-track comparison, but his voice on this song has a discernable twang that is also evident on Headstones hits like ‘Unsound’ and ‘Cubically Contained.’ Bands who warrant tribute albums generally have a reasonably extensive back catalogue, but there are a limited number of Hard Core

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Logo songs based on Michael Turner’s lyrics, so some of them appear multiple times on this album. There are two versions of ‘Edmonton Block Heater,’ one by The Pursuit of Happiness and the other a rap version by the Dream Warriors. The rap version of the song is strong, and might be one of the only rap songs ever recorded that is about winter. The Pursuit of Happiness version is a high-energy punk song inspired in part by singer/songwriter Moe Berg’s youth listening to punk and new wave while growing up in Edmonton. ‘My first couple of bands in Edmonton were a part of that scene,’ he says. ‘Because I’d spent so much time listening to punk as a kid, I felt we could lend some authenticity to the proceedings. I based my arrangement for the song on SNFU’s “Gravedigger.” SNFU were also former Edmontonians and I watched them grow up and become one of the most influential punk bands of all time. It was a blast recording the song and I was pretty proud of how it turned out.’ The Pursuit of Happiness knew McDonald well, since he had directed the video for their song ‘Cigarette Dangles’ in 1993, which Berg describes as ‘one of the best ones we ever did.’ He says that Hard Core Logo ‘very accurately depicted life on the road, especially for a band not particularly well funded by a label. The sight of a van on an icy winter road is the most common mental picture any band who has toured Canada sees.’ The Hard Core Logo Soundtrack The official soundtrack, released two years after the film in 1998, is now out of print and lists for up to $150 on eBay, although copies can sometimes be found for under $50. It is primarily composed of the songs originally recorded by the Toronto band Swamp Baby in the spring of 1995. The band wrote most of the songs themselves using Michael Turner’s lyrics, and then Hugh Dillon rerecorded the vocals over the

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songs before the film began shooting so that he could lip-sync believably in the film. The soundtrack is rounded out by tracks from Teenage Head, The Ramones, and Chris Spedding. The Swamp Baby tracks are musical originals except for two: ‘Sonic Reducer’ is a frequently covered punk classic by the Dead Boys that was first recorded in 1977 for their album Young, Loud, and Snotty, and now turns up frequently in skateboarding videos and video games. The other is ‘One Foot in the Gutter’ by a late-1970s Toronto band called The Ugly, whose story is in many ways more outrageous than that of Hard Core Logo. Colin Brunton is a Toronto producer and director of a documentary about the late-1970s Toronto punk scene called The Last Pogo Jumps Again. He also, coincidentally, was the producer of Roadkill and Highway 61, and Hard Core Logo is dedicated to him and four other people. According to Brunton, ‘One Foot in the Gutter’ was a song by The Ugly that was written somewhere between 1976 and 1978. It was written by bassist Sam Ferrara and guitarist Raymi Mulroney. Raymi’s brother, Mike ‘Nightmare’ Mulroney, was the lead singer. Brunton describes their career thus: The Ugly didn’t call themselves ‘punk’ … They preferred the term ‘Hoodlum Rock,’ because they were. Mike and Ugly manager Zoltan Lugosi (who changed his name to Johnny Garbagecan) were ‘second story artists,’ i.e. they specialized in B & E’s. One of the interesting things about their music was that it was true. In other words, if they wrote about holding up a milk store, you can bet they held up a milk store. Mike carried a gun, which was unheard of in late seventies Toronto. He moved to Vancouver in the early nineties, like lots of Toronto punks, lured by cheap, good heroin. Thrown off of a three-story building by bikers who’s hangout he’d broken into (I swear I’m not making this up), he landed in a garbage dumpster. Though unconscious, the bikers proceeded to kick the shit out of him a little more.

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As for the soundtrack itself, it has a lo-fi aesthetic that increases its authenticity. The sound is a bit muddy, and sounds reasonably like it might have been recorded by an independent punk band in the 1980s. In the film, it also has to function as a ‘live’ recording, as when the band plays ‘Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?’ at the Rock against Guns benefit, so the music can not sound too polished or clean. One of the apparent ironies of the music is that it is so good. Swamp Baby is a little-known independent band, but several of these songs are perfectly believable as punk rock ‘hits.’ That is not to say that it is surprising their songs are so good, rather that they should be more famous themselves. There is no discernible difference in quality between ‘Sonic Reducer’ and ‘Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?’ – except for the fact that one is now considered a punk classic and the other is not. It makes sense then that McDonald would have chosen these two songs as the first two Hard Core Logo tracks in his film, as it is impossible to tell the original from the cover. Portrait of a Thousand Punks: Hard Core Logo Nick Craine’s comic-book version, Portrait of a Thousand Punks: Hard Core Logo, is as much a co-production as an adaptation, since Craine collaborated with McDonald on the project and was present on the film shoot. Craine is a comic-book creator, artist, and illustrator based in Guelph, Ontario. His illustration work is now commonly featured in newspapers like the Globe and Mail and the New York Times. Portrait of a Thousand Punks is a blend of material from Turner’s book and McDonald’s film. For the most part, it looks like the film. That is to say, while the main characters are not exact replicas of Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie, and the others, they are obviously inspired by them. Some of the black and white illustrations are copies of the shots in the film, but most are original creations. The dialogue is a blend of

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Turner’s book and Baker’s screenplay, some of it word-for-word from the film. The final result is an odd amalgam of other work, but it stands on its own, especially since Craine allows himself to fill in some of the peripheral details of the band using newspaper articles and testimonials from people who ‘knew’ the band or worked with them at some point in their career. All of the imaginary writers and contributors have the names (and sometimes the faces) of Craine’s friends and colleagues from Guelph. Using his artistic licence to add something of an in-joke, he replaces the recognizable square van that the band drives in the film with a representation of his old band’s touring van. For much of the mid- to late 1990s, Craine played in a rock/punk/folk band called Black Cabbage that did its share of touring across Canada. Craine had previously worked with McDonald on a graphic novel version of Dance Me Outside, and was a collaborator on Hard Core Logo as well as an adapter. He was on the set in British Columbia, and watched the band and the film come together. ‘It was a very interesting vibe,’ he says, ‘because there were so many last minute decisions.’ Some of those decisions had to do the cast, Dillon in particular: ‘Most of what you see [of Dillon] in that film is not acting – it’s really just his personality.’ When it came time to produce his version of the story, Craine thought carefully about the nature of adaptation. ‘It wasn’t going to be just a straight panel representation of what happened,’ he says. ‘I wanted the content to drive the form. I also let my own experiences inform it.’ He decided to maintain the film’s ending rather than the book’s, even if it seemed to him that the book’s finale, where Joe ends up starting a new band under his original name of Joe Mulgrew, was a more suitably Canadian one. ‘Is it really a Canadian story if Joe shoots himself?’ he wonders. ‘That’s an American celebrity move, but I still liked the ending cinematically.’ He added one gruesome visual detail to the overhead view of Joe Dick on the pavement – an image of a cat licking up blood. ‘I wanted to show Joe bleeding like the martyr he

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Music rehearsals for Hard Core Logo. Top (L–R): Bruce McDonald and John Pyper-Ferguson. Bottom (L–R): Pyper-Ferguson, Hugh Dillon, and Bernie Coulson. Photo montage by Nick Craine; courtesy of Nick Craine.

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thought he was. Even this little cat is drawing something from him. Even though he was a taker himself.’ Overall, he argues that one of the reasons Hard Core Logo has been so popular in its many permutations is that it is a type of story that is rarely or never told. ‘It occupies a gigantic deficit that is not represented in pop culture. Anytime there’s a gigantic deficit like that, there are hungry minds and audiences and artists who want that part to be represented.’ Filling in those deficits is extremely difficult, of course, and Craine points out that ‘most people don’t have the talent or the stupidity to take off on a tangent and see it to fruition.’ Billy Talent Originally from Mississauga, Ontario, the band now known as Billy Talent began life as The Other One, and then called themselves Pezz for a while until, according to singer Ben Kowalewicz, they received a call one day from a Memphis-based band who also called themselves Pezz, threatening a lawsuit if Kowalewicz’s band did not change its name. In the search for an alternative, two things came together. The first was his love for Jane’s Addiction, which inspired his search for a band name that contained a proper name. The second element was the appeal of Hard Core Logo, which he had recently seen. ‘I was working in a record store in Meadowvale [Ontario] and one of my co-workers recommended the film and I watched it myself. It just kind of connected with me,’ he says. And while it might seem like many people would choose Joe Dick as the most inspirational Hard Core Logo member, Kowalewicz found Billy Tallent ‘just as strong a character,’ especially his ‘air of oldschool arrogance.’ Oddly, the name change seems to have been the best thing that ever happened to the band since, as Kowalewicz notes, ‘as soon as we changed the name our sound became more precise. After that things

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started taking off.’ As Billy Talent (with one less ‘l’ than the character) the band has since produced three albums, and all have gone platinum in Canada, some of them several times over. They have also found success in Europe even though, like most Canadian bands, they have found it difficult to replicate that success in the United States. Their sound is a blend of punk and hard rock, and more polished than Hard Core Logo’s music, closer to the music one could imagine being made by Jenifur, Billy Tallent’s other band in the film. Kowalewicz says he is pleased that some people have now discovered the book and the film because of his band’s name. ‘It’s cool that we can have people talk to us and say that they watched the movie or read the book. It’s happened all over the world, from Russia to Spain. It’s interesting that we were inspired by the movie and people go back to the movie. It’s all full circle.’ Hard Core Logo: Live The latest addition to the Hard Core Logo canon is a stage version of the story that debuted in late 2010 and early 2011 in Edmonton and Vancouver. Produced, written by, and starring Michael Scholar, Jr, it is officially an adaptation of Turner’s book, McDonald’s film, and Baker’s screenplay. Scholar says that he had the idea for a stage version not long after seeing the film in 1996, but figured that someone would have done it already. He ended up making a name for himself with a version of The Black Rider, a stage show by Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs, and Robert Wilson. Scholar and his father produced the show for the Edmonton Fringe Festival in 1998, took it to the New York Fringe Festival, and toured with the show on and off for the better part of a decade, ending with a six-week sold-out run at the Tarragon Theatre in Toronto in the fall of 2008. Soon afterward, Scholar began working on the stage version of Hard

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Core Logo, once he had managed to get permission from Turner, McDonald, and Baker. The show is a combination of drama, puppetry, and musical performance, with songs performed in their entirety rather than the snippets and medleys that appear in the film. Like Nick Craine before him, Scholar chose not to adapt either the book or the film exclusively, but has created an original piece from elements of both. He was primarily interested in the novel, but there are elements of the film narrative that he found compelling, like the idea of the benefit being for Bucky Haight and all that that implies. He also says that he could not imagine not having the film’s ending. His motivations for wanting to remake the story are numerous, and include the simple fact that he loved the story and wanted to be a part of it. Casting himself as Joe Dick allows him to play rock star, and he says he did not feel a lot of pressure to either re-create or counter Hugh Dillon’s performance in the film. A crucial motivation, though, was his desire to turn this back into a Vancouver punk story. The novel has a lot of specific Vancouver references, and even though the film is set there it drops much of the local specificity in favour of a more general punk attitude. In particular, Dillon’s influence on the script meant that much of Joe Dick’s politics were stripped out of the film. For his part, Dillon says that the book’s politics ‘didn’t mean a thing to me’ and describes politics in general as ‘just another thing people hide behind.’ One of the primary ways in which Scholar put the Vancouver back in Hard Core Logo: Live was by hiring Joey ‘Shithead’ Keithley from the punk band D.O.A. to write new songs for the play, songs that again use Michael Turner’s lyrics from the book. Keithley has been central to the Vancouver punk scene for thirty years, but it is not just his connections to the place and the story that made Scholar want to work with him. It was Scholar’s sense that Vancouver punk sounded different than Toronto punk, that the former was closer in style to the more aggressive west coast sound while the latter was more influenced by New York bands

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like the Ramones. He says, ‘I wanted to take the great story elements from the movie and the great poetic elements from the book and then infuse the Vancouver musicality that comes from the godfather of Vancouver punk, which is Joey Shithead.’ Keithley’s band D.O.A. were formed in the late 1970s and released their first album, Something Better Change, in 1980, followed by Hardcore ’81, which was apparently the first use of the word hardcore to refer to punk rather than pornography. The sound was fast and aggressive, and the band toured extensively around North America and around the world throughout the 1980s. Like American band Black Flag, they were often the first punk band to play in small cities and towns, and Keithley is proud that his band was a lot of people’s first punk show. The band has gone through numerous permutations over the years and is still active, although Keithley is the only member who has been part of the band the entire time. He has maintained his political interests in part by seeking public office, and was a candidate for the Green Party three times in recent years, although he now says he is finished with that type of politics. For one thing, he differed with some of the members of the party on a number of non-environmental issues, and says that at least one party leader was anti-abortion and anti-union. He also says that when he ran, ‘no one from the Green Party in North America had even been elected, so there was no corruption … Once you get elected then you start being corrupted almost right away, and being pushed and pulled as a politician.’ Then there is the lifestyle: ‘I didn’t really think it would be fun to be elected, because then I’d just be away from home and listening to a bunch of people bitch at me. That sounds a lot less pleasant than being away from home and being on a D.O.A. trip.’ If Joe starts to sound like a real-life version of Joe Dick, it is because he is, at least in part. He has often been regarded as at least a part of the inspiration for the character in Turner’s book, not least because of the similarity of the punk handles (Joey Shithead / Joe Dick). In addi-

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tion, D.O.A. played an acoustic gig in 1990 at the Arlington Cabaret in Vancouver, where the opening band was the Hard Rock Miners (who were Michael Turner’s band). That show seems to have inspired the idea of a legendary punk band now playing an acoustic gig. These two similarities, coupled with both Joes’ politics, makes it clear that there is at least some poetic inspiration going on here, although from this basis the story diverges substantially from Keithley’s. ‘D.O.A. had its dysfunctional moments,’ he says, ‘but I never carried on like that.’ As for a Vancouver sound, Keithley says he did not think that much about that as he was composing. He was more concerned about capturing the decade-appropriate tempo of the band’s sound, which he describes as ‘medium-paced punk,’ acknowledging that it would have sounded fast at the time, but that a lot of bands have since played much faster. He also differed with Scholar slightly on the importance of preserving all of Turner’s words. ‘I would pare down some of the words but Michael would insist on putting them all back in there,’ he says. In the end, there will be at least three versions of many of the band’s songs, all of which began as lyrics on Turner’s page years ago. Keithley’s versions will join the Swamp Baby renditions that are in the film and the tribute album covers. To add one more twist, Keithley’s label released a 7” single with Scholar’s stage band on one side performing ‘Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?’ and D.O.A. on the other side, covering ‘Blue Tattoo.’ These songs, and this band, have ended up having a life far beyond that of the majority of real bands. Slash Fiction and Remix Videos The relationship between Joe and Billy in Hard Core Logo has become a source for much online ‘slash’ fiction – stories generally written by women that focus on romantic and sexual relationships between the two leading men. The peculiar online culture of slash fiction actually

