Family Stories: Gender and Discourse in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter

Introduction

While being deposed in a class-action suit instigated by townspeople who have lost their children in a tragic bus accident, Nicole Burnell, an adolescent girl who has survived the accident, constructs a lie about what happened in order to sabotage the prosecuting attorney's case. Mitchell Stephens, the lawyer who seeks someone to blame for the town's loss, is obsessed with creating a cause-effect narrative to explain the accident, largely because he, too, has "lost" a child and struggles to understand how and why: the class-action suit to which he is drawn becomes his vicarious means to compensate himself for the fact that his daughter abuses drugs and may die of AIDS. But Nicole is deeply suspicious of the narrative line which Stephens wants to impose on the accident. Not only is she aware that his story is a construct and that the accident was simply that--an accident, no one's fault--but her relationship to her own father, Sam Burnell, is troubled by the narrative that he has constructed for her. Sam promises to turn his daughter into a rock star, and Nicole, initially seduced by this dream, enters into a sexual relationship with her father. Thus Nicole is a survivor not only of the accident but of incest as well. These two plot lines merge in the film when Sam becomes involved in the lawsuit because he wants to further use Nicole, who has lost the use of her legs in the accident, for material compensation. Nicole, who comes to recognize herself as an object in both Stephens's and Sam's stories, sees a way to write herself out of both narratives: knowing that the town will drop the suit rather than prosecute one of its own community members, she falsely testifies that the bus driver was speeding at the time of the accident. With her lie, the suit ends.

Nicole's invented story at the film's climax invites analysis of the relationship between gender and narrative in The Sweet Hereafter. The differences between Nicole's acts of narration and Sam's and Stephens's stories can be illuminated from a theoretical perspective that explores the ways in which the film grants narrative power to a woman character with a feminist vision. In fact, director Atom Egoyan not only portrays Nicole as a storyteller within the film's diegesis, but he also blurs the bounds between Nicole as character and Nicole as heterodiegetic narrator and thus allows her desire, her subjectivity, to speak through the film itself rather than simply being narrated by it. ¹

This blurring is expressed cinematically through the relationship between Nicole's voice on the soundtrack and images of her body on the visual track. For the viewer of The Sweet Hereafter to understand this dynamic, the work of feminist film theorist Kaja Silverman becomes very useful, though the film also suggests important modifications to her theories. In The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Silverman expresses some surprise at "the fetishistic value which a surprising number of film theoreticians have conferred upon the voice.... When the voice is identified in this way with presence, it is given the imaginary power to place not only sounds but meaning in the here and now. In other words, it is understood as closing the gap between the signifier and the signified" (43). Here, drawing on Lacan, she refers to the imaginary wholeness the child shares with the mother when it is enveloped in the female voice in the womb, and the lack associated with language when the child enters the symbolic order. ² But as Silverman points out, sound is really no more "present" in cinema than are images: "what is at stake within cinema's acoustic organization, as within its visual organization, is not the real, but 'an impression of reality'" (44; qtg. Comilli 132). In creating this impression...