Atom Egoyan's 'The Adjuster' 9781442686663

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Intimate Distance
1. Welcome to Canada
2. Out of the Ashes
3. Before the Fire
4. The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude
5. Arrivals
6. Departures
Production Credits
Further Viewing
Notes
Selected Bibliography

Citation preview

ATOM EGOYAN’S THE ADJUSTER

One of Canada’s pre-eminent auteur filmmakers, Atom Egoyan has been celebrated internationally, earning multiple awards from the prestigious Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals as well as an Academy Award nomination. The Adjuster, an accomplished and controversial early work, is a dark drama about the complex and intense relationship between an insurance adjuster and his clients. In this accessible analysis, Tom McSorley traces the genesis, production, and reception of Egoyan’s fourth feature film from its Cannes Film Festival premiere to its North American commercial release. The book locates The Adjuster in the larger context of Canadian cinema history’s peculiar and often troubled evolution, and offers a provocative interpretation of the film’s unique analysis of the malaise of materialism in North American culture. Featuring new interview material with Egoyan himself, this study in the Canadian Cinema series offers an insightful review of one of Atom Egoyan’s most searching, unsettling films. tom mcsorley is the executive director of the Canadian Film Institute, a sessional lecturer in Film Studies at Carleton University, film critic for CBC Radio One’s Ottawa Morning, and a contributing editor at POV Magazine.

This page intentionally left blank

CANADIAN CINEMA 3

ATOM EGOYAN’S THE ADJUSTER TOM MCSORLEY

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2009 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn: 978-1-4426-4116-7 (cloth) isbn: 978-1-4426-1048-4 (paper)

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

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McSorley, Tom Atom Egoyan’s The adjuster / Tom McSorley. (Canadian cinema ; 3) Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-1-4426-4116-7 (bound) isbn 978-1-4426-1048-4 (pbk.) 1. Egoyan, Atom–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Adjuster (Motion picture). I. Title. II. Series: Canadian cinema (Toronto, Ont.) ; 3 pn1997.a31127m37 2009

791.4302’33092

c2009-903707-6

TIFF and the University of Toronto Press acknowledge the financial assistance of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Introduction: Intimate Distance

3

1 Welcome to Canada

9

2 Out of the Ashes

19

3 Before the Fire

27

4 The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

41

5 Arrivals

75

6 Departures

83

Production Credits Further Viewing Notes Selected Bibliography

92 95 96 102

This page intentionally left blank

ATOM EGOYAN’S THE ADJUSTER

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: Intimate Distance

The Adjuster is a film born in flames. Both inside and outside its impressive widescreen cinemascope frames, it is a cinematic phoenix rising from the ashes of real and metaphorical apocalyptic fires. Indeed, fire is the genesis of the film itself, as the concept for The Adjuster originates in a devastating, and apparently random, act of arson in Victoria, B.C. On New Year’s Eve 1989 Atom Egoyan’s parents’ furniture store and home burned to the ground. During this time of crisis, Egoyan was intrigued by the insurance adjuster working on their case. More than simply processing the claim, the adjuster seemed to act as a source of material comfort and consolation for the Egoyan family: an ordinary briefcase-toting guardian angel, a bureaucratic agent of life’s restoration. As Egoyan recalls, ‘It was one of the most heightened weeks of my life. Sifting through the ashes with the adjuster, coming up with an arbitrary value of things that didn’t exist anymore. It was very inspiring for me to watch this very ordinary person elevated to almost the status of a mystical god through this process. He was the angel of reconstruction who was going to rematerialize our lives.’1 This professional figure, detached in his assessing of damage and assigning of monetary value to often priceless family heirlooms and memorabilia, yet intimately engaged with the details and distress of the intense emotional topographies of the family itself, is the exact profile of the quintessential Egoy-

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

an male protagonist: deeply connected and utterly disconnected at the same time. In the apparently dispassionate, clinical, even banal role of an insurance adjuster, Egoyan found mythic resonances and great dramatic potential. Egoyan notes, ‘I actually had a completely different script ready to go when this happened.’2 And so, out of the flames of a family fire, Noah Render was conceived and Egoyan’s next film suddenly became his story.3 In one sense, this is not surprising. Since his first feature film, Next of Kin, in 1984, Atom Egoyan has explored the curious and opaque tensions in contemporary society in narratives that revolve around characters in dramas constructed upon collisions of intimacy and distance. There is Peter Foster in Next of Kin, who pretends to be the long-lost son of an Armenian-Canadian family; his imposture brings him into the intimate bonds of familial affiliation, but his performance of being ‘Bedros’ keeps him necessarily at a distance. In Family Viewing (1987), Van is alienated from his brutish father as he tries to keep his Armenian grandmother out of a nursing home while trying desperately to preserve home movies of his mother as his devouring father tapes over them with sexual acts with his current girlfriend, Sandra. Completed in the same year as the Victoria fire, Speaking Parts (1989), involves an actor, Lance, who works in a hotel, itself a site in which anonymity and intimacy are constantly in play (not surprisingly, hotels abound in Egoyan’s early works). Lance agrees to try to dissuade a powerful film producer from altering the script created by Clara, a screenwriter who has lost her brother. This relationship between Lance and Clara is wholly professional, since he will get a ‘speaking part’ in the film as she has written it, but it is also intimate in its emotional trajectory. In a concise, onscreen depiction of the intimacy-distance dramatic dialectic in Egoyan’s work, Lance and Clara masturbate to each other’s image via satellite videophone connection – he in one city, she in another. The examples of characters whose professional personae embody and enact this idea of intimate

4

Introduction: Intimate Distance

distances, this combination of engagement and detachment, continue after The Adjuster: the photographer in Calendar (1993), the auditor in Exotica (1994), the lawyer in The Sweet Hereafter (1997), the investigator in Felicia’s Journey (1999), and the customs inspector in Ararat (2002). Outside the framelines of The Adjuster and on a metaphorical level, Canadian cinema, in particular the cinema of English-speaking Canada, several years earlier had undergone its own rebirth from the ashes of a state film-funding program.4 Begun in 1975 and called the Capital Cost Allowance (CCA), it offered a 100 per cent tax shelter for private investors. The policy encouraged the making of more ‘commercial films’ in Canada’s tenuous film ‘industry.’ As a result of this well-intentioned, if misguided, initiative, films were made with the idea of attracting distributors and exhibitors in the United States. To succeed in this endeavour, producers ensured that all Canadian references were removed from the films, and that most leading roles were given to American performers. Any ‘Canadian-ness’ was to be made either unrecognizable or invisible. At almost every level and in almost every sense, with the exception of a very small number of films by David Cronenberg, Phillip Borsos, and a handful of others, the CCA was unsuccessful. It was cancelled in 1982. Rising from its collapse was a new ethos at the Canadian Film Development Corporation (later renamed Telefilm Canada): to support Canadian stories and Canadian talent before and behind the camera and to make films as obviously Canadian as possible. This shift in funding objectives would enable an entirely new generation of filmmakers, of whom Egoyan has become the most recognized in Canada and abroad, to initiate and sustain films that are unabashedly Canadian and, as it turns out, formally challenging, largely uncommercial, and heavily influenced by European art house traditions of auteurist cinema. Seven years after Atom Egoyan delivered his debut feature and nine years following the demise of the CCA, The Adjuster remains a fascinat-

5

I.1. Atom Egoyan directing The Adjuster. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

Introduction: Intimate Distance

ing specimen of the evolution of a distinctive Canadian cinematic talent. His ability to produce films on a consistent basis, due to a new and more culturally nationalist state-funding philosophy, allowed his writing and directorial skills to develop with a degree of continuity. By the time he started work on The Adjuster, Egoyan had won prizes at festivals in Canada and around the world, attracted international critical attention and international investors for his next projects, and, more important, expanded upon and explored more deeply his idiosyncratic thematic preoccupations. Generations of Canadian filmmakers before him did not have this kind of supportive environment within which to work and develop. In Egoyan’s case, what is outside the frames of his work, meaning Canada’s attitude towards its own film artists, affects what one sees inside the frames of his films. Given the authority and assurance of his vision in The Adjuster, it is clear that he had had consistent support to develop a distinctive cinematic vision. His fourth feature film in seven years, The Adjuster offers ample evidence of an impressive evolution. Not only have his budgets increased steadily and significantly, but Egoyan’s formalist cinematic signature here is seen, for the first time in his career, on the expanded celluloid canvas of cinemascope. The Adjuster’s often arresting widescreen articulation of how intimacy and detachment inhabit the same cinematic space further elaborates on Egoyan’s earlier thematic concerns in an authoritative and assured new visual style. Indeed, in this film Egoyan returned to and elaborated upon his principal thematic concern of the duality of intimacy and detachment, basing this narrative on a troubling personal experience. He also pursued further investigations of the idea of the family, the ambiguous role of technology, and the nature and function of both still and moving images in contemporary experience. Also present and a central preoccupation in the Egoyan filmography, from Next of Kin in 1984 to Adoration in 2008, is the interrogation of the processes of narrative structure and disclosure and how these processes affect the creation of

7

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

meaning within the film’s fictional universe as well as in the spectator’s construction of knowledge during the watching of that universe as it unfolds. The Adjuster is a formally sophisticated weaving of these ideas into a typically eccentric Egoyan ‘family’ drama of a strange, singular insurance adjuster named Noah Render. His is a world created, destroyed, and even possibly reconstructed by fire, and Render navigates his path among those damaged by the fires of fate and circumstance and contingency with equal amounts of surprising intimacy and startling detachment.

8

1

Welcome to Canada

Both Atom Egoyan and Noah Render travelled great distances to get to Canadian screens. Born in 1960 in Cairo, Egoyan himself came with his Armenian family via Egypt to Victoria, British Columbia, in 1963; Egoyan the filmmaker and his protagonist, across vast and barren landscapes of ambivalence towards the very idea of a Canadian cinema. There are historical and geopolitical sources for this ambivalence that are worth underlining briefly. Noted Canadian film scholar Peter Harcourt’s famous and still relevant phrase bears mentioning as a way of framing this journey. His telling observation that ‘Canadian cinema is an invisible cinema, because it is a cinema that exists but which no one sees’ speaks to a number of historical realities that inform the evolution of Canadian cinema.1 For a number of reasons, the arrival of Atom Egoyan (and, of course, The Adjuster) is a crucial example of an important but very modest reduction of that invisibility. Essential to a complete understanding of the emergence of Atom Egoyan as a Canadian film artist and to the arrival of Noah Render as a particular specimen of Canadian film protagonist is an outline of the unusual, challenging, even tortuous Canadian cultural and cinematic context that produced them both. Cinema arrived in Canada in the late nineteenth century with images from elsewhere. The first public screening in Canada was held in Montreal, Quebec, on 28 June 1896. It was a reel of short films by the

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

French duo, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, and the Thomas Edison Company of the United States.2 The consumption of images created outside the country would define the cultural practice of going to the movies for Canadians for the next six decades and consequently would affect the shape of the often confused and clouded approaches to state funding of film production in Canada. This is not to suggest that no films were being made. In the early 1900s, for example, short film travelogues extolling the natural wonders of Canada were produced by the Canadian Pacific Railway and were used in Europe to encourage emigration. By 1918 the Canadian government had recognized cinema’s potential as a source of public education and national development. In that year it established the Exhibits and Publicity Bureau, changing its name in 1923 to the Canadian Government Motion Picture Bureau, or CGMPB. In 1939 the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was established, led by Scottish documentary pioneer, John Grierson, who actually coined the term ‘documentary.’ Explicit in its general mandate, ‘to show Canada to Canadians and to the rest of the world,’ was an affirmation of the primacy of the educational function of cinema. Nothing in the creating of the NFB suggested that it would ever be involved in the production of drama, especially feature-length fiction films. Interestingly, it would be the filmmakers working at the NFB in the early 1960s who would eventually agitate for those very fiction films to be permitted.3 Feature fiction films were produced in the silent era, too: notably Evangeline in 1913, produced in the Maritimes, and Back To God’s Country in 1919, a melodrama set in Canada’s northwest. Given the country’s low population density and modest investment opportunities, the lack of a film industry developing in this era is not surprising. Nevertheless, feature films were made, however sporadically. Ultimately, the greatest impediment for developing a feature film industry in Canada, even in the more open and fluid exhibition realities of the earliest days, was

10

Welcome to Canada

access to screens owned by American interests.4 As the American film industry expanded and consolidated its grip on the exhibition sector in the early 1920s, box office access opportunities for Canadian filmmakers went from few to virtually none at all. One consequence of the primacy of the documentary film form in Canada is the particular shaping of the cultural practice of filmgoing. The primary ongoing exposure for Canadians to their own moving images would be and would remain the documentary. Indeed, the dominance of fiction feature films by Americans, accelerating in the 1920s and firmly entrenched in the 1930s, set in concrete an exhibition practice: the American feature film preceded by a Canadian documentary short film. The naturalization of this practice would be effectively solidified over the subsequent decades, when virtually no Canadian feature films were made, let alone screened. Canada, on the outskirts of power since its creation as a colony of Great Britain, easily slipped into the new colonial orbit of an emerging superpower living right next door. Canada the colony was conditioned to understand itself as the weaker figure in relation to twentieth-century American power and to wisely and pragmatically accommodate itself to the realities of the new geopolitical order: to adjust. As John Grierson himself argued, we have Hollywood to entertain and Canada’s documentaries to educate. Why change?5 In post–Second World War English-speaking Canada, the few practising independent filmmakers began to lobby the federal government over the ridiculous reality of a sovereign nation’s cinemas being offlimits to its own feature films. In Quebec, for example, they pointed out that since the early 1940s French Canadians were going to their cinemas and seeing their own stories in feature films presented on movie screens across the province. In this and many other fields, Quebec’s political positions were framed by compelling discourses of ‘survivance,’ or cultural survival.6

11

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

English-speaking Canada, on the other hand, had no such anxiety, perhaps attributable to the fact that it shares a common language and many cultural similarities with the United States. From this flows a certain ambivalence about the necessity to protect ‘Canadian-ness,’ however one defines it. Moreover, successive federal governments felt no urgency to intervene in a foreign country’s virtual cinematic monopoly of Canada’s movie screens. Should any motions to curtail American hegemony be raised, Canadian cabinet ministers and prime ministers would be lobbied, intimidated, even coerced by Hollywood industry heavyweights and, in the case of Brian Mulroney (who was elected, ironically enough, in the same year as Egoyan’s first feature film was released), by a United States president, Ronald Reagan , who, oddly appropriate in this context, was an actor in Hollywood for decades.7 Some of the solutions to this situation are laughably colonial. In 1948, for example, to mollify critics in Canada and acquiesce to Hollywood’s power, the Canadian government introduced the Canadian Co-operation Project. In exchange for leaving its monopoly intact, Hollywood had to insert Canadian references in its scripts and agree to screen NFB animated short films before its feature films in the United States.8 The Canadian Co-operation Project lasted until the end of 1953. American movies unspooled freely again, with no further need to insert references to Canada, and an ambivalent, English-speaking Canadian audience flocked to view images conceived and produced elsewhere, just as they did in 1896. It is important to emphasize that even within this condition of cinematic marginality in their own nation, filmmakers continued not only to make films, but also to lobby the Canadian government to intervene in some manner to secure even limited access to Canada’s screens. While these efforts largely failed, owing to the Canadian government’s colonial timidity in the face of the powerful United States film interests, several independent feature films were being made across English-

12

Welcome to Canada

speaking Canada in the early 1960s, films that would have a significant influence on Egoyan. One example of such feature filmmaking outside the NFB, and an influential production model for later filmmakers, would come to be known as the ‘university underground.’ Students on campuses from Toronto to Vancouver made low-budget features with their friends and fellow film enthusiasts. Making films in this fashion meant complete artistic freedom for and control by the filmmaker. In the manner of the French New Wave, young Canadians such as David Cronenberg and Ivan Reitman in Toronto and in Vancouver Larry Kent and Jack Darcus made auteurist fiction films in the early 1960s. A similar phenomenon was also taking place at the Université de Montréal. In 1962, for example, a low-budget fiction film, Seul ou avec d’autres, was being made in a collective context by aspiring filmmakers such as Denys Arcand, Denis Héroux, Stéphane Venne, and others. All shot on location on ridiculously modest budgets, these films spoke to an emerging generation of Canadian filmmakers eager to tell Canadian stories on the big screen and to register a Canadian cinematic vision via fiction rather than documentary. Even within the conservative walls of the NFB, feature films were also being made, but clandestinely. Although John Grierson had long since departed the NFB in the late 1940s, his successors would not involve the NFB in fiction features, as it was not part of organization’s mandate. In 1964, however, two fiction feature films were produced by the NFB, one in Toronto (Nobody Waved Good-Bye, by Don Owen) and one in Montreal (Le Chat Dans Le Sac, by Gilles Groulx). Both Owen and Groulx had been expected to make documentaries on the subject of disaffected youth in their respective cities, Toronto and Montreal. Instead, they delivered feature films that revolved around young people, who were undeniably disaffected, but placed them in a fictional narrative context. Owen’s is a Cassavetes-inflected personal tale of a young

