There’s an episode of the old mid-90s RoboCop TV series in which our hero, robot/cop Alex Murphy, is pursuing a hijacked bank truck around the city. The city is presumably Detroit, because that’s where RoboCop lives, just as Superman lives in Metropolis and the Fantastic Four live in New York City. More than this, because Robocop is a romping-stomping allegory for American industry, the city has to be Detroit. He can’t just pack up and move to Seattle like Frasier or something. Anyways, Robocop’s tooling around what’s supposed to be Detroit and turns a corner and all of a sudden, over his shoulder, you can spot the CN Tower, plain as the protective metallic visor on his face. Then Robo follows the truck into what’s obviously the SkyDome, which is in fact not at all in Detroit, but in Toronto. It’s the kind of thing that laughably spoils the illusion of the otherwise watertight robotic-cop program for any Toronto or Toronto-savvy viewer. But it’s exactly the kind of the thing that has made Toronto a viable locale for shooting movies and TV shows for decades: besides offering tax incentives and a (once) attractive exchange rate, Toronto is essentially characterless. It could be anywhere. And so the game of Toronto-spotting has become a dorky parlour game for local film buffs, who can tell you that Christian Bale’s Wall Street serial killer in American Psycho worked out of the TD Centre at Bay and Wellington, or that Billy Madison took home the gold at the Academic Decathlon at Danforth Tech. And when Toronto does play itself, usually at the nudging of local filmmakers, it’s forced into giving too much away: laying down it’s skyline, it’s major intersections, and the telltale clatter of its streetcars like some tenderfoot poker player lucking into a royal flush. + You Are Here, the first feature film from acclaimed Toronto video artist Dan Cockburn (opening this Friday at TIFF Bell Lightbox), gleefully stymies both these impulses. Though tricky to sum up easily, the film follows a frumpy archivist (the late Tracy Wright) who stockpiles slides, video cassettes, tape recordings, and other curious detritus she finds scattered around the city. As she investigates and indexes the material, her archive begins exhibiting signs of unruly behavior, as if it were acquiring a consciousness of its own. “No matter who’s making a movie in Toronto, and no matter if it’s being used as Toronto or as another city, some people are going to notice that,” says Cockburn, picking over the scraps of a salad at the Lakeview last week. “And they’re going to talk about it. They’re going to say, ‘Oh it’s interesting that they’re using Toronto as another city.’ Or, ‘It’s not interesting,’ but it’s still something worthy of noting.” It’s this habit of logging the mere presence of the city, interesting or not, that Cockburn wanted to avoid. So despite the fact that it was shot in and around a production office and studio near Dundas East and Carlaw, you never really get a solid sense of where you are. Of course, the film’s title offers more than the necessary geolocation guidance. It situates the viewer as being here–present, extant in relation to a film that both demands and rewards an immediate, undistracted presence. This probably makes You Are Here sound pretty heady and intellectual, like one of those films you’re supposed to chew through like a serving of cinematic veggies. This isn’t really the case. While You Are Here is undeniably, unashamedly smart and philosophically-engaged, Cockburn seems like the kind of guy who’s more interested in puzzles, riddles, and thought experiments than chin-stroking intellectual sophistry. And the film’s upturning of Toronto provides a different kind of extra-cinematic game. For the hawk-eyed Toronto location-spotter, You Are Here‘s like the upper-level graduate seminar. (This might be ironic, given the filmmaker’s intent.) In one scene, a team of urban cartographers systematizes the movements of a team of mysterious agents who roam the city, like a real-life Google Maps. Throughout the scene, the mappers call out intersections that define the boundaries of Cockburn’s sort-of-Toronto: one street real, the other made-up (Princess and Grace, Manning and Duplex, et cetera). The gesture, knowing and pranksterish, defines the film’s attitude to space and urbanity, and especially the space and urbanity of Toronto. And it’s bound to frustrate the hawk-eyes. “Originally, it was Toronto streets and Toronto intersections,” says Cockburn. “And then, when I kept working on the script, I realized this was going to make it extremely difficult for me because I’d actually have to adhere to the real geography of a city. Because for all these words that spin out in this cyclone of verbiage, I’d have to plot a path for these characters. And while there may be something Kubrickianly awesome about doing that, I just didn’t want to do it.” What Cockburn hoped to elide was the voltage of verisimilitude; of recognizing a space as a real and lived-in and, worse, real and lived-in by yourself. “I think it’s something a lot of filmmakers do,” he explains. “For better or for worse, you sort of say, ‘Well, my movie is not taking place in the real world.’ So you can’t take pictures of the real world because then you evoke real things, real concerns, that aren’t supposed to be part of this movie.” + For all that, Cockburn’s elision of locality will still raise questions of, “Hey, why not frame Toronto qua Toronto?” Or, “Why not do it more delicately, without being all rah-rah about it?”(See? We literally just raised those questions.) “I don’t want to blame everything on the Canada/America, Little Brother/Big Brother syndrome, but I think it’s got a lot to do with that. Because American movies are the movies that people see,” says Cockburn. This inferiority complex–call it the Kid Brother syndrome the cultural cringe, beaver hour fever, whatever–is the neurosis that gets diagnosed even in its absence, when waving Canadian flags and clanging streetcars are scrubbed from what still somehow feels like a very Toronto film. “I guess I would like it to not be an issue. Or not be an issue in or of itself,” says Cockburn of the burden to visually represent the city. “I presume that a New Yorker doesn’t get excited to see New York on screen. In fact they’d think nothing of it. New York movies are part of the cinematic air that we all breathe.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine some hardened New Yorker watching King Kong and exclaiming, “Hey! That’s the Empire State Building!” But New York, we’ve come to understand through cinema as much as literature and Broadway, is where stories happen, where life comes to dramatically work itself out. Toronto, though the backdrop for plenty of good stories (incidentally or intentionally), doesn’t have that immediate dramatic cachet. Not yet. But the made-up, quasi-real Toronto of You Are Here (a film which, it’s probably worth pointing out, is very, very good) offers a new way of thinking about screening the city. It’s a nice counterpoint to last year’s Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Edgar Wright’s hyperactive Hogtown fantasia that digitally-matted in a CN Tower where there shouldn’t be one. If Toronto’s on-screen representations waffle between passing as one-or-another city or overweening to flaunt its sundry charms, these films offer a third way–a middle-ground for hewing a cinematic identify that’s neither too abashed nor too immodest. And as for the hawk-eyes, this new cinematic space just gives their game of landmark-spotting an extra dimension. Cockburn, a little bit despite himself, even seems to shiftily relish the idea of obsessive viewers freeze-framing, rewinding, and generally missing the point of his film just to piece together its confounding geographical puzzles. “I feel like there is no task that is too trivial for someone these days. I can’t help but like the idea that someone out there may be trying to place these locations.” You Are Here opens Friday, August 19 at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West).
