The Canadian Mockumentary
In 1996, director Bruce McDonald adapted Michael Turner's book, Hard Core Logo, into a feature film. The film itself is one of Canada's crowning achievements, for it synthesized homegrown actors, producers and directors, creating a uniquely Canadian born movie. Hard Core Logo follows the story of the Canadian punk-rock band that goes by the same name: Hard Core Logo. The premise is, in 1991, Hard Core Logo broke up, but then reunites five years later, after they give a benefit concert to honor their wounded idol, Bucky Haight. Four their five-day tour, Hard Core Logo decides to bring along filmmaker Bruce McDonald to capture their last shot at glory. Although Hard Core Logo is a fictitious band, the movie is filmed in the classic documentary style that was popularized years earlier by American made, This Is Spinal Tap. Whereas This is Spinal Tap was a blatant mockumentary comedy, Hard Core Logo borrows from the classic Canadian tradition of documentary realism. Yet, what makes Hard Core Logo so extremely Canadian and cunningly versatile, is that it also follow the other branch of Canadian traditionalism in its usage of fantasy. Hard Core Logo brilliantly intertwines two of Canada's most prevalent cinematic features to creature the true mockumentary: a film that is so deceptively fictitious, that it becomes real.
Hard Core Logo follows the clean-cut documentary lines that John Grierson defined in mid-century Canada. As defined by Grierson, documentaries are "the creative treatment of actuality" (Leach 12). While shaping the National Film Board of Canada's mandate, Grierson's goal was to "interpret Canada to Canadians and to other nations" (Leach 12). Hard Core Logo follows all of these directives. To commence, the premise of the film is, in itself, a creative treatment of actuality. By using a fictional band as the protagonists of the faux-documentary style, the lines of reality are being extremely blurred. This contradictory approach offers up fiction as a reality, which immediately makes one question their definition of what is real and what is 'mock'. As well, there is a distinctive back-story to each character that can easily be related to by any Canadian. The fans from each western province are stereotypical, yet not farfetched.
To the people from Saskatoon, one could easily pinpoint the Regina rock fans, all the while distinguishing between the fans from Alberta or Calgary. As John's voiceover explains, "Calgary is the same as ever. Big, friendly, smiling, beef eating faces. Good faces here. Better than LA with its go for it, stoner faces. Or Toronto with it's smug little, rat race faces. Or Montreal with its separatist, chain-smoker faces" (Hard Core Logo). On that note, linguistics and accents offer a quick and easy divide of the Canadian people for those living within or outside of the country. What is interesting, and albeit ingenious, is the writing of Canadian Noel S. Baker. Baker especially makes the film easy to follow by our southern peers in the United States. The provincial anachronisms are broadly recognizable to the point that one does not need to actually travel to a separate Canadian city to understand the culture divide that exists between the ten provinces. Due to this, the typical 'Canadian' becomes extremely recognizable to other countries, while still staying true to the Canadian people. For this reason, Canada is perfectly portrayed to a Canadian, and is understandable to those who are not Canadian.
Furthermore, following the first principles of the documentary, McDonald emphasizes how his mockumentary serves initially as a social function. As is describes, "cinema, as a new art form, has a potential for observing life that could be to serve a social function" (class notes, January 14, 2008). Essentially, documentaries serve the purpose of helping people become 'better citizens'. Hard Core Logo might not make Canadian citizens more law abiding and courteous, but it does manage to give voice to a wide variety of Canadian adopted subcultures. For instance, at the benefit concert for Bucky Haight, there is a tightly shot montage of punk and rock bands performing on stage. The styles range from an all female punk rock group to a plaid and thickly bearded, male grunge act. Despite the intermixing of styles and songs that blur together for the montage, there is enough time allocated to each band to reveal the allusions to the distinct musical influence. The musical mosaic begins with a glam rock band that heavily resembles David Bowie's infamous Ziggy Stardust, which then jumps into a Bikini Kill-esque, all girl, punk group, which follows a laid back grunge act that resembles the calm indifference of the Stone Temple Pilots at their peak. Uniting overseas influences, and then applying them to mock-Canadian bands, creates a melting-pot effect. Canadians become more aware of their heritage via the borrowed influences of others. Naturally, the mock-Canadians bands alter their sound and habits to make them their own. By subverting a genre of music and creating a unique Canadian sound, Hard Core Logo successfully serves as a social and cultural beacon.
