Author Archives: gus

The Malahat Review’s summer issue launch

The Malahat Review’s summer issue launch
(and pre-launch dinner)

Please join us in celebration of our Summer issue (#179)!

Monday, September 17th
The Fernwood Inn, 1302 Gladstone

6:00 p.m.: All launch readers, Malahat volunteers, and Friends of The Malahat are invited to join us for a pre-launch dinner at The Fernwood Inn (art room at the back) (though we’d love to pay for your meals, all we can offer in compensation is the pleasure of our company)

 

7:30 p.m.: Student Open Mic, hosted by Benjamin Willems, followed by readings from the Summer issue:

Dorothy Field
Danielle Janess
George Sipos
Laura Trunkey
Patricia Young
Terence Young

Admission is FREE, all ages are welcome.

Hope to see you there!

RSVP (not necessary, but appreciated): malahat@uvic.ca

More info is on our website

RSVP to this event on facebook

Art gallery affirms artistry of kitty videos

By Lynne Van Luven
Dissing cat videos has suddenly become a vibrant pastime among the literati. Writers and film critics alike frequently bemoan the puerile focus and the cute factor. I don’t get it.

I’d understand if such critics were exercised by schlocky music videos or vile snuff films. Or if they took umbrage at screaming-chef videos or the blather of smarmy blonde actors who extol their new-found “lifestyle” wisdom.

But to bemoan kitty videos? Come on, folks, graft a bit of humour on to your humanity. Life is filled with awful realities: daily events in Syria; reporters being stifled and killed around the world; children starving, people using guns to express their political views . . . .

But kitty videos? How can you scoff at these witty, whimsical and loving expressions of man’s bond with felinity? When life is kicking you in the ribs, a quick viewing of the antics of Maru, the box-infatuated Japanese cat, will immediately alleviate your pain. And if you are on the outs with family or friends, there is nothing like a quick link to the furious cat video to remind you how
silly hissy fits really look.

That’s why I was thrilled to learn that The Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just sponsored an Internet Cat Video Film Festival, with 70 entries, as a social experiment — as well as a modern-art event.

And I was even happier to see some of my favourite feline performers entered: Keyboard Cat was represented (26.3 views since first posted in 2007) as was the obsessive Maru. Best of all, the winner of the People’s Choice award turned out to be my all-time favourite cat video: the inimitable Henri 2, Paw de Deux, by Will Braden.

So take that snobs! The rest of us already knew the truth: no matter how many times we listened to Henri’s lugubrious self-indulgent mewlings, we couldn’t help chortling.

Lynne Van Luven would be owned by 15 cats if left to her own devices.

Nothing Small About Gay Dwarves Stories

Gay Dwarves of America
By Anne Fleming
Pedlar Press
205 pp; $21

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

In the world of literary genres, the short story could be entering endangered-species status. Not because fewer people write short stories; quite the contrary, many writers enjoy the short story form, and literary journals still publish them. But because few collections of short stories appear on bookstore shelves — Alice Munro notwithstanding. This means that when a short story collection appears, it must be outstanding. Anne Fleming’s Gay Dwarves of America, with its audacious title, is such a book.

Anne Fleming is a B.C. writer with one earlier collection of short stories, Pool Hopping, and a novel called Anomaly. She is a humourist who, pleasingly, can’t help but highlight life’s ironies. She also displays a flair for the poignant. Her writing is smart, smart-assed, funny, and cool. You feel cool reading these nine stories. That doesn’t mean you won’t also feel deep sadness. Fleming’s writing is self-reflexive too. But mainly, Fleming creates unforgettable characters. She writes character the way some poets write extended metaphor. In Gay Dwarves of America, each story is a character, each crazily different. In an unthemed and unlinked collection, this is key: keeping each story distinct keeps the collection as a whole alive, compelling.
Gay Dwarves, unlike most contemporary collections, takes risks from the start. It begins with one of the least risky, “Unicycle Boys.” Curtis is the unicycle boy; Jenny is the narrator. Jenny is the story. She’s the perfect snooty high school girl. She’s cool, ironic and smart-mouthed. The dialogue, “I ran into (Curtis) at Caravan. He’s kind of a neat guy. In a loserish sort of way,” is perfect high school superior. Curtis of the unicylcle is how Jenny learns what the story conveys. It’s a good lesson.