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pre-dates the Internet, and is generally assumed to have begun with Star Trek fanzines in the late 1960s and early 1970s.11 The relationship between Kirk and Spock is the most famous of these imagined homosexual relationships, but slash fiction exists for a vast number of film and television texts. Hard Core Logo is actually among the less commercially successful of these source texts, but the creation of slash fiction for the film can be attributed in part to the complexities of the relationship between Joe and Billy. At one point in the film, John tells a fan that Joe and Billy have actually had sex, although it is unclear whether he is telling the truth, is delusional, or is simply out to get revenge on the two of them. At least one of the fan fiction stories deals directly with the infamous encounter that John details, and places the sex between Joe and Billy in the context of their long-developed emotional closeness and friendship, even as it offers a detailed and pornographic account of the actual sex.12 Some slash fiction is based on the contention that the codes of an erotic relationship are present in the source text, and many of the online fan videos posted on YouTube also make this claim by showcasing potential romantic looks between Joe and Billy. By re-editing the film and rearranging various shots, the videos make the homoerotic undertones of the film into an explicit romantic relationship. Several of the videos compile shots that feature Joe and Billy standing close together, smiling at each other, or exchanging meaningful glances, and add a soundtrack of romantic music. Two of the available examples at the time of this writing were set to the Dandy Warhol’s ‘You Were the Last High’ (sample lyric: I am alone but adored / by a hundred thousand more / than I said, when you were the last) and Puddle of Mudd’s ‘Blurry’ (lyric: You could be my someone / You could be my scene / You know that I’ll protect you / from all of the obscene). The videos are, for the most part, creative and well constructed. Another example uses a brush-off song recorded by Pink, ‘U + Ur Hand,’ and begins with the shot of Joe putting the

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band’s demo into the van’s tape deck and telling the others that this is ‘the best thing we’ve done yet’ as Pink’s drumbeat begins. The video then cuts to a shot of Billy lowering his book in the back of the van, and other shots are cued to the lyrics of the song: ‘I’m not here for your entertainment’ as Billy points at the camera and asks for it to be turned off during their argument in Regina, and ‘keep your dream just give me the money’ as Billy throws the telephone off the motel balcony. What makes these works particularly fascinating is that in the case of Hard Core Logo, they are the only part of the fictional universe created by women. Indeed, that is the situation for many of the texts that provide the inspiration for slash fiction and for fan fiction more generally. There are no easy answers to the question of why a group of women, most of whom identify as straight, would be interested in writing about homoerotic and homosexual relationships between men. It is likely that many of the potential answers have an element of truth to them, at least for some of the women creating this work. In a relatively early study of fan fiction communities published in 1992, Camille BaconSmith found a range of answers when she asked writers why they focused on romantic and sexual relationships between men. One woman volunteered, ‘Our culture so thoroughly denigrates the personalities of women that women cannot imagine themselves as heroic characters unless they imagine themselves as male.’13 While this might be true, it is also the case that female writers and filmmakers outside of the fan fiction world create stories about women all the time (even as they might have a harder time having these stories published or produced). Many of the responses Bacon-Smith collected centre on the connection between sex and romance in the stories, and posit that what the stories provide is a vision of sexuality as inexorably tied to romance that appeals to some women.14 In any case, these fictional creations are valuable and interesting in their own right, especially for feminist scholars seeking to better

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understand women’s relationships to mass media and cultural production. While fan fiction and Internet videos currently occupy a relatively low place on the cultural hierarchy, that is more a result of their status as gendered and amateur objects, rather than a reflection of their inherent value as creative works. As Francesca Coppa notes in an article titled ‘Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance,’ there are plenty of models for ‘derivate’ works of art, in which original texts are subject to endless and infinite revision. Theatre and performance provide the most obvious examples, and, quoting Marvin Carlson, Coppa points out that theatrical performances inevitably include information not featured in the written script, and that in adding these details they point out the omissions and hidden subtexts in the original work. ‘Fan fiction works much the same way. Once a story supplements canon – giving us something the original source did not by filling in a missing scene, getting inside a character’s head, interpreting or clarifying or departing from the story as originally told – future supplements become inevitable, and they aren’t any more redundant than multiple productions of Hamlet.’15 Anticipating the objection that Hamlet is a richer text that can support endless performance, Coppa argues that ‘it is Shakespeare’s endlessly creative fans – be they theatre practitioners carrying the stories on their bodies or literary critics teasing out new textual interpretations – who keep Shakespeare going.’16 Readers still inclined to be dismissive of fan fiction and videos might want to consider the relationship of all of this work to the other adaptations of Hard Core Logo I have been discussing so far in this book. We might imagine someone making the case that only Turner’s original novel is a work of artistic value and that all of the subsequent works are of lesser standing, but we would have trouble actually finding someone to make that case, living as we do in a world where even academic ivory towers harbour few such champions of the purely literary, and where

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the explosion of cultural and media studies since the 1980s has led to serious academic consideration of all manner of creative texts. Michael Turner himself is emphatic that his own novel has no special status over subsequent creations. And once we accept that McDonald’s film, and filmic adaptation more generally, is a legitimate form of art, it becomes impossible to justify any criterion of cultural value that excludes what has followed the film, whether it is a comic book, a punk song, or a piece of erotic fiction. Each work or interpretation succeeds or fails on its own terms, regardless of the form it takes, and each is a re-imagining of what came before. The fan fiction that imagines the beginning of Joe and Billy’s relationship or the consequences of Joe’s death, and the videos that fill in the gaps between looks and gestures, are all, in their own ways, essays on the original text. The second half of this book constitutes one more addition to this considerable and rich collection of essays, but first we must briefly consider McDonald’s work since Hard Core Logo, since much of it is a continuation of the ideas he developed in his road movie trilogy. Bruce McDonald’s Films since Hard Core Logo For much of the decade after completing Hard Core Logo, Bruce McDonald worked primarily in television, directing an extraordinarily wide variety of programs, including Emily of New Moon, based on a series of books by Lucy Maud Montgomery (most famous for writing Anne of Green Gables) and Queer As Folk, a groundbreaking series about gay life for the US pay channel Showtime, which was set in Pittsburgh but filmed in Toronto. Picture Claire McDonald directed only one feature film in the ten years after Hard Core Logo, 2001’s Picture Claire, a noir-ish thriller intended for wide release,

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and shot for a reported $10 million with several American stars, including Juliette Lewis, Gina Gershon, and Mickey Rourke. (The latter’s role amounts to not much more than a cameo). In the film, Lewis is a French-speaking Québécois woman fleeing drug dealers in Montreal who seeks refuge with her boyfriend, a photographer in Toronto. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time leads to her being suspected of murder, and the rest of the film involves a complicated plot with a number of unlikely coincidences. The film is in some ways a victim of its own ambitions in casting, since it is immediately difficult to accept Lewis as Québécois, as she is not a native French speaker and certainly does not speak with a Québécois accent. The fact that she cannot communicate at all in Toronto renders her mute for much of the film and makes it difficult to identify with her character. Gershon performs well, but the only person in the film who seems comfortable in his role is Callum Keith Rennie, whose good looks and charm make his portrayal of a violent hoodlum all the more creepy. Picture Claire debuted to tepid reviews and was not released to theatres, which was obviously a disappointment, and occasional source of conflict, for McDonald and the producers. The Tracey Fragments Beginning in 2007, McDonald began a second strong run of features with The Tracey Fragments, starring Canadian actress Ellen Page. The film’s marketing was helped by the fact that Page’s next film, also released in 2007, was Juno, which became a major hit and earned four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Page. Juno grossed over 140 million dollars in the United States, and all of a sudden Page became the centre of the marketing campaign for The Tracey Fragments. Anyone who chose the film expecting something like Juno was in for somewhat of a shock, however, since the film is easily McDonald’s darkest – an impressionistic and hallucinatory portrait of

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A typical montage from The Tracey Fragments. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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a teenage girl’s unravelling. Page plays fifteen-year-old Tracey Berkowitz, a teen outcast whose younger brother has gone missing. As Tracey searches Winnipeg for him, just in advance of a predicted blizzard, she rides city buses and encounters a variety of low-lifes. At school, Tracey is mocked, degraded, and taunted as ‘It’ by her classmates because of her underdeveloped body. At home, her parents only speak to yell, and the boy she fantasizes about victimizes her. Whereas Juno could fit somewhere in the John Hughes pantheon of films about outcasts who find some connection to those around them, The Tracey Fragments is much closer to works by Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg in that it offers little redemption from its darkness and dysfunction. The Tracey Fragments is also McDonald’s most formally challenging film. It is told in flashback, and the sequence of events is never quite clear. For almost the entire film, the screen is subdivided into images of various sizes that are constantly combining, shifting, and disappearing. Sometimes these frames show the same scene and shift the time slightly, so that moments are repeated or occur out of order. Sometimes they show scenes that happen before or after the primary scene, while at other times they show objects and footage of the city. The idea is to capture Tracey’s subjectivity and the way in which she remembers the traumatic days during which the film takes place. McDonald further emphasized the fragmentary nature of the narrative by releasing raw footage from the film shoot and encouraging fans to ‘remix’ it. The best of these remixes were then special features on the DVD. The film makes one further artistic risk in casting – it features Julian Richings, who plays Bucky Haight in Hard Core Logo, as Tracey’s female therapist. Richings wears a skirt, blouse, and wig, channelling the obtuse and clueless psychologist for whom Tracey cannot seem to provide the correct answers. Having Richings play a woman captures Tracey’s sense of the therapist, in the way that a teenager might label an older

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woman she dislikes as a ‘man.’ The film received strong reviews, including a New York Times piece that claimed ‘The 77 minutes of The Tracey Fragments are not always easy to endure or to believe, but their cumulative effect is also hard to shake.’17 Pontypool McDonald followed The Tracey Fragments with Pontypool (2008), a horror film about a zombie-creating virus that appears in the small town of Pontypool, Ontario. Almost the entire film takes place in a radio station located in a church basement, where a grizzled alcoholic DJ named Grant Mazzy and his two female co-producers begin to receive reports about strange crowds attacking a doctor’s office, and then horrific calls from their traffic reporter about cannibalism and murder. They eventually realize that this virus is transmitted in words, but not before one of the women succumbs to the virus and tries to attack her two co-workers. Since the virus has only infected the English language, Mazzy and producer Sydney Briar (played by real-life husband and wife Stephen McHattie and Lisa Houle) keep themselves safe for a time by speaking French. The film is a great example of accomplishing a lot with a limited budget. Since most of the horror is described rather than seen, the film creates continuous tension without recourse to a lot of effects, and the idea of a virus transmitted through language is a compelling one that allows the film to comment on media, social interactions, and the nature of linguistic comprehension. Since it is such a ‘talking’ film, it depends heavily on the performances of McHattie, Houle, and Georgina Reilly, who plays Laurel-Ann, the young assistant producer who eventually succumbs to the unnamed virus. All three performances are strong, and the film received good reviews overall, including a positive notice in the Globe and Mail, which called it ‘ultimately a testament to its frequentlybesieged director’s audacity and vision.’18

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This Movie Is Broken In 2010, McDonald completed or released a remarkable four films, all of which had music themes. The first of these, released at SXSW in Austin, Texas, was This Movie Is Broken, a fiction/documentary hybrid which combines a narrative with concert footage of Toronto band Broken Social Scene. The story is set against the backdrop of a real Broken Social Scene concert at Harbourfront in Toronto in the summer of 2009. The actors were filmed in character in the crowd, watching the show and eventually ending up backstage. About half of the screen time is taken up by the band’s performances. The story is a simple one for most of the film. We follow a young man named Bruno during a day that begins when he wakes up next to Caroline, his long-time crush. All would seem to be good, except that Caroline is getting ready to go to France to study, and he would like to convince her to stay. After Bruno’s friend Blake boasts on his behalf that he can get Broken Social Scene tickets and backstage passes, Bruno must scramble to get them to impress Caroline. Since the story only takes up about forty minutes of screen time, McDonald has to work hard to build up his characters and narrative quickly, and at first it seems like not much can happen here. Either Caroline will stay or she will go. And while she does indeed have to make that decision, the film has a few genuine narrative surprises up its sleeve. This Movie Is Broken is yet another example of McDonald making something compelling and rich out of next to nothing. There is a moment in the making-of documentary on the DVD that is particularly illustrative of his resources and budgets. It shows the shooting of a scene in which Bruno carries Caroline through the streets of Toronto on his bike. In the documentary, we see a cameraperson, presumably cinematographer John Price, perched on the back of another bike, with McDonald himself pedalling away in front.

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Trigger The second film of the year, Trigger, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 2010, and was the first film screened at the festival’s new permanent home, the Bell Lightbox theatre. The screening was a difficult moment, because one of the film’s two stars, Tracy Wright, had died in June of that year. Wright had played Margo, the spaced-out rock star, in McDonald’s Highway 61, and had also had roles in Picture Claire and This Movie Is Broken. She was the long-time partner and wife of Don McKellar, McDonald’s frequent collaborator. In Trigger, Wright plays Vic, one half of a ‘90s grunge band who reunites with her former partner, Kat, one night in Toronto, for dinner and a women-in-rock tribute show. In the years since their band split over their creative differences and addictions to alcohol and drugs, Kat (played by Molly Parker) has moved to L.A. and has a successful career working in music for film and television. Vic has stayed in Toronto and is trying to restart her music career with some acoustic shows. When they meet at the beginning of the film in a fancy Toronto restaurant that Kat has chosen, there is a history and tension between the two women that is immediately compelling. In addition to the chemistry between the two, the film doubles as an affectionate tribute to women in music, and is perhaps the only film to treat female musicians with this level of respect. The film’s implied feminism is somewhat ironic given that the script was originally conceived as a sequel to Hard Core Logo, one in which Billy and Joe reunite after many years (dealing with Joe’s death would have required some explanation). The inability to make the scheduling work led to the film being re-imagined as the story of two women. The script deals with the aftermath of a friendship and an artistic relationship in compelling ways, and the fact that the characters are now female adds resonances that would not be there in the original version. Some of

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the most emotionally powerful moments in Trigger come when young women recognize Kat and Vic, and say thing like ‘You made high school not suck so much.’ There is a sense throughout the film of the community of women in music, even if the relationships between them are not always smooth and peaceful. The film is also very much a Toronto movie, with settings ranging from recognizable restaurants to a local high school. Music from the Big House McDonald’s last two films of 2010 debuted at the Whistler Film Festival in December. Music from the Big House is a documentary about the journey of a Canadian blues singer, Rita Chiarelli, to the Louisiana State Maximum Security Penitentiary, also known as Angola Prison. Chiarelli spends time in the prison playing music with some of the convicts, most of whom are serving life sentences for violent crimes. Shot in black and white, the film explores both the role of music in individual redemption, and broader notions of crime and punishment. For most of the film, discussion of what these men have actually done is elided in favour of conversations that emphasize their remorse and their humanity. When their crimes are finally revealed during the end credits, the contrast between the severity of the offences and warmth of the people we have spent some time getting to know is stark. Chiarelli is clearly a kind and warm woman, and the film documents her struggle when she considers that all these men, whom she comes to see as friends, have victims. Given the simplicity of the film’s structure – some interviews and a few performances – the issues it raises are troubling and profound. Hard Core Logo II McDonald has had a number of ideas for Hard Core Logo sequels over the years, and both Callum Keith Rennie and Hugh Dillon have expressed

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interest in working on a sequel that revisits their characters, assuming it was something that they believed in, and assuming that everyone involved could find the time and money. So far, all of those criteria have not been satisfied at the same time, but that has not stopped McDonald from making a sequel that does not feature those actors. Hard Core Logo II was shot in Saskatchewan in the summer of 2010, and is the story of a rock band in which the female singer is haunted by Joe Dick. A more detailed analysis of the film is found in the epilogue of this book.