In addition, Hard Core Logo clearly uses the second and third principles of the documentary. Claiming that the "performance of people in documentaries� are transformed by their situation and are not entirely themselves" as well as claiming that "the best way to represent people is to represent them though raw materials", Hard Core Logo reveals the humanity of the human condition, through fabricated characters (class notes, January 14, 2008). While being a mockumentary, Hard Core Logo toes a delicate line of emphasizing cinematic realness, all the while being a complete sham. As John writes, "Why the hell are two grown men still calling themselves Joe Dick and Billy Tallent? When they gave themselves those names they were 16... 17. The question is, when do they stop using them? Forty? Fifty? Sixty?" (Hard Core Logo). The personas of the Hard Core Logo members offer a disguise for their failed ventures at becoming rockstars. As long as Joe Dick is not Joe Mulgrew, he still exists as a punk legend. Furthermore, as it is revealed, John Oxenberger, is schizophrenic. Oddly enough, he is the only character to retain a single personality and persona, claiming, "I used to want a punk handle too... just couldn't find one that fit. � Maybe I never had a real self to throw away like those guys" (Hard Core Logo). The lives of the fictional characters become real over the course of the film: Billy's reluctance to rejoin the group, John's frail grasp on sanity, and the final act of suicide by Joe; they all appear to be hyper-real. There is a palpable shock felt when Joe pulls the trigger that ends his life, just as there is a sense of deep sorrow for John's na�ve and tentative hold on his own mental sanity when he says, "I write to try and keep my head clear. It's good, and sometimes, I'm afraid I'll forget things�then I would be lost and no one could find me" (Hard Core Logo). As one could expect, although the characters are not real, their actions and reactions are.
Where Hard Core Logo breaks from documentary to fantasy is in its usage of time. Foucault's notion of the imaginary heterotopias is shown in the non-linear filmmaking that gives Hard Core Logo its unique mockumentary style (24). McDonald continuously utilizes different forms of direction to showcase the adventures of Hard Core Logo: shots that play with temporality, voiceovers, information cards, and montages. As Foucault wrote, "our experiences of the world is less than that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein" (22). Hard Core Logo becomes a band that cannot connect with its own fabric, for they are a stagnant point in time. As Mulligan, Hard Core Logo's manager, describes, there is an evoked reminiscence of a "punk nostalgia" for Hard Core Logo's reunion tour. Fans break from their current lives to dress up and act like they did years previously, all for a small taste at a past life that is being recreated for them in the present. Fans that were once youthful and rebellious are now working members of society with families and mortgages. Hard Core Logo represents a different time and space where mentalities toward a traditional lifestyle denoted materialism and assimilation. By never growing out of their rockstar tendencies, Hard Core Logo becomes their own pocket of space on linear timeline. Joe sums it up by saying, "there's two ways to look at it: Billy wants the models and limousines, while I'm happy with hookers and taxicabs" (Hard Core Logo). With the exception of Billy, Hard Core Logo thrive on what the once were and represented, and bring that mentality with them, to a time and place that have radically changed.
Where the movie gains its disjointed sense of time, are in the fans. Legions of aging rockers pour into concert halls to watch their favorite underground band from years earlier, as they try to recreate the experiences and performances of their past. Viewers are pulled along on Hard Core Logo's tour, watching in embarrassed horror as the once monumental punk band can barely fill a venue. As Joe explains, "I'm not going on until there's at least twenty people in this club" (Hard Core Logo). Since the band does not know what will happen when they go on tour, their reactions and interactions are situational and depend heavily on the people that attend their shows. One such an example is when Billy reacquaints with Mary the Fan. Mary brings her husband and her young daughter, Billie, to Hard