13

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

couple trying to escape the suburbs of Toronto. No doubt with a view towards his minuscule budget and influenced by the ‘university underground’ movement, he worked with non-professional actors and an improvised script. Gilles Groulx’s film is a Godardian exploration of a young couple in Montreal searching for some form of existential authenticity. Both films garnered critical acclaim. The year 1964 appeared to be the one in which everything would change.9 It would not. Clearly, the appetite and the ability to make Canadian feature films existed. Inspired generally by the auteurist energy of the French New Wave and the rise of independent filmmaking in the United States, and specifically by the changing of the generational guard in Hollywood, a certain momentum was gathering. A small critical mass of filmmakers, emboldened by what they observed across Canada and by their own confidence in producing low-budget features, began to both sharply criticize a complacent Canadian government for its lack of concern for a nascent film industry and lobby that same government to legislate some form of access to Canadian screens for Canadian filmmakers. Despite all the work being made in the early and mid-1960s, what was still missing were screens on which to show them. In the face of much lobbying by filmmakers and by certain members of Parliament, in 1967 the Government of Canada responded by creating the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC). The CFDC would take applications for feature film projects and dispense funds for production costs. While certainly a positive initiative, the CFDC was hampered in two ways. The first was a philosophical quandary: should it provide funding for more commercial style films or concentrate on the auteurist brand of artist-driven filmmaking that, in many respects, instigated the establishment of the CFDC in the first place? Secondly, on a more pragmatic but equally essential plane: funding of film production was excellent, but how could the CFDC influence the American controlled distribution and exhibition sector in Canada? This has been

14

Welcome to Canada

the fundamental problem with Canada’s film policies over the years: the making of the films themselves is politically benign; the push for more extensive exhibition of them involves a political and economic struggle with what has become for Canada the new imperial centre, Washington, D.C, and the American dream factory in Hollywood, California. With the establishment of the CFDC, the former problem was solved, the latter gingerly avoided. As the first films that received CFDC production funding came to fruition in the early 1970s (The Act of the Heart by Paul Almond; Goin’ Down The Road by Don Shebib et al.) and were ready for distribution, they would encounter the same immovable barrier that had confounded Canadian filmmakers for five decades before them: no access to screens. To explain this phenomenon, a disingenuous argument evolved that argues that the reason Canadian films are unpopular is that they are too artsy and are not commercial or ‘audience friendly.’ The lack of box office success was presumably evidence of this problem. Of course, this position conveniently ignores the fact that the Government of Canada did nothing to challenge American control of Canadian screens, and that Canadian filmmakers had virtually no access to box offices of any kind. The result was a shift in CFDC thinking about which productions it would support. This shift would turn out to be temporary. Dominating the period from 1975 to 1982, more commericially styled, generic, ‘audience friendly’ films would be favoured. To accelerate this process, in addition to its ongoing funding of the CFDC, the Government of Canada launched the Capital Cost Allowance (CCA) tax shelter scheme intended to jump-start private investment in Canada’s feature film ‘industry.’ To describe film production in English-speaking Canada during this period as an ‘industry’ was ludicrous enough in the mid-1970s (except in Quebec, which indeed had developed a small and growing industry for cultural-political reasons), but to solve the problem with a

15

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

strategy to attract American distributor interest by backing what were essentially imitations of American-style thrillers and generic horror and teen films with minor American actors in lead roles can perhaps be most charitably characterized as a form of colonial pragmatism. To stimulate private investment in film production and to bolster the CFDC’s financial contributions, investors were offered a 100 per cent guarantee on any monies invested, and were protected regardless of whether the film was released, made money, or failed miserably at whatever box office it could locate. This tax shelter was an absolutely no-risk investment. Not surprisingly, production levels rose considerably, but over half the films made in Canada during these years, later nicknamed the ‘Tax Shelter Era,’ were never released, and the others sank into oblivion. Made to appeal to some imagined American market, in spite of vast evidence that no such market existed in the United States for any foreign films, let alone low-budget imitations of Hollywood films, the films of the ‘Tax Shelter Era’ failed to prove that the ‘commercial style’ films would find audiences in Canada. Irrespective of their quality, these films also faced the same entrenched barriers to distribution and exhibition that had never been addressed by legislative intervention, by the government’s insisting that a certain proportion of films shown in Canada be Canadian. Yes, many more films were produced and the intended jump-starting of filmmaking in Canada was addressed, but, as usual, Canada did nothing to help, however modestly, to give these films a chance to appear on Canadian screens. Of the over 150 films produced in the seven years of the CCA, there were some films that succeded commercially and artistically. Notable among them are Vancouver filmmaker Phillip Borsos’s The Grey Fox (1982), an elegant, elegiac paean to the western hero, featuring Bill Miner, an American stagecoach robber who escapes from prison in the United States and heads north to Canada to begin a new career robbing trains. The other is David Cronenberg’s prescient, disturbing horror-

16

Welcome to Canada

drama, Videodrome (1983), a dark portrait of a television station manager whose interest in a satellite broadcast of pornographic programming begins to distort his processes of perception. Weaving together themes of identity, ontology, and technology’s effects on both individual psychology and on collective communications in the late twentieth century, Cronenberg had a huge impact on Atom Egoyan, whose own work was to take up and expand upon Cronenberg’s templates. For that reason alone, perhaps, we can appreciate the tiny but, in this case, crucial influence of this misguided CCA program. Aside from these few highlights, however, the CCA investment scheme produced mostly execrable films, increased the affluence of doctors, lawyers, and dentists (all of whom comprised the bulk of the investors); significantly wealthier film producers; and an embarrassed Government of Canada. In its shabby failure, the CCA provided still more evidence that making movies, as a political priority and as a valued medium for Canadian cultural expression, was a daunting, perhaps even hopeless prospect. In 1982 the Capital Cost Allowance initiative was quietly cancelled. From its collapse would emerge the most significant, sophisticated, and successful generation of Canadian filmmakers in Canadian cinematic history’s tortuous knot of marginality, colonial deference, false starts, ruinous funding strategies, and impressive levels of artistic creativity and tenacity. Chief among that generation was Atom Egoyan, an Armenian-Canadian born in Cairo, Egypt, and raised in Victoria, B.C., who started making short films while attending the University of Toronto just a few years before the CCA went up in flames.

17

This page intentionally left blank

2

Out of the Ashes

Broadly speaking, when the Egoyan family arrived in Canada the early 1960s, it was a very different place, demographically, socially, and especially politically. The vibrant, thriving multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and post-colonial society that Canada would become was still a few decades away. Indeed, in terms of its political evolution and consciousness, notwithstanding the Centennial year of 1967 and all of the attendant nationalist sentiment expressed at that time, Canada remained, for all intents and purposes, a colonial property of the United Kingdom. The Canadian constitution, for example, was controlled ultimately by faraway London; no amendment to the constitution could be executed without the approval of the Queen of England. In other words, after a full century of the Canadian Confederation, Canada’s legal status essentially remained a colonial one. Although 1967 brought a flowering of sorts of nationalism and Canadian self-affirmation and self-expression, the reality, increasingly regarded as anachronistic, was that Canada was neither in complete control of either its own constitution nor, by extension, its destiny as a nation-state. In the 1970s the government of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau created the CCA and, while still in power, extinguished it in 1982; in the same year he decided to repatriate the Canadian constitution from the United Kingdom. Following a typically complex and contentious

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

intra-Canadian debate about this bold political initiative between the ten provinces (including Quebec, led by a separatist political party) and the federal government throughout the previous eighteen months, the Canadian constitution was repatriated in April 1982. In retrospect, 1982 can be regarded as an annus mirabilis, for both a nation emerging out of colonialism (not entirely, given that even Trudeau did not attempt to repatriate Canadian movie screens from American control) and a film industry, however tenuously, entering an era of unapologetic Canadianism. If Egoyan is, as has often been advanced, a ‘child of Cronenberg’ (cinematically speaking), as a Canadian citizen he is also a child of Trudeau, born or, more precisely, re-born in 1982. The CFDC was also undergoing a rebirth. From 1982 onward, the ethos within the federal funding body would shift from a bias towards supporting commercial styles of filmmaking based on some vague perception of ‘audience-friendly’ films (this bias would return to Telefilm Canada, the renamed CFDC, in the late 1990s), to one where independent, low-budget, artist-driven auteurist work would take precedence. From 1975 to 1982 onscreen Canadian-ness was to be concealed; after 1982 it was to be emphasized. Egoyan’s feature film career, starting with Next of Kin in 1984, was launched during this auspicious era. Of course, the federal funding agency is not the only factor in the Egoyan emergence. In fact, Next of Kin was not even funded through the CFDC. Another crucial component of the rise of Egoyan and his generation was the film cooperative phenomenon. In the mid-1970s the film cooperative movement began in cities from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Vancouver, B.C. The establishment of local co-ops was rooted in an appetite to tell stories on film, stories from the places that produced them. Film cooperatives were locally based collectives in which paid membership brings access to cameras, lighting equipment, film stock, and so forth: the basic infrastructure of filmmaking. Working with extremely low budgets, the co-ops served as training centres for aspiring

20

Out of the Ashes

filmmakers who, by design and of necessity, worked in the auteurist tradition of writing, directing, sometimes editing and even shooting their own films. Virtually every important Canadian filmmaker of Egoyan’s generation (Peter Mettler, Bruce McDonald, Guy Maddin, Patricia Rozema, John Paizs, Jeremy Podeswa, Patricia Gruben, John Greyson, François Girard, Lea Pool, Gary Burns, Bruce Sweeney, et al.) began at a film cooperative. Without these co-ops, it is impossible to imagine the rise of the remarkable Canadian cinema of the last three decades, especially in English-speaking Canada. In a country without a film studio system or access to its commercial cinema screens, co-ops provided hands-on training and the opportunity to develop film styles idiosyncratic to their creators. Perhaps a happy consequence of being ‘invisible’ is the lack of a commercial imperative, a lack that affords a large measure of artistic freedom to Egoyan’s generation of filmmakers. All developed their works in a situation of total artistic control, with tiny budgets and limited crews: perfect hothouse conditions for auteurist cinema and particularly necessary to encourage indigenous independent Canadian film during the period of the CCA. Funding for the co-ops came from membership fees, but also from Canada’s arts councils, at both the federal and provincial levels. The federal cultural agency, the Canada Council for the Arts, supported and encouraged film co-ops through its Media Arts section, while, in Egoyan’s case, the Ontario Arts Council financially supported the infrastructure of the co-op generally and provided funding for individual film productions such as Next of Kin. Again, this level of funding and support was specifically targeted at filmmakers who maintained total control over their artistic vision and were not principally motivated by commerce. The funding zeitgeist was very much about speaking in one’s own ‘cinematic voice,’ not imitating film styles or production models from elsewhere. In one sense, it was a subtle cinematic anti-colonial manifesto, made manifest in monies disbursed and in the funding philosophies

21

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

articulated in the arts councils’ granting criteria. Be yourself. Be Canadian. Atom Egoyan’s career began and developed in this post-colonial Canadian cultural hothouse. Another significant element of the movement of film cooperatives was the rapid erosion of documentary realism as the dominant cinematic style informing this new generation of Canadian filmmmakers. Until this point, with the notable exceptions of David Cronenberg, Morley Markson and a few others, the Canadian fiction film was invariably – for budgetary reasons and as a result of a majority of filmmakers having started their careers making documentaries at the NFB – conceived and constructed within a strictly realist aesthetic. Most of Egoyan’s generation were artisanal self-starters who had never worked for the NFB, and other influences inflected their ideas of cinematic styles and modes of storytelling. In particular, the freewheeling formal approaches of Canada’s experimental film movement (paradoxically launched within the walls of the NFB by animator Norman McLaren) and its leading figures (Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, Vincent Grenier, David Rimmer, Ellie Epp, Bruce Elder, Rick Hancox, Richard Kerr, et al.) inspired Egoyan and others to incorporate philosophical interrogations of the image itself into dramatic contexts. The experimental accusations against the documentary and realist traditions that upheld the idea of the ‘image as truth’ were especially appealing and rich in possibility. The actual technological processes of image construction and the artificial and epistemologically untrustworthy constructed images themselves would supply additional ambiguities, modernist and post-modernist, to already problematic narratives exploring themes of perception, identity, memory, and communication. The experimental influences are striking in Egoyan’s first three films; they appear in The Adjuster more subtly and enable his investigations of his own filmmaking processes to be woven into stories involving the effects of

22

Out of the Ashes

images, moving images, and moving-image technologies on his troubled, lonely, alienated dramatis personae. Having been raised in a family of artists – both of his parents were painters – Egoyan’s own artistic career essentially began in high school, where he wrote and sometimes acted in plays heavily influenced by Theatre of the Absurd playwrights such as Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. In 1978 Egoyan moved from Victoria to Toronto to study International Relations at the University of Toronto. While there, he wrote, performed, and directed plays both on campus and at the professional Tarragon Theatre company. Already having started making films in Victoria,1 he found in Toronto an emerging group of contemporaries also eager to work in cinema. With friends, began making short films as a member of the Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto (L.I.F.T) cooperative, and established his film company, Ego Film Arts. Before his first feature, Egoyan wrote, directed, and sometimes shot four short works: Howard In Particular (1979), After Grad With Dad (1980), Peep Show (1981), and Open House (1982). In addition to the lingering literary influence of absurdism, Egoyan’s early short films reveal his admitted cinematic influences of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, and Michangelo Antonioni. The cool modernist formalism of these masters is not difficult to discern in his work, and that formalist tendency has persisted.2 In addition, Egoyan draws direct inspiration from the experimental cinema and its confrontations with notions of cinematic realism, its scepticism of narrative, as well as its interrogations of the role and significance of image-making technologies in contemporary society and culture. These heady influences and a production context within which to pursue them in theatrical and, increasingly, cinematic contexts, shaped the early work of an emerging film artist and would inform his career path up to and including The Adjuster.

23

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

In terms of his artistic and intellectual pursuits and a supportive environment in which to explore them, Egoyan was not alone. A remarkably cohesive community of aspiring filmmakers in this encouraging environment in Toronto came together in the early 1980s, each working on each other’s scripts, productions, and post-production activities. For example, Peter Mettler shot Egoyan’s first two features, Next of Kin and Family Viewing; Bruce McDonald edited Next of Kin, Family Viewing, and Egoyan’s third feature, Speaking Parts. There are numerous other examples. The work of this period is, in retrospect, surprisingly consistent in its aesthetic daring, its experimentation, and its unconcealed Canadianness. The accelerated, by Canadian standards, evolution of these filmmakers’ careers was also bolstered by the establishment of the Ontario Film Development Corporation (OFDC) in 1985. Modelled to a degree on the CFDC (by now named Telefilm Canada), this provincial funding body provided additional production funds for filmmakers based in Ontario. Another source of money for independent productions in Ontario, the arrival of the OFDC had a catalytic effect on film production in Canada’s most populous province, and it was an indispensable asset in the development and success of Egoyan’s generation of filmmakers. Indeed, so successful at Canadian and international film festivals were these Toronto-based filmmakers that they were dubbed, years later, the ‘Toronto New Wave.’3 And so they were. Like the French or any other cinematic New Wave, these films were made in a non-industrial, even artisanal production mode, formally daring or at the very least stylistically explorative, and produced under the total artistic control of their makers. Moreover, they were confident, unabashedly Canadian, and determined to discover and articulate in a film style that spoke in its own Canadian voice. In Egoyan’s case, at least in the early years before his successes moved him into adopting more industrial-scale production frameworks, the

24

Out of the Ashes

production model was that of the ‘team’: small and consistent crews (in particular, Mychael Danna, music; Peter Mettler and Paul Sarossy, cinematography; Steve Munro, sound design; Linda Del Rosario, production design; Camelia Freiberg, producer) and a repertory company of actors and actresses such as Arsinée Khanjian, David Hemblen, Gabrielle Rose, Tony Nardi, and, starting with The Adjuster and many Egoyan films thereafter, Don McKellar, Maury Chaykin, and Elias Koteas. Not only did this choice of approach enable a young director to trust and develop his craft in a comfortable working environment, it also gave his early films a concreteness, a consistency of ideas and themes embodied in familiar faces and physiognomies. The textures of his early works are remarkable in that they introduce dramatic and formal variations with the same performers, which adds another layer of meaning to the tensions onscreen between intimacy and detachment. To paraphrase a statement attributed to legendary French director Jean Renoir: ‘We make films with friends; in Hollywood they make films with money.’ In the first decade or so of the Toronto New Wave (ca.1984–94), increasingly dominated by Atom Egoyan, this was the predominant ethos of that filmmaking community. If 1982 was a critical year, for good and bad reasons, 1984 was another. One component of the rapidly gathering renaissance of filmmaking from English-speaking Canada, of which Atom Egoyan became the leading figure, was the Festival of Festivals in Toronto, which mounted a massive retrospective of Canadian cinema at its annual exhibition in September 1984. The first such Canadian film event ever, the ‘Northern Lights’ retrospective, while looking back at the multifarious achievements of a Canadian cinema largely unacknowledged, even ‘invisible’ to most Canadians, was also looking forward with optimism to the postCCA period and now, in a larger political framework, a post-colonial constitutionally repatriated Canada. Part of that looking forward at the future of Canadian cinema at the 1984 Festival of Festivals was an inau-

25

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

gural festival program section entitled ‘Perspective Canada.’ Included in this section was the world premiere of a low-budget first feature film, entitled Next of Kin, by a young Armenian-Canadian writer-director named Atom Egoyan.

