MAKE IT DANGEROUS: CANADIAN FILM’S PUNK SENSIBILITY

Originally appeared in Canadian Notes & Queries. Anthologized in the Best Canadian Essays 2018.

I am the future. So warns Peter, leader of the nihilist punks controlling Lincoln High School, the devastated, graffiti-drenched site of the unhinged Canadian film Class of 1984 (1982). These slovenly, racist ne’er-do-wells sneer at authority, sling angel dust to sophomores, and mosh joyously to Teenage Head. After menacing their music teacher, Andrew Norris, into a murderous rage, they meet untimely ends via buzzsaw, via steering wheel, via skylight. Order once again prevails.

Shot in recognizable locations around downtown Toronto, Class of 1984 presents as a statement on escalating teen violence. Watching it now in all its revved-up paranoia recalls a certain fervour of its time – the fear that such untameable scum might be society’s future. It also prompts consideration of what might constitute a “punk sensibility” in cinema, and how such an insurrectionary spirit (whether genuine or posed) has been filtered through a distinctly Canadian perspective.

Punk comprises many modes: a musical genre, a criterion, a stance. It’s regularly self-contradictory, frequently self-negating, often quite stupid, and perpetually facing the pronouncement of its own death. It’s a sensibility rooted in failure, whether out of naiveté, failed ambition, or sheer absurdity. The narrative forms of punk cinema typically culminate in tragedy or farce (or a hybrid of the two). As Greil Marcus notes in Lipstick Traces, his foray to contextualize punk within a broader avant-garde tradition, “nihilism can find a voice in art, but never satisfaction.”

The form’s easy signifiers have been well-recognized since the seventies: hacked-up leather, overheated miscreants slamdancing to rudimentary rock, sloganeering of a smash-the-system bent. British punks donned bondage-lite garb to rattle conservative sensibilities, while America’s disaffected youth rejected disco glitz for hard-core skateboarder grubbiness. Canadian incarnations, meanwhile, have often adopted a vulgar, quasi-working-class hoser persona fuelled by beer and fuck-the-man disaffection. Bands like DOA, and later SNFU and No Means No, reveled in unpretentious Canadiana draped in flannel and toques.

Bruce McDonald’s Hard Core Logo (1996) champions this vibe as it follows its titular group through a dismal reunion tour, faithfully depicting the rock circuit’s beer-stained stages, bleak stretches of highway, and subzero post-show parking lots. Centred on the shaky homosocial camaraderie of Joe Dick and Billy Tallent, aging rockers losing step with time, it styles itself as a punk movie (anarchy symbols, cameos from Joey Ramone and Art Bergmann, lots of spitting), but little distinguishes these saps as anything but failed careerists, absent of any ideological energy. McDonald’s heroes have more in common with the soft-metal burnouts of The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988) than the punks encountered in the first volume of Penelope Spheeris’s landmark documentary series.

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