The second story, the eponymous “Gay Dwarves of America” is considerably more quirky. As a short, gay woman, I read it with trepidation, alert to stereotypes and slurs. The story is about John and his college roommate, Pen. Neither is gay nor a dwarf. They exploit the idea to set up a website. But it’s an idea to keep out the sadness. In the end, both are sad.

The stories continue in this quirky manner. If the character isn’t quirky, and most are, then the situation is strange, or the point of view is unusual, or the subject matter is peculiar. Or the format is challenging. Take, for instance, “Puke Diaries,” about throwing up from six different points of view, including that of a cat. It begins with the cat. Each character has unique vocabulary for it, his or her own reasons for puking. The story grows into wholeness, comes together.
By the time we arrive at the final story, “Thirty-One One Word Stories,” which actually is one word centred on each of the final thirty-one pages, we are able to create our own story from each of the words. This is the tacit instruction. The words are inspiring: Thief, Martyr . . . Martha . . . . I began thinking about Martha. As the last story, it works, as each story does in its own exquisite way.

_______
Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer and poet. Her first book, Paper Trail (NeWest Press, 2007), won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book, Leaving Now (Caitlin Press, 2012) was released this spring. She completed her MFA at UVic in June.

The Q but with Longer Hair

Every day I drive to work from my nice Elk Lake acreage (rented not owned – I am still a student); I listen to Jian Ghomeshi and his show The Q. I love listening to him on the CBC. He has great charm: consequently, the artists and public figures he invites on his show feel comfortable and open up in ways they do not with other interviewers.

It is two weeks until my thirtieth birthday. This morning I sat up in bed and sang the words “Soon I’ll be Thirty, I don’t want to be Thirty.” My wife has grown accustomed to how weird I am, so she just asked the sensible obvious question: “What are you singing?” “Moxy Fruvous – Stuck in the Nineties,” I replied. She had never heard these words. I was astonished that she had no idea what I was talking about.

Moxy Fruvous is a Canadian vocal folk group that sang politically satirical songs during the late eighties to late nineties. They released a great album in 1993 called Bargainville. The lyric I sang this morning was from one of the singles off the album. Of course, Jian was a member of this awesome band.

So let us occasionally remember a different phase of the career of the Canadian radio host Mr. Ghomeshi. Below is a link to one the band’s best tunes “King of Spain.” Note the great nineties fashion and Jian’s awesome long locks.

 

_______

Matthew (Gus) Gusul is the Online Editor for The Coastal Spectator.

First Novel Levels Critical Eye on 1950s

Stony River

By Tricia Dower
Penguin Group, 350 pages paperback, $24
Reviewed by Joy Fisher

In an Author’s Note appended to her first novel, Stony River, set in the 1950s, Tricia Dower writes: “Nothing was as it seemed back then.” It was, she asserts, “an age when secrets crouched behind closed doors.”

The three protagonists in this coming of age novel, Linda, Tereza and Miranda, all struggle to come to terms with the unspoken and, sometimes, unspeakable, secrets which affect their lives.
Close in age—Linda is 11, Tereza 12, and Miranda 15 when the narrative commences in 1955—they are nevertheless contrasting both in appearance and in their life circumstances. Linda is middle class, plump and silently resentful of her over-protective parents. Tereza, beaten by her working-class step-father, is swarthy, functionally illiterate but street-wise. Miranda is a red-haired Irish lass whose deranged but brilliant father, James, known to the neighbours as “Crazy” Haggerty, keeps her locked up in a decaying, book-filled house.

Despite their differences, the lives of these three adolescents intersect repeatedly for the rest of the decade until the novel reaches its conclusion, and the stories of each protagonist a resolution.

Although Dower has lived in Canada since 1981, the novel is set in a small town in New Jersey not unlike the one in which Dower grew up. Stony River, nearly surrounded by a river of the same name, emerges as a character in its own right: a map of the town showing the locations of crucial settings in the narrative assumes pride of place as a kind of frontispiece.

