once, as I went past, I drew a sign at a point in space, just so I could find it again two hundred million years later," -- Italo Calvino, A SIGN IN SPACE
49th Parallel, in a nearly exact correlation to Lars and the Real Girl, a film roughly seventy years older, more fluid, less schematic, and even a different genre, is not an intrinsically Canadian film. Canadian films for and about Canadians may exist, and Canadian literary writers love to assume, through the chic ferocity of Margaret Atwood, that a distinctive Canadian identity exists, embodied in the graphic hero of Wolverine, perhaps, but much like X-Men is an overblown extended metaphor about difference and restraint, Canada never truly evolved as a nation, and it had the luxury of not doing so thanks to the fact that Britain Germany and France hate each other. 49th Parallel is actually a dialectical argument about neo-imperialism of two types: romantic absolutism (German Nazism, which for our purposes, for the time being, shall remain disparate from Italy's half-assed delusions of grandeur) and the UK's torturous evolution of virtuous monarchy, itself a national psychosis which is in no way unique to British sensibilities, although every empire has a unique and singular application.
Britain's unique mindset falls under this rubric:We defeated Spain and at least drew a stalemate with France at the end of the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, were therefore the truest heirs of Rome, and we get to tell the rest of the world how to live, play nice, and respect each other's autonomy, according to our rules and laws, because we killed enough indigenous natives, including Frenchmen, to have earned that right.
The Germans came along a little late and said not so fast, and the frightening thing is, the Germans almost won, despite their significant disadvantages, despite Leslie Howard's moral outrage, despite Powell's and Pressburger's near religious fidelity to the justice of liberal democracy, and Olivier's canonization by Pope Pius in the opening scene after the crash. How was the German vision different, setting aside their mechanized methods of sanitizing human civilization? The difficulty lies in the fact that Hitler as Fuhrer obscures why the German establishment rallied to eugenics, and that one ethnicity which had set itself apart for millennia became the handmaiden of the mother of all genocides -- one from which the disabled were not excluded-- but even Nazi's knew when to back off, and in the early days of Hitler's consolidation of power, German families rose up to protect their disabled loved ones, and officers stopped rounding up disabled German citizens to inter them-- setting these issues apart, what did the National Socialists want, or desire to achieve, and was it even possible to alter evolutionary science in such a radical fashion? It isn't an easy question to pose, but in essence, the Fascists, too, had such a radical notion of egalitarian purity that it might have wiped itself out in a mono-biological disaster of a human efficiency model, one which threatens to return with the merger, at least, between human and machine, perhaps in a few hundred years. Life is messy. Hitler's Fascists, unlike Britons, were invested in superior efficiency models as a notion of great civilization.
It was humanity's greatest quarrel to date. The United Kingdom won at such a great price that the lines of the equally messy Islamic insurgency can be traced through it, though this seems to have hit its watermark, whatever else these soldiers for Allah have up their sleeve.
In the same vein, Lars isn't a Canadian film either, but a North Hollywood softball a nod to US selfish shallowness about what community adaptation actually means, with Patricia Clarkson as the lynchpin for accommodating a necessary delusional mechanism, with a conclusion that sails in like a beatitude on a featherbed, but that's a luxury which North Hollywood can concoct only because the British bayonet and Yankee military success at consolidating territory created it.
In these troubled times, the sense of jeremiad in the US is overblown, even if Trump pulls an upset and has a bad term in office, but it is also true that US hegemony will never again quite be what it was, and without it, the Canadian comfort zone, and its presumed benevolence, will cease to exist. Man eating lions are a succinct minority doomed to extinction, but even the dowager has her pet causes.
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