Film

Souvenir of Canada  

By Junius  

Douglas Coupland’s film Souvenir of Canada—and it is his film, entirely—raises the question of the personal, emotional basis of patriotism—the love of one’s country. Apart from a few fads like Oolik, which was apparently a deliberate PR attempt to create a national friendly symbol, Coupland’s “Canada House” is mainly furnished with normal examples of household life in the twentieth century and requires the maple leaf flag, another PR job, to distinguish the “souvenirs” as Canadian at all.

The film is deft, and quite bearable (perhaps even shorter than it should have been), but it belies its own premise of a united Canada. The two chief symbols say that Canada is too much to handle. The teenage Coupland is portrayed (in a nicely acted non-documentary bit) as attempting to leave his Vancouver home and drive with his best friend across the whole of the country. They are defeated by the size of it. By Manitoba they are not speaking to each other. The journey exhausts them, Canada is exhausting.

The other major symbol in the film, aimed at bridging the Atlantic and the Pacific, is the Terry Fox run, which for reasons we all know, he could not finish. He could have done with a smaller nation. If he had started from here, Terry Fox could have finished British Columbia in triumph. He remains, anyway, largely a British Columbia hero, does he not?

Coupland certainly presents himself as a British Columbian. His “Canada House” is really a British Columbia House, resonating with his own boyhood home. The creation of the house as a work of art, one exportable to Canada House in Trafalgar Square, London, is Coupland being clever, as he can be. But the simple non-clever Coupland comes through. It is an objectification of his local patriotism, his feeling for his birthplace in Vancouver and the range of childhood haunts, which cover the whole province because his father had been a pilot in the War and maintained a small aircraft to get them to different hunting and fishing places in the province. Coupland’s nicest ornament in his house are little fishing buoys from the Queen Charlotte Islands. By these and other markers in the film, Coupland announces that he had done with traveling the world and has come back to live in BC.

Canada doesn’t seem to enter into that decision. The forced unity of the separate provinces of Canada seems an unnecessary burden. “United” is not a very good word anyway. Think how much less dangerous the world might be if the States below us were not “United.” Congress, whose corruption comes from lobbying to get the biggest piece of the enormous mother of a pie, could be packed in. Let the “United” States split up into autonomous regions that can feel at ease with themselves, then the rest of the world can relax.

Same with Canada. Coupland has done us the service of showing how thinly veneered patriotism is over the landmass of Canada and how strong is the pull of the local.