The town and the book are peopled with a supporting cast of characters as colourful as the protagonists. “Dearie” is a pink-haired grandmother so vividly drawn the author has a hard time keeping her from stealing scenes. Buddy, who eventually becomes Tereza’s husband and the father of her child, is ultimately revealed as a homicidal maniac. And James, although dead at the beginning of the book, continues to haunt the narrative as Miranda gradually comes to realize that her son Cian was not the product of a mystical union of the goddess Danu and god Dagda, deities in the Pagan Celtic religion into which her father had indoctrinated her.

These characters are not caricatured as villains nor offered up as sacrificial lambs on the altar of conventional values, however. They are drawn in depth, with love. Even one of the detectives investigating Buddy confesses he sympathizes with him. And Miranda believes that “[s]eeing differently might be the truest gift James left them.”

Seeing differently is also the truest gift Dower has given to her readers. She says her goal was to write a “ripping good yarn,” but that the urge to challenge religious dogma as well as assumptions about right and wrong, sanity and madness, love and abuse crept in. She’s right, but her writing is so imbued with compassion that it never seems strident. By the time you finish this novel, you, too, will see differently, and you will be a better person for it.

I have heard it said that a good book has a soul, and all the characters in it have souls. Stony River is a good book.

Joy Fisher is a survivor of the 1950s and a fourth year student in UVic’s Writing Program.

 

Afterthought on a Fringe Gem

Afterthought on a Fringe gem

Bookworm
By Corin Raymond

Who would think that a one-hour dramatic monologue about books by a guy who looks like a truck driver could bring tears to your eyes—but that’s what happened for me at the last performance of Bookworm, the final show of the Victoria Fringe Festival of 2012.
Corin Raymond likes to say he’s a singer-songwriter who lives with his books in Toronto. He admits to having three or four thousand of them, all of which he’s read, some many times. His love for books—their feel, look and the sound of their words in his mouth—was instilled in Raymond by his father, a bibliophile, teacher and “secret actor.”
Raymond’s unabashed passion for books and affection for his father brought the entire audience to its feet, roaring approval. It’s no surprise that Bookworm was named a “Pick of the Fringe.” Catch it in Vancouver if you can.

Reviewed by Joy Fisher, a fourth-year student in UVic’s Writing Program

 

 

Turn Up the Volume, Crank Down the Windows

Cadillac Couches

By Sophie B. Watson
Brindle & Glass. 217 pp. $19.95

Reviewed by Julia Kochuk

In her witty debut novel Cadillac Couches, Sophie B. Watson sets scenes of Canada’s cross-country landscape to a playlist of nineties favourites. Watson tells the journey of two “foul mouthed, Albertan, wannabe Edwardians” in their early twenties, chasing music and purpose .
It’s summertime in the late nineties under the prairie skies of Edmonton. The air is laced with Dan Bern and the scent of fresh onion cakes. Anxiety-ridden Annie is stuck in inertia: watching, not living; a fan, not a player. She nurses her broken heart with red wine, music, and cigarettes smoked on her “Cadillac couch,” a vintage couch she bought “for twenty-five bucks at the Salvation Army on the north side of the river one lucky Saturday.”
The inertia and heatbreak make Annie antsy. She must get her mind off her ex, and her butt off the couch. She must make real-life rock star Hawksley Workman fall in love with her. She decides a road trip to the Montreal Folk Festival, with her très chic friend Isobel, is in order. Hawksley will be performing.
Will Annie gain control of her anxieties? Will she get over Sullivan? Will she get the chance to meet and/or marry Hawksley? What is Annie’s purpose, her holy grail? Will she ever find it?
Sophie B. Watson is an award-winning freelance writer, published in several magazines including Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch Magazine, and Legacy Magazine. This is her first novel.
Cadillac Couches reveals Watson’s ability to create truthful character and voice: Annie is old enough to pay her own bills, but youthfully naïve enough to hope “sexy-ass troubadour” Hawksley Workman could pick her from a swarm and fall madly in love with her. Cadillac Couches effectively represents the stage between teen and adult: that in-between stage where responsibilities are low and expectations for life are high.
The novel unfolds chronologically, starting with the escape from Edmonton in a beat-up 1972 pink Volkswagen Bug named Rosimund. The action is staccatoed with flashbacks and daydreams, mirroring the road trip mind. Each chapter opens with a sketch and lyrics, as if you were doodling in your notebook and fiddling with the radio from the passenger seat of the car.
While life looks rosy through Rosimund’s windows, the story sometimes moves faster than the poor Bug can travel: the novel is packed full of road kill, fuzzy navel drunken nights, high school memories, a pregnancy scare, and many minor characters. However, this still rings true to the true road trip nature, where scenes flash by windows and people are forgotten as you pull away from gas stations.
Cadillac Couches is a marvelously quirky and enjoyable novel. It is as much a ballad to Canada, as it is to music. It captures all you feel about the scenery passing by, the songs you know the words to. It reminds you that you can escape, but also that seasons change; you can come home more you than you were when you left.