26

3

Before the Fire

Consider for a moment the narrative structures, thematic concerns, and philosophical questions posed by Egoyan’s three feature films before The Adjuster. All three are set within the intense and idiosyncratic dynamics of ‘the family’; all three explore technology in these families and how it functions as an agent of memory and identity; all three incorporate passages shot on video and woven into the filmed sequences; all three revolve around benumbed, ambivalent, remote male protagonists lost in dubious quests for self-affirmation in their lonely lives; all three examine and develop the notion, which is elaborated further still in The Adjuster, that empirical knowledge in an accelerating technological world cannot and even should not be trusted, as there is both more and less to the picture than meets the eye. These are the foundational ideas of Egoyan’s cinema, sketched out in his trio of early works. They will find a more richly realized, psychologically nuanced, and cinematically sophisticated expression in The Adjuster. After completing several short films, Egoyan wrote and directed Next of Kin, the oddly comic yet unsettling drama about a young man unhappy with his WASP upbringing who decides to join an Armenian family in Toronto. Undergoing videotaped family therapy sessions, the alienated and indolent Peter Foster (Patrick Tierney) is asked to review his family’s tape in a private room. Once there he discovers another

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

family’s taped session on the monitor and watches it instead. He learns that the Deryan family patriarch, George (Berge Fazilian), is resentful of his now thoroughly culturally assimilated daughter, Azah (Arsinée Khanjian), and fears losing his cultural heritage. As Peter watches more, he learns that on their journey to Canada the family had to give up their son, Bedros, for adoption. This family tragedy inspires Peter to pretend to ‘be’ the grown-up Bedros and bring the Deryan family back together. The fact that physically he could not look less Armenian does not deter him, nor does it prevent the Deryans from immediately embracing him as their long-lost son. This charming debut feature appears on the surface to be a sweet comedy about Canadian multiculturalism, but, as ever in Egoyan, something is going on below that surface that is deeply disquieting. Peter, who in a voice-over declares that he sees himself as an actor, and how, by being an actor, he can pretend and help other people in some fashion, is about to embark on a strange project of familial restoration. The family trauma experienced by the Deryans, he reasons, will be healed by his performance. But what of the possible emotional and psychological damage that would occur should the Deryans discover he is a fake? His altruism, if it can be described as such, instead would be an act of cruel and selfish arrogance. Moreover, given his appearance, are the Deryans themselves pretending, too? If so, then why? It seems implausible that they would believe Peter is their son. What is Azah thinking of his arrival? Is he a pretender? What is his motivation? None of these questions is resolved by the film, and we are left to conjecture. Even in this first attempt at feature drama, then, Egoyan subverts the seemingly ordered narrative surface with absence, ambiguity, and insinuations of uncertainty: we want to believe what we are witnessing is a narrative unfolding, yet so many unsettling implications of the story rise to the surface upon reflection. In this way, our uncertainty about these questions forms the most compelling drama, as we must

28

3.1. A family pretends; a pretend family? Next of Kin. © Ego Film Arts

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

retroactively interpret the meaning of the narrative and our own first responses to it. In addition to the uncertainty created for the spectator by the lack of resolution, a consistent approach to narrative disclosure in all Egoyan’s feature films, Next of Kin’s Peter Foster is the first example of a protagonist who embodies that strange combination of intimacy and detachment; a first sketch, as it were, of Noah Render. The role of technology, specifically the video camera, is also significant in Egoyan’s debut feature. While relatively modest compared with its presence in later works, video technology in Next of Kin functions as a mode of introspection (videotaped family therapy sessions are watched separately by Peter’s family members), a portal into some kind of familial ‘knowledge’ and increased self-awareness, and the primary source of dramatic irony (Peter and the spectator are aware of his plan, the Deryans are not). The video camera is the engine of narrative action in this film. Egoyan occasionally intercuts video images of Peter staring into the camera to underscore Peter’s consciousness of his pretence, his ‘performance’ of being a son and a brother. Video technology records, rewinds, replays deep human intimacies, while remaining utterly dispassionate to what it records: an effective metaphor for the mysterious profiles of Egoyan’s characters themselves. Produced on a tiny budget of approximately $25,000, derived largely from a grant from the Ontario Arts Council, Next of Kin found favourable responses in Canada and at international festivals. It received an Honorable Mention for the Interfilm Award at the Mannheim-Heidelberg International Film Festival in Germany. In many senses, with Next of Kin Egoyan created the thematic and stylistic template for all the films that follow: the preoccupation with the forms and functions of the ‘family,’ technology, and human alienation, combined with the interweaving of video and celluloid images. He also began to evolve a production model in which the same actors and crew would work as a team, in an artisanal context, much like the auteurist approach taken by the French New

30

Before the Fire

Wave of the 1960s, the New German Cinema of the 1970s, and, closer to home, by the co-op model and the Cinak example set by the prolific, poetic work of Quebec filmmaker Jean Pierre Lefebvre 1 Three years later and on a significantly increased budget (ca. $200,000) he produced his second feature film. Family Viewing concentrates more fully on the impact of moving image technology on the nexus of familial relationships, on individual psychology and memory, and on the mediated construction, preservation, and, more sinister still, erasure of family history. Home video cameras and players proliferated in the mid-1980s, and Egoyan’s is a reflective, prescient2 drama about this pervasive technology’s possible effects, good or bad, on those who use it. Revolving around Van, another alienated young man like Peter Foster (not coincidentally played by Patrick Tierney’s younger brother, Aidan Tierney), Family Viewing is the complex Oedipal tale of Van’s desire to move his maternal grandmother, Armen (Selma Keklikian), out of her inferior nursing home in order to provide better care for her. This despite the refusal of his father, Stan (David Hemblen), to let her move in with them. Van works at large hotel and thinks she would be happier in her own room in that hotel’s temporarily vacant wing. He subsequently involves a sex-trade worker, Aline (Arsinée Khanjian), in the plan, as her mother is in the same nursing home. It is a clandestine plan executed while Van is under the threatening patriarchal gaze of Stan, a domestic tyrant who sells video surveillance systems and home video equipment. Also distressing to Van is his knowledge that Stan is taping over images of his Armenian wife (Rose Sarkisyan) with recordings of his sexual acts with his girlfriend, Sandra (Gabrielle Rose). In addition, there are darker bits of evidence on the tapes about the possible, even likely, abuse and degradation of Van’s Amenian mother by Stan. If Next of Kin is a more gentle, though still unsettling, investigation of what constitutes ‘a family,’ then Family Viewing is a much more in-

31

3.2. Van and Aline wonder what has been and what is to come. Family Viewing. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

3.3. Sexuality and technology: Stan and Sandra. Family Viewing. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

tense and troubling case of a dissociative family unit whose psychological murk is both illuminated and rendered more complex by the forms and functions of technology in the lives of that family. In this film we see surveillance video cameras in public spaces, cameras and recorders for Stan and Sandra’s home-made pornography, sequences shot and edited as though they were ‘real’ television sitcoms featuring Van, Stan, and Sandra. The insistent video imagery confuses the actual and the imagined in the narrative as it unfolds. It also troubles the diegetic surfaces of the film itself and is a further example of the navigations necessary in Egoyan’s films, for both characters and spectators alike, to decipher one’s orientation and direction in that puzzling territory between intimacy and distance. From video to other examples in the film, such as Aline’s phone-sex job, communications technologies, rather than clarifying and simplifying the processes of navigation, instead make discerning those obscure emotional and epistemological cartographies even more complex, even more daunting. Family Viewing was an international breakthrough film for Egoyan. In addition to winning the best Canadian feature film award at Festival of Festivals in Toronto, it was runner-up to renowned German director Wim Wenders’s Wings Of Desire at Montreal’s Festival of New Cinema and Video. Upon receiving his award, Wenders himself promptly conferred it upon Egoyan, thereby anointing him as an emerging member of a loosely affiliated international club of important art house directors. This generous gesture also opened investment doors for Egoyan in Europe – indeed, his next film was made with some European financing. International awareness of and interest in his work began to grow in earnest after Family Viewing. Working with his largest budget to date (ca. $800,000) and shooting for the first time on 35mm film stock, with financial support from British and Italian investors, Egoyan’s third feature film, Speaking Parts, released in 1989, introduced his work to a much broader audience over-

34

Before the Fire

seas. The first of his films to be selected for the Cannes Film Festival, screened in the prestigious Directors’ Fortnight section, it continued Egoyan’s explorations of the impact of technology on the processes of communication and knowledge construction by characters and spectators alike. Like The Adjuster, which will follow it, Speaking Parts examines the strangeness of human interaction in highly codified professional situations, in moments of technologically mediated intimacy, and in the strategies of fiction and pretence seemingly necessary for his protagonist and others in this film to locate a sense of identity. At the core of Speaking Parts is Lance (Michael McManus), a minor actor who works in a hotel to make ends meet. His co-worker, Lisa (Arsinée Khanjian) is infatuated both with Lance and with his connection, as an extra in various films, to what she imagines is the glamorous world of cinema. She and Lance do menial jobs at the hotel. Lance is also a gigolo for certain guests identified to him by the hotel’s manager (Patricia Collins). When a screenwriter Clara (Gabrielle Rose) checks in, Lance, seeking film work, slips her his CV. A film is being made of her screenplay about her brother’s life and death, but the Producer (David Hemblen) is making changes to the script to make the story, from his pre-eminent producer’s perspective (likely an oblique reference by Egoyan to the Tax Shelter Era and other disastrous funding priorities in Canadian cinema history), more appealing, more ‘audience friendly.’ Lance gets a job on the film as an extra, but, now involved sexually with Clara, he acts as a spy for her, a go-between of sorts for Clara and the Producer during the shoot. As the film production proceeds, the film-within-a-film conceit of Speaking Parts is stitched into the relationships between Lance, Clara, and the Producer and echoed by a complementary subplot, which involves Lisa working for a video company that makes recordings of weddings. The dislocating power of the images themselves create, in the kinetic concluding sequence, a propulsive dramatic undercarriage of dialectic tension between knowl-

35

3.4. Locating identity. Lance in Speaking Parts. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

Before the Fire

edge and uncertainty, between the ‘real’ and the illusory. Orbiting the problematic central idea of how cinema constructs knowledge and preserves individual and collective memory (Clara’s visits to the video mausoleum to ‘see’ her brother; Lisa and her employer Billy [Tony Nardi] taping the intimate rituals of weddings in the context of a commercial enterprise) is the notion that moving images are both seductively satisfying and utterly inadequate. In this storm of images, it is hard to know where you are. That tension of uncertainty is essential to Egoyan’s poetics of cinema. As he observes, in a statement that is essentially, at least at this point in his career, his artistic creed: ‘The most resonant moments for me as a viewer always come when I don’t quite know what it is I’m watching.’3 In Egoyan’s work the relationship to the image is always complex, even conflicted, and rife with uncertainty. As Daniele Riviere muses, ‘Can one even speak of an image today, when it can be broadcast and retransmitted by television and satellite relays to the point where the stage is everywhere? When the frame, the limit that constitutes an image separated from the exterior/interior world, has become undecideable? Transmission is diffracted, a labyrinthic network is woven; where do our images come from?’4 Ron Burnett connects this promiscuity of images with the discourses of national and individual identity construction as well as the dangers inherent in an image-saturated world: ‘Identity, be it national or personal cannot be divorced from images. At this rather tenuous and fragile stage of our [Canadian] history, it may be necessary to discover a new way of using images instead of creating more contexts in which they use us.’5 As in Family Viewing, and as will be continued in The Adjuster, there is here an indirect, allegorical, and curiously powerful family drama at work. The family structure is relocated into the film production context. The ‘family’ in Speaking Parts is clearly more metaphorical than real if, as Egoyan’s work constantly probes and puzzles over, there is

37

3.5. Video as memory: Clara in the mausoleum. Speaking Parts. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

Before the Fire

such a natural entity as a ‘family’ in the first place. The abstract ‘family’ trio of Lance and his film production ‘parents,’ Clara and the Producer, are engaged in struggle for control within the metaphorical ‘nuclear family’ of a film production. This struggle is complicated by the fact they exist in an epistemologically confused atmosphere of images. They are connected primarily by video or televisual images: they communicate by them, achieve sexual ‘intimacy’ through them, and attempt to ‘read’ each other’s strategies and agendas on the flat, hazy surfaces of the myriad of screens, which they either look out from or look at. Elaborating upon the technological presence in the characters’ lives and its paradoxical ability to generate simultaneously intimacy and detachment, Speaking Parts pushes forward in spectacular fashion the thematic and stylistic explorations begun in Next of Kin and Family Viewing and anticipates the even more daring application of these ideas in The Adjuster. Perhaps because of the combination of its enhanced production values and its selection for Cannes, Speaking Parts announced the Egoyan œuvre on an even larger international stage than either of his first two critically lauded features. This work was widely written about by the international cinema press at Cannes, including high-profile journals such as the Cahiers du Cinema, the New York Times, and the Village Voice. Moreover, the film’s thematic preoccupations with the body, identity, and technology generated interest in academic and theoretical critical circles around the world, particularly in France. The name of Atom Egoyan was indeed becoming a recognized cinematic signature, and he was increasingly regarded as a genuinely new and original voice in contemporary cultural discourses about identity and technology.6

39

This page intentionally left blank

4

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude All is not quite what it seems. Atom Egoyan 1

First the body. No. First the place. Samuel Beckett2

If the combination of alienation, isolation and impeded intimacy are increasingly becoming the narrative fuel in his first three films, then that troubling, mysterious admixture is the very engine driving The Adjuster. Egoyan’s fourth feature, made on a budget of approximately $1.5 million, roughly double that of Speaking Parts, weaves these ideas together so thoroughly in the spaces between the characters and audience that the film itself verges on disappearing entirely into its cryptic dialogue snatches, its pregnant pauses, its silences, and the vast surfaces of its cinemascope images. There is so much disturbed psychological terrain here and so many narrative caesuras, it is hard to locate oneself as a spectator. In this sense, Egoyan’s work recalls and recalibrates Northrop Frye’s famous phrase describing the point of departure for the Canadian imagination’s response to the world: where is here?3 That is to say, we start from a sense of displacement: where are we, where am I? In The Adjuster’s alchemical blend of remote characters, vague motivations, and considerable pretences, all drifting across spaces of uncertain

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

ontology, Frye’s question must therefore be radically reconfigured in this new, technology driven, very late twentieth-century Canada from merely ‘where is here?’ to ‘where, what, why, and even when is here?’ In this film, a transitional work in which Egoyan moves away from the disjunctive and alienating effects of the video imagery-saturated earlier films and more towards experimental uses of narrative time and fractured epistemologies, these variations on Frye’s question gather and coalesce. The complex processes of temporal and spatial location, for characters and spectators alike as the film unfolds, becomes the core of the drama itself. This process of ‘location’ will dominate his later works, particularly Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and Ararat. With the creation of The Adjuster in 1991, Atom Egoyan’s already prodigious poetics of uncertainty acquire new densities, new possibilities, new resonances. Having been criticized for making films that were regarded by some as obscure and cold, particularly Family Viewing and Speaking Parts, Egoyan’s challenge with his fourth film was, as he says, first to ask himself about his career trajectory, ‘what path are you taking?’ with a resolute view towards finding ways to ‘project your vision to a larger audience.’4 This does not mean that he was planning to construct The Adjuster to be deliberately more accessible or ‘audience friendly’ than his earlier films, but rather to deliver a more elegantly rendered and perhaps more selfconsciously ‘cinematic’ film with which to pursue themes and motifs evident in his previous films. Working for the first time in the 35mm anamorphic format and, also for the first time, not weaving in sequences of video imagery as striking visual and textural contrasts to the ‘organic’ look of celluloid, Egoyan’s preoccupation with the gnarled relationship between images and meaning remains consistent, forceful, and even continues to expand upon its previous speculations in the first three films. The overlapping dramas in The Adjuster are enacted in an environment less obviously technologically mediated and in a cinematic space more familiar, as it were, to ‘a larger audience.’