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As Hard Core Logo begins, we are already watching the movie that we do not yet know exists, that is, Bruce McDonald’s documentary about the band that is announced after the reunion gig at the Commodore. Later, Bruce will be introduced filming the gig, and as the band leaves for the tour, Joe says that the film crew will now be accompanying them. At that point, the making of the documentary is supposed to be a new development, with the premise that the film crew has gone back and filled in the details. The scene is interspersed with titles that explain the background of the band – that they were formed in 1978, that they made seven records, played over one thousand shows, and broke up in 1991. There is also a fake quote from a real Toronto magazine: ‘We’ll never sell out’ – Joe Dick, Now Magazine, 1990. In the first scene, Joe Dick and John Oxenberger are being interviewed in front of a wall that contains band graffiti. On the wall, the slogan ‘Hard Core Logo Rules’ has already been modified to read ‘Hard Core Logo Sucks.’ Bruce asks Joe what Hard Core Logo means, and he explains that it means ‘Fuck you, and that’s exactly what we were all about.’ ‘Move or fuckin’ die. If I want your cigarette I will come and get it. But if you’re smart, you’ll just give it to me, because that way it avoids confrontation.’ In this sequence, Joe also challenges Bruce when he stumbles over a word, mocking his hesitancy as he asks a question.

John and Joe explain the meaning of Hard Core Logo. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

Punk Rock Nation

The scene establishes Joe’s character in under a minute – confrontational, idealistic, boyish, charming, and a first-class bullshitter. The last characteristic is immediately reinforced by the following scene, in which Joe explains the motivation for the charity gig. He says that a little while ago, his hero Bucky Haight was shot on his farm in Saskatchewan, and that while no one knows if this was a ‘Chapman/ Lennon’ thing or a stalker thing, he does know that both of Haight’s legs have been amputated. Immediately, John cuts in and says, ‘I just heard it was one leg that was amputated.’ As Joe insists that it was both, he is clearly not the more credible character. He continues that both legs were cut off ‘just above the … just below the knee. It’s a stump anyway. That’s what I heard.’ John remains sceptical in the background. The question of Joe’s trustworthiness of course becomes central to the film, as it is later revealed that even John’s version of the story is exaggerated. Bucky is actually in possession of both his legs, and has not even been robbed. The story is simply an excuse for Joe to bring the band back together again, and a way to bring his friend Billy Tallent back into his life. Much more interesting than that, though, is the enigmatic nature of Joe’s character. It is nearly impossible to tell throughout the film who he really is, or what he really feels or believes in. Joe’s selfhood seems to come almost completely from his position as lead singer of the band, in which he has become so used to performing that he does not know how to stop. It is also possible that Joe does know how to stop performing, but that he is not about to do it while there are cameras around, as there are throughout this film. In the very next scene, Bruce asks Joe what he has been doing for the past five years and he replies, ‘I get by, play a little fucking acoustic gig once in a while. I’m Joe Dick; people will come to see that. This is different. The whole band’s together. It’s not just the Joe Dick show. It’s a gang.’ Here he seems aware of the gap between himself and Joe Dick, the character he plays on stage. This gap is reinforced by the film’s visu-

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als, since the shot changes to one of Joe riding in the back of a pickup truck, but his voice is carried over from one of the previous scenes, so that his lips are not moving. The effect is to emphasize the difference between this man and his persona, as he discusses himself from a distance. The cockiness of the voice and the claims he makes are undercut by the lonely-looking night-time shot. At the same time, the dialogue in this scene reinforces the strength of Joe’s loyalty to his band mates. Bruce asks him about each in turn, and he offers specific praise. Pipefitter is ‘bright and really good at what he does.’ Asked about John Oxenberger’s mental-health problems, Joe replies, ‘He’s fine now … When people have problems you don’t abandon them, unless you’re a fucker.’ Joe’s description of Billy Tallent sets up one of the key conflicts of the movie, the brotherly love/hate relationship between these two men. At the core of Hard Core Logo is the relationship between Joe and Billy, their mutual interdependence, and Billy’s eventual betrayal of Joe that destroys whatever chance he had to have a music career. As screenwriter Noel Baker points out, their relationship is a common one in music: ‘There’s a rock and roll template,’ he says. ‘The Joe & Billy story reproduces itself … You see it in bands over and over again.’ Bruce McDonald echoes this description: ‘It’s like Page and Plant or Townshend and Daltrey. It’s a love story and a marriage gone bad.’ Joe’s wishful thinking that things will be better this time is evident in his introduction of Billy. He says that the last time he saw him, Billy ‘got on a plane to somewhere being a big shot, so I haven’t seen him in awhile. I miss him, but he’ll be back. Always is … He may not enjoy it, he’ll bitch, but he’ll be there.’ The continuing shots of Joe in the back of a pickup are intercut with stills of Billy striding through International Arrivals at the airport, guitar in hand, and getting into a cab. He looks glamorous and confident, and the use of black and white photographs reinforces the distance between Billy and his band mates, and between Billy and

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us. We have the sense that these photos could have been snapped by a paparazzo, even though in reality Billy is not famous enough for that. The film’s next sequence is a television report on Hard Core Logo’s reunion gig that begins with the headline ‘Notorious Punks Reunite.’ We see fans with mohawks gathered outside a bar, and hear interviews with fans, one of whom claims that the band are ‘not just people who are talking about stuff, they’re people who are making it happen, who are doing it.’ This is one of the points in the film that mocks the music and our reception of it, since it seems obvious that Hard Core Logo have simply been ‘talking’ about stuff all along, and there’s not much evidence that they’re actually doing anything in any sort of political sense. Part of the pose of punk’s rebelliousness is the idea that it is socially relevant just by existing, while only a handful of bands had any sort of political or social agenda other than rejection of mainstream music, fashion, and values. This is not to deny of course that rejection can by itself be important, but there is an extent to which punk in its various incarnations fits into a continuing cycle of obsolescence on which the music industry depends. One of the ironies of punk’s rejection of capitalism, of its concerns with selling out and authenticity, is that music itself depends on the idea that what has come before must be rejected as inferior in favour of the current and new. This idea is not that different than the planned obsolescence that is built into fashion or cars or technology. Just as capitalism depends on the continuous replacement of old products with new ones, music depends on new sounds that mark older music as tired and clichéd. This turnover is actually more pronounced the further one is removed from the mainstream music business. Major labels signing artists destined for crossover appeal are by far the most conservative in their tastes – they choose sounds with proven hit-making potential, and tend to ignore new music until it has made significant cultural inroads. The majors’ well-documented reluctance to innovate has unfortunately

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carried over to distribution models, which is why they currently find themselves on the brink of collapse in the face of sharply declining CD sales and digital distribution they cannot control. For most of their history, the major labels have had little incentive to challenge the status quo in any particular moment, and for years have only rarely signed innovative acts directly, instead hedging their bets by signing distribution deals with smaller, more innovative labels that have no choice but to take chances. In contrast to the mainstream industry, the realm of ‘independent’ music – of which punk has become a part – depends on a nearly continuous turnover of new bands. Since this subculture celebrates the small and the independent, and is continually concerned with the authenticity of new acts, it tends to champion unknowns, and ignore or critique bands that have reached a certain level of success. More accurately, commercial success is allowed so long as the act has properly passed through the indie music gatekeepers who populate small music magazines, college radio, and what remains of independent record stores. Musicians who receive the requisite nods at the right times can maintain their credibility, but it is nearly impossible for acts signed directly to a major to gain this kind of cred, no matter what they sound like. The emphasis on next-new-thing can lead to an accelerating turnover, in which one’s credibility as a critic is dependent on consuming bands before anyone else, a position aptly parodied by an occasionally spotted ironic T-shirt that reads ‘I hate bands you haven’t even heard of yet.’ As the T-shirt reveals, this is actually a parody of a type and a subculture, but it contains a large enough kernel of truth. In actuality, almost all these alterna-types would profess an admiration for a wide range of new and old music. In fact, one of the further requirements of membership in this indie-rock subculture is the ability to mount a spirited defence of a musician whom others would see as ridiculous – say, Billy Joel or Styx1 – so as to demonstrate that one is only motivated by one’s

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own informed tastes and not mindlessly following the other cool kids. But the key point holds, that independent music is actually marked by a quick consumption and disposal of new acts to a greater degree than mainstream music, even while the independent world circulates the idea that it is concerned with authenticity and the intrinsic value of the music it celebrates. The contrast between the quick turnover of new bands and arguments for the value of championed bands is particularly acute in punk rock, since the music is to some extent based on a rejection of what has come before in favour of a stripped-down immediacy and intensity. Punk tries to reject the traditional trappings of the music industry, so there is an inherent conflict in the idea that some acts could be ‘legends’ who must be respected. Contemporary punk bands are supposed to genuflect at the altar of The Ramones and Fugazi at the same time that punk presents itself as being opposed to genuflecting to anyone or anything. In Hard Core Logo, this conflict is represented in two ways. The first is that Joe Dick claims to idolize Bucky Haight, for whom he has organized this benefit concert. And while Joe does actually seem to deeply admire the singer, his presentation of Bucky as a musical martyr hides the fact that it is Joe who is exploiting him this time. Thus, Joe pretends to respect his punk elders, but only so far as they are useful to him to establish his own credibility. McDonald also burnishes Hard Core Logo’s cred in the lead-up to the Commodore gig by having Joey Ramone offer an endorsement. In a scene that immediately follows the fan’s assessment of Hard Core Logo as a band who is ‘making it happen,’ Ramone appears as part of the televised interviews and offers his assessment of Haight and Hard Core Logo. He cannot claim HCL as an influence, and it does not make sense that he would endorse them musically, but he talks about how Haight was a ‘really good friend of mine … What Hard Core Logo are doing is a really cool thing.’ In this way Hard Core Logo’s

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authenticity is endorsed without them having to pay sincere tribute to anyone, and the contradictions of their status as an ‘authentic’ secondgeneration punk band are elided. This scene is also crucial to the construction of Hard Core Logo as an apparent documentary, since the pleasure of the scene is that this is really Joey Ramone talking about Hard Core Logo as if they were a real band. McDonald had also used Ramone, playing himself, at the end of his film Roadkill. In Highway 61, he had cast Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra as a US border guard. In that case, Biafra hams up the part of an over-zealous protector of America, pressing Valeria Buhagiar’s Jackie Bangs with invasive questions. ‘The United States of America is my home,’ he rants. ‘Would you invite someone into your home if they had been arrested for indecent exposure?’ It is a meta-cinematic moment where the intrusion of the real world intensifies the comedy of the scene. Biafra is a notorious social dissident who once ran for mayor of San Francisco on a campaign that included, in part, a requirement that all businessmen wear clown suits downtown between the hours of nine and five. So while his performance is enjoyable even if you don’t know who he is, it makes it much funnier if you do. (There is a similar scene in Rob Stefaniuk’s Hard Core Logo–influenced film Suck [2009], as the band in the film tries to cross into the United States and faces a stern border guard played by Alex Lifeson of Rush.) What a performer brings to a role is sometimes referred to as his or her ‘star text’ – the sum total of what the audience knows about this actor either from past films or from outside sources like tabloids, fan magazines, websites, or television. While watching a film with a recognizable star, we are constantly switching positions between being lost in the fictional world of the film and our intermittent awareness that this is, say, Tom Cruise, on the screen. This awareness brings with it momentary reminders of his other roles, his relationships, tabloid headlines, and any other impressions we have ever had. In a moment

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we put that aside and slip back into the fictional world. These two moments are not separate, though – our awareness of the star text can deeply colour our reading of the film.2 The most interesting star text in Hard Core Logo is that of Bruce McDonald himself, and he appears in the film for the first time in the same TV sequence as Joey Ramone. McDonald explains that Joe Dick had offered him money to film a reunion show at the Commodore and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Although it is not evident at this point, McDonald is very much playing a version of himself rather than just a filmmaker named Bruce McDonald. Later in the film, Pipefitter will make fun of his other films by name. If you have no idea who Bruce McDonald is when you begin watching Hard Core Logo, then it is entirely possible that this man is simply an actor playing a filmmaker. Even if you’ve noticed that the name on the DVD box is Bruce McDonald, there is no way to tell whether this person actually is the same Bruce McDonald. His role adds to the verisimilitude of the documentary, and justifies the construction of the rest of the film. If you do know who Bruce McDonald is, and he actually has a star text for you, then his appearance is more complicated. His role still adds to the realism of the film while simultaneously undermining that realism. Assuming we know that this is Bruce McDonald, that he really did make this film, and that it is not really a documentary, the on-screen appearance of Bruce McDonald is a reminder that this entire film is a clever construction, and that we as an audience are in on the joke. The opportunity to share in that joke comes at the expense of the film’s verisimilitude, of its ability to convince us that this is a real film about a real band. However, as mentioned above, central to an understanding of star texts is the notion that our awareness of stars is usually fleeting, that we are well practised in our ability to simply ‘forget’ about the actor and slide back into the world of the film. The complexities of our awareness of this film’s status as a mocku-

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mentary rather than a documentary are central to understanding how it works. In their book Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight establish a classification system for mock documentaries depending on their level of self-reflexivity and critique. Degree 1 is Parody, and includes films that ‘make obvious their fictionality,’ using documentary codes and conventions in some form in order to parody an aspect of popular culture.3 This category includes famous examples like The Rutles, Eric Idle’s affectionate parody of Beatlemania, and This Is Spinal Tap. Degree 2 is Critique and Hoax. These are films that ‘tend to be characterized by an “ambivalent” appropriation of documentary codes and conventions … but also incorporat[e] more explicit commentaries on media practices themselves as part of their subjects.’4 It is in this category that Hard Core Logo would likely fall (Roscoe and Hight do not discuss it), although, depending on how we read it, the film also might be part of their third category, Deconstruction. Here they emphasize films where ‘the documentary form itself is the actual subject.’5 It would be a stretch to say that documentary form is the key subject of McDonald’s film, but as we will see, the relationship between documentarian and subject is something of a stealth theme in this film. It seems like a joke at the outset, but become progressively more serious and substantial as the film progresses. McDonald becomes a major figure in the development of the plot, and does so in ways that make the responsibilities of the filmmaker a central idea in the film. As the show at the Commodore begins, we see quick sequences of numerous Vancouver bands, including Flash Bastard, Lick The Pole, The Modernettes, Art Bergmann, and D.O.A. (Oddly, the Canadian DVD version of the film includes the band names on screen, but the US version does not.) Bergmann also appears backstage interacting with Hard Core Logo. The local touches root the film to a particular place and the west coast music scene, a small irony since the film’s setting was at one

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Hard Core Logo prepare to take the stage. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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point nearly moved to Toronto and the east coast in order to increase its chances of receiving Ontario government funding. As the headliners finally take the stage, they interact like a real band, performing little rituals, and being kissed in turn by Joe Dick. Much of the believability of this scene comes from Hugh Dillon’s comfort as a lead singer. This is the role he plays on stage all the time, and he is a natural at it. He banters with the audience and ad-libs some dialogue, including one of the film’s best punk rock lines, ‘You don’t know shit from good chocolate, babies’ as the first song, ‘Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?’ begins. The songs themselves are crucial to the believability of the band and the success of the film. Recorded by Toronto band Swamp Baby with vocals re-dubbed by Dillon, they are moments of spectacle in the middle of the narrative. The band and audience jump around in sweaty exuberance, a lone girl dances backstage, a fan clutches a drumstick in his teeth, and photographers snap pictures. This return-to-form triumph is interrupted by an interview with Billy Tallent in the bar’s bathroom. While he says that the show is ‘not bad for four guys who haven’t played together in a while,’ he is quickly pressed by interviewer Bruce to talk about his gig with Jenifur, an American alternative band with whom he has been filling in and is on the cusp of joining. Billy’s status with Jenifur changes throughout the film, and it is the source of much of the film’s narrative trajectory. Whether he is in or out of Jenifur has obvious implications for whether he can remain in Hard Core Logo, but more importantly, it represents one of the tensions of the film. Like many Canadian artists, Billy must choose between remaining in Canada or chasing better options in the United States, which is also the choice between independence and ‘selling out.’ Billy claims that he is just waiting for paperwork to come through that will confirm his permanent addition to the band, and then he is ‘gone.’ At this moment the scene cuts back to Joe on stage, waving his arm triumphantly, a contrast that emphasizes the gulf between the two men’s desires.