Julia Kochuk is a fourth-year writing student at the University of Victoria.

 

Somewhere Beyond Nowhere – Tara Nicholson

Somewhere Beyond Nowhere

Tara Nicholson

September 7 to October 6, 2012

Opening Friday, September 7, 7 to 10pm

Deluge Contemporary Art

636 Yates Street, Victoria
Exhibition Hours: Wed to Sat, 12 to 5 pm

Since completing her MFA thesis work two years ago, Wilderness and Other Utopias
photographed in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Tara Nicholson has integrated the
peripatetic tendency prevalent in so much of contemporary art practice further into
her work, using travel and temporary relationship as keys for developing a body of
work based on locations in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec and Holland.
She insinuates herself into new communities to determine local byways, campsites and
landmarks, temporary shelters and ephemeral spectacles: a swimming hole in an
abandoned quarry, ski-doo graveyard, a decaying papier-mâché mascot killer whale,
dumped like a corpse at the edge of summer woods.

A phrase in Nicholson’s exhibition statement undertakes the contradictory conjoining
of “local and remote.” This in itself is a comment on the disjunctive way that
modern development thrusts fragments of suburbia into what was previously
wilderness, at the same time leaving behind pockets of dilapidation in the form of
desolated retreats of past-tense recreational seclusion or forsaken networks of
resource extraction infrastructure. Lapsed, lost or unlikely habitation abounds in
this work, from a teepee on Salt Spring Island, to a flagging Conservative campaign
sign tacked to an aging industrial compressor, to a rustic tower clad in pristine
Tyvek; the vacated hideaway, the forgotten boomtown, or subcultural otherworld gone
to seed. In one of the images from Holland, Kuierpadtien, the torqued sheath of a
worn blue water slide relays the colours of an improbably idyllic tableau of
children paddling on an artificial lake. Nicholson seeks out visions that in her
words, “hover between reality and fantasy,” a fluxing of nature and artifice too
precious or precarious to last forever.

Nicholson relies on firsthand experience and anecdote, noting, “often I try and find
a place from memory or look for things I specifically remember, textures, light or
structures.” Paradoxically, she employs this well-tuned sense of place to “challenge
identity,” and its attendant territoriality, citing John O’Brian and Peter White’s
book, Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary Art
(McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), which, in unravelling the nationalist
mythology of Canadian landscape, examines the way notions of “northernness” and
“wilderness” became part of the country’s cultural identity in the early twentieth
century. Nicholson is interested in the persistence of such myths, even as her own
approach echoes the restless explorations of early Canadian painting (the title of
her show almost an answer to a recent survey of Emily Carr at the Art Gallery of
Greater Victoria, On the Edge of Nowhere.)

Outside of the viewfinder’s capture, some moment of human interaction is often part
of the picture. Nonetheless, Nicholson chooses in many (but not all) cases to
exclude figures from her work. This creates an ambiguous but charged scene,
recalling Hemingway’s dictum that a story should include purposeful omissions in the
crafting of its narrative. Those that remain are often strikingly isolated, as in
one particularly vertiginous composition of a naked woman floating in a lake
overlooked by a fire-scorched horizon of dessicated pines (this turns out to be a
self-portrait), or a trio of riders on an overcast beach that merges blurs in hooves
and hair with roving patches of grey on the horses and sand into something
inaudible, emblematic and weightless with nostalgia.

