Satire as Magnifying Glass: Crossing the US Border in Bruce McDonald's Highway 61

For Canadians, the US border has always been a problematic one because, culturally at least, we haven't always been entirely sure where it is. To be fair, it has become much clearer in the past fifteen years or so, as Canadian social policy has taken a fairly abrupt turn toward the European model. Canada has long had policies like socialized medicine of course, but there seemed to be a palpable sense into the early 1990s that Canada was losing its identity in favor of an American one, particularly troubling since we had only just succeeded in pushing off the bulk of our British identity. Throughout the 1990s however, a few key policy changes that reflected national preference (if not complete consensus) marked a clear shift. Among other changes, the federal government adopted gay marriage after most of the provinces had already ruled it a fundamental human right. A move to decriminalize marijuana, even though it never passed into law, had the intended effect of making the drug socially acceptable in much of the country. A policy change in the early 2000s gave new mothers the right to take a full year off work while being paid by the government, a plan that tapped into Canada's already generous unemployment insurance program.

It is easy for Canadian liberals to boast about such enlightened policies, and they are obviously thrown into stark relief by the turn to the right that has been the legacy of the most recent American presidency. But while these differences might seem profound, the border is still a place of cultural anxiety for Canadians, in the sense that it can seem very clear most of the time while defying easy explanations or definitions. In addition, a set of national social policies do not a culture make, at least not in the sense that other nations seem to have a culture that has transcended shifts from left to right and back again.

The border I am discussing here is a psychological one, rather than the physical line whose effect is delineated by crossing line-ups and duty-free regulations. It is intrinsically linked to English Canadians' sense of themselves as a people, as a culture, and as a nation. For better or worse, much of that sense has been defined in relation to American culture, because of proximity, both literal and cultural, and because of the overwhelming hegemony of US culture, a hegemony that is particularly pronounced in the film industry. Indeed, American films dominate Canadian screens in a way they do in few other countries. Foreign films, primarily American, account for as much as 98% of distributors' revenues.¹ The intermingling of the film markets is so complete that the "domestic" box office figures recounted in nearly every American newspaper on a Monday morning include the box office for Canada. In the film industry at least, Canada is not a distinct nation.

Throughout this paper, the Canada I refer to is "English" Canada, i.e., the country outside of Quebec.² Quebec actually has its own relatively thriving commercial and art-house cinema, with homegrown films dominating the box office many weeks. In late August 2007, a comedy about the infidelities of three brothers called Les 3 p'tits cochons (The 3 Little Pigs) and a drama called Contre toute espérance (Against All Hope) held the number one and two spots, respectively (Strauss par. 1). While there are some similarities and links between English and French Canadian cinema, these cinemas fit into—for the most part—the traditional Canadian division of the country into "two solitudes."

As many critics have recently pointed out however, the notion of two solitudes is nowhere near a nuanced-enough description of Canada's national identity nor its cinemas. At the very minimum, as George Melnyk has written, we need to account for Inuit and native cinema as a distinct national identity within Canada. He points out that there are numerous groups—Aboriginal, ethnic, immigrant, and feminist—who do not want to be subsumed into a generic English Canadian identity (4...