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As if to call attention to this gap between Canada and the United States, there are several Canadian music in-jokes in this scene. Billy wears a ring with the logo of The Headstones, Hugh Dillon’s real-life band, and when we are shown an image of Jenifur on the cover of Spin magazine, the other bands advertised on the cover include Canadians like hHead and, again, The Headstones. It is something of a sad joke in a way – it should not be inherently ridiculous that a couple of Canadian bands would be on the cover of a major American music magazine. In the fifteen years after Hard Core Logo was made, the situation improved, and numerous Canadian indie acts like Arcade Fire and Broken Social Scene were featured on such covers. Billy also wears a bandage on his finger in this scene, and some fans have speculated that this is a nod to McDonald’s film Highway 61, in which people who have sold their souls to the devil must sign a contract in blood, and thus sport identifying finger bandages. It is an intriguing reading of the scene, and makes perfect sense given Billy’s attachment to American fame. One wishes it was an intentional touch in the film, but Callum Keith Rennie has no memory of it being so and had forgotten that detail from Highway 61. He says it was simply that he cut his finger playing the guitar. Immediately after the Commodore gig Joe pitches Billy his proposal for a five-gig western Canada tour that will take them as far east as Winnipeg. Billy agrees on the condition that they stay in hotels and will not sleep in the van or band houses. As they discuss the tour at a bar, they break into silly childish jokes where one of them freezes and the other pretends he cannot see him, and we get a glimpse of childhood footage of the two of them playing guitar. The shots are silent, jerky, Super-8 footage complete with scratches and lines, and they set up the depth of the two men’s friendship and provide an apparently innocent contrast to their present-day selves. It is obvious from the outset that Joe seems to value his relationship with Billy more than Billy values his with Joe. Joe needs to keep Billy

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close to him for personal reasons as much as professional ones, but he has more working against him than the loss of one key friend and band mate. As their agent Mulligan points out in a speech that is the centrepiece of the film’s trailer, the logistics of their tour make it impossible to succeed: ‘Say they make 6 g’s. They take my 15%, the van, the food, the gas, the hotel … 4 guys, 3000 miles, 5 nights … at this point you do it for love.’ Even if Joe can manage to hold the band together, appeal to fans, fill the clubs, and make it home in one piece, the best he can hope for is to break even. What prevents Joe’s success as much as anything is the country he is living in. Large and sparsely populated, Canada is a punishing country for all but the most popular bands to tour. This is where punk ideals and national identity intersect, and like a good punk show, it isn’t pretty. As Mulligan explains the punishing logistics of the tour, we have just seen a cartoonish map of Canada, with a wavy white line tracing the band’s route. The map is crucial because it anchors the band’s troubles to a geographic reality. It is not that these five cities spread out over three thousand miles are the only ones in which they can get a gig, or the only ones in which they have a fan base. They are the only cities of any size, period. So it is not just Hard Core Logo who face these odds, but any Canadian band that wants to tour the west coast. From central or eastern Canada, the prospects are not much better. From Winnipeg to Toronto is a distance of nearly 2100 kilometres (about 1300 miles), a drive that takes over twenty-four hours. If you cut south from Winnipeg through the United States you add some miles but subtract some time (and save money on cheaper gas), and could potentially play in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, and a half-dozen smaller places. The catch is that Canadian bands are often barred by visa rules from playing in the United States, unless they can demonstrate that they already have substantial recognition in the country. You cannot tour unless you already have a fan base and press, which are hard to get

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The challenge of geography. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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without being able to tour. So in many cases, the door is closed. Bands occasionally try creative methods for getting around this ban, like having the band members travel in separate vehicles and pose as tourists, but this is impractical much of the time. If Hard Core Logo had the option of travelling due south, they could potentially play to a lot more people in half the distance. Bands in Toronto could travel all the way down the east coast to Florida in the time it takes them to get to one gig in Winnipeg. Canada is a vast and nearly empty country, probably one of the worst places in the developed world for a business that requires driving from city to city. Canada’s total population is less than that of California, which means that artists who have a home-grown audience have to try to make a living on one-tenth the population of American bands. A gold record in the United States is one that sells 500,000 copies, roughly the point at which major label releases ‘break even’ and the artist starts to see substantial royalties. In Canada a gold record was traditionally awarded for sales of 50,000 to reflect the smaller population, but the economics of selling 50,000 versus 500,000 don’t change at all. Gold records are now awarded for sales of 40,000 in Canada, to reflect declining CD sales overall. The bottom line is that any artist’s chances of recouping expenses and making a profit are slim. It is in this grim economic environment that the notion of punk rockers ‘selling out’ becomes moot in Canada. Bands ‘do it for love’ not simply because they do love it, but because they generally do not have a choice. There is virtually no way for musicians to become rich in the Canadian market. The only way to get rich is to do what Billy is doing – go south. In this way, the tension in Hard Core Logo between Joe’s and Billy’s versions of success is a tension about national identity. Choosing to stay in Canada is choosing to remain true to punk rock ideals, to focus on music and eschew the trappings of fame, if only because there are no trappings to be had, even if you are famous within the country. Despite

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its image as a quiet and polite place and punk’s association with cities like New York and London, Canada is the real punk rock nation, where the choice to stay home is a choice to remain a working-class rocker for ever, notwithstanding extremely rare exceptions like The Tragically Hip. In recent years, as the traditional economics of the record business have collapsed and CD sales have fallen 50 per cent between 2000 and 2010, it has arguably become marginally easier for Canadian artists to crack the US market. For one thing, Canadian artists never made much money off record sales in the first place, so the era of digital downloading does not have the same impact. On the other hand, digital distribution makes national boundaries less of a factor, and has sometimes made it possible for Canadian bands to get the recognition in the United States that will qualify them to play in the country and actually earn some money. Bill Baker is the co-founder of Mint Records, a Vancouver-based independent label that has been in business since 1991. He says that success in the United States is still dependent on exhaustive touring, and doubts that digital distribution has made crossing the border all that much easier. He points out one clear advantage, though, that fans of bands who do manage to play in the United States can log onto a website the next day and find the band’s music, rather than searching in vain in a local record store. In the past, Baker would have had to get CDs into small stores in every corner of the United States, and while Mint still distributes CDs, the band is now less likely to suffer if the label has less-than-perfect distribution. Matt Smallwood, the general manager of Maple Music Recordings in Toronto, is even more optimistic about the possibilities that digital distribution has opened up for Canadian musicians, even if, like Baker, he emphasizes that successful bands are still those that tour and tour. He describes the current visa process for bands as ‘not insane, but hard.’ With the possibility of heading south, bands can tour from Toronto to

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Montreal and down the US east coast, rather than heading out on the cold road to Winnipeg. Smallwood is also optimistic about the future of his own company, which is a label but is also affiliated with a distributor and a website that sells exclusively Canadian music. Most of their recordings sell 2000–5000 copies, he says, and the company is profitable with these numbers. Even as we try to avoid romanticizing the starving artist, there is some truth to the idea that not being worried about making money has often been good for musicians’ creativity, since it freed them to make music without chasing trends. Part of the success of Canadian bands in the United States in recent years can be chalked up to the fact that independent musicians who focused on creativity for its own sake made themselves appealing to audiences listening for new sounds. These developments obviously come too late for pre-digital era Hard Core Logo, a band already out of place in the mid-1990s. If Canada is a punk rock nation, it is also a nation in which punk and other forms of independent music are supported by government grants and regulations. Artists can apply for grants to record or tour under several government programs, and regulations on commercial radio require stations to play at least 30 per cent ‘Canadian Content,’ music that is primarily written, produced, or performed by Canadians. This latter regulation holds despite the fact that Canadian artists have been stuck at about 12 per cent of the market for a number of years, and despite the continued objections of the stations themselves. It often seems strange to outsiders that popular music of any kind would get such support, but it is essential in order for Canadian artists to compete. Arguments that they should compete on a level playing field with American and international artists are nonsense, since, as the above description of population and geography makes clear, there is no such thing as a level playing field where the two nations are concerned; and that is even before we consider the promotional juggernaut of American film,

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television, and other media, all of which constantly push American artists and all of which are freely available in Canada. While financial support for the arts has to be constantly weighed against other national priorities, it seems obvious that the modest levels of support in Canada provide a significant national benefit, often getting artists over initial hurdles so that they can then finance themselves. If music making is difficult in Canada, then filmmaking is even more challenging, and Hard Core Logo’s status as a film about a struggling band creates interesting resonances. Despite the daunting numbers that Mulligan lays out, the assumption is that the band can make enough money to cover expenses and break even, which actually means doing quite well considering the geography they are up against. In filmmaking the bar is still higher, with even a very-low-budget film now costing around a million dollars, and virtually no chance of making that money back in the Canadian market, where American films fill about 96 per cent of the screen time, other nations fill about 2 per cent, and Canadians films fill the remaining 2 per cent.6 There are again substantial government funding programs so that films can be made at all, but even those do not guarantee distribution of the finished film. As Hard Core Logo prepare to battle geography and indifference, Joe’s enthusiasm is contradicted by reality immediately, when he asks Pipefitter and John to meet him at 6:00 a.m. and is clearly late by an hour or more. It is at this point that the film begins to become a road movie as well as a rock and roll movie and a buddy picture. McDonald’s experience shooting road films begins to show, and even though the Hard Core Logo crew shot almost the entire movie in Vancouver, we continually get a convincing sense of the road unfolding. The earliest shots in the van are of good luck charms – a dashboard Virgin Mary in a cracked shell and a curling trophy attached as a hood ornament. The world that passes by is the British Columbia interior, and McDonald films these impressionistically – we see trees, mountains, and lots of

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snow, passing by in a blur, mile after mile. As in many road movies, the road opens up possibilities for discovery of the self, but at this point in the narrative neither Joe nor Billy is ready for any kind of self-discovery. It falls to John to open up first, and to simultaneously turn his critical eye on his band mates, who are trapped in juvenile versions of themselves. As John scribbles in his journal, we hear his thoughts as voiceover, wondering, Why the hell are two grown men still calling themselves Joe Dick and Billy Tallent? When they gave themselves those names they were 16, 17 … Question is, when do they stop using them? 40? 50? 60? You wonder if they remember their real selves, Joe Mulgrew, Bill Boisy ... I used to want a punk handle too, just couldn’t find one that fit … Maybe I never had a real self to throw away like those guys.

While Joe and Billy will move towards self-discovery in this film, what they find out about themselves will not be very appealing. Part of Joe’s transition in the film is his realization of the gulf between his stage persona and his real self, and his growing sensation that there is not enough of him beyond Joe Dick – that he has, indeed, as John points out, thrown his real self away. In Billy’s case, the throwing away of the real self is something more akin to a Faustian bargain – he is actively trying to trade it away for money and fame. John himself is making his own difficult journey away from the stability of friends and medications and into the darkened space of his own mental illness. It makes sense that he does not feel like he had a real self to throw away, since that real self is inherently unstable. The other band members have opted for personas that seem stable and secure, but are actually confining. The escape these new names and identities provide is enticing but, like the road, comes to an end eventually. The only thing hiding this unpleasant fact is that they have managed to stay on the road for so long.

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Nearly all of this character development is the invention of screenwriter Baker and McDonald. We do read a lot of John’s thoughts in the novel, and his diary writing makes his band mates nervous until they eventually threaten to destroy the journal and John has to mail it home. But John’s mental illness is a script invention, as is all of his discussion of the band members’ identities. Ironically, in the novel ‘John Oxenburger’ actually is a stage name, since one of the contracts lists his name as ‘John Oliphant’ alongside Joseph Mulgrew, William Boisy, and Ronald Dubinsky. In the film, John remarks that no one even remembers Pipefitter’s real name and it is never used. But John, too, has already lost his former self and does not show any awareness of it. As we switch in this scene from John’s voice-over to Billy’s, we get a sense of how strong the foundations of the bands’ relationships actually are. Billy talks about how he and Joe have been friends since they were thirteen, and how it is much more difficult to form real friendships after a certain age. He says that he loves him ‘more than anybody I know, than I’ve met since.’ The relationships between the band members are drawn in more oblique ways as we begin to see them interact with each other. As Pipefitter sleeps in the van, Joe, John, and Billy eat at Herbie’s and talk about the demo tape Joe has made from their gig at the Commodore. It is low budget and looks it, and the use of an actual cassette tape now dates the film nicely. The diner scene is intercut with one-on-one interviews with the band members in which they recount their past history. Joe’s version is an account of the glory days, in which they ‘sold a million t-shirts a night … managed ourselves … had tons of booze on the rider … That was before Ed Festus showed up and fucked it all up.’ His description of their victimization is immediately undermined by John, who tells us that Joe ‘brought in Ed Festus to manage us’ and that there had been talk of a major label deal. Billy’s version refuses to traffic in either sentimentality or blame, and reflects his continuing inability to reflect or

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grow: ‘We were simply a band for twelve years, and then we stopped being one. That’s it.’ After the others provide an account of Joe’s infamous stunt at a gig in New York City, in which he urinated into the drink of Sire Records chief Seymour Stein, Billy is able to provide an analysis of Joe that he cannot provide for himself. ‘He’d just fuck it up because he didn’t want that next level.’ He cynically describes Joe as being ‘addicted to losing.’ It is at this point that Joe makes his quip about how ‘Billy just wants the models and limousines, and I’m happy with hookers and taxi cabs,’ a brilliant line that screenwriter Noel Baker graciously admits was an ad-lib from Dillon. Soon Joe turns on the camera crew in a revealing meta-moment. He challenges McDonald the documentary director: ‘So what are you playing us off against each other? So that would make you kind of a cunt, wouldn’t it?’ While it might be possible in the reality of the film that Joe is making his comment based on the line of questioning, the moment actually depends on the idea that Joe Dick can see the edited sequence, that he can hear the back-and-forth between the band members, even though these interviews are all shot in different locations at different times. His demand can be interpreted in a number of ways – as either Bruce the documentarian showing remorse for his exploitation of these guys, or as Joe Dick’s well-developed ability to understand the construction of appearances. Throughout the film, Joe seems to be aware of the complex relationship between performance and reality, and to be trying to perform the reality he wants. He knows that he can be ‘Joe Dick’ as much as he wants to be, and that this role gives Joe Mulgrew real freedom. He also believes that if Hard Core Logo act like a successful and unified band, then they will be one. He can control the connection between performance and reality in the former case, but not in the latter, and this disconnection is one of the things that will do him in. He knows that while the documentary crew can be helpful to him in creating the image of the band he needs, he is also aware that it is

