Border Crossings: Representations of North American Culture in Bruce McDonald's Highway 61

Bruce McDonald's 61, which came out in 1991, is centrally concerned with Canada's America. (1) It is movie that explores North American from Thunder Bay to New Orleans, representing United States society and culture from Canadian perspective. I will argue that far from providing realist view, it is one that is mediated through literature and music, and that relies upon comedy, caricature, stereotype, and myth. The images of Canada and America, to which I will be referring, are drawn from body of literature about representation of national identity and culture within filmic and literary texts. The film makes an effort to convey ethnic and geographic diversity in its inclusion of French-Canadian, East Indian, Manitoban, and Northern-Ontarian characters. Likewise, its representation of U.S. includes African-Americans, Southerners, and Mid-Westerners. Thus, while film's perspectives are largely English-Canadian, they are situated within pluralistic context. I have resorted to generalizing about things Canadian and American for sake of convenience, in knowledge that identities are far more multiple, fluid, and specific than this sort of cross-cultural comparison allows. Should my concepts sound unitary and unifying as result, I would like to endorse their provisional nature. 61 begins with Pokey Jones, trumpet-playing barber from Pickerel Falls, Northern Ontario, finding man frozen to death in his backyard. Jackie Bangs, roadie, claims that dead body belongs to her brother, and that she must take it to New Orleans to be buried, although she is really using corpse as suitcase for drugs. Jackie tries unsuccessfully to hitchhike, before Pokey offers to transport coffin on roof of his car. Mr Skin, who believes he is Satan, pursues them along highway, because dead man had signed pact with him relinquishing his body upon his death. Along way, Pokey pays tribute to various musicians associated with regions he travels through. For example, he visits house where Bob Dylan spent his early childhood and is filled with sense of awe. Pokey makes Dylan allusion in title of film explicit, when he proclaims: Highway 61's song. When you travel south on 61 what you're really doing is tracing popular music back to its roots. I lived on northern tip of this highway and I studied and I read. I've never left home, but I know every inch of this highway. Correspondingly, soundtrack of film pays tribute to popular music by playing songs that represent its periods and styles. Beginning in barber's shop, and hence evoking barber shop quartet, film includes heavy metal, folk, rock, pop, country and western, soul, blues, zydeco, and jazz, with song lyrics complementing spoken narrative. The movie format of 61 recalls journey in Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation novel On The Road (1955), in which two youths criss-cross United States, hitch-hiking, stealing and destroying cars, in mad pursuit of women, drink, and poetic and religious self-enlightenment. (2) Like Walt Whitman, they seek to embrace geographic and mythological immensity of their land and they celebrate experience for its own sake. Sal Paradise speaks of the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent (67) and he asserts that Dean Moriaty's criminality, which leads him to steal cars, is a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy, since he steals them for joy rides only (11). This novel celebrates and fetishizes car itself: Sal swears that Dean's very soul is wrapped up in fast car, coast to reach, and woman at end of road (190). McDonald's film also employs journey as structuring device. There is some similarity between cross-country rampage Jackie embarks on and journey in Kerouac's book. But Jackie's purpose in making trip is to smuggle drugs across border: she is impelled by her carefree, criminal nature, rather than by quest for enlightenment. …

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