42

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

While on the surface not as experimental as the early works, The Adjuster is a productive new exploration of the celluloid widescreen images and their effects not only on audiences watching them, but also those characters who populate and navigate their various, and decidedly odd, journeys within them. Paradoxically, given his notion of projecting his vision to a larger audience, this film is, for Egoyan at this transitional moment in his career, his most challenging with respect to film style and character trajectories. Jim Leach notes, ‘Whereas the presence of video cameras in the earlier films reminds us of the filmmaking process that has produced the images we are watching, here the “absence” of the camera is foregrounded and becomes a major factor in the film’s representation of characters whose “unreality” attests to the absence of a satisfying symbolic culture.’5 As Egoyan himself says, after the video-film collisions in, especially, Family Viewing and Speaking Parts, ‘Then I started this investigation of the film texture in a much more controlled way. That reached its peak with The Adjuster, which I now look at and kind of gasp at because it has reduced emotions to such a degree. I mean, these people are so gone, so beyond the point of return, it becomes absurd. A lot of the humour of the film is the result of how gone these people are.’6 As he also mentions, in an interview conducted while on location during the principal photography phase of the production, ‘This is a film where you can take chances.’7 Those chances, as we shall see as we examine the film in detail, were indeed taken and they are both considerable and engaging. Egoyan once rather wittily summarized The Adjuster this way: ‘I have made a film that concerns an insurance adjuster, some film censors, an ex-football player, an aspiring cheerleader, a podiatrist, an actress, a lamp merchant, a butterfly collector and the devoted staff of a large hotel,’ adding, ‘Everyone is doing what they are doing for a reason, which is never the reason. I wanted to make a film about believable people doing believable things in an unbelievable way.’8 His précis is accurate

43

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

and intriguing, but, leaving aside the question of believability, to locate ourselves with some degree of clarity in the thickets of narrative detail, a brief and more baldly expository summary of The Adjuster is required. Noah Render (Elias Koteas) is an insurance adjuster who processes victims’ claims and looks after their immediate material needs and comforts by putting them up in a hotel. Noah has sex with most of them and is seen as an angel, as a hero, by most of his clients as well as by the management and staff of the hotel. He himself lives in a desolate real estate development on the outskirts of Toronto with his ‘wife,’ Hera (Arsinée Khanjian), son, Simon (Armen Kokorian), and Hera’s sister, Seta (Rose Sarkysian). Hera is a censor who watches, and secretly records on her portable video camera, pornography for the purposes of recommending banning or cutting the films based on a set of criteria. Seta stays at home, mostly burning black and white photographs of her unidentified homeland. She also watches the pornographic material that Hera records and brings home to her. Elsewhere in the city, the couple Mimi (Gabrielle Rose) and Bubba (Maury Chaykin) enact theatrical sexual fantasies in the subway, in their mansion, on a football field, and, after Bubba shows up at the Renders’ house pretending to be a filmmaker who wants to shoot a scene there, in a home. At Hera’s workplace, she is discovered secretly videotaping the pornography she watches by a fellow censor, Tyler (Don McKellar), and is reported to the chief censor, Bert (David Hemblen). As her relationship with her colleagues grows more menacing, and Noah moves them into ‘his’ hotel when the film shoot begins with Mimi and Bubba, The Adjuster accelerates to its mysterious denouement. When Noah leaves in the middle of the night from his ‘family’s’ room to have sex with a male client, Hera, Seta, and Simon are seen leaving by taxi without him. Realizing they have gone when he returns to their now empty hotel room and thinking that they have returned to the house, he drives home to discover that Bubba is soaking the living room with gasoline while Mimi sings

44

4.1. Intimate detachment: Tom kisses Noah’s hand in the hotel room. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

in the shower upstairs. He asks Noah, ‘are you in, or are you out?’ as he prepares to strike a match. Noah stumbles backwards out of the house and watches it go up in flames as he studies the silhouette of his hand against the backdrop of his burning home. The film concludes with a sequence depicting the first time Noah met Hera, Seta, and Simon at the scene of their house burning to the ground. To describe the plot details of The Adjuster is, strangely, to risk reducing it to a mere skeletal narrative curiosity, to ‘render’ it an object worthy, perhaps, of some desultory, slightly morbid attention. This is arguably the case for most film descriptions, of course, but especially so in this instance. In this film it is not the events themselves that are dominant, but rather Egoyan’s construction of the contexts that inform them: professional, personal, historical, cultural, and their many combinations and permutations. The dramatic tensions and textures of The Adjuster inhabit the spaces between utter bewilderment and tentative steps towards comprehension, for characters and spectators alike. The film is structured in such a way as to dislocate us as we watch, to undermine our knowledge as we labour to apprehend just what is going on, and, in doing so, to illuminate our own processes of interpretation and the making of meaning. We are uncertain at the outset and we struggle to comprehend the often vague or outright opaque connections between the characters, the motivations of the characters, and the bizarre events themselves. In our encounter with the plot lines and characters of this film, we confront repeatedly the notion that ‘all is not quite what it seems.’ Beginning with The Adjuster, the experience of an Atom Egoyan film is, pace Samuel Taylor Coleridge, less one of a willing suspension of disbelief and more one of a willing desire to believe in or at least understand what is happening inside his idiosyncratic fictional universe. His skill as a dramatist, however, resides in resisting easy entry into this universe and its meanings. Instead, uncertainty is the primary source

46

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

of tension, onscreen and off. This primary strategy of uncertainty, of mystery, combined with a jigsaw puzzle narrative structure to contain and enact it, will be developed further in subsequent films. As he admits, ‘I’m fascinated by structures where the viewer is suddenly placed into a world where they have to try to put these pieces together.’9 He could very easily substitute ‘the viewer’ for ‘the character.’ In the case of The Adjuster, for nine-tenths of the film we are held in a kind of epistemological suspension, trying to discern what is taking place, as well as to locate our understanding and interpretation of the unfolding fiction. It is not until the 91st minute of this 102-minute film that the connections, or lack thereof, between the various characters begin to come into some kind of focus. This being an Egoyan film, however, it is only a partial clarity, which itself will generate many other questions. Questioning begins immediately. Rather than establishing the characters and elements of plot direction, as is conventional practice, the first few scenes in The Adjuster create questions and puzzles. Late at night, Noah is awake while Hera sleeps restlessly. He goes off to a fire and introduces himself to Arianne (Jennifer Dale), a woman whose house has burned. Immediately following this scene, Hera is on a subway train watching what appears to be a homeless person in some psychological distress. An apparently affluent woman in a red dress sits beside him, then takes his hand and presses it to her thigh and in towards her crotch, grinning maniacally. The next scene is of this subway ‘couple’ getting out of a chauffeur driven car at a mansion somewhere. (Is she taking him home? Are they related somehow? Are they brother and sister, husband and wife?And so on.) The fourth scene shows Hera in the screening room, where we hear sounds of a pornographic film off-screen, followed by Seta sifting through black and white photographs of a foreign land while Simon’s toy bear sings an inane tune in the foreground of the frame. In the first ten minutes, then, questions

47

4.2. Sexual theatrics in the subway: Bubba and Mimi. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

are already legion: What is happening? How are these people connected? Are they connected at all? Where is this going? It is this narrative technique that Egoyan employs throughout the film. The code to narrative events or narrative sequence is unclear. No sooner do we think that we know what is happening than something is revealed or takes place to force us to rethink our position as spectators. For example, when Bubba remarks cryptically to Noah that ‘it’s very special to have a sister,’ does this mean that Mimi is his sister? Did we not assume that she was his wife? Perhaps our previous ‘reading’ of Bubba and Mimi’s relationship was erroneous. What do we think about that? We are never entirely sure of the answer, as Egoyan leaves it as a hint only, an open-ended question. This also works within the fictional universe itself, when Arianne mentions to Noah that she saw the spark that would set her house ablaze and admits, to Noah’s puzzlement, that ‘something had to change, so I watched as it did.’ Even for Noah, or perhaps especially for Noah, ‘all is not as it seems.’ More dramatic still is the example delivered in the film’s closing sequence. In a sense, it is the The Adjuster’s narrative keystone pulled out and it brings the whole enigmatic edifice down upon us. While Noah watches the inferno unleashed by Bubba, Egoyan cuts to another house fire and its victims standing helplessly before it: Hera, Seta, and a baby, presumably Simon. Noah approaches them, puts his hand tentatively on Hera’s shoulder, and intones his practised introduction: ‘I’m an adjuster.’ In this sequence, most likely a flashback to when Noah first met them, everything we have seen throughout the film enters a new context, accompanied by a raft of new questions. Were they simply another case for Noah? Were they married at all? Were they a family? Was it all a game? A pretence? Did Simon’s father perish in that fire? Is this why Seta uses fire to destroy the photographs? Why did they leave Noah? Where have they gone? Questions without answers. We are left without details, and we must resort to conjectures

49

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

assembled from fragments of evidence in the rubble of alienation that is the world of Noah Render. These kinds of interpretive uncertainties dominate our experience of The Adjuster and give its fictional universe, already a lonely world of surface and simulacra, additional textures of mystery. This technique, this tension between disclosure and withholding, will inform the rest of the film and even enforce a particular kind of spectatorship. Best described as a process of retroactive certainty, however tenuous that certainty may actually be, the effect of Egoyan’s narrative design is to foreground one’s own processes of interpretation, to interrogate why we think what we think and when during the film, and, ultimately, to illuminate the problematic nature of our relationship to moving images. This relationship, at once intimate and detached, informs and complements the style and substance of The Adjuster’s haunting, layered, and labyrinthine narratives. Shooting for the first time in wide-screen format,10 Egoyan, with a nod to the considerable formal influence of Italian master Michaelangelo Antonioni,11 in attempting to connect these characters to one another visually registers and emphasizes not only the isolation between them, but also the dislocation of the spectator. There is so much empty space in the composition of the frames, and characters are often spatially separated within them. Bubba’s first arrival at the abandoned housing development, for example, is framed in long shot as he strides across a vast, empty landscape, utterly isolate; this is later repeated in an extreme long shot of him driving across the development to the Render’s house. Bubba and Mimi’s intimate distances are also amplified in the composition of the shots when he brings her to the football stadium for her cheerleader fantasy. Even in sequences dominated by medium shots, characters are placed at the edges of the frame. When Hera is explaining to Bert and Tyler why she records the films they watch, she is to the extreme left of the image, with the blur of background

50

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

activity at the censor offices comprising most of the image. When Noah and Arianne tour the wreckage of her home, they are placed at either edge of the frame, each framed by a separate, jagged hole in the wall of the destroyed structure. This consistency of this wide-screen aesthetic is also applied to closeups. Rather than visually articulating emotional intimacy, close-ups in The Adjuster reveal drift and disconnection. For example, the film starts with an extreme close up of Noah’s hand being lit through the skin by a flashlight he is shining into his palm. Given the size and scale of the anamorphic image, the effect is disorienting. What we are looking at appears in the dim light as abstract, unidentifiable. The extreme intimacy of the shot is exaggerated by its sheer magnitude. Furthermore, as it is a scene shot at night, it is difficult to register what it is we are actually seeing, a motif that recurs at many levels throughout the film. In perhaps the most effective, and strangely moving, example is when Bubba describes what his ‘film’ is about to Noah and Hera in a distant, disjointed, elliptical, poignant, monologue about the spaces between people. From the opening frames of the film to the final shot of Noah’s hand held up to the fire, Egoyan uses wide screen as an instrument of dislocation and disorientation. Its expansive surfaces express the condition of the characters’ physical isolation without and, in virtually all cases, emotional desolation within. Isolation. Desolation. Disconnection. Egoyan’s work searches for the sources of alienation, tries to locate them, to account for them in the cultural and social contexts that produce and perpetuate them. It asks: how does this happen? In Egoyan’s films, identities appear mutable, occasionally ephemeral, and always mysterious. In The Adjuster, as in the trio of films that preceded it, the characters appear not to be living but rather ‘performing’ their lives, as though this performance will somehow connect them to an authentic life. As Egoyan relates, ‘the principle by which I construct my films is based very much on the notion of char-

51

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

acters in the late twentieth century being completely overwhelmed by their place in a society which is constructed on image. The whole delineation of personality and the conduct of personality through the society become very precarious. It becomes difficult to distinguish between natural patterns of behavior which represent our true intentions and patterns of behavior which we create to represent our intentions as we believe will best serve our image.’12 Consciously or not, then, Egoyan’s characters are involved in gestures of pretence. Some are themselves screen actors; others perform ‘in character’ telephone sex and escort services; others, in the case of Peter Foster, pretend they are long lost sons. With varying degrees of intensity, they are committed to pretence as a mode of being. This confusion of the real and the imaginary, the conflation of professional codes of conduct (and in Noah’s case, in the act of utterance itself) with one’s ‘natural patterns of behavior’ and ‘true intentions,’ is the infrastructure of the profound alienation experienced by the characters in The Adjuster. It is an approach to character rooted in Egoyan’s interest in theatre: ‘Absurdist drama was something that informed the early films. I was fascinated by the harnessing of lunacy and despair, by the rituals that characters devised to deal with their pain or trauma. You see that absurdist influence (Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter) in a film like The Adjuster – the use of repetition, role-playing, compulsive behavior that touches on the violent and the grotesque.’13 Noah Render is indisputably one of the most alienated characters in Egoyan’s filmography and, indeed, in all of Canadian cinema. Since, or perhaps because of, English-speaking Canada’s slow and sporadic arrival into the world of fiction feature films (which themselves are marginalized in their own country), male protagonists in Canadian cinema are generally weak, bewildered, benumbed, and remote figures of failure. In fact, the so-called loser cycle14 of films of the 1960s and 1970s struck the fatalist template that remains the predominant one for most Cana-

52

4.3. Bubba and Mimi on the set of their ‘film.’ Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

dian films made since. From the thwarted rebellion of the adolescent Peter in Don Owen’s Nobody Waved Good-bye in 1964 to the downbeat ‘miserablism’ of the films of Don Shebib, particularly Goin’ Down The Road (1970) and Between Friends (1973), protagonists in English-speaking Canadian cinema are invariably defeated by fate, circumstance, or their own excesses of pride, greed, or more obscure personality defects. Many are downright delusional, like Rick Dillon in Peter Pearson’s Paperback Hero (1973), Max Renn in Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), Henry Adler in David Wellington’s I Love A Man In Uniform (1993), and virtually all of the lonely, drifting figures in the films of Guy Maddin. The examples are legion and speak to larger Canadian attitudes towards individualism, the realities of worldly power, and the limitations of a personal agency in a largely communitarian social culture. Notions of heroism and individual agency are the antitheses of those to be found in Hollywood, as if Canadian filmmakers want to establish a counter-myth of the hero to the American triumphant individualist prototype. Noah Render is one of many, coming from a long, sad parade of Canadian men whom the world, fate, or circumstances always outwit, always defeat. They can’t make it here. They can’t make it anywhere. Working within this tradition while redefining it, Egoyan has relocated Noah’s condition of alienation to the psychological and emotional interior of his protagonist. In other words, unlike the uber-‘loser cycle’ film, Goin’ Down The Road (1970), with its ragged figures, Pete and Joey, who leave Cape Breton to strike it rich in Toronto but do not, Noah is not a failure as an insurance adjuster; the opposite is the case, to the point where he keeps an entire hotel filled with very satisfied clients who cheerfully greet him when he visits. Noah’s alienation is at once deeper and more obscure. He is, in Egoyan’s phrase, an ‘angel of rematerialization,’ a quasi-mystical or mythical biblical healer who will ‘render’ things right again. At the same time, he is also an utter cipher, a man without qualities; indeed, as Egoyan describes him, Noah is ‘A

54

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

person who could only exist when other people projected something onto to him, when they projected their need onto him, otherwise he was just this shell.’15 It is precisely this shell that fascinates. Initially, Noah appears preternaturally kind, compassionate, and caring. His words, his body language, his intonation that sounds like a form of incantation seem to express genuine concern. As the film progresses, these words are repeated by rote and attain through their repetition an abstract, remote quality, the very professionalized hollow diction devoid of meaning so perceptively explored elsewhere in, as one example, the films of Stanley Kubrick. As he speaks to client after client (Arianne, Tom, Lorraine, Larry, and Matthew), the words detach from their meanings and become performance, expressing nothing but the mask of their champion performer: ‘You may not know it yet, but you’re in a state of shock.’ Words speaking of intimate comfort yet arriving as if from an infinite distance. Noah appears to exist somewhere between intimacy and detachment, perhaps on a self-styled spiritual plane, as he has no hesitation to accept a kiss of gratitude on the hand from Tom (Gerard Parkes) after having slept with Tom’s wife, Lorraine (Patricia Collins). The most obvious, revealing, absurdist example of this duality occurs with Noah and Arianne in a hotel room, itself a space of both anonymity and intimacy, having sex while discussing details relating to her insurance claim. The source of Noah’s alienation is not explained or explored: is it a result of some previous trauma in his life (as is the case of characters in Next of Kin, Family Viewing, Speaking Parts, and especially in Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, and, in terms of collective trauma, Ararat), or is it some erotic form of deformation professionelle? Again, we are left to wonder, to speculate. Like almost all the characters on this Noah’s ‘ark,’ Noah himself is unknowable. In this sense, the adjuster character thoroughly embodies The Adjuster the film and our frustrating and intriguing experience of its epistemological puzzles and culs-de-sac.