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something outside his control. His confrontational tone with the filmmakers attempts to cover a fear that the film will reveal a reality other than the one he wants, the one that he knows is there but has no desire to face. If this is his fear, it seems strange that he would have invited the documentary crew at all. It was always likely that they would capture the duplicity of his performance and unravel his image, not least when they arrive at Bucky Haight’s farm and find Bucky walking. But Joe’s belief that he can manipulate the documentary is not simple cockiness, nor is it naivety. It is the awareness, shared by Bruce McDonald, that documentaries can be nearly as constructed as fiction films, and that they are reflections of the desires and perspectives of their makers as much as of the reality they purport to cover. This is Joe Dick the postmodernist, with no faith in the correspondence between the world and its image, even as recorded by a camera. In this way, Joe Dick is well in line with contemporary theories of documentary. The tendency in most recent theory has been to emphasize the ways in which documentary and fiction films are similar, and to downplay their epistemological differences.7 This position contradicts the position of earlier documentarians of the 1960s and 1970s, the era known for the style that came to be called Direct Cinema or cinéma vérité, in which documentarians eschewed talking heads, on-screen titles, and voice-overs in favour of an unadorned style that attempted to give ‘direct’ access to events. The classics of this style are Robert Drew’s Primary (1960), about the Wisconsin presidential primary of John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, the ‘institutional’ films of Robert Wiseman like Titicut Follies (1967), High School (1968), and Hospital (1970), and the diverse films made by brothers David and Albert Maysles and their collaborators, including Salesman (1968), Gimme Shelter (1970), and Grey Gardens (1975). This was an attempt by filmmakers to get at the truth of events, and it is sometimes now derided as naive, as if these filmmakers thought that the camera could simply record reality without bias.

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But to see Direct Cinema as naive is to insult a generation of skilled documentarians who were generally committed to progressive ideals. Albert Maysles, for one, has always maintained that films like Gimme Shelter told the truth, and not because of the technology, but because the filmmakers were committed to the fairest possible representation of events.8 It is not that Maysles does not know he could have told a number of different stories about the Rolling Stones’ disastrous concert at Altamont in December of 1969, but he is claiming that the one he and his brother and Charlotte Zwerin told was a fair and reasonable one. Furthermore, Gimme Shelter also reveals its own self-awareness and constructedness in the scenes of the Rolling Stones watching footage of themselves in the editing room. Hard Core Logo fits into the history of both rock and tour documentaries in a number of ways. The genre was well established by the late 1960s, not only by Gimme Shelter but by D.A. Pennebaker’s film about Bob Dylan, Dont Look Back [sic] (1967), and his concert film of the Monterey International Pop Festival (Monterey Pop), which was released in 1968. This latter film, along with Michael Wadleigh’s Woodstock (1970), became a classic of the concert genre, and came to define an era as much as a film style. It was Woodstock that the Maysles brothers were reacting against in some ways as they worked on Gimme Shelter. Part of Albert Maysles’s determination to ‘tell the truth’ about Altamont was that he did not think Woodstock had done so about the event it claimed to represent.9 It is no accident that the rock documentary came of age just as pop music was transforming into rock music, and thus changing from a disposable teen distraction into a music form worthy of serious consideration. Direct cinema was itself dependent on the invention of lightweight cameras and sound recording equipment in the 1950s, and so it matured in a moment when film was becoming firmly ensconced as an art form and music was now worthy of consideration too. The rock doc-

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umentary is rooted in the assumption that rock and roll is important, and that the documentary itself has a cultural value beyond entertaining fans of a given band. At the same time, rock documentaries have always been caught up in a strictly auteurist conception of film, since there are literally thousands of concert films that really are designed to be for fans only, and these are not generally considered to be as important as the handful of films made by directors with another body of work. This rarefied group includes films like Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz (1978), about The Band, and Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense (1984), about the Talking Heads. While all of these are great concert films, if they had not been made by a name director, no one outside of the band’s fans would give them any notice. This is one of the reasons why McDonald’s 2010 film This Movie Is Broken is a blend of concert film and narrative. It proved impossible to get funding to produce a straight concert film, which was the original intent.10 As a narrative, the film had a potential festival and mainstream audience outside of dedicated fans of Broken Social Scene. The rock documentary is a visible enough format that it was quickly subject to parody, of which one of the earliest was The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, made for TV in 1978. Directed by and starring Eric Idle of Monty Python, the film is an era-by-era send-up of the Beatles, from mop-tops to their later experimental stage. Like all parody, full enjoyment of the film depends to some extent on your knowledge of the source text, The Beatles themselves, but it also works as a more general parody of the hagiographic treatment rock stars often receive in filmic portrayals. The Rutles set the stage for Rob Reiner’s 1984 masterpiece This Is Spinal Tap, the film to which Hard Core Logo owes a great deal, a debt that the film itself repeatedly acknowledges. As we rejoin the band on the road, the film’s next scene is one that exemplifies Baker and McDonald’s adaptation of their source novel.

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Pipefitter wakes up in the van, having missed his chance to eat at Herbie’s, a diner on the Trans-Canada highway. In the book, John recounts Pipe’s anger in a diary entry: ‘Joe refused to stop until we needed gas again. Pipe then threatened to piss all over the van unless we did … Pipe had his prick out, screaming “It’s gonna blow! It’s gonna blow!” After twenty minutes they calmed down and we drove in silence. Five minutes after that Joe pulled over at a fruit stand.’11 The film adds another element that darkens the scene somewhat. As soon as Pipe threatens to urinate on the floor, Joe capitulates to his demand and agrees to stop the van. As Pipefitter moves to sit down, he steps onto a whole in the van floor that has been covered with carpet, and his leg goes through. For a moment we expect that he will now be the one who is missing a limb. As his band mates pull him to safety, a distraught Pipefitter realizes that he has urinated in his jeans, and whines that ‘all he wanted was a fuckin’ burger.’ Where the scene in the book is primarily comical and represents the band’s internal divisions, the film scene adds the considerable external challenges the band is up against, represented by the fact that they are travelling in a beat-up van where someone has consciously patched a hole in the floor with a carpet. Pipefitter’s humiliation raises the stakes and the drama further. The band had saved him a burger, but now he has lost his pride rather than a meal. It is interesting as well that in the book John clearly writes that ‘Pipe had his prick out,’ but in the film he has his jeans down with his hand in his underwear without showing his penis. Various film ratings systems in Canada and the United States influence such choices, but more important are the filmic expectations that govern such displays. Since penises are only rarely seen in film, it becomes a very big deal to show one, and in this case it hardly seems necessary. But as film scholar Peter Lehman has pointed out, part of the challenge of representing penises on screen is the complexity of what they represent. In many cases, the idea of phallic power is undermined by the appearance of an actual

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penis, which is never as impressive as the idea of the phallus demands. So penises in film are often used for comic purposes, where the humour lies in the contrast between masculine power and masculine bodies. Lehman has also categorized a number of 1990s films as featuring what he terms ‘the melodramatic penis,’ in which the penis represents neither power nor comedy.12 Given Pipefitter’s lowly status in the band, it might make sense to make him the object of a joke about manhood, and the scene does this to some extent. But Pipe’s tears and loss of bodily control also push the scene towards melodrama, which Linda Williams has classified as one of the three ‘body genres’ (the others being horror and pornography) that are associated with a physical reaction on the part of the audience (tears, shivers, and arousal, respectively).13 In this case, it seems unlikely that Pipe’s dilemma will bring tears on the part of the audience, but his own tears and the depth of his shame give the film an element of melodrama nonetheless. This is life and death for want of a burger. To complicate his portrayal further, Pipefitter’s perspectives on the band fill much of the next section of the film. Shots of his interviews in which he espouses significant hopes for the tour and the band’s future are interspersed with shots of his head sticking up through the skylight on the van, framed by sublime shots of the Rocky Mountains and sci-fiish tunnel interiors. He says, at one point ‘I think we’re going to go all the way with it this time, unless [Joe] like dies in a bizarre gardening accident or something like that.’ The latter comment is one of the film’s direct nods to its cinematic ancestor, This Is Spinal Tap, since in that film a ‘bizarre gardening accident’ is the fate that befalls the first of Spinal Tap’s many drummers. Of course, the connection to This Is Spinal Tap revealed by Pipe’s comment is a particularly dark one, since Joe will indeed be dead by the end of the film. A post-show interview in Calgary with a young music writer named Tiffany reveals more of the tensions between Joe and Billy when she

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Pipefitter considers the landscape. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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quotes their manager Ed Festus as describing them as fighting like ‘a tanked-up white trash married couple in a trailer park.’ Even as the interview sets the two men up as white trash, it reveals the extent of their privilege when Joe turns on Tiffany suddenly, asking her to ‘Fuck off’ in mocking terms and then doing an imitation of her troubled face. The privilege that he can draw on here is the cultural capital that comes with being the one in the band and the subject of the interview rather than the journalist. As much as journalists do not like to admit it, there are some awkward dynamics at play in celebrity or artist interviews, where nearly all of the power lies with the person being interviewed. Joe knows that he has this power and is not afraid to use it in this scene to counter his own potential humiliation as Tiffany repeatedly asks Billy about his gig with Jenifur and praises his guitar-playing skills. When he turns on her she looks to Billy to ‘rescue’ her, but no help is forthcoming. The bond between these two men is much stronger than the obligation to be decent to a stranger. There is also a nicely ironic moment in this interview scene when Tiffany quotes an old interview where Joe claimed that ‘the music industry was the stupidest, sleaziest, most boring business in the entire world.’ Asked if he still feels this way, he agrees and says, ‘Rock and roll’s a fuckin’ sales tool. It sells beer, swimming pools, and movie stars.’ The ‘swimming pools and movie stars’ bit is directly lifted from the intro credits of The Beverly Hillbillies, but it is the line about selling beer that is ironic because Joe has just lifted a bottle of Molson Canadian Ice to his lips, and Molson products appear throughout the film as part of an obvious product placement deal. Joe’s line is the filmmakers’ way of dealing with this necessary evil, and on some level it contributes to Joe’s selfserving and contradictory character, even though it depends on a metamoment that, if you notice it, draws you out of the world of the film. We soon see the first of the cartoonish shots McDonald created for the film, of an endless road painted on a revolving drum, marked only

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by the yellow line and the van’s headlights. Superimposed is a list of what the band has consumed so far: 1560 kilometres, 440 litres of gas, 189 cigarettes. As Joe and Billy play their movie-title game in the van while driving overnight, screenwriter Baker includes a reference that is intended to face the obvious precedent for this film head-on. The game is to name a ‘cool’ film that begins with the same letter as the last letter of the previous film, so in response to Joe’s offer of ‘Dead Ringers,’ Billy answers, ‘Spinal Tap.’ Leaving aside for a moment that this is, technically speaking, an error, since the film they are talking about is actually called This Is Spinal Tap, such a reference makes a lot of sense. (A few seconds later, Billy disallows Joe’s follow-up of This Is Spinal Tap with The Passenger because The Passenger technically starts with ‘T’ and not ‘P.’) If you make a film that is a mockumentary about a failed rock band trying to recapture their former glory, everyone is going to compare it to This Is Spinal Tap. In Hard Core Roadshow, Baker writes that he figured it was ‘a good idea to get the Spinal Tap issue right into the open … Acknowledge the ancestor, as it were.’14 This despite the fact that, fake documentary and failing rock band aside, the two films have very little in common. While This Is Spinal Tap is a comedy, and an extremely funny one, Hard Core Logo is much darker. It is about the failure of dreams and relationships rather than the failure of space pods that will not open on stage. One might reply that Spinal Tap has its fair share of poignant moments, just as Hard Core Logo has plenty of humour, but overall the focus of each film is substantially different. The film reference that is most crucial in this scene is the last one: Young at Heart. As Baker writes in Hard Core Roadshow about this choice: ‘Joe’s inability to think of a cool film that starts with a Y (as in “Why”) leads him to choose a 1950s Technicolor romance about a self-destructive musician who goes to the brink of death for love, but is delivered

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unto a happy ending with Doris Day … Billy’s scorn for Young at Heart warns Joe not to expect any happy ending to his renewed “courtship.”’15 So if you are in the relatively small group of Hard Core Logo viewers who have seen and remember Young at Heart, Joe has pretty much given away the ending. As we return to one of John’s diary voice-overs that details a flying dream, we see footage of Pipefitter playing with his belly and then see him challenge John about what he’s writing. In a follow-up interview with Bruce, John’s mental fragility begins to become clear and we get a sense of the unwinding to come. The interview with John continues in a Regina motel room, where we see him frantically searching for his prescription pills and beginning to come apart. The moment is overshadowed by the view of Billy through the motel window, tossing a telephone off the balcony. He has just checked his messages at home and received a message from Ed Festus that he has been bounced from Jenifur. (In Turner’s novel, Billy’s outgoing message says that he has gone down to the dump to shoot rats and that callers should leave a message after the cool guitar riff. In the film, that line is replaced by one that says ‘I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m eating corn chips and masturbating.’ This is a line from a Kids in the Hall sketch called ‘The Terrier Song,’ and yet another Canadian in-joke). The drama in the film ramps up here as both Billy and John begin to self-destruct. In a backstage confrontation, John is stammering and incoherent, and Billy is first violently angry and then increasingly drunk as the show progresses. When he meets Mary the Fan after the show, he looks like he is about to make out with her, despite the fact that her husband in standing nearby. Mary has a daughter she has named Billy, and the obvious implication is that this is Billy Tallent’s child. (As he talks to her, a poster behind him on the wall advertises the Hard Rock Miners – novelist Michael Turner’s old band – as part of a double bill with The Real McKenzies, a Scottish-Canadian band who

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play punk with bagpipes and kilts, and have released eight albums since 1992.) It is in this scene that John, speaking to Mary, makes explicit the homoerotic subtext between Joe and Billy. He is telling Mary about an argument the two of them had at a gig, and when she asks why they were apparently fighting about movies, he casually replies that ‘that was just how they dealt with the real issue, which was Joe fucking Billy up the ass the night before.’ He claims he does not know what was really going on, whether this was a bet between them, or revenge for something. As Baker points out in his book, ‘John’s disclosure of Joe and Billy’s dark secret might be motivated by a desire to pull down the two band leaders to avenge his own years of obscurity as “John the bass player.”’16 It also might be brutal honesty or the ramblings of someone who is increasingly incoherent. As Baker himself notes, it does not really matter if it is true. He inserted it to ‘charge up the dramatic tension.’17 The potential homoerotic subtext of Billy and Joe’s relationship is a complicated issue, because in some sense it seems so obvious, even without John’s claim that they have actually had sex (however limited and perhaps not even consensual). I would suggest that homoerotic subtexts always seem obvious because they’ve become almost a default reading in almost every film that has two close male characters. The frequency of this type of reading does not mean that it is not there, but it should give us pause that we almost never discuss close female relationships this way. Every Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis character can be viewed as having a homoerotic relationship with whomever he is buddied with in a particular film, but no one accuses Meryl Streep of the same thing, no matter how many of her films revolve around intimate relationships between women. Comparing our readings of homoeroticism in scenes with two or more female characters makes this policing of gender boundaries clear. We do not read close female friendships as homoerotic because