Tara Nicholson grew up in Northern British Columbia, spending time in the Okanagan
and on Vancouver Island. She has attended artist residencies in Newfoundland and
Banff, and exhibited work across Canada, at The Parisian Laundry Gallery, Montreal,
The Jeffery Boone Gallery, Vancouver and a recent exhibition in the 2012 Calgary
Banff Canmore Exposure Photography Festival. Nicholson teaches at the Vancouver
Island School of Art and the University of Victoria.

— John Luna

Gimme Some Lovin’: Did John Landis, Hollywood’s king of schlock comedies, unintentionally save black R&B?

Back in 1980, one movie challenged Hollywood’s colourblindness by showcasing some of America’s top rhythm and blues talent in the guise of a mainstream comedy. Not only did it revive the fading careers of the likes of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker and Ray Charles, but it also introduced a whole new generation to the timeless soul and funk of America’s R&B all-stars. Surprisingly, that movie was The Blues Brothers.

It’s surprising because few would ever describe that Dan Aykroyd/John Belushi vehicle as a powerful piece of black filmmaking—not even director John Landis. Hot off 1978’s unexpected hit frat-house comedy Animal House, which came in at #4 for box office moneymakers that year (just behind Grease and Superman), Landis was suddenly a director in demand . . . moreso than his previous two releases (1978’s Kentucky Fried Movie and 1973’s Schlock) would have ever predicted.

But, as the affable Landis told his audience at the Victoria Film Festival back in February, where he was doing a live Q&A with noted Canadian film journalist Richard Crouse, his heyday in the Hollywood spotlight was still a few years off—but he would never have been offered the likes of An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places or Michael Jackson’s Thriller had The Blues Brothers not hit all the right notes at just the right time.

Live from Los Angeles, it’s the Blues Brothers

No real surprise the director would choose to work with John Belushi immediately after Animal House—despite the comedian’s escalating drug habit, and then subsequent enrollment in rehabs for the treatment for addiction—especially since the original casting for Animal House was supposed to feature Aykroyd as well. And the popularity of the Blues Brothers as a legitimate band had mirrored Belushi’s own rise to Hollywood stardom since their debut performance opening for Steve Martin at the Los Angeles Amphitheater in 1978—an appearance which spawned their first album, Briefcase Full of Blues, which subsequently hit #1 on the Billboard 200 charts before going double-platinum and spinning off a pair of top-40 hits (their covers of “Soul Man” and “Rubber Biscuit”).

With Belushi and Aykroyd’s Jake and Elwood Blues personas now firmly fixed on the music charts, and their 1979 departure from Saturday Night Live, in retrospect it seems almost inevitable that they’d start looking for an onscreen outing for the Blues Brothers. But, as Landis told the VFF audience, the idea of showcasing black R&B stars didn’t exactly find a ready audience in American film distributors.

“‘This is a black movie,'” Landis recalled industry reps telling him after one preview screening. “‘White people won’t go see this.'” (They were wrong, of course: The Blues Brothers topped out at a respectable #10 for domestic box office in 1980, pulling in some $57 million that year alone.) He also recalled how the owner of the second largest theatre chain in the United States told him point-blank, “‘I won’t book this movie—I don’t want black people in my neighbourhoods.'”

No colour please, we’re mainstream America

Keep in mind Barack Obama was only 19 in 1980 and, as the future president was entering his 20s, America was about to embark upon the Reagan era. (To put that in context, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party had already taken power in England and, here in Canada, Joe Clark’s Conservatives were about to unseat Trudeau’s Liberals.) And Martin Luther King Jr. Day, while first proposed in 1979, wouldn’t be officially observed until 1986. “MTV wouldn’t even play black acts until Michael Jackson’s Thriller,” Landis noted (without, it should be said, taking any credit for directing that breakthrough music video.)

Up on the silver screen, the only other top-10 films with significant black roles that year were Stir Crazy (Richard Prior) and The Empire Strikes Back (Billy Dee Williams’ turn as Lando Calrissian). Check the AM dial and the only notable black acts were “safe” disco hits like Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” and Diana Ross’ forgettable “Upside Down,” as well as the radio-friendly likes of Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough.” TV wasn’t much better, with only The Jeffersons widely challenging the colour bar. And while the fading disco era was just evolving into what would become electronica’s Chicago and Detroit house movements, it was still early days for black America’s hip hop scene, leaving R&B as the main game on the wrong side of town.