55

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

The same problem of knowledge applies to Bubba and Mimi. Their status as a couple is dubious and their language seems to arrive from across vast distances. The influence of Beckett and Pinter is much in evidence throughout the film, but is acutely present in what these two characters say to each other and, in Bubba’s case, to no one in particular. The discussions about cleaning the body and its decay are decidedly Beckettian,16 as is Bubba’s ghostly, drifting monologue that invokes images of time’s passage, memory, desire, and resignation to the absurdity of one’s predicament. Beyond their use of language, of course, are their remarkable actions. Staging sexual ‘events’ to indulge and please Mimi, as he does not appear to derive any pleasure from them, Bubba performs as a vagrant on a subway, a pimp to a football team, and a film director renting the Render house as a set for what appears to be a pornographic suburban housewife fantasy involving barely adolescent boys. Why are they doing these things? Why does Bubba incinerate them both and the Render residence at the film’s conclusion? The alienation is as profound as its sources are opaque. Such gaps are the grammar of The Adjuster’s narrative language. In constructing the film this way, Egoyan has radically alienated characters located within a film that radically alienates the spectator. This alienation appears as a general condition in this film, a profound malaise whose symptoms are evidence of a world lost in labyrinths of its own devising, a materialist culture constructed upon a now corroding foundation of artifice, pretence, and image. It is a distressed, panic-stricken world that is barely controlling itself, struggling to contain its angst by clinging to rituals and conventions of what late-twentieth-century North American society regards as normal. Furthermore, the condition is so extreme that empirical knowledge itself is in crisis: what one sees is not necessarily what is there. The actual has collapsed into the artificial. Artifice is everywhere in The Adjuster. From the compulsive sexual theatrics of Mimi and Bubba’s ‘performances,’ to Noah and Hera’s mod-

56

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

el home with fake books on its bookshelves, to the abandoned development’s billboards depicting happy families and the notion of living in houses with titles that invoke (adding still another level of dislocation while slyly alluding to Canada’s colonial past) gentrified life in rural England, to even Noah and Hera’s ‘marriage’ and ‘family,’ everything is artificial, not as it seems. These are images, not realities. Distinguishing between the two is the source of crisis within the film and is the primary, and somewhat daunting, task of the spectator. As in all his other films, Egoyan here probes the nature, function, and significance of images, static and moving, and connects this investigation of the image and image-making to all the other artifices and pretences at play in The Adjuster. Noah Render uses images as a means to assign monetary value to objects pictured within the photographs of his clients. In a strange perversion of John Grierson’s empirical documentary idea of the image as truth, Noah regards the photographic image as concrete evidence to assist him in the completion of his ‘Schedule of Loss’ insurance claim forms. His relationship to these photographs could not be more ontologically certain. Scanning the surface of a provocative nude photo of one member of the gay couple, he observes calmly, ‘It doesn’t show much of the background.’ This is precisely because Noah himself cannot see context or background, as he is caught up in a kind of temporal labyrinth of the eternal present, a character with no history. Value does not reside in people’s emotions and histories, nor can it be perceived in images of their lives. For example, when examining the picture of the gay man’s beloved and now deceased dog, he asks dispassionately about how much it had cost and whether or not it was a purebred animal. Elsewhere, back at the fake family ‘home,’ Seta’s ritualistic burning of photographs of her faraway homeland is rooted in more complex notions of memory, history, and identity. Relocated to a society where the promiscuous, obsessive production and consumption of domestic images (photographs, home video, et al.) is

57

4.4. Image and value: ‘It doesn’t show much of the background,’ observes Noah. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

understood as a process of preserving memory, Seta’s destruction is both a gesture of her alienation and, arguably, her resistance to assimilation. She is sanctifying and strengthening her memory and identity as she sacrifices images of her history. Bubba’s engagement with the image, meanwhile, involves producing images with his still camera and, putatively, with his motion picture camera for his ‘film.’ (We are never really certain if he is actually a filmmaker.) Less a recorder of images of places he likes than someone projecting his own fantasies of ‘beautiful families’ into his camera (we recall his slide projections of the Render house onto the body of Mimi at their banquet fantasy), Bubba has a more sinister relationship with the image, for, through his gaze, he is seeing nothing and imagining everything. He may even be lying, using the process of taking pictures to convey his admiration for the Renders in order to persuade them to let him into their house. In a society that has domesticated the camera and regards ‘taking pictures’ as harmless fun, Bubba’s shooting photos inside the Render bedroom of the sleeping Hera, Simon, and Seta is a clever strategy. It is also psychotic. Given Egoyan’s previous films, which liberally incorporate alternative forms of moving image production, specifically video, it is atypical that the moving-image forms present in The Adjuster’s narrative go largely unseen. When Hera is watching various pornographic films in the screening room at the censor board, for example, only the soundtrack of the films is heard. Egoyan does not show any images from the films themselves. Similarly, during Seta’s obsessive home consumption of the pornography on tapes provided by Hera, images are not seen; only sounds are heard. If any images exist from Bubba and Mimi’s film, a highly unlikely prospect but possible, they are never seen. This repeated denial of the visual replicates, even dramatically enacts in some sense, the very idea of censorship as a crime of epistemology, a withholding of knowledge by some against the many. We can only imagine what Hera is seeing and, by extension, what will be excised by the cen-

59

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

sors, ensuring that we will never see what they have seen. This, as Amy Taubin comments, ‘heightens our awareness of our own voyeurism by refusing to let us see.’17 As employees at the censor board casually toss forbidden still images into bins for destruction and films are subjected to cuts according to criteria that Tyler recites by rote (the actual rules of the Ontario Film Classification Board at that time), Egoyan’s film raises serious questions about the socio-political implications of such authorized procedures of constructing the forbidden. Just what is our relationship to images of sexuality, to images of the forbidden? What is the motivation for Hera to secretly record what only censors are supposed to see? Is it the case that, as she explains to Bert after Tyler discovers and reports her recording, she simply wants her sister to know what she is doing at work? Or is it because, as Bert admits about himself and argues that she is the same, the material is sexually arousing? ‘It’s normal,’ he intones, and is angered by her refusal to affirm his position, sending Tyler on a mission of sexual assault on Hera during a subsequent screening session. At the moment of Tyler’s advance and sudden contact on her inner thigh, a gesture that recalls Bubba’s clutching of Mimi’s thigh on the subway, Hera stands up and, laughing and weeping simultaneously, the unspooling images of the film they are watching flutter and flicker across her face, the images of sexualized bodies and an actual body layered upon each other: a palimpsest of desire, degradation, fantasy, and power. It is a striking moment in The Adjuster, a collision of image and reality, at once collapsing them into each other and dramatically underlining the vast distance between the two. Significantly, there is one sequence in The Adjuster where what is on a screen is not withheld. It is a brief scene, but it holds considerable significance and contains a number of elegant ironies. Near the end of the film, Noah and Arianne are lying down together in her hotel room after she has met his ‘family’ in the restaurant. She is asleep, and Noah is

60

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

watching television. He is watching Suzanne, a film produced during the Tax Shelter Era starring Arianne (actually, it stars Jennifer Dale who is playing Arianne).18 Her appearance on the screen excites Noah because now he perceives Arianne to have more value. While she sleeps, he kisses her hand while he watches her on the screen that has endowed her with more significance, more currency, as it were, for Noah. Not unlike his ‘reading’ of still photos for the monetary value of objects in the photographs themselves, Noah’s relationship to motion pictures clearly works in the same fashion. In a totally commercial movie intended by its makers to entertain, Noah, perhaps in some perverse sense appropriately for his character, sees nothing but another kind of ledger giving value to Arianne. Suzanne’s appearance in The Adjuster is Egoyan’s self-conscious reference19 to the Tax Shelter Era, a period in which a film such as The Adjuster would most likely never have been supported, as it would have been deemed ‘uncommercial’ and not ‘audience friendly,’ terms that did and still do have a censorial power in the film production sector. As a Canadian independent filmmaker of the immediate post-Tax Shelter generation, Egoyan’s insertion of this sequence from an actual and dreadful example of ‘commercial’ filmmaking in Canada not only adds evidence for Noah’s myopia, but also subtly critiques the persistent attitude towards filmmaking in Canada that favours the production of imitations of American-style films to achieve commercial success. At several levels, then, inside the frame and outside the frame, this short sequence offers rich ironies about Noah’s relationship to images and also that relationship as expressed by Canadian commercial film producers. In a film about alienation, dislocation, and the image, with its many functions and multiple meanings, Egoyan also explores the role of the physical body in these strange social and emotional landscapes. As Beckett writes, ‘First the body. No. First the place.’ In The Adjuster, it is the context of the body, its placements and displacements, that domi-

61

4.5. Image and body: Mimi bathed in Bubba’s photographs of the Render home. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

nates its meaning. Nothing is organically situated in this lonely world of artifices, in these labyrinths of solitude where characters travel by themselves – Seta, Arianne, the Wild Man of the Billboards (Paul Bettis), and Louise the hotel maid (Jacqueline Samuda) – or in tenuous pairings always in which each partner is separate in some profound way (Noah and Hera, Tom and Lorraine, Mimi and Bubba, the gay couple). Examples of this bodily alienation are legion. The bodies in the pornographic films are reified commodities performing touch, simulating intimate contact with professional detachment, much like Noah with Arianne and, presumably, with Lorraine and Matthew, both of whom he has sex with. Hera’s podiatrist (John Gilbert) touches her foot afflicted with warts, but dispassionately. Noah and Bubba touch each others’ shoulders and arms awkwardly after their verbal agreement to allow the film to be shot in the Render residence. Tom kisses Noah’s hand and Lorraine sleeps with him, but both are curt and dismissive once their claim is processed. Louise reveals that the prostitution of her body is an economic necessity, stating that ‘The night is too long for kind souls.’ Mimi’s sexual scenes are parodies of intimacy and carnal contact. Elsewhere, the separation of the body from the physical world is invoked when Noah is called an ‘angel.’ Perhaps the one character who is in direct contact with his body is the Wild Man, who masturbates outside the full-length window of the living room where Seta watches pornography, but even his bodily performance is isolated, behind glass, and somehow desperate. Shocked to see an actual body in a sexual aspect outside her window, Seta, dressed in a suggestive negligee, is inert as she watches a torrent of sexual imagery, in some sense as if as her body does not exist. Mimi says of the body in the shower that ‘it must be the touching’ that makes people want to sing. This is a world in which the characters can make bodily contact only in the most extreme and alienated contexts and places. They have lost their bodies, have somehow drifted away from them as the primary source of identity and

63

4.6. Constructing the forbidden: Bert and Tyler, the censors. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

4.7. Abducting the forbidden: Hera secretly records pornographic images. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

medium of human contact. ‘First the body. No. First the place.’ In this light, Noah’s ultimate gesture, perhaps, can be read as a confused and desperate attempt to discover and recover his body by holding his hand to the flames of his burning house, his ‘place.’ As Geoff Pevere observes, the conflagration is a critical moment in a film where nobody lives at home, ‘leaving Noah to contemplate the only dwelling he’s got left: his body.’20 We shall never know. Perhaps tangentially but certainly insistently in Egoyan’s first three features, notions of body and home revolve around the idea of ethnicity. As we have seen, questions of ethnicity and Canada’s increasingly multi-ethnic society certainly have fascinated and informed Egoyan’s early films, whether in comedic or seriously dramatic contexts. In them he has explored not only the rich social and individual possibilities of the idea of ethnicity, however defined, but also its problematic complexities as a mode of individual or collective identification and affiliation. Ethnicity is unquestionably a factor, but it is not necessarily the determining agent of identity in Egoyan’s cinema. Interestingly, and perhaps consistent with The Adjuster’s identification of a much broader cross-cultural malaise of materialism in multi-ethnic Canada and North America, this film does not foreground questions of ethnicity as dramatically as its three predecessors. As Egoyan mentions about the casting of Elias Koteas as Noah, he was pleased that Koteas’s appearance and that of Arsinée Khanjian’s were sufficiently similar to avoid obvious tensions or signifiers of ‘ethnicity’ in The Adjuster. ‘These people visually look like a couple. In most of the films I’ve had there’s been this weird sense of a classically WASP person with someone from a different, sort of Semitic background. One of the things that’s been a really incredibly exciting surprise to me is that these people look like they’re from the same background. So, there’s not this sense, as there is in the other films, that there’s a cultural alienation taking place. It’s within one context.’21 The dramatic spine of this film, unlike Next of Kin and Family View-

65

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

ing especially, has little to do with specific explorations of ethnic difference or various exilic or displaced states of being, as it seems everyone is displaced or exiled in some sense in The Adjuster. Not that it entirely ignores the subject. The very presence of Hera, Seta, and Simon in Noah’s life obviously refers to an otherness, exotic or otherwise, that exists. It also registers, forcefully but not insistently, that theirs is an outsider’s gaze. They do not speak English and are isolated from the Canadian society around them, although that society itself is depicted as profoundly adrift and confused about its own whereabouts. In their silences, perhaps, resides a contrast to the cacophony of the North American world, but this point is not pursued or fetishized, but rather is registered as a cultural difference. Aside from Simon’s largely silent observation of the world he is moving through, Seta’s connection, a strangely bodily one, to what her sister does may or may not be informed by her ethnic otherness in this place at this time. It remains more a question of epistemology than, strictly speaking, one of ethnic otherness, as this theme is not fully developed in The Adjuster. In another departure reflected in this his fourth feature, then, Egoyan collapses these questions of ethnicity, fetishized or not, into the larger, seemingly pan-cultural and pan-ethnic alienating and arguably homogenizing processes of materialism. When we return to the problematic and intriguing process of locating oneself as a spectator in this particular Egoyan fictional space, let alone consider how the characters themselves navigate their way, it is helpful to revisit a recurrent thematic preoccupation and narrative trope to be found in virtually every Atom Egoyan film: trauma. For example, what animates the Deryan family’s belief in Next of Kin that Peter is their son is the painful experience of having left their child behind before coming to Canada. In Family Viewing, the twin traumas of Van – an absent mother and a grandmother in a shabby nursing home – can be understood to account for his often murky motivations. The death