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John tells Mary about ‘the real issue.’ Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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our conception of femaleness includes plenty of space for emotional intimacy. In film, straight women can express feelings or love for one another, and hug or kiss each other without being read as potentially homosexual, but men have very little space for the same thing. The levelling of the charge ‘homoerotic’ often seems to be a way to undermine the images of masculine power in film. Unlike Joe Dick and Billy Tallent, the men whose on-screen interactions are usually read as homoerotic are likely to be action heroes, men of super-human prowess and physical strength. Calling their heterosexuality into question is a way to undermine that power, and while those images of masculine power do need to be undermined, it is not clear that the best way to do that is to call them queer. This is not to argue that homoeroticism is not sometimes there. But it is a reading that is sometimes too appealing. We get to criticize hyper-masculinity, and do it in terms that would most disturb the hyper-masculine men themselves. Calling their politics into question would not do it, and they might not react to feminist readings of their actions and position. But we know that implying homosexual desire would get under their skin, and that is what makes it so much fun.18 It would, of course, be a lot easier to make the above argument in relation to Hard Core Logo if Baker hadn’t included the line about Joe raping Billy. He is well aware that he is ‘creating what the critics will doubtless call a tense homoerotic subtext.’19 Keeping in mind that we do not know whether or not this claim is true, or whether John is perhaps rambling or lying, let us consider the context of the rest of their relationship. They are supposed to have been friends since they were thirteen years old, and have spent years together in social and creative contexts. There would be every reason to expect that they would have a certain amount of emotional closeness, since, as numerous people have noted, a band is in many ways like a marriage. It sounds like a strange question to ask, but it is a completely necessary one: why can’t

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two or more men have a close emotional relationship, with all of the interdependence and baggage that implies, without it being sexual? If Joe and Billy were actual brothers, we would fit their relationship into that framework, and their sexuality would be less ‘suspect.’ The inference of homosexuality in their relationship, and in filmic ‘buddy’ relationships in general, depends to a significant extent on the policing of gender boundaries in which men are not supposed to be emotionally interdependent. Love and other emotions are to be reserved for family members and romantic partners only. Rather than see John’s claim about Joe and Billy as ‘proof’ of their homoerotic or homosexual attraction, it is also possible to read it as John performing the manoeuvre I have been describing above. Jealous of Joe and Billy’s status as band leaders, and of their closeness that excludes him and Pipefitter, John might be levelling the charge of homosexuality as revenge, a reading Baker saw as possible in his own script. Later in the film, we see that Joe and Billy are indeed willing to drop their drummer and bass player and start a new career on their own terms, so John’s jealousy is not without a basis in fact. In this context, we don’t know whether to believe John and it does not matter all that much, as long as we resist the temptation to see his revelation as proof of what we knew all along, that Joe and Billy are secret lovers. Such a reading has the appearance of stripping away surface appearances to get at the substance of Joe and Billy’s relationship, but in reality it closes off readings of the complexity of their emotional relationship, and denies their interactions any standing on their own terms. Everything becomes a masquerade for their sexual desires, and we are simply watching two men try to repress their latent homosexuality. In the end, such a reductive reading is limiting, homophobic, and boring. The scene itself does everything possible to call John’s account into question. He begins by saying that Billy and Joe’s fight on the night he is describing ‘was just a cover for the real issue,’ which was their sexual

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encounter. In this moment John sounds like an armchair psychoanalyst, and his credibility is undermined further when he asks Mary her name at the end of the scene, which from her reaction he is obviously supposed to know. The ambiguity is furthered in the transition to the next scene, which occurs without an establishing shot. We cut from Billy in the backstage scene to a shot of Joe in a diner. The soundtrack shifts subtly, but the sound of a band that is heard in the backstage scene is also a sound bridge to the diner, where it mixes smoothly into the song that is playing on the diner’s jukebox. The first line of the song we hear is a woman’s voice gently singing ‘Which way you going, Billy?’ This track, a late-1960s hit by The Poppy Family, was at one time one of the most popular Canadian songs ever recorded, hitting number 1 in Canada and number 2 in the United States while being certified gold in the United States. It is the second time it has appeared in the film, since it was also playing in Herbie’s diner earlier on the trip. The song thus subtly mocks Billy’s masculinity and sexual status while providing yet another reminder that real success lies south of the border. The question ‘Which way you goin’?’ could refer to either his sexual orientation or his career goals. As if in answer, he and Joe are soon spending the evening with a couple of local prostitutes, who are introduced by a game that Joe plays by looking around the diner and describing for Billy the lives of the people he sees. He pegs one man as a farmer who has taken up drinking after his wife has left him and his farm has collapsed. The two women are described as small-town girls and college dropouts who work at the local mall or at the diner they are sitting in. Joe describes one of them as having her eye on ‘that cute guy that works at Le Chateau [a fashionable clothing store], but she’s worried that her friends will think that he’s a homosexual,’ thus introducing further fears about the acceptable performance of masculinity. When the girls approach the table and announce that they are ‘working,’ Billy is reluctant to get involved with

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Billy Tallent meets Thelma and Louise. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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them. His inclinations seem more like good sense than tentative heterosexuality, especially the next day, when it is revealed that the two girls have made off with all of the band’s money. As the band makes its way across the prairies to its next gig in Winnipeg, we see the most straightforward road-trip images yet, as the van winds its way past hay fields and across flat prairies (shots likely faked somewhere much further west than Saskatchewan or Manitoba). We also see a map that traces the Trans-Canada highway to Winnipeg, and here McDonald cannot resist a joke that flashes by too quickly for most to notice – one of the landmarks on the map is ‘Bruce McDonald Provincial Park’ in place of Spruce Woods Provincial Park. This is the point in the film where questions about the power of documentary representation start to become clear. A second map of Canada from sea to sea to sea is undercut by the voices of the band members discovering that their Winnipeg gig is cancelled because the bar has closed down. In Turner’s novel, the band simply gets word that the Winnipeg gig is off before they go there, but the film wisely emphasizes the futility of the endeavour by making them actually show up. The scene is crucial because it is shot from inside the van while the band members (and McDonald’s sound recordist, whom we see for the first time) are out in the snow arguing about whose fault all of this is. The group alternatively turns on Joe, then Pipefitter, and finally on Billy, who is jeered as ‘Billy Fuckin’ Hollywood.’ Joe and Pipefitter then raise their cigarette lighters and mockingly call him ‘Slash.’ As the band disintegrates, McDonald is safe and warm in the van, observing. It is clear that their misfortune is his gain, since the argument makes for great footage. This assertion of directorial control is furthered in the next sequence, which is one of the interviews with the band at the side of a road, in which they now mock each other good-naturedly. Most crucial is Joe’s first line, in which he asserts that ‘me and Billy decide every-

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thing, about the band, about the way this thing’s shot (gesturing to the camera) – everything.’ His bravado is of course undermined both by what we have just seen and the fact that the editing reveals the director’s ultimate control over how the band is portrayed. As he goes on to rank the band members in terms of importance (he is no. 1 and Billy is no. 2), he seems to have less and less power. His status is then further diminished by an interview with Billy in which Billy asserts that anger is a pose that eventually turns people bitter, and he is clearly talking about Joe. The two are played off against each other once more, so that despite Joe’s assertions of control, the film is beginning to make it clear that the director has the upper hand. From Billy’s interview we cut to an interview with Joe in which he is asked directly if he is jealous of Billy and then asked what he is going to be doing when he is forty-five. While he avows that he will ‘still be writing songs,’ and that it depends on how his ‘alcoholism goes,’ the interview conspicuously foreshadows the disaster awaiting Joe at the end of the film. In the extreme close-up of his eyes that ends the scene, it is fairly clear at this point that nothing is going to end well.

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Late at night on the road again, we hear more of John’s voice wondering what would happen if he was ‘honest every moment for the rest of my life.’ This sounds like non-diegetic voice-over, but he is immediately interrupted by Joe saying ‘Save it for your group sessions, John,’ so he is speaking aloud in the van. The moment immediately becomes a group therapy session, and an explosive one at that, as John decides that his band mates need a dose of brutal honesty. He tells Joe that he has to admit that he would be nothing without Billy. The real fireworks begin when he announces that Billy’s Jenifur gig has been cancelled, which gets Billy screaming at him. When he tells Pipefitter that he is enjoying a last gasp before a lifetime as a garbage man, Pipe joins in the abuse too, yelling that John belongs in a ‘fucking straightjacket.’ Although John has been enjoying his moment of delivering the truth to his band mates, he cannot handle it being thrown back at him, and immediately starts screaming and banging his head off the van door. As he does so, he hits the cassette deck in the van so that the tape of the Commodore gig begins playing ‘Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?’ again, setting up a nice contrast between their early, promising reunion gig and the anarchy and dysfunction that is beginning to overtake the band and the tour. There is a further contrast in the next scene at the side of the road, filmed in silhouette against a dawn sky. Despite the timing, there is

John tries to be the voice of honesty for his band mates. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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nothing promising about this moment, as the band members deal with their disagreements while arguing in the road, and their brutal honesty is tempered by the fact that we cannot see anyone’s faces. It is here that Joe tells Billy that he can ‘can the rock star shit’ and Pipe joins in, calling him ‘Mr. Rock-star-no-more.’ Screaming and exhausted, the band members realize they have two nights left and no money, and it is suggested that they visit Bucky Haight. Joe is reluctant to do so for reasons that will become obvious, but eventually gives in when Billy argues that some hero worship from Joe will be just what Bucky needs. Before we get to the farm, we cut back to one of the earlier, calmer interviews with John, who describes Bucky as singing the ‘smartest songs I ever heard.’ We then quickly cut to Billy saying ‘I think he’s a dink.’ As the band arrives at Bucky’s farm in Saskatchewan, Joe’s lie is finally revealed to the others when Bucky walks out on his front porch and has both legs intact. He looks at the band in disgust and walks away. In case we have forgotten about Joe’s lie, the film cuts back to him at the Commodore gig, making an apparently heartfelt plea that the attack on Bucky should be considered as important as the murders of John Lennon and Marvin Gaye, and the suicide of Kurt Cobain. The incongruity is played up by non-diegetic piano music on the score, one of the only times such music is featured in the film, so that it is as if McDonald is purposely mocking him. The ‘anger’ of director McDonald is accentuated as we rejoin the band at the farm and find McDonald and his crew trying to film outside the kitchen windows where Bucky and the band are talking. They are marked as outsiders now because they do not have a microphone in the room and cannot hear what is being discussed. They wonder aloud if ‘Bucky is in on this too’ and call Joe a nasty name when the camera gets to him. Joe comes out of the house and is confronted by McDonald. He admits that he lied about Bucky’s legs and used the benefit money for

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The band face off at dawn. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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the tour and for ‘your film stock.’ ‘I fuckin’ lied,’ he says. ‘Bucky’s got his legs back. Cheer up and chill out.’ As the band spends the morning sitting around Bucky’s table drinking martinis and listening to his sad tales of the record business, the film takes a meta-turn when Bucky questions Bruce, asking him if he is ‘a real filmmaker’ or ‘a journalist, some kind of hack.’ Before long, Bucky is pulling tabs of acid out of the freezer and giving two tabs each to everyone present, including Bruce and his crew. Only John hesitates, aware that dropping acid is a risky venture for someone in his mental state. From here we begin a two-and-a-half minute fantasy sequence as band and filmmakers trip on acid. We see them in various costumes, playing with guns and guitars, and eventually see them covered in blood from a goat that Pipefitter has apparently killed with a chainsaw. The soundtrack features chants, strange noises, and excerpts from CBC radio, and is at moments reminiscent of the Beatles’ famous ‘Revolution 9.’ But there is a more direct connection to this scene, and it is one that reveals much about Hard Core Logo and its themes. The film that Hard Core Logo most resembles is not This Is Spinal Tap, but Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, and it is in the farm scene that the similarities between the two films become clear. Easy Rider features its own acid scene in New Orleans, one that includes many shots of graveyards and a famous sequence in which Peter Fonda cries about his mother. According to Peter Biskind, Fonda was encouraged by Hopper to climb up on a statue and talk about his actual mother, who had committed suicide. All of this took place on a film shoot that featured generous portions of real drugs.1 The acid scenes in Hard Core Logo and Easy Rider both occur at similar points in their respective narratives, when the major motivation for the journey has been satisfied. In Easy Rider, Billy and Wyatt are initially headed for New Orleans, and in Hard Core Logo it is of course the apparent crime against Bucky Haight that motivates

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Ringmaster Bucky Haight leads the acid trip. Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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the reunion of the band and thus the tour. Both sequences also feature flash-forward shots that offer premonitions of what lies ahead for the characters. In Hard Core Logo we see Joe with a gun to his head, and in Easy Rider we see the motorcycles burning, but both shots can be dismissed as mere imagery at the points at which they appear. If both films feature an acid sequence, so what? There might be a stylistic similarity and even a small-scale tribute going on, but it might not be anything more than that. In fact, the acid sequences only call attention to a set of thematic connections that might otherwise escape our attention. For starters: both films are about idealistic journeys that reverse their nations’ usual route of expansion and return from west to east. Both feature counter-cultural protagonists determined to avoid mainstream capitalism and the traditional trappings of success. Both journeys are funded by ill-gotten gains and, crucially, both end in the deaths of their protagonists when it is clear there is nowhere left to go. Much has been made of Easy Rider’s status as an anti-Western, featuring modern outlaws on motorcycles rather than horses. Not only do Billy and Captain America recognize that the traditional journey west is rendered impossible by the settlement of the entire continent, but they contradict the idealism of such a journey by facing ostracism and hopelessness at nearly every stage. Towards the end of the trip, Fonda’s famous line, ‘We blew it,’ encompasses both their hope to create something better for themselves and the more general failure of the late 1960s to live up to its counter-cultural potential. There are obvious parallels with Hard Core Logo, especially in the fact that for most of the film Joe seems to honestly believe that he is potentially creating something new here, a place for artistic accomplishment and friendly camaraderie, despite the fact that there is no stated or obvious way in which the short-term goal can lead to anything of substance. There is never a real chance that a five-city western Canada tour is going to make a marked difference in the band’s trajectory, in

