Cinematic Scars

Cinematic Scars

A young man pretends to be the long lost son of an Armenian family. A father videotapes his sexual escapades with his new wife, recording over his son's childhood in the process. A devastating bus crash tears a community apart. A serial killer meets his match in an innocent girl. Here are many different stories, but they all seem remarkably similar when told with the brilliant narrative skill of director Atom Egoyan. In his career, spanning over twenty years, Egoyan has covered a range of topics and genres, always doing so with his wonderfully unique style. Constantly toeing the line of explicit sexuality, and raw emotion, he is able to disturb and confuse the audience into total submission and constant awe.

Atom Egoyan was born in Egypt in 1960, before immigrating to Western Canada as a young boy, with his parents, whom were both artists. He graduated from the University of Toronto with Honours, and later made the city his permanent residence. He proceeded to make ten features, multiple shorts, and even directed an episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." Egoyan has been nominated for the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival four times, winning the Grand Jury Prize for The Sweet Hereafter, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the same film. Hollywood North truly began to develop in the late 1970s, making Egoyan a pioneer for the nation, becoming intertwined with such notable artists as David Cronenberg, and Denys Arcand.

An Egoyan movie is exceptional, because for the director the simple act of filmmaking is a statement unto itself, constantly commenting on the role of storytelling and reflexive nature of the recorded image. However, while investigating these themes, he is contributing to the confusion by participating through the cinematic medium, giving his films a multidimensional panorama of ideas. Egoyan is able to manipulate time and his images, and therefore the viewer, in order to perfectly play and ultimately express the final message, the definitive thought.

In this, Egoyan is a member of a wonderful voyeuristic tradition, in league with Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape, and David Lynch's Blue Velvet. All three directors play with the artistic voyeur as well as the sexual one, asking everyone to question their individual truth. Egoyan is not unique in his use of the recorded image or his blatant exposure of sexual taboo, but rather he is separated by his message. Soderbergh utilizes the videotape, to reveal the truth behind the women's lacquered lives, but for Egoyan this grainy images only obscures the individual and memory, and pulls the viewer farther away from reality. Lynch uses explicit sex to make statements about the characters, while the sexuality of Egoyan's plots speaks strongly to his message. Yet along the wayward path of deceit, truth is still Egoyan's ultimate goal, discovering the rich, complex emotion within the individual. But yet Egoyan chooses the medium of film, a public exposing method, begging the question of how he is able to reconcile the complexity of the human spirit he painfully wishes to express, and the faÐ*ade presented by human beings and in turn his characters.

For Egoyan, grief is able to isolate his characters' in their loneliness, creating an easier target to manipulate for his vision. The Sweet Hereafter (1997) provides an appropriate tableau for the director, as tale of woe. In the wake of an accident involving a school bus, which killed many of the children of a small town in Northern Canada, an out of town lawyer (Mitchell, played by Ian Holm), tries to get the victims' families to file a lawsuit. This is a terrible public tragedy, but with dozens of personal wounds. Grief and tragedy are often considered unifying factors, as individuals gather together over a common feeling, in order to recover from the associated pain, and find life again. But Egoyan sees a greater truth: no matter what performance is put on for the public, a private pain leaves the permanent scar on a person's soul that cannot be altered with a thousand counselling sessions. In this film, this is emphasized by Mitchell's private tragedy: his daughter is a drug addict, and has just informed him that she is HIV positive. He too has lost his child. And while he tries to help the community deal with their much too public pain, he denies his own. Nicole, the sole survivor of the crash, is also a victim of this truth. Nicole has been having an incestuous "Lolita-style" affair with her father, and is now caught between her role as a child, and that of a woman. This explains her resistance to the lawsuit, as she understands that nothing can change what happened, and it is better to move forward, and accept one's injuries. She has been physically scarred by the crash, as she is now confined to a wheel chair, but the emotional baggage she carries will always be an additional weight. And while she accepts change, she also makes it, insisting upon a lock for her bedroom door. They will all, as individuals and a society, be haunted by the memory.

For Atom Egoyan, memory is unreliable, yet in it are absolute truths. Videotape tells no lies, bur it covers and coats the human spirit with emotional deceit. This is visualized in The Sweet Hereafter, as Mitchell videotapes the bus wreckage. This footage does not tell the story of what happens, and offers no true consequence; the recorded image is devoid of the sentiment that has clouded around the community; it cannot tell the tale of each dead child. In Exotica (1994), the story of the people who visit a strip club, the importance of memory is essential. Francis is in denial about his daughter's death, even hiring a babysitter every day to sit with the phantom child. The truth is only revealed to the audience through a memory of Christina, the girl's babysitter and the person who found the body during the search. The scene is quite surreal as sun seems to be in an impossible place in the sky, and Christina is not an accurate reflection of who she was at that juncture, being far too sophisticated. The source is unreliable, but the reality is far too sincere. The public consciousness of the tragedy allows it to exist whereas Francis' denial allows it to disappear. Francis' memory seems to rely on a videotape, watching a personal recording of his daughter and wife play the piano. They constantly press their hands towards the camera obscuring the image, blocking the view, and seizing the memory. He does not want to forget, but his source is forcing him to. Unlike Sweet's Nicole, he is stuck in the mire of depression because he cannot face the truth, and move forward.

While the meaning behind the form is always different, the technique is common, as Egoyan