66

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

of Clara’s brother despite her having donated her own lung to him propels Speaking Parts. In Exotica, the death of Francis’s daughter traumatizes him and this informs his entire being. The overarching traumatic experience of the school bus accident in The Sweet Hereafter is of a communal nature and informs all of what is done and said. The many entangled responses to another general but specifically located trauma, the Armenian genocide, are the engines of Ararat’s overlapping interrogations of history and identity. In Adoration, teenaged Simon’s existential internet excursions and familial struggles are enacted against the backdrop of the death of his parents. In The Adjuster, however, the sense of trauma is as pervasive as its effects on character motivation are vague. Everyone in this film, it seems, is coping with trauma, with something that has gone awry, with an unaccountable sadness. These characters are responding to some things, or not responding to other things, and we cannot readily comprehend why or how. This narrative atmosphere is dense and heavy with the traumatic from, obviously, the families living at the hotel as their postdisaster realities are negotiated, to Mimi and Bubba’s fantasy fetishes (just why are they engaging in these activities is another answered question), to Noah’s own peculiar remoteness (what has happened to him to make him this way?). The Absurdist influence on Egoyan has never been more pronounced than in this film, as the general atmosphere of post-traumatic consciousness has never been less connected in his narratives to character action, motivation, or consciousness. In contrast to his previous and subsequent films, not even at the most basic levels can we account for, or locate, the principal characters in relation to some terrible or troubling incident that has deformed them. In the world of The Adjuster, literal and metaphorical trauma, or post-trauma, is a state of being, not a dominant narrative device. It not only adds another layer to the many levels of alienation the film explores, but also identifies a subtly satirical element in The Adjuster that connects it to the Absurdist

67

4.8. Ashes of change: Arianne in her charred home. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

dramatists Egoyan counts among his chief artistic influences. Cinematically speaking, it also places this film, more than any other of his works, in the company of Stanley Kubrick and, especially, Luis Buñuel, both of whose films offer up paradoxical combinations of cinematic formal authority with uncertainty-driven narratives that critique, or satirically detonate, cultures and societies that themselves subscribe to authoritarian, totalizing systems of thought. What exactly is Egoyan satirizing? In general terms, it is a technologically dominated and utterly materialist society that has become historically deracinated and emotionally stunted. As Egoyan mentions, ‘This film is really dealing with the crisis of what it means to live a life that is based entirely on objects, where everything is about sort of a materialist impulse, not only your attachment to objects and to life style, but when you apply materialist approach to other people, when you begin to see other people as being attachments to your life as opposed to other souls that you need to find for communication or an emotional connection to … it’s a world in which emotional attachments are secondary to figurative ones.’22 This is a world in which characters relate to one another almost exclusively through external objects and media: money, property, pornography, cameras, the cinematic apparatus itself, the legalese of insurance policies, and the ledger. Egoyan’s depiction of a society constructed in such a fashion reveals vast fissures in this world’s interpersonal, collective, ethnic, and individual psychological landscapes. His satire resides in this exaggerated, alienated world that is, à la Buñuel and Kubrick, both recognizable and extreme, at once familiar and strange. As Egoyan himself noted while shooting the film, ‘It’s absurd and it’s extreme but it is within the realm of reality.’23 Specifically, it is Noah Render who emerges as a satirical figure, as he embodies these fissures, this lack, this remarkable disaffiliation and disconnection caused by imagining the world in materialist terms only. In addition to his membership in that huge and disappointing fraternity

69

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

of male protagonists in Canadian cinema, Noah resembles many characters from international cinema. One thinks of the host of alienated, amoral men adrift in the stark cinema of Antonioni and, in particular, as Egoyan has admitted as an inspiration, of the ‘visitor’ in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), who sleeps with and destabilizes an entire haute-bourgeoisie Italian family. There are others, but the most intriguing, perhaps, is Father Nazario from Luis Buñuel’s satirical parable about the politics of altruism, Nazarin (1958). Like Nazario, who leaves his parish to go out into the Mexican countryside to live according to the teachings of Christ, Noah also imagines the world according the language of his profession: he speaks by rote, chapter and verse as it were. Distant descendants of Don Quixote, both experience the harsh and confusing disparity between the world as it is written in bibles and insurance policies and the world as it is experienced in the impoverished villages and towns of Mexico and in the distressed urban realities of late twentiethcentury Toronto. Like that of Buñuel, Egoyan’s satire is not without compassion: Noah, like Nazario, is at some level a product and a victim of his misplaced, confused, and commodified notions of altruism. The satirical elements of The Adjuster are announced in some fashion by the nomenclature Egoyan employs. As in the traditions of Juvenalian satire, the commedia dell’arte, and Restoration Comedy, Egoyan’s character names connote, and in some cases denote, sometimes ironically, their dominant traits. Noah Render invokes the Old Testament character from Genesis, of course, whose ark saved humans and animals from the apocalyptic diluvial rains, while the surname’s many meanings include ‘to cause to be or become: make,’ ‘to give or pay in return for or as a thing to do,’ ‘to give assistance,’ and, significantly, ‘to represent or portray artistically.’24 All of these multiple meanings are in some fashion executed or embodied, literally and figuratively, by Egoyan’s protagonist. The name of Hera, meanwhile, is a classical allusion to the wife of Zeus, who is worshipped as the queen of heaven and as a goddess

70

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

of marriage. Hera lives in a parody of such meanings, both in relation to her omnipotent ‘husband,’ who shoots arrows out of windows like some mythic hunter, and in the tenuous constitution of her marriage to Noah. Also rooted in classical mythology is the name of Arianne, a French variant of Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos, who fell in love with Theseus and helped him to escape the Labyrinth and the Minotaur.25 Arianne, in allowing her house to burn down because something ‘needed to change,’ is arguably the one character who seems capable of navigating her way out of the emotional, spiritual impasse of materialism. Mimi and Bubba are infantilist nicknames, connoting not only the intimacy of such naming, but also a temporal rupture in these two adults who, in their speech and demeanour, seem to be regressing into some childlike state, however perverted by adult sexual fantasy and activity. The other and more minor figures in the film have singular, unattached first names only, suggesting a lack of affiliation beyond the temporary space they inhabit in the hotel or the screening room: Tom, Lorraine, Louise, Bert, Tyler, the gay couple (Larry and Matthew), and the masturbating Wild Man, whose names are not spoken onscreen. Seta and Simon are similarly disaffiliated, with the additional distancing effect of our mistaking them for being Noah’s ‘family’ before the film’s final revelation of the actual origins of their arrival in Noah’s world. As a satire on North American26 materialism, The Adjuster is a searching, if occasionally enervating, critique of a society and culture that, to borrow Bubba’s fractured phraseology, ‘has everything it wants but not what it needs.’ This critique is indirect, however, as Egoyan is not diagnosing the specific source of the consumer materialistic society, but rather is examining its various and largely debilitating effects on those who imagine they live in a free and open society. In this spiritually and emotionally attenuated world, these characters, when not trying to escape into fantasy (as in the barely repressed panics of Mimi and Bubba’s ‘performances’), seem to be unconsciously surrendering to an array of

71

4.9. ‘Are you in or are you out?’ Bubba’s endgame. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude

distant systems of epistemological authority: insurance policies, government censorship, and the generalized and pervasive secular religion of economics. Options everywhere seem constricted, closed down. Value is derived from money and only money. It is a desperate, existentially inauthentic world of stasis, solitude, and profound boredom, which, perhaps, can be redeemed only by fire, the film’s most insistent and elemental image. Flames are everywhere. They flicker across the faces of Noah and his clients at the scenes of their houses burning down; they appear at the grand dinner as flambé desserts, as Mimi struts across the table; they blacken the images of home and history as Seta burns her photographs; they appear on the prayer cards made by the hotel manager (Tony Nardi) as a heart in flames, the same flaming heart motif that will appear on Bubba’s film production jackets, suggesting that perhaps ‘Flaming Hearts’ is the title of his film. The heart in flames is a medieval symbol of Christ’s sacrifice and purification of a sinful world by fire.27 On the prayer cards and on Bubba’s jackets, this image is completely secularized and relocated from its religious symbolic context, yet it suggests the idea, at least, of the redemptive, purifying power of fire in the strange fallen world of The Adjuster. Given Bubba’s and Mimi’s interest in cleansing (although it is discussed in terms of another element, water), it is not surprising that Bubba’s endgame murder-suicide ritual of purification, when he decides to ‘stop playing house,’ will be executed with fire. The final, ambiguous image in the film is of Noah’s hand held up to the flames now consuming his model ‘home.’ Is this an image of purification? Is Noah to become reconnected with the world now that he has lost this world of artifices? Is his hand, the professional hand that proffered the touch of consolation on hundreds of clients’ bodies, the would-be Hand of Fate invoked in the Fatima hanging from his car’s rear-view mirror,28 now transformed and re-animated by this fire? As with so much in this film, we simply do not know.

73

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

Indeed, not knowing is an intrinsic part of the experience of The Adjuster. The characters, minor and major, are largely unknowable, functioning at a certain level as abstractions in an absurdist satirical drama. Dramatic situations arrive without clear histories or contexts, and the connections between characters, particularly in the first fifteen minutes when such things are usually established in films, are either vague or non-existent. Egoyan’s dramatic strategy is to place the spectator in a position similar to that of his characters, one of epistemological jeopardy: clients wait as their policies are settled by remote insurance companies; society at large is prevented from seeing certain imagery by censors and thus will never know what is missing; characters are unsure of each other’s motivations and observe one another carefully; we are mystified by the relationships between the characters and, when we think we know what is happening, it is subsequently revealed that we did not. Having structured uncertainty into the film in such a manner – and this is more than a trick of storytelling – Egoyan underscores not only the sheer mystery of other people, but also the essential vigilance one must maintain in a contemporary world of surface, pretence, and artifice. We must adjust our ways of seeing that world and, by extension, our ways of seeing cinema. Not knowing is a way to begin.

74

5

Arrivals

But don’t be put off by solemn reviews: The Adjuster is a movie that’s full of smiles and chuckles.1

It is a measure of the critical and international festival success of Egoyan’s first three features that, even before The Adjuster was fully completed, two sections of the prestigious Cannes film festival were inviting the film to be in one of their official selections at the 1991 edition. The programming heads of both the Un certain regard and Quinzaine des realisateurs sections asked Egoyan to place his film in their respective sections of the festival. By now very experienced (Speaking Parts was at Cannes in 1989) and very savvy in the game of positioning a film in the appropriate section of a film festival for maximum impact, Egoyan chose the Quinzaine, a part of the Cannes festival that has traditionally emphasized and promoted auteurist cinema. The Adjuster had its world premiere in Cannes in May 1991. International critical response to the film at Cannes was mixed. While very impressed with the visual style of The Adjuster, Variety’s review argued, ‘In an escalating quest for eccentricity, however, Egoyan’s analysis of voyeurism is becoming shallow,’ adding about Mimi and Bubba, ‘Their characters have potential that the script never devel-

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

ops.’ Ultimately, the reviewer describes the film’s surface and promptly judges it only at that level: ‘At no point does the viewer ever gain indepth knowledge of any character in the film (a vast departure from the detailed caricatures in Family Viewing).’2 Derek Malcolm of British newspaper The Guardian presents a similar critical perspective, noting in his generally positive overview of the 1991 Cannes festival, ‘there were disappointments, too. Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster was a beautifully shot but almost impenetrable story by this talented Canadian director.’3 The important French cinema journal, Cahiers du cinéma, offered dismissive remarks about Egoyan’s being a second-rate David Lynch.4 On the other hand, the French newspaper Liberation praised the film for its artistry, and influential American critics David Ansen and Richard Corliss, of Newsweek and Time magazines, respectively, considered it to be one of the best films shown at Cannes that year.5 Regardless of the lack of a critical consensus, The Adjuster was sold at Cannes to a significant American distributor, Orion Classics.6 Distribution rights to the film were also sold to France, the United Kingdom, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Korea, Italy, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In addition to generating impressive world sales, the film was invited to literally dozens of smaller international film festivals, from Spain to New Zealand, Russia, and Australia. A few months after Cannes, in fact, the film travelled to the Moscow International Film Festival in July, in that festival’s official competition. It won second prize and prompted one Russian film writer to give it a very special critical designation. Baffled by its ellipses and mysteries, critic Marina Murzina asks, ‘Is it a thriller? Is it a psychological (family or social) drama? No – it’s neither one nor the other. This professionally shot, introspective and multi-layered film could have been pure art. But as it is, one can only say, ‘Oh, what strange cinema …’ She concludes by describing it as ‘a ‘UCO,’ an ‘unidentified cinematic object.’7 Arriving in Canada having already gained considerable international

76

Arrivals

attention, The Adjuster made its Canadian debut at the Festival of Festivals in Toronto (now known as the Toronto International Film Festival) in September 1991. It was the awarded the Toronto City Prize for Best Canadian Film, with a cash prize of $25,000. Upon receiving the award, Egoyan, in an echo of Wim Wenders’s gesture towards him four years earlier in Montreal, gave his money to fellow Canadian filmmaker, John Pozer, whose film The Grocer’s Wife, which Egoyan greatly admired, was also in the festival . The Adjuster went on to win two prizes at the Cinefest in Sudbury, Ontario, as well as the Golden Spike prize at the 1991 Valladolid Film Festival in Spain, which was shared with Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise. Surprisingly, the film received only one nomination, for Best Director, at the annual Canadian film industry awards ceremony, the Genie Awards. Egoyan did not win. Immediately after its presentation at the Festival of Festivals, The Adjuster was released commercially in several art-house cinemas in Toronto on 16 September 1991. Contemporary Canadian reviews of the film express responses similar to those of the international critics. The Toronto Star’s Craig MacInnis describes it as ‘dark, dangerous … and fiendishly funny,’8 while the Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen observes, ‘All this is splendidly intricate … The Adjuster makes us think a lot and feel a little, yet not intensely, not passionately,’ adding that, as a writer, ‘he still has some way to go.’9 Alex Patterson of Eye magazine in Toronto offers a similar perspective: ‘Egoyan has still not overcome the tendency of his characters to seem less like real people than representative types, and his plots less like credible events than hypothetical constructs.’10 Bruce Kirkland of the Toronto Sun was less reserved in his admiration, ‘The Adjuster is an insight into the emotional machinations of our chaotic society: it explores our sexual mores, it examines the tenuous nature of human relationships under stress,’ concluding by arguing, ‘it also offers a break from the obvious that we usually watch. All The Adjuster needs to play on our consciousness is a slight attitude adjustment.’11

77

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

In Montreal, Huguette Roberge of La Presse found it an original subject masterfully realized,12 while the Montreal Gazette’s John Griffin had no problems with the alienated atmosphere of the film, stating, ‘Canada’s most obviously brainy filmmaker scrambles existential creepiness with a strange germ of humour in what – for Atom Egoyan – amounts to his most accessible film ever.’13 In Vancouver, meanwhile, the same hestitations about the distanced fictional world of the film challenged critics. The Vancouver Sun’s Elizabeth Aird observes: ‘It’s technically and intellectually brilliant, and about as elegant as film-making gets. But it is distanced, it is ironic and it can’t possibly capture a heart.’14 In Egoyan’s home city, Victoria, the response is familiar: ‘Like dry martinis, bebop and abstract art, the films of Atom Egoyan are an acquired taste … Egoyan’s mesmerizing, multi-layered film is indeed bewildering in that it doesn’t come close to equating the linear style of the Hollywood comedies (even the darkest ones) that is so familiar … It’s his most polished and technically impressive work so far, and his most emotionally involving … It’s a hypnotic, Rubik’s Cube of a film that brims with symbolism, visual puns and a peculiar gallery of obsessive characters.’15 In a cinematic culture rooted in traditions of documentary realism, these reviews are perhaps not surprising in their ambivalence to Egoyan’s more abstract, absurdist style. Regardless of how much they admire the craft of the work, the effects of the alienated world of The Adjuster flummox and frustrate certain kinds of spectatorship. Overall, the film’s Canadian box office grosses from 1 January to 31 December 1992 totalled $99,426.16 Its release to a relatively high number of cities and towns in Canada, however, itself is significant in the history of Canadian cinema. Thanks to its distribution deal with Orion Classics, The Adjuster also had, for a Canadian film at least, almost unprecedented presence on American screens. Before its commercial release in 1992, the American premiere took place in late September 1991 at the New York Film Fes-

78

Arrivals

tival. Arriving on American art-house screens in the spring of 1992, the film encountered both salutary and savage reviews. Influential Chicago critic Roger Ebert embraced its riddles and narrative games: ‘What is interesting is how Egoyan creates this intensely personal universe while at the same time making a movie that is funny and challenging. He isn’t one of those directors who delights in confusion and frustration. When he shows us something we cannot understand, and then pulls back to explain it, he takes the same delight in his revelation as a magician would – or a silent comedian like Buster Keaton. That’s why the movie is so consistently entertaining. Instead of just sitting there while the plot unfolds – one, two, three, so that we can see that each event does indeed follow the last – he keeps us watching and guessing as the jigsaw of his story and relationships finally becomes a complete picture.’17 Concurring with this form of cinematic pleasure, Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle locates his response this way: ‘I was put off, too, during several passages of The Adjuster. Egoyan’s construction seemed overly deliberate and schematic. Self-satisfied. In retrospect, I find myself appreciating its mysteries, and feeling grateful that a filmmaker like Egoyan – weird and enigmatic – can flourish today.’18 Also from San Francisco, Andrew O’Hehir writes, ‘Egoyan is a serious filmmaker whose command of the medium is unsurpassed and who is expressing a profound, if veiled and arch, critique of human communication in the electronic age.’19 This kind of critical praise is echoed by the New York Times’s Janet Maslin, who characterizes the film as ‘off-balance, mischievously witty,’ noting that ‘Mr. Egoyan directs with utter confidence.’20 In the Los Angeles Daily News, critic Bob Strauss describes it as ‘a bracingly well controlled cry of pain that’s not afraid to also laugh in the face of human frailty.’21 In Fort Lauderdale, Florida critic Candace Russel calls it ‘a heady, intelligent film. Egoyan is in a class by himself.’22 In an article for Sight and Sound, the Village Voice’s regular film critic, Amy Taubin, sees Egoyan in a class not by himself, but in very august com-