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the same way that it is never clear in Easy Rider what Billy and Wyatt are hoping to achieve in New Orleans (or anywhere else). After the party and the bonding, what comes next? Both sets of protagonists depend, to some extent, on a vague sense that something good is going to come along, even when there is no evidence to support such hope. Billy and Wyatt have the excuse that they are caught up in the cultural optimism of the late 1960s. By the 1990s, Joe Dick has no such excuse, which makes the audience all the more cynical about his prospects. All Joe has is some generalized punk-rock attitude, and even his Billy is not buying it for most of the film. Along for the ride to kill time, Billy Tallent has something in common with Billy from Easy Rider, in that neither seems to buy into any larger social or personal goal for the trip other than a good time. In Billy Tallent’s case, he is not even enjoying himself all that much. In his book about Easy Rider, Lee Hill writes that ‘Given Easy Rider’s bleak and fatalistic ending, it is intriguing that many viewers and critics recall the film as an artifact of 60s idealism rather than as a harbinger of the increasingly cynical tone of the decades to come.’2 Easy Rider is indeed deeply pessimistic about the prospects of social change at the end of the 1960s, but what does such a position mean in Canada in 1996? For starters, the loss here is personal. Partly because Joe’s ideas about the transformative powers of music seem outdated and naive, he seems less heroic. At this point, he should know better, since even his band mates seem to know what they are up against and what their possibilities are. Only Pipefitter seems to have much hope of getting something out of this, and all he wants is the little bit of money he has been promised (which of course he does not get). And if that is not clear enough, Mulligan’s speech at the beginning of the film, ‘At this point you do it for love,’ makes it clear from the outset that this project is futile. At a fundamental level, Hard Core Logo is not about a band who try something and fail, it is about a band who try something at which they are

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doomed to fail, which is a completely different movie. The reason that viewers remember Easy Rider as ‘an artifact of 60s idealism’ is because, despite the ending, it is an artifact of 1960s idealism, both in terms of its means of production and because of its characters’ genuine hopefulness. Even if there is nowhere left to go, they have the momentary escape of the open road. Hill points out that after Easy Rider, the potential pleasures of the open road are ‘increasingly defined as brief respites from an inevitable acceptance of what cannot be changed,’ and cites movies like Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971) and Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) as examples.3 By the time we get to Hard Core Logo, the tension between Joe and his band mates is precisely this acceptance. They know what cannot be changed and Joe does not. As entertaining and compelling as Joe is, the audience is inevitably with the band mates on this one, even if they wish that they were not. We know that he is not going anywhere and that is what makes this such a dark film. We are compelled to watch and sometimes we are even laughing. The band members are not laughing when they wake up the day after the party at Bucky’s farm, hung-over and covered in blood. Billy has an exchange with Bucky in which he responds to Bucky’s compliment on his guitar playing (and the gift of a guitar) by calling him an asshole. Pipefitter is shaking with the realization that he killed a goat (with a chainsaw), and Joe is confronted by Bucky in a scene that offers a further knock to what is left of his idealism. Bucky tells him that he came to Saskatchewan to escape all the people who wanted to use him, and is disgusted that Joe managed to use him from afar. If being told by his apparent idol that he never wants to see him again has a deep effect on Joe, it does not show much here. We cut immediately to Billy taunting Joe about ‘the amazing healing powers of this place,’ and saying sarcastically, ‘Hope you don’t do time for the benefit [funds].’ Joe’s response is characteristic: ‘Just fuckin’ feeding the legend, baby.’ Bucky

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is his idol but, like all idols, what he represents is far more important than the man himself. To underline that point, the following show in Saskatoon opens with Joe dedicating ‘Blue Tattoo’ to ‘the late great king of punk Bucky Haight, who died last night in New York City.’ The song lyrics are literal at this point, at least as far as the legend is concerned: ‘You had no time for corruption / You felt the world was an unsafe place / You worked towards a solution / Best you could do was to send me away.’ The mythcreation of the moment is contrasted with some of the most documentary-like footage immediately afterward. We cut to an interview with Billy in which he talks guitars with Bruce, but this is just a setup for the scene to follow, in which Joe arrives to interrupt the interview. We see shots of the floor and hear Bruce telling the cinematographer to keep the camera rolling as Billy and Joe head out of earshot to talk. Billy is still wearing the microphone from the interview, so we get to hear their conversation from across the room. The conversation is about their plans after the tour, and it is here that they decide to stick together and make music without Pipe and John. Billy makes Joe swear that it will be about music and not cocaine, and they exchange awkward handshakes before Joe tells Billy ‘I love you,’ and gets a playful slap on the head for his confession. The documentary effect is maintained here by furtive camera movement and obvious attempts by Joe and Billy to keep their voices down, unaware that the mic is still on. This is one of the places where the film reestablishes the director as the source of power, one who can fool the band members into revealing intimate secrets, even as they conspire against the filmmakers and against each other. In this way it continues the push/pull between Bruce and Joe that has been a theme throughout, but the sense is very much that the director is winning, especially as the band starts to come apart. As if to emphasize the band’s naivety, the overheard dialogue is immediately followed by a non-sequitur

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Billy and Joe play ‘Blue Tattoo.’ Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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interview from much earlier in which the band members introduce themselves and say what their roles are in the group – guitarist, songwriter, etc. The scene contrasts Billy and Joe’s scheming with a relatively more unified moment for the band, but it also makes them seem like innocents who have no idea what is in front of them. In case we might start to feel too much compassion for these lambs on their way to slaughter, their innocence is immediately complicated by a shot of Pipefitter masturbating in the back of the van under a blanket. On one hand, we are mildly disgusted as he wipes his hands on the blanket. On the other hand, he seems like a teenaged boy as he then peacefully drifts off to sleep. The next day’s driving game is now to name fake Canadian bands, and Billy is corrected when he tries to offer ‘Church of Worms,’ which he immediately corrects to ‘Faster Leonard Cohen, Die! Die!’ Most of the band names have at least some reference to snow or cold in them, and the games ends with suggestions of ‘Sled Dog Afterbirth’ and ‘MacArthur Parka.’ At the band house in Edmonton, Joe and Billy discuss the sudden bright spot in the band’s future, a chance to get third billing at a rock show in Toronto that is expected to draw 30,000 people. This brief moment of promise is interrupted by Pipefitter, who has John’s diary and proceeds to read it aloud. Of course, he ends up reading it unaware that John has come in and is standing behind him, and it is here that the tension between the band members and Bruce the director comes to a head. Pipe turns his embarrassment at being caught on Bruce, telling him to turn the camera off, and beginning to taunt him. Pipe directly references the real Bruce McDonald’s other films, including Roadkill and what he mocks as ‘Highway 69-er.’ He says that the band members have been to hell and back, and the reason that they have survived is ‘because we’re a fuckin’ band, man.’ His assertions are cut with awkward looks from Billy, who knows that their time as a band is essentially

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over. Pipe continues to lay down his claim: ‘I bet we’ll be here longer than you will.’ The scene is funny because we know that the band is doomed, and also because we know that this is not a real band. Pipe’s put-downs have all the force of Daffy Duck’s in Duck Amuck (1953), where he rails against the control of his illustrators. This is the point where it is clearest that Bruce has all the power in this relationship. By including the band’s mockery of him, he makes it clear that he gets the last word and the last laugh, and that it is impossible for them to really undermine him. It is here that the real Bruce McDonald shows his awareness of the control he asserts as an artist over his actors and his documentary subjects. They can say what they want, but none of their words are of much use when the director has images and editing at his disposal. John then helps him make exactly this point in the next shot, as he burns his notebook in the backyard. It is an arresting image of him in red one-piece pyjamas with his flaming notebook in his hand, and he makes the idea explicit. ‘There you go,’ he mumbles, ‘words come and go … but pictures never die.’ As this contrast continues, we see more interviews with the individual band members in which they describe their relationship in terms of a family or a marriage. The words are undercut, though, by the choice to divide the screen into four boxes and show all of them speaking simultaneously, so that their divisions are now literal, and they also speak over and past one another rather than to one another. All the warmth of the words the band members use to describe each other is not enough to overcome their divisions or the ill intentions of the filmmakers, especially once Billy begins his interview with an Edmonton community radio station and reveals in an off-air moment that he has been offered the gig with Jenifur after all. He swears the DJ to secrecy, and then comes out of the booth to make sure that Bruce is not going to betray him either. Bruce tells him ‘We’re cool,’ and then

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‘Words come and go … but pictures never die.’ Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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says, ‘Just wait, we’ll show you how cool we are’ once Billy is back in the booth. Bruce is now a character who is not just an observer, but a driver of the action, and this is becoming a film about filmmaking as much as it is about music making. Bruce’s developing responsibility for the final implosion of Hard Core Logo is one of the key differences between the book and the film. It creates the thematic question of the documentarian’s responsibility, and it makes Bruce himself into a complete, and flawed, character. Indeed, nearly all of his character’s motivation in Hard Core Logo II comes from his guilt about what he has done to this band and his attempts to make up for it. The full extent of his guilt is not yet clear, however, as this interview ends and we are still focused on Billy, who humiliates Terry the DJ much as he and Joe had humiliated Tiffany the interviewer earlier in the film, by alternately mocking and befriending him. It is Billy’s betrayal of Joe that is emphasized at the beginning of the next scene as Joe talks to the camera about the ten rules of the ‘rock n’ roll swindle.’ Number four is ‘find a guitar player that’s committed, honest, trustworthy,’ and he recites this just as Billy appears and is unable to engage him in conversation. But Billy’s betrayal is instantly compounded by Bruce, who is unable to resist confronting Joe on camera about Billy’s impending departure, assuming that this will make great dramatic footage. He sets Joe up as much as possible, asking him about the new album that he and Billy are planning to make together, and then segueing casually into the question ‘How do you feel about Billy leaving the band?’ As he repeats the question the camera moves in for a ‘gotcha’ close-up, but we don’t get to see much of Joe’s reaction beyond the obvious sense of betrayal, since we immediately cut to the band performing on stage. This performance is a medley of songs including ‘Rock and Roll Is Fat and Ugly,’ ‘Edmonton Block Heater,’ and ‘Who the Hell Do You Think You Are?’ before it eventually ends on ‘Something’s Gonna Die

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Tonight.’ In an article about filmic adaptations that centres on this film and McDonald’s Dance Me Outside, Bart Beaty points out that the framing of this scene is important, as Pipefitter and John are repeatedly shown in isolation but Joe and Billy are presented in as many two-shots as possible, ramping up the drama as Billy repeatedly challenges Joe at the microphone by adding backing vocals.4 At this point, John is in full meltdown mode, having painted his face white and performing in white briefs, staring off into space. The final dissolution of the band comes when Joe begins to thank the audience for coming and tells them that this is the end of our ‘hugely successful reunion tour,’ continuing the rock and roll stardom myth. He adds that ‘it’s also the end of Billy Tallent’s fuckin’ life’ before pulling back and punching Billy in the face. As they begin to fight on the stage and fall into the audience, John once again becomes the narrator/chorus of the film, immediately grabbing the microphone and performing some type of free verse of nearly random lyrics and phrases that, despite their source in his fractured psyche, begin to become relevant to the action. As Joe and Billy are finally pulled apart by the audience he intones, ‘off with their heads, throw them to the lions, feed them to the dead,’ referencing the ways in which, for the audience, this is simply part of the rock and roll spectacle in which performers are sacrificed for the entertainment of the audience. This continues as Joe re-takes the stage, and as Bart Beaty notes here, ‘Pipefitter’s destruction of his drum kit ironically returns the fight to rock show theatricality, … visually rendering the band’s ending as a form of pathetic rock star ritual.’ Joe also makes a show of smashing Billy’s Stratocaster, and this is a complex moment, since it is simultaneously a deeply personal insult and also a rock and roll cliché. For all the importance of this moment to Joe, for all the pain of being betrayed by his best friend, for all the realization that things are not going to be remotely as he had hoped, all he can manage is a stage manoeuvre performed a thousand other

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times by a hundred other bands. At this point he is clearly still trapped in a performance, and trapped as Joe Dick, since it is as Joe Dick that he is responding. So far, this is just one more time in which Joe Dick has put on a show, and in this respect it is disappointing. We are waiting for something more. The final scene of Hard Core Logo takes place on an Edmonton street outside the club. Joe is drinking from a bottle on the steps of the bar, and talking to Bruce and the camera crew, who now seem like ruthless exploiters who have manipulated the band for their own gain. If this has been a struggle for control between Joe and Bruce, it is clear who the winner is. Joe is the object of control, and we are fully aware of the personality behind the camera. One of the strengths of the film is that we come to this awareness of the director slowly over the course of the narrative. At first Bruce the filmmaker is just some guy who helps create the sense that this is a real documentary. The self-mocking nature of his early appearances sets him up as something of a joke, one that is more or less funny depending on whether you already know who Bruce McDonald is. The meta element is cute, and a device, and it does not seem all that important thematically. The fact that McDonald is playing himself is misleading because that is what convinces us that all of this is not to be taken seriously. If he had cast someone else to play the documentarian, we might have different expectations about the character. Someone who can make fun of himself like this does not seem so threatening. In the end, though, Bruce’s involvement is one of the darkest themes of the movie. All of the early scenes in which Joe challenged Bruce seemed, at the time they appeared, to set Joe up as abrasive in the face of a filmmaker who was just doing the job for which he was hired. Throughout the film, Joe has seemed like the one who cannot see the reality of the situation, the limited possibilities and the constraints on their success. In retrospect, he seems like the only one who can see the power of the camera. It is why he wants the film

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crew along in the first place, and why he wrestles for control throughout. The man who has apparently lost himself in the character of Joe Dick can still understand the nature of performance better than anyone around him. As Joe sits on the steps, drinking like the derelict we assume he is to become, we get one last reminder of the apparent innocence of the camera crew as drunk fans wander into the shot, occasionally smiling and waving, never seeing the camera as a threat. Joe gets up and wanders down the street, before stumbling back toward the filmmakers. His first line as he approaches is partly muffled, but it is something like ‘We’re good,’ since his next line is clearly ‘We’re buddies’ as he offers Bruce a drink. He seems convivial as he hands Bruce the bottle. ‘You got everything you needed, right?’ and then the cryptic ‘One more shot’ as they pour. He is calm and composed as he says, ‘What is it? One more shot and salut?’, takes the drink, pulls out a handgun, and shoots himself in the head. Joe’s suicide at the end of this film is genuinely surprising on first viewing. He seems reconciled to his fate, calm and relaxed. This is of course because he is aware of the performance left to come. It is not just that Joe commits suicide and the camera happens to be there, it is that Joe is committing suicide for the camera, aware at every moment of the scene he is creating. All of this is a setup for maximum shock value when the moment comes, but it is also a reassertion of control. This is the only way that Joe can maintain any authority over his own life and his own performance when everything else has been taken. As Nick Craine has pointed out, he is also destroying the mask of Joe Dick the only way he is able. In the novel, Joe Dick ends up busking back in Vancouver, and Joe’s death wasn’t in the original film script either. The idea for this finale came from Hugh Dillon, who seemed to rely on a gut sense of who this character was and what he would do. On some level, it seems strange

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‘One more shot and salut.’ Courtesy of Shadow Shows.