Enter Aykroyd and Belushi who, as Landis told us, “exploited their celebrity to promote this kind of music. The whole ‘mission for God’ line in the movie was me making fun of Danny Aykroyd because he was such an evangelist for rhythm & blues.” And while it’s easy now to look back in awe at the lineup of R&B royalty he was able to feature in the film—Aretha Franklin, James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway—Landis admitted it wasn’t hard to interest them, since all had been in career slumps since the mid-’70s.

“When we started in 1979, R&B was considered over,” he told the Victoria Film Festival’s mostly white audience. “None of the ‘name’ acts in the film were big at the time—the only one who had any sort of career was Ray Charles, who was doing country & western. It wasn’t so much, ‘How can we get them on board?’ . . . we’d just pick up the telephone and they were, like, ‘Okay, I’m, in.'”

Note should also be made of the outstanding support band behind Jake and Elwood, which Saturday Night Live keyboardist and bandleader Paul Schaffer helped Belushi and Aykroyd form: blues guitar great Matt Murphy, Blood, Sweat & Tears trombonist Tom Malone, SNL sax player Lou Marini, plus the famed likes of Donald “Duck” Dunn and Steve Cropper—two of the three MGs behind Booker T & the MGs. (Cropper also co-wrote such iconic hits as “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”, “In the Midnight Hour” and “Knock on Wood.”)

Can you dig it?

When asked what makes The Blues Brothers still so memorable, Landis didn’t even hesitate. “It’s really the music more than anything,” he readily admitted. “The musicians . . . it was amazing working with those guys. John Lee Hooker was live, James Brown was live . . . the others [Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles] were recorded, although they did have trouble with the lip-synching, because they never sing a song the same way twice. But the whole point of the movie was to introduce you to rhythm & blues.”

And it seemed to work: following the box-office success of The Blues Brothers, interest in all of the major R&B acts in the film surged again, with their music careers getting a much-needed kickstart that has never really faded. The Blues Brothers themselves scored another top-40 hit with “Gimme Some Lovin'” once the film’s top-selling soundtrack hit the stores, which led to a national tour and their third album, Made in America . . . the last album cut before Belushi’s death in 1982.

The film’s other contribution to popular culture? Reviving the popularity of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses (a look Belushi copied from John Lee Hooker himself). As Landis explained, they needed about 250 pairs of Wayfarers to film The Blues Brothers, but since they were considered “black” sunglasses, Ray-Ban had cut production by then and he had to send people out to scour black neighbourhoods across America just to find enough pairs for the shoot. (Of course, following the success of the film, Ray-Ban quickly struck a juicy $50,000 Hollywood product-placement deal and soon found themselves forever linked with Tom Cruise’s face as a result of 1983’s Risky Business.)

A mission from god, indeed

Looking back , it’s easy to write The Blues Brothers off as yet another lame-ass, overblown Saturday Night Live sketch writ large (or indeed, the film that made all those other lame-ass, overblown SNL sketches-turned-movies possible), but Landis is clearly pleased with its legacy—despite the film’s inherent problems: the cuts the studio insisted upon to make the film more palatable to mainstream white audiences, the ridiculousness of all those automotive pile-ups (which, contrary to popular myth, did not set a record for the most number of car crashes onscreen to date—as Landis explained, “We had a 24-hour bondo shop working in Chicago . . . one car would have 50 to 60 collisions, then get repaired overnight and be ready to shoot again”), and Belushi’s escalating drug abuse. “By midway through the movie, it was getting really bad,” Landis said. “We were all surprised he lived as long as he did . . . I’m still angry with him [for dying].”

Yet it’s the surprising cultural impact and bending of the colour bar that obviously keeps The Blues Brothers close to John Landis’ heart. Who knew that two fictional white-trash brothers from Chicago would lead to an unexpected merging of mainstream popular culture and black R&B?

—————-

A specialist in popular culture, John Threlfall has been a freelance writer for over 20 years, including a five-year stint as the “walking encyclopedia of popular culture” for CBC Radio One’s Definitely Not The Opera and 12 years on staff at the Victoria-based alternative weekly Monday Magazine. He was also one of six Canadian Gen-Xers featured in the NFB documentary Le Temps X and co-authored the quirky guidebook Victoria: Secrets of the City for Arsenal Pulp Press. By day, you can find him working in the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts; by night, he’s usually in a darkened theatre keeping busy as one of Victoria’s theatre critics.