79

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

pany, ‘Excepting Godard and Cronenberg, no other film-maker has explored the connection between technology and voyeurism and between home movies and pornography so intensely or intelligently.’23 Others disagreed. In New York’s Newsday, for example, Jan Stuart argues that the real stars of the film are Director of Photography Paul Sarossy and Production Designer Linda Del Rosario, although ‘By the end, you may want to light a match to the whole place.’24 The Indianapolis Star’s critic Bonnie Britton writes that, although admirable, the film will likely confuse mainstream viewers.25 Bob Ledger of the Newark Star Ledger is more blunt in his review entitled ‘Pretentious Art Film Makes Adjustment to Self-Parody.’ He writes: ‘The slow sepulchral line readings make Canadian English sound like German,’ and ‘The Adjuster seems more like a devastating satire of the archetypal “art film.”’26 Steven Gaydos in the Los Angeles Reader offers a similar assessment: ‘Without an emotional center, even the best laid plans of an offbeat writer-director like Atom Egoyan are doomed to splinter apart into pretension and self-indulgence.’27 The LA Weekly’s Ella Taylor calls it ‘a disjointed series of scenes that develops too much in Egoyan’s head, and not enough in ours.’28 Most brutal is a New York Daily News review entitled ‘Atom’s Sex Bomb a Dud’: ‘this is another flick that should play better on video, where a judicious fast-forward finger will enable viewers to speed through the director’s more stultifying self-indulgences.’29 Entertainment Today’s Larry Jonas opines: ‘The plot thickens, but doesn’t entirely gel. Not all the pieces fit into the mosaic, so make the most of what you see.’30 Finally, Marshall Fine’s review, ‘The Adjuster Requires Lots of Adjustments,’ argues, ‘A sense of disconnection overwhelms this stand-offish film,’ and, as a supposed commercial coup de grâce, ‘This film won’t help build his following.’31 In the United Kingdom, where the film followed the same pattern of a festival premiere screening followed by limited commercial release, The Adjuster was generally received warmly. Noted film historian

80

Arrivals

and critic Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard writes, ‘The Adjuster confirms Egoyan’s promise as a real cinema original.’32 Nick James pronounces, ‘The Adjuster is the most original film released for ages.’33 Jonathan Romney of Sight and Sound also praises the film: ‘Dispensing with the more mannered aspects of his earlier features, and adopting a more downbeat realism in his visual tone, Egoyan here manages to spread his thematic net considerably wider,’ concluding that ‘The Adjuster works brilliantly as a layering of repetitions and parallelisms.’34 Critics in Australia, too, regarded the film highly. Deborah Jones of The Weekend Australian, for example, offers this perceptive assessment, one lost on many reviewers: ‘Egoyan’s real success … is in making these people pitiable, when they so easily could have been forgettable ciphers.’35 Domestically and internationally, then, The Adjuster attracted considerable attention and achieved an impressive level of distribution for a Canadian film that is decidedly not ‘full of smiles and chuckles.’ Its trajectory in the world underlines the importance of the international film festival circuit to the promotion of Canadian cinema within Canada and abroad. Without direct and broad access to the cinema screens in its own country, Canadian films of this period needed festival exposure and critical praise in order to secure distribution. The Adjuster is an exceptional film in Egoyan’s career in this regard, too. His subsequent films, largely owing to festival exposure and the embrace of influential international critics, would also achieve impressive levels of distribution and exhibition, relatively speaking, in Canada and in other countries.

81

This page intentionally left blank

6

Departures

If The Adjuster leaves Noah no choice but to start his life from scratch, Egoyan is in a similar position with regard to his film-making career. Amy Taubin1

I’d never go this far again. Atom Egoyan2

In many ways, he never did. Atom Egoyan’s film career after The Adjuster is marked by increasingly larger budgets (with certain exceptions, such as Calendar in 1993 and Citadel in 2004); more industrialized production models involving larger crews and a markedly less familial working environment; and more participation in international production, distribution, and star systems. While his subsequent work retains an aesthetic rigour, familiar thematic preoccupations, and his signature style, it also presents fictional worlds and characters more accessible, knowable, and, as he puts it, ‘grounded in some recognizable reality.’3 Looking back at The Adjuster almost two decades later, Egoyan notes, ‘It’s as far as I could go to present this sense of a completely unresolved and suicidal tendency on the part of these individuals and this society,’ adding, ‘There is a theatricality to the film that is also unusual.’ In a

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

tangible sense, then, Egoyan did remake his career after his fiery encounter with Noah Render. Not only did his work in cinema alter its shape and scope, but he also expanded his artistic repertoire, becoming an accomplished international theatre and opera director and creating a number of impressive multimedia installation works presented in art galleries around the world. We have examined The Adjuster, in retrospect, as a transitional work in the early career of Egoyan, but he regards it more as a sense of an ending, both artistically and in relation to the production of fiction films in English-speaking Canada generally: ‘I actually think it’s an expression of the end of something. In a way, I went as far as I could go having characters that were drifting through their life without any clear sense of who they were. They were, in some ways, not fully inhabited characters. I started in Calendar, certainly Exotica, and The Sweet Hereafter to give more of a sense of the characters’ actual lives.’ Perhaps the daring and the extremity of the world depicted in The Adjuster is a product of the renewed energy and vision of Canadian film production in the immediate post-CCA years. After all, these years were characterized by a willingness to finance more challenging film projects. As he mentions, ‘There was a particular climate that allowed that film to be made, and I seriously doubt if I brought such a script forward today that it would get such support. I had access to a system to make something that today would be unfilmable.’ In this other sense, then, The Adjuster is an example of the Canadian film production sector’s own transition from a predominantly auteurist, art-house mode to a more commercial one, however modest. Indeed, the development of a more commercially oriented generation of producers and directors following in the wake of the Toronto New Wave has been evident in the last decade. As a transitional film, in terms of both its production context and its oblique articulation of the Canadian predicament, The Adjuster remains a key film in the gnarled evolutionary path of Canadian cinema.

84

Departures

That is ‘outside the frame’ of the film itself, in a sense. The lasting achievement of The Adjuster ‘inside’ its anamorphic frames is more elusive to locate. It certainly retains its power and relevance as a penetrating critique, indeed a satire, of the emotional and psychological deformations created by a culture of materialism. While by no means a political film in any overt sense, the political implications of the film are nonetheless easily discerned. Speaking directly about the political subtext in the film, Egoyan explains, ‘During that particular political environment of the late 1980s, I was interested in the processes of a society that was trying to create a code that would be able to translate into a way people might behave, be it the code being enunciated by the film censors, or the more pervasive code of materialism, possessions, and things you would expect to have.’ The 1980s witnessed the rise of the neo-conservative movement in North America, embodied by United States President Ronald Reagan and embraced by Canada’s Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Economic policy was driven by the notions of laissez-faire capitalism, tax and social-spending reductions, a monetarist approach to societal evolution, and supply-side or ‘trickle down’ economics. Perhaps as a response to the turbulence of the 1970s (Watergate, Vietnam, the Energy Crisis, the Iran hostage-taking incident, et al.), the zeitgeist of the 1980s in the United States and Canada was dominated by rampant consumerism, by distraction through materialist consumption, and by an ethos of acquisition. The Adjuster arrives at the beginning of the next decade, of course, but its benumbed world is the consequence of a society that has become lost, adrift in its Wildean confusion of money with actual value. As Egoyan observes, ‘Consumerism and materialism affected these people’s lives completely. The Adjuster is stating a condition.’ In stating that condition, it is also severely critical of its deadening effects on individual lives. While decidedly a product of its time, the film’s critique transcends the period in which it was conceived and released. If

85

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

anything, its argument has gained more relevance in the early twentyfirst-century with its phantasmagoria of accelerated consumer culture. Also important to the shape and texture of the film is the fact that it was written around the time of the first Gulf war, a faraway conflict for Canadians that was ‘experienced’ primarily through technology, through the moving images of television. Daily media reports on the war and the array of fetishized military technology (‘smart’ bombs, infrared combat visors, stealth aircraft, etc.) numbed responses to the events themselves. As he says, ‘This was a virtual experience of something terrible and visceral.’ In this context, Egoyan also echoes the ideas of contemporary European philosophers Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and others with regard to concepts of simulacra and virtuality. Certainly, as Baudrillard et al. argue, the idea that the world is a place of artifices, surfaces, and technological detachment seductively defined a set of philosophical responses to the terrors of that historical moment. While it has to be said that The Adjuster occasionally reveals a somewhat jejeune infatuation with high European cultural theory, these ideas are consistent with Egoyan’s three previous films, each of which explores the tenuousness of the ‘real,’ the pervasive presence of the artificial and the pretended, and the consequences of technology’s role in shaping and reshaping perception and, indeed, knowledge. Artifices, doublings, and chimeras are constants in the unstable fictional universe of Egoyan, and in the labyrinth of solitudes that is the world of The Adjuster almost everything is detached from its actuality: family, marriage, homes, sexual passion, even books! In some sense, The Adjuster reveals what can happen to a society that has become obsessed with the material, the artificial, and the technological, and when that society’s interpersonal behaviours and rituals become devoid of meaning. It is only the forms of these things that matter, the external shapes of things; below the surface where communication and meaning may reside is not the concern of this world of professional performances,

86

Departures

family pretences, and a hollow formal language unmoored from what it is really expressing. A society and culture that produces and privileges empty form is in a precarious, unbalanced condition, and that is precisely what The Adjuster’s own paradoxically persuasive formal structure is exploring and articulating. At one level, the film is an arresting example of Raymond Williams’s concept of the ‘structure of feeling,’4 that is, a cultural product that embodies and illuminates, however indirectly, the larger cultural forces and shifts in play around it. The Adjuster’s drama identifies a dangerous drift under way in the world, a gaping fissure in the ordered, premeditated, rational, materialist culture that supposedly defines and nurtures North American society. It also engages at several levels with what can be described only as a crisis of valuation: how do we value persons, places, and things? The Adjuster is evidence of a broader malaise, and Egoyan’s sense of this, his ‘structure of feeling,’ is unerring. Interestingly, and perhaps tellingly, Egoyan was offered an opportunity to adapt the film into a television series for the American broadcaster, Home Box Office (HBO), presumably to expand its diagnosis of this larger social tension at work in contemporary society. He declined. Beyond these larger socio-cultural analyses, The Adjuster is also, in Egoyan’s words, ‘a very personal work.’ The experience of his family’s fire precipitated in him ‘a sense of futility that was overwhelming and really powerful. In all the work I’ve done, I’ve never had one that emerged so directly out of an experience I was inhabiting. So, when I see The Adjuster now, it is a chronicle of a very particular moment in my life.’ In recreating this indelible personal experience, processing it in his dramatic imagination through a skein of Absurdist literary influences, and exploring further his own increasingly authoritative film aesthetics in cinemascope format, Egoyan does indeed ‘go far’ in this darkly compelling work. Given its oblique strategies of disclosure and dramatic structure, the

87

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

‘Canadian-ness’ of The Adjuster is initially difficult to perceive. Directly and indirectly, The Adjuster weaves a number of discourses about Canada into its existentially anguished narrative of displacement, dislocation, and alienation. This Canadian-ness does not define the film, but it does inform it. Aside from the obvious extra-diagetic material production reasons and the clever citation of Suzanne in the film, The Adjuster’s Canadian sensibility is evident in a number of ways. The most direct evidence is Noah Render himself. Deeply connected to the Canadian cinema’s tradition of flawed or wounded protagonists discussed above, Noah’s ‘lack’ is foregrounded throughout the film at many levels. He is both uncommunicative and, though seemingly unaware of it, profoundly alienated. Like dozens of English-Canadian cinematic characters before and after him, he is powerless against the world, whether he recognizes it or not. More subtly, perhaps, Noah’s clientele also reveals a Canadian tendency, as they all wait passively for the powers-that-be to release them, to settle their claims. There is no revolt, no uprising, only one slight and embarrassed expression of impatience by Tom and Lorraine. The authorities are benevolent, it is imagined, and those stranded in the ark/hotel have resigned themselves to wait. As he observes, ‘there is something very Canadian about my characters. It’s difficult for me to articulate what it is. But I think it’s that the characters are so tentative when it comes to their own personas, that there’s something so self-conscious about them, that they don’t assert themselves and they never quite feel they have a right to be where they are.’5 This is a quintessential Canadian attitude, born of the country’s history and national consciousness as a counter-revolutionary, colonial state and, later, as a modest power in the world beyond its borders. In many aspects of its national character, Canada is about adjusting. The Canadian ur-myth is not one of dominating or mastering one’s environment, but rather, to borrow from Margaret Atwood, to survive within it, to adjust to its powers.6 Canada’s colonial history amplifies this idea

88

6.1. Rebirth or despair? Noah’s final gesture. Courtesy Johnnie Eisen. © Ego Film Arts.

ATOM EGOYAN THE ADJUSTER

in the contexts of political, economic, and military adjustment to the imperial centres of London and Washington, D.C. It is important to emphasize that these examples do not suggest apathy and powerlessness, but rather identify a humble pragmatism bolstered by a modest hopefulness. For Egoyan, this Canadian attitude is best expressed when Noah and Hera tell Bubba that, despite the vast barren landscape that surrounds their model home, they are confident, like some latter-day Canadian pioneers, that the land will soon be settled by others and that a community will evolve. Still another aspect of The Adjuster’s idiosyncratic, remote Canadian expression is identified in article in the Quebec-based film journal 24 Images. Critic Thierry Horguelin observes that the film in some fashion reveals the ‘non-identity’ of English Canada in its fiction.7 The ‘no man’s land’ in The Adjuster’s housing development functions as a metaphor for English Canada’s inability to locate its identity in the face of its limited colonial historical evolution, its present predicament vis-à-vis the dominant United States popular culture and economic control within Canada’s borders, and its own ambivalence and tentativeness about identifying itself as something distinct from the United States. In this provocative and persuasive interpretation, Noah Render becomes a potent symbol of a much larger, pan-Canadian cultural malaise: an ambivalence about Canada’s – especially English-speaking Canada’s – very existence.8 If, as Bill Marshall argues, ‘Canada is a nation whose size, diversity, and relatively weak symbolic investments are creating centrifugal forces that threaten its long-term viability,’9 then Horguelin’s perspective adds a further intriguing interpretative possibility to the strangeness of Noah Render and his connection to larger discourses about identity in English-speaking Canada. In cinematic terms, of course, Canada has long adjusted to Hollywood hegemony on our cinema screens. In the light of this particular historical cultural adjustment, then, perhaps we can perceive another

90

Departures

level of meaning in Bubba’s role as a would-be filmmaker. From the fragmentary evidence of its narrative content, Bubba’s movie, at least at the level of its elaborate production infrastructure of dolly tracks and light stands, appears to be conceived in some sense as a kind of imitation Hollywood film production not unlike the CCA-era productions, a perverted version of the desire to exist on the big screen, that elusive screen that has been inaccessible to Canadians for decades. Allegorically speaking, this form of long-standing Canadian adjustment has been devastating for the Canadian cinema, with many of its celluloid houses burning down throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In this sense, The Adjuster stands in the early 1990s as a potent, provocative example of the possible reconstruction of English-speaking Canadian cinema. Born in flames, The Adjuster also ends in flames. Noah Render stands before his model home, perhaps in a moment of rebirth, perhaps in a deepening moment of despair and detachment. We do not know. The power of this film, and to a degree all of Atom Egoyan’s cinema, resides in the ambiguity of this moment. Not unlike another film that concludes with a house burning down before the eyes of its owner, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (1986), where the protagonist Alexander has destroyed his home in an obscure gesture to the heavens to prevent nuclear Armageddon, The Adjuster’s denouement is the end of something and maybe the beginning of something else. There are no guarantees, no answers, no assurances. Like Noah and Alexander, as spectators we are suspended witnesses of conflagrations that may or may not redeem these worlds of distress and despair. Ultimately, but in no sense didactically, Egoyan’s haunting fourth feature film suggests that its epistemologically unsettling experience will perhaps enable us, like Arianne, to recognize that something has to change and that we are watching while it does.