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that this was such a late addition, since it makes such narrative sense. Joe has lost his band yet again, been betrayed by his best friend in the world, and lost the battle with the filmmakers to control his own image. He does not have anything left, and going out like this allows him to add himself, at least ideally, to the pantheon of suicidal rock stars. The film was made in the shadow of the death of Kurt Cobain, and Cobain’s death, as pointless as it was, convinced the world that he was serious about all the things he had been saying he was serious about – not becoming a rock star, and remaining independent and idealistic. In the same way, Joe’s suicide marks his final attempt to become someone to be taken seriously, even as he has been a jester of sorts for his entire life. For someone like Joe Dick, there is also the possibility that he would end up more like Darby Crash than Kurt Cobain. Crash was the lead singer of The Germs, an early L.A. punk band who released one album in 1979. He committed suicide with an overdose of heroin on 7 December 1980. His death was overshadowed by the murder of John Lennon the next day, and he and the band ended up largely forgotten for many years. As much as the idea that death is a good career move in rock and roll is a cliché, such a reading obviously trivializes the mental-health issues that lead people to take their own lives. In this film, we never know whether Joe’s decision is spontaneous or planned, or what his reasons might be. We only know that his death is partly a performance for the cameras, one that is intended to confront and disrupt the filmmakers, but one that also gives them their most dramatic footage, which is, if the ‘documentary’ is to be believed, included in the final product regardless of the trauma it creates. As Joe falls to the ground, we hear one of the crew yell ‘Is this for real?’ as they all scramble towards him, and it seems like this moment does conflate the various fictional and documentary purposes of this film. The net effect, though, is to disrupt the documentary reading of

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the film. If this was still the documentary by ‘Bruce McDonald,’ then he would have to be cold enough to not only goad Joe into suicide, but to exploit that suicide for dramatic effect. Instead, this seems like the moment where the film lets Joe get his revenge on the documentary crew. This the moment of his payback, and it affects the audience as well as the crew, since this is a film with no denouement. As soon as Joe is dead, the movie is over, and we have to deal with the shock of the act at the same time that we admire the filmmakers for pulling it off. To quote Ramona and Russel from Roadkill once again, it was an act of violence, and we loved it.

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Epilogue: Hard Core Logo II

Funny things happen when you carry a camera into a room. – Bruce McDonald

Although Hard Core Logo II takes place fifteen years after the action of the original film, it picks up thematically right where its predecessor left off, with the question of Bruce McDonald’s complicity in the death of Joe Dick. The guilt and/or remorse of the fictionalized Bruce McDonald is the central theme of the sequel, as Bruce tries to come to terms with his role in exploiting Joe Dick’s misery and failure. At times he is repentant, and at other moments he blames Joe’s death on others, including Bucky Haight. The beginning of the film finds Bruce McDonald recounting the shock of Joe’s suicide, and his own choice to include the footage. In a voice-over, he says, ‘but how could I not use it? Joe would have wanted it that way. Of course he would have.’ Despite the years, the fictional Bruce McDonald has not grown much. He has spent his time directing a show called The Pilgrim for the Home Bible Channel and becoming rich. The primary plot of Hard Core Logo II concerns Care Failure, lead singer of Die Mannequin, a Toronto punk band, who claims to be possessed by the ghost of Joe Dick. When Bruce meets Care, who is coming apart at the seams, he senses an opportunity to get back into documentaries

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and to exploit the situation of another struggling rock star. Throughout the film, various characters challenge Bruce directly, accusing him of complicity in the death of Joe Dick and of repeating the same mistakes with Care Failure. His new filmmaking partner Liz makes him swear on the ‘Documentary Code’ not to manipulate or objectify anyone or to enrich himself at the expense of others. In the end, Hard Core Logo II demonstrates a deep understanding of the nature of documentary. Unlike his fictional alter ego, the real Bruce McDonald is deeply insightful about what it means to make movies about other people, and the mockumentary format allows him the freedom to explore these issues in depth without actually exploiting anyone. By asking as many questions as it answers, it is a fitting coda to the original work. In complicated and compelling ways, Hard Core Logo II ends up being both a cautionary tale about artistic hubris and a celebration of the power of film.

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Production Credits

Production Companies Terminal City Pictures & Shadow Shows Director Bruce McDonald Writers Noel S. Baker (screenplay) Michael Turner (novel) Cast Hugh Dillon Callum Keith Rennie John Pyper-Ferguson Bernie Coulson Julian Richings Bruce McDonald Danny Nowak Jochen Schliessler Benita Ha Claudia Ferri

Joe Dick Billy Tallent John Oxenberger Pipefitter Bucky Haight Documentary filmmaker Documentary cameraman Documentary sound recordist Pipefitter’s girlfriend John Oxenberger’s girlfriend

Production Credits

Corrine Koslo Terry David Mulligan Nicole N. Parker Megan Leitch Mike Kopsa Alexa Marden Xantha Radley Jennifer Bishop Samaya Jardey Morgan Brayton Dean Paras Danny Salerno Joey Ramone Art Bergmann Jeremy Bishop Tony Tucker Dan Fazzio Pete Mills Lick The Pole The Modernettes D.O.A.

Laura Cromartie Mulligan Journalist Mary the Fan Mary’s husband Little Billie Joanne / Thelma Tracy / Louise Naomi Victoria Terry the D.J. Satan Himself Himself Bongo player Bongo player Flash Bastard Flash Bastard Themselves Themselves Themselves

Producers Christine Haebler (Producer) Brian Dennis (Producer) Karen Powell (Associate Producer) James Head (Executive Producer) Director of Photography Danny Nowak, C.S.C. Film Editor Reginald Harkema

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Production Credits

Production Designer David Willson Costume Designer / Hair and Make-up Debbie Jow Sound Design Bill Sheppard Sound Mixer Jochen Schliessler Original Music Composed and Produced by Schaun Tozer Original Hard Core Logo Music Produced and Arranged by Peter J. Moore Original Hard Core Logo Lyrics Written by Michael Turner Songs Performed by Swamp Baby Steve Cowal Rick Sentence Randall Bergs Mark Bosa Jim Mattachione

Singer Bass Guitar Guitar Drummer

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Production Credits

Casting (Vancouver) Wendy O’Brian Livingstone Casting (Toronto) Deirdre Bowen Casting Runtime 92 minutes Aspect Ratio 1.77:1 DVD Releases There are two DVD versions of Hard Core Logo. The Canadian version, released by VSC, has the commentary track by Bruce McDonald, Noel S. Baker, and Hugh Dillon, but is unfortunately in 4:3 pan-and-scan format. The American version, released by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Pictures, has fewer special features, but is 16:9 widescreen.

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Further Viewing

Dont Look Back. D.A. Pennebaker. 1967 Easy Rider. Dennis Hopper. 1969 Gimme Shelter. David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin. 1970 This Is Spinal Tap. Rob Reiner. 1984 Stop Making Sense. Jonathan Demme. 1984 Roadkill. Bruce McDonald. 1989 Highway 61. Bruce McDonald. 1991 Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Sacha Gervasi. 2008 Suck. Rob Stefaniuk. 2009 This Movie Is Broken. Bruce McDonald. 2010 Trigger. Bruce McDonald. 2010 Music from the Big House. Bruce McDonald. 2010 Hard Core Logo II. Bruce McDonald. 2010

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Notes

Unless otherwise cited, all quotations from Michael Turner, Noel S. Baker, Bruce McDonald, Hugh Dillon, Callum Keith Rennie, Nick Craine, Michael Scholar, Joe Keithley, Colin Brunton, Ben Kowalewicz, Moe Berg, Bill Baker, and Matt Smallwood are from interviews or email exchanges with the author. 1. Adaptations 1 Don McKellar, Roadkill DVD commentary. 2 Ibid. 3 Will Straw, ‘Canadian Cinema,’ in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), 524. See also Christopher E. Gittings, Canadian National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2002). 4 Sumita S. Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–1987 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 4. 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991 [1983]), 6. 6 Ibid. 7 For a thorough discussion of Turner’s work in literature and film, see Peter Dickinson, ‘Adapting Masculinity: Michael Turner, Bruce McDonald, and Others,’ in Screening Gender, Framing Genre: Canadian Literature into Film (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 186–211. 8 Noel S. Baker, Hard Core Roadshow: A Screenwriter’s Diary (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1997), 34–5.

Notes to pages 30–64

9 Ibid., ix. 10 Ibid., 243. 11 For an introduction to this history, see Francesca Coppa, ‘A Brief History of Media Fandom,’ in Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006), 41–59. 12 At the time of this writing, there was Hard Core Logo slash fiction available at Squidge.org (http://www.squidge.org/~peja/hardcorelogo/slash .htm), RedShipsGreenShips.com (http://redshipsgreenships.com/rghcl .html), and numerous other sites. 13 Camille Bacon-Smith, Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 240. 14 Ibid., 243. 15 Francesca Coppa, ‘Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance,’ in Hellekson and Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities, 238. 16 Ibid. 17 A.O. Scott, ‘Average Teenage Girl, Assembling a Life without a Set of Instructions,’ New York Times, 9 May 2008. 18 Stephen Cole, ‘Zombies Bring Out the Best in Bruce McDonald,’ Globe and Mail, 6 March 2009. The New York Times review is: Stephen Holden, ‘A Surprise Is in Store for This Shock Jock,’ New York Times, 29 May 2009. 2. Punk Rock Nation 1 For just such a defence of Billy Joel, see Chuck Klosterman, ‘Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink,’ in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (New York: Scribner, 2003), 42–54. 2 The key text on stardom in film is Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, 1998). 3 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 68. 4 Ibid., 131. 5 Ibid., 160

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Notes to pages 73–88

6 The idea of ‘screen time’ is a problematic one in that it does not tell us how many people are watching a particular film or its share of market revenue. The 2% figure may also be too generous, particularly in English Canada. For a detailed discussion of this question, see Charles Acland, ‘Screen Space, Screen Time, and Canadian Film Exhibition,’ in William Beard and Jerry White, eds., North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002), 2–18. 7 See, for example: Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, eds., Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Ivone Margulies, ed., Rites of Realism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); and Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). See also Robert Rosenstone, ‘The Future of the Past,’ in Vivian Sobchack, ed., The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (New York: Routledge, 1996), 201–18. 8 From a talk by Albert Maysles at a screening of Gimme Shelter at Doc Films, University of Chicago, 10 October 2000. 9 Ibid. 10 Breaking This Movie: The Making of ‘This Movie Is Broken,’ supplement to This Movie Is Broken DVD (Alliance Films, 2010). 11 Michael Turner, Hard Core Logo (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993), 85. 12 Peter Lehman, ‘Crying Over the Melodramatic Penis: Melodrama and Male Nudity in Films of the 90s,’ in Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001), 25–41. 13 See Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,’ Film Quarterly 44:4 (Summer 1991): 2–13. 14 Baker, Hard Core Roadshow, 105. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 For an example of a contrary reading of this scene that makes the case for Joe’s ambiguous sexuality, see Peter Robert Browne, ‘“Which Way You Goin’ Billy?”: Masculinity, Genre, and Self-Reflexivity in Hard Core Logo,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 18:2 (Fall 2009): 87–103. See also Dickinson, ‘Adapting Masculinity,’ 196. 19 Baker, Hard Core Roadshow, 105.

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Notes to pages 99–110

3. Easy Riders, Raging Fools 1 Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 64. 2 Lee Hill, Easy Rider (London: BFI Publishing, 1996), 44. 3 Ibid. 4 Bart Beaty, ‘Imagining the Written Word: Adaptation in the Work of Bruce McDonald and Nick Craine,’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 13:2 (Fall 2004): 39.

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Selected Bibliography

Original Novel Turner, Michael. Hard Core Logo. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993. Other Published Hard Core Logo Material and Michael Turner Work Baker, Noel S. Hard Core Roadshow: A Screenwriter’s Diary. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1997. Craine, Nick. Portrait of a Thousand Punks: Hard Core Logo. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998. Turner, Michael. American Whiskey Bar. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004. On Bruce McDonald and Canadian Cinema Baldassarre, Angela. ‘Bruce McDonald: Dance Me Outside.’ In Reel Canadians: Interviews from the Canadian Film World, 77-82. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2003. Beard, William, and Jerry White, eds. North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema since 1980. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002. Beaty, Bart. ‘Imagining the Written Word: Adaptation in the Work of Bruce McDonald and Nick Craine.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 13:2 (Fall 2004): 22–44. Browne, Peter Robert. ‘“Which Way You Goin’ Billy?”: Masculinity, Genre, and Self-Reflexivity in Hard Core Logo.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 18:2 (Fall 2009): 87–103.

Selected Bibliography

‘Cinemas, Nations, Masculinities.’ Special Issue of Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8:1 (Spring 1999). Edited by Angela Stukator. Dickinson, Peter. Screening Gender, Framing Genre: Canadian Literature into Film. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Edwardson, Ryan. Canadian Content: Culture and the Quest for Nationhood. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Gittings, Christopher E. Canadian National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2002. Harcourt, Peter. ‘Canada: An Unfinished Text?’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2:2–3 (1993): 5–26. McEwan, Paul. µSatire as Magnifying Glass: Crossing the US Border in Bruce McDonald’s Highway 61.’ SymplokeF 15:1–2 (2008): 115±24. McGreal, Jill. ‘Canadian Cinema / Cinéma Canadien.’ In Geoffrey NowellSmith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema, 731–40. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Melnyk, George. One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Monk, Katherine. Weird Sex & Snowshoes and Other Canadian Film Phenomena. Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2001. Ramsay, Christine. ‘Canadian Narrative Cinema from the Margins: “The Nation” and Masculinity in Goin’ Down the Road.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2:2–3 (1993): 27–50. Straw, Will. ‘Canadian Cinema.’ In John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson, eds., The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, 523–6. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Taylor, Aaron. ‘Straight Outta’ Hogtown: Sex, Drugs, and Bruce McDonald.’ In George Melnyk, ed., Great Canadian Film Directors, 199–225. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007. White, Jerry, ed. The Cinema of Canada. London: Wallflower Press, 2006. On Mockumentaries De Seife, Ethan. This Is Spinal Tap (Cultographies). London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Juhasz, Alexandra, and Jesse Lerner, eds. F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Rhodes, Gary D., and John Parris Springer, eds. Docufictions: Essays on the Intersec-

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tion of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking. London: McFarland & Company, 2006. Roscoe, Jane, and Craig Hight. Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001 On Road Movies Cohan, Steven, and Ina Rae Hark, eds. The Road Movie Book. London: Routledge, 1997. Hill, Lee. Easy Rider. London: BFI Publishing, 1996. Laderman, David. Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. On Fan Communities and Remix Culture Bacon-Smith, Camille. Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Coppa, Francesca. ‘Women, Star Trek, and the Early Development of Fannish Vidding.’ Transformative Works and Cultures 1 (2008). http://journal .transformativeworks.org. ‘Fandom and Feminism: Gender and the Politics of Fan Production.’ Special section of Cinema Journal 48:4 (Summer 2009). Gray, Jonathan, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds. Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York: New York University Press, 2007. Hellekson, Karen, and Kristina Busse, eds. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2006. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sandvoss, Cornel. Fans: The Mirror of Consumption. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005.

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CANADIAN CINEMA Edited by Bart Beaty and Will Straw 1 Bart Beaty. David Cronenberg’s ‘A History of Violence’ 2 André Loiselle. Denys Arcand’s ‘Le Déclin de l’empire américain’ and ‘Les Invasions barbares’ 3 Tom McSorley. Atom Egoyan’s ‘The Adjuster’ 4 Johanne Sloan. Joyce Wieland’s ‘The Far Shore’ 5 Zoë Druick. Allan King’s ‘A Married Couple’ 6 Darren Wershler. Guy Maddin’s ‘My Winnipeg’ 7 Paul McEwan. Bruce McDonald’s ‘Hard Core Logo’