Move Over Rocky Horror Picture Show: The 21st Century Has Its Own Midnight Movie

By Matthew “Gus” Gusul

If I were to re-visit the 2010 version of myself he would never believe that in two short years, he would be writing an article about Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. In 2010, when I was first forced to watch the movie by my wife and brother-in-law, I assumed (and hoped) I would never watch The Room again. It is a terrible movie. It has very little merit as a piece of art. If someone set out to intentionally make the worst film ever, they would fall short in comparison with this movie. In my opinion, everyone involved in the creation of this work should be forced to sign a decree commissioned by the government, monarchy, papal office, or some Hollywood higher power that all parties involved will never again, under any circumstances, engage in another artistic endeavor in their lives and to do so would be criminally and artistically negligent.

The Room is written, directed, produced, and starring Tommy Wiseau. Hmmm. Warning signals go off at this point. It is the story of a man who is in love with a woman who cheats on him with his best friend. He discovers the affair and the audience sees his world unravel. “Everyone betray me. I am sick of this world.” Also, the movie features a number of sub plots that are briefly introduced and go nowhere. There are major holes in the plot, long pointless panoramic views of San Francisco, characters inexplicably entering and exiting the story, a game of football played in tuxedos in a back alley, and as far as I can see, no reason why anyone should watch it.

Against my better judgment, my wife and I attended The Room at Cinecenta on the University of Victoria campus on a Saturday in late January 2012. I knew little of what to expect going to this movie. All I knew was that the movie was terrible and that we needed to bring plastic spoons. I went with a sense of dread, but I was surprised at my experience. I had fun and my eyes have been opened to a 21st century cultural phenomenon.

It was a packed house filled with over 150 weirdos, nerds, and innocent bystanders (like me), corralled in by the freaks (like my wife) who enjoy this movie. Many of them were dressed like characters from the movie and playing catch with a football. This cult even has its own greeting, borrowed from the movie. Instead of saying hello to each other, the greeting of choice was “Oh hai, Marc”, a quote from the movie. Okay? …The movie started and we quickly learned some of the rituals of audience behaviour. Every time a character would inexplicably exit the scene, the audience would yell, “But you just got here!” During the long panning shots of the San Francisco skyline the audience would yell, “Go! Go! Go!” until we were returned to the action of the film. At several points in the movie, audience members threw plastic spoons at the screen and yelled “Spooooooooooooons!” It took some time to sort out what was going on, but I eventually realized there was a framed picture of a spoon in the main room of the house where the couple lives together. If you see the picture – yell and throw. Throughout the entire show people yelled or booed or cheered at the film, except one scene that takes place in a flower store. At the beginning of the scene, people in the audience shush everyone. The audio and video are not in sync and the audience finds humor in this poorly executed editing. This moment highlights the delight the audience finds in this poor quality film.

This phenomenon is not unique to Victoria. It has been happening since 2003 all over North America, and is just starting to enter Europe. Originally, The Room was released as a drama. Audience members started showing up to screening to mock the movie, and creator Tommy Wiseau changed the film’s listing to dark comedy. Now this movie has drawn a cult following that has made it a full-fledged movement complete with Internet memes, YouTube videos, and merchandise. The beauty of this phenomenon is the community created by moviegoers and fans who attend, not to celebrate brilliance as is often the case, but to celebrate poor quality; the epic fail that the movie represents. This movie is something we can all excitedly boo.

Perhaps this says something of a generation and of 21st century art culture. We have been wowed in so many ways. How many times has a masterpiece been crafted for cinema? All of us can name titles of tens, if not hundreds, of excellent films. The new generation has proclaimed that it enjoys poor quality art, giving rise to 21st century art culture, one that enjoys celebrating and making light of the shortcomings of The Room.

This is a phenomenon that will not go away. Trust me, I checked with the 2020 version of myself on this one. If you haven’t done it yet, go see this movie. If you don’t, you will be left wondering what all these weirdos, nerds, and innocent bystanders are laughing about.