91

Production Credits

Production Company Ego Film Arts Director Atom Egoyan Writer Atom Egoyan Cast Elias Koteas Arsinée Khanjian Maury Chaykin Gabrielle Rose Jennifer Dale David Hemblen Rose Sarkisyan Armen Kokorian Jacqueline Samuda Gerard Parkes Patricia Collins

Noah Render Hera Bubba Mimi Arianne Bert Seta Simon Louise Tom Lorraine

Production Credits

Don McKellar John Gilbert Stephen Ouimet Raoul Trujillo Tony Nardi

Tyler Doctor Larry Matthew Motel Manager

Producers Atom Egoyan Camelia Frieberg David Webb Original Music Mychael Danna Director of Photography Paul Sarossy Film Editor Susan Shipton Script Editor Allen Bell Art Direction and Production Design Linda Del Rosario, Richard Paris Costume Design Maya Mani Makeup Department Nicole Demers (makeup artist)

93

Production Credits

Maxine Rogers (hair design) Assistant Director David Webb Cynthia Gillespie (second assistant director) Ingrid Veninger (third assistant director) Sound Department Steven Munro (sound design, sound editing) Daniel Pellerin, Peter Kelly (sound mix) Ross Redfern (sound recordist) Special Effects Northern Effects Running Time 102 minutes Aspect Ratio 2.35 : 1

94

Further Viewing

Eyes Wide Shut. Stanley Kubrick. U.S.A. 1999 Nazarin. Luis Buñuel. Mexico 1958 The Passenger. Michaelangelo Antonioni. Italy 1975 The Sacrifice. Andrei Tarkovsky. Sweden 1986 Teorema. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Italy 1968 Videodrome. David Cronenberg. Canada/U.S.A. 1983

Notes

Introduction: Intimate Distance 1 Interview with Geoff Pevere in Exotica (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995), 30. 2 Interview with Bruce Kirkland, ‘Atom Makes Adjustment,’ Toronto Sun, 2 May 1991. 3 Upon the screening of The Adjuster in Cannes in May 1991, Egoyan’s hometown newspaper, the Victoria Times Colonist, contacted the real adjuster who worked for the Egoyans. Identified only as ‘Steve’ (this was actually Noah’s character name in an early draft of the script), the journalist, Tim Gibson, reported that this professional adjuster had not seen any of Egoyan’s films and that ‘Steve likes Disney movies.’ When told of the sexual escapades of Noah Render, Steve’s response was ‘My God! That’s the furthest thing from anyone’s mind when adjusting.’ 4 See Sandra Gathercole, ‘The Best Damn Film Policy This Country Never Had,’ in Feldman, Take Two, 36–46. 1. Welcome to Canada 1 See Harcourt, Movies and Mythologies, chap. 4. It is also crucial to note that throughout the twentieth century and even today, 97 per cent of public exhibition screen time in Canada is occupied by films produced in Hollywood. 2 See Morris, Embattled Shadows.

Notes to pages 10–31

3 For a comprehensive account of the nature of the documentary bias in Canadian cinema’s evolution, see Evans, In the National Interest. See also Jones, Movies and Memoranda;Morris, Embattled Shadows. 4 For a thorough, detailed account of this history, see Magder, Canada’s Hollywood, and Pendakur, Canadian Dreams and American Control. 5 Fascinating in this context is Joyce Nelson’s intriguing book, The Colonized Eye, which suggests that Grierson colluded in some sense with American interests against the establishment of a Canadian feature film industry. 6 For further reading on the specific case of Quebec cinema, see Marshall, Quebec National Cinema. 7 See Sandra Gathercole, ‘The Best Damn Film Policy This Country Never Had,’ in Feldman, Take Two, 36–46. 8 For additional examples, see the NFB documentary film on this subject, Has Anybody Here Seen Canada? (Director: John Kramer, 1979). See also Magder, Canada’s Hollywood; Pendakur, Canadian Dreams. 9 See Peter Harcourt, ‘The Beginning of a Beginning,’ in Self Portrait (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1980). See also Steve Gravestock, Don Owen: Notes on a Filmmaker and His Culture (Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival Group, 2005). 2. Out of the Ashes 1 As Jonathan Romney relates, Egoyan had made a short film in 1978 in Victoria entitled Lusts of a Eunuch, which screened at a Victoria art gallery. See Atom Egoyan, 7–9. 2 See ibid., 8. 3 See Cameron Bailey, ‘Standing in the Kitchen All Night,’ Take One Summer (2000): 6–11. See also Brenda Longfellow, ‘Surfing the Toronto New Wave: Policy, Paradigm Shifts and Post-nationalism,’ in Loiselle and McSorley, Self Portraits, 167–200. 3. Before the Fire 1 More a production philosophy than a film production company, Cinak Compagnie Cinématographique was established by Jean Pierre Lefebvre

97

Notes to pages 32–43

2 3 4 5 6

in 1968 as an independent production company and as a mode of making films in a context of budgetary control to protect the filmmaker’s control over the shape and final artistic form of the film itself. Directors such as Jean-Claude Labrecque and Denys Arcand produced their early features through Lefebvre’s influential Cinak company and production model. See Harcourt, Jean Pierre Lefebvre. Beyond the Cinak approach to production, Lefebvre himself was very influential in Egoyan’s early career, offering script advice, and so on. Egoyan acted with his partner, Arsinée Khanjian, in Lefebvre’s 1987 experimental feature, La Boîte à soleil. Family Viewing was released two years before Steven Soderberg’s acclaimed sex, lies and videotape captured international attention. Interview with the author at Ego Film Arts offices, 8 July 2008. Daniele Riviere, ‘The Place of the Spectator,’ in Desbarats et al., Atom Egoyan, 93. Ron Burnett, ‘Speaking of Parts,’ in Speaking Parts (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1993), 22. This interest led to Speaking Parts becoming Egoyan’s first published sreenplay, replete with an academic essay on the film by Ron Burnett and a comprehensive filmography. It was published in 1993. See also the publication of Desbarats et al., Atom Egoyan, in 1993, and its extensive discussions of Speaking Parts. Numerous screenplays and critical texts on Egoyan’s subsequent films have appeared, including this one, but Speaking Parts started the substantial publishing flow.

4. The Adjuster: Labyrinths of Solitude Filmmaker commentary on Alliance Atlantis DVD of The Adjuster (2001). Beckett, Worstward Ho! 7. See Frye, The Bush Garden. Filmmaker commentary. Jim Leach, ‘Lost Bodies and Missing Persons: Canadian Cinema(s) in the Age of Multi-National Representations,’ Post-Script 18: 2(1999): 11. 6 Interview with Geoff Pevere in Egoyan, Exotica, 60. 7 Filmmaker commentary. 8 Alliance Atlantis official press kit for The Adjuster, Toronto 1991. 1 2 3 4 5

98

Notes to pages 44–71

9 Filmmaker commentary. 10 ‘The reason we shot the film that way was because there were anamorphic lenses in the country being used for Clearcut [Canada 1991, Director: Ryszard Bugajski]. It worked out, with all the locations we used, in a magical sort of way.’ Interview with the author, 8 July 2008. 11 Egoyan notes, ‘I’m a big fan of Antonioni’s cinema. I love the way Antonioni would construct space in the frame and how he places the characters in peculair, expressive spatial confiigurations in relation to one another.’ Ibid. 12 Filmmaker commentary. 13 Interview with Atom Egoyan in Burwell and Tschofen, Image + Territory, 344. 14 See Pevere and Dymond, Mondo Canuck. See also Geoff Pevere, ‘Rebel without a Chance,’ in CineAction! Spring 1988, 44–8. 15 Filmmaker commentary. 16 See, especially, the Beckett plays, Happy Days (1961) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1959), which Egoyan adapted to the screen in 2000, and the later prose pieces Company (1979) and Worstward Ho! (1983). 17 Taubin, ‘Perversity Inc.’ 18 Directed by Robin Spry and starring Jennifer Dale in the title role, Suzanne had its debut at the Festival of Festivals in Toronto in September 1980, eleven years before The Adjuster. The film was produced by Robert Lantos, who was also involved in the production of The Adjuster and who would go on to produce most of Egoyan’s subsequent films. 19 ‘You know, I put that reference in there thinking that people would get it, and that, beyond the Canadian cinema history thing, that part of people’s pleasure in filmgoing is to get the references and do the work. I suppose I was a little idealistic in thinking that way.’ Interview with the author, 8 July 2008. 20 Geoff Pevere, ‘No Place Like Home,’ in Egoyan, Exotica, 31. 21 On-location production interview with the filmmaker, in the ‘Special Features’ section of the Alliance Atlantis DVD of The Adjuster (2001). 22 Filmmaker commentary. 23 On-location production interview with the filmmaker. 24 The Compact Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 25 See Pierre Grimal, Penguin Book of Classical Mythology (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 42.

99

Notes to pages 71–9

26 Meaning specfically, of course, Canada and the United States of America and leaving aside that other substantial inhabitant of North America, Mexico. 27 Juan Eduardo Cirlot, Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical Library, 1962), 136. 28 Filmmaker commentary. 5. Arrivals 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Anonymous, Toronto Life, September 1991, 46. ‘Suze,’ Variety. Derek Malcolm, Guardian, 21 May 1991. Taboulay, Cahiers du cinéma . She writes: ‘On est loin du petit vélo de Lynch su lequel visiblement Egoyan essaie de monter’ (46). Jay Scott, ‘A Tale of Two Movies,’ Globe and Mail, 10 May 1991. Unattributed report, The Globe and Mail, Toronto 24 May 1991. Cited by Greg Grandsen, The Globe and Mail, Toronto 20 July 1991. Quoted in advertisement for film’s release. Toronto Star, 18 September 1991. Rick Groen, ‘The tools of objectification,’ in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 18 September 1991. Alex Patterson, Eye, Toronto 10 October 1991. Bruce Kirkland, Toronto Sun, 16 September 1991. Huguette Roberge, La Presse, 16 November 1991. John Griffin, Montreal Gazette, 25 October 1991. Elizabeth Aird, ‘Making Adjustments,’ in Vancouver Sun, 31 January 1992. Michael D. Reid, ‘Egoyan’s Cerebral Wit Ignites Adjuster,’ Victoria Times Colonist, 6 December 1991. As reported in Playback magazine, March 1993. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times, 24 July 1992. Edward Guthmann, ‘Adjuster Is Odd and Original,’ San Francisco Chronicle, 10 July 1992. Andrew O’Hehir, San Francisco Chronicle, 10 July 1992. Janet Maslin, New York Times, 2 October 1991. Bob Strauss, ‘Egoyan Needn’t Fix Much in Appealing Adjuster,’ Los Angeles Daily News, 5 June 1992.

100

Notes to pages 79–90

22 Candace Russel, ‘Quirky film raises heady questions, ‘Ft Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, 18 July 1992. 23 Taubin, ‘Burning Down the House,’ 19. 24 Jan Stuart, ‘Peeping into the Lives of Voyeurs,’ Newsday, 29 May 1992. 25 Bonnie Britton, Indianapolis Star, 8 August 1992. 26 Bob Ledger, Newark Star Ledger, 29 May 1992. 27 Steven Gaydos, Los Angeles Reader, 5 June 1992. 28 Ella Taylor, LA Weekly, 5–11 June 1992. 29 ‘Phantom of the Movies,’ New York Daily News, 29 May 1992. 30 Larry Jonas, ‘The Fire Next Time,’ Entertainment Today, 5 June 1992. 31 Marshall Fine, Gannett Newspaper, New York, 29 May 1992. 32 Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 28 May 1992. 33 Nick James, UK City Limits, 28 May – 4 June 1992. 34 Sight and Sound, 38. 35 Deborah Jones, ‘Mysteries in an Empty Life,’ Weekend Australian, 4 July 1993. 6. Departures 1 Taubin, ‘Burning Down the House,’ 19. 2 Filmmaker commentary on Alliance Atlantic DVD edition of The Adjuster (2001). 3 Interview with the author, 8 July 2008. 4 See Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. 5 Lesley Ellen Harris, ‘Atom Egoyan: Laughter in the Dark,’ Canadian Forum (December 1991): 17. 6 See Atwood, Survival. 7 Thierry Horguelin, ‘DOS A DOS du contenue canadien,’ 24 Images 56–7 (Autumn 1991). 8 This observation connects to broader and periodic Canadian political and historical discussions of theories of Continentalism and of Canada dissolving itself into the United States.

101

Selected Bibliography

Atom Egoyan Published Screenplays Ararat: The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002. Exotica. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995. Speaking Parts. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1993. On Atom Egoyan Burwell, Jennifer Lise, and Monique Tschofen eds. Image + Territory: Essays On Atom Egoyan. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007. Desbarats, Carole, Jacinto Lageira, Daniele Riviere, and Paul Virilio, eds. Atom Egoyan. Trans. Brian Holmes. Paris: Dis Voir, 1993. Romney, Jonathan. Atom Egoyan. London: BFI Publishing, 2003. Reviews of The Adjuster Castiel, Elie. ‘The Adjuster / L’Expert en sinistre.’ Sequences 156 (1992): 56. Charity, Tom. Time Out, 27 May 1992. Grierson, Bruce. ‘The Adjuster.’ Monday, 17–23 October 1991. Johnson, Brian D. ‘Bleak Beauty.’ Maclean’s, 30 September 1991, 68. Nevers, Camille. Cahiers du cinéma 450 (December 1991): 72–3. Romney, Jonathan. Sight and Sound, June 1992, 38. ‘Suze.’ Variety, 27 May 1991, 81.

Selected Bibliography

Taboulay, Camille. Cahiers du cinéma 445 (June 1991): 46. Taubin, Amy. ‘Burning Down the House.’ Sight and Sound, June 1992, 18–19. – ‘Perversity Inc.’ Village Voice, 2 June 1992, 25. Turan, Kenneth. ‘Egoyan’s Clear Vision Guides Surreal Spin of Adjuster.’ Los Angeles Times, 5 June 1992, 67–8. Wall, Karen L. ‘Déjà vu / jamais vu – The Adjuster and the Hunt for the Image.’ Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2: 2–3 (1993): 129–44. On Canadian Cinema Clandfield, David. Canadian Film. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987. Dorland, Michael. So Close to the State/s: The Emergence of Film Policy in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Evans, Gary. In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board from 1949 to 1989. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Feldman, Seth, ed. Take Two. Toronto: Irwin, 1984. Fetherling, Douglas, ed. Documents in Canadian Film. Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1988. Handling, Piers, and Pierre Veronneau, eds. Self Portrait: Essays on the Canadian and Quebec Cinemas. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1980. Harcourt, Peter. Movies and Mythologies: Towards a National Cinema. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1977. – Jean Pierre Lefebvre. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1981. Hoolboom, Mike. Inside the Pleasure Dome: Fringe Film In Canada. Toronto: Coach House Press, 2001. Jones, D.B. Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretative History of the National Film Board of Canada. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1981. Leach, Jim. Film In Canada. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2006. Loiselle, André, and Tom McSorley, eds. Self Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada Since Telefilm. Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 2006. Magder, Ted. Canada’s Hollywood: The Canadian State and Feature Films. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Marshall, Bill. Quebec National Cinema. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Morris, Peter. Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 1895–1939. 2nd ed.

103

Selected Bibliography

Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1978. Repr. 1992. Nelson, Joyce. The Colonized Eye: Rethinking the Grierson Legend. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1988. Pendakur, Manjunath. Canadian Dreams and American Control. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. On Canadian Culture Atwood, Margaret. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1972 Drache, Daniel ed. Staples, Markets, and Cultural Change: Selected Essays of Harold A. Innis. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995. Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1971. Pevere, Geoff, and Greig Dymond, eds. Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey. Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1996. Influences and Intersections Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Beckett, Samuel. Worstward Ho! New York: Grove Press, 1983. Fuentes, Carlos. Myself with Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1988. – The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. London: André Deutsch, 1992. Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought In Mexico. Translated by Lysander Kemp. NewYork: Grove Press, 1964. Said, Edward W. The World, The Text and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Havard University Press, 1983. Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2005. Williams, Raymond. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968. Records accessed from the Atom Egoyan Collection courtesy of the Film Reference Library, a division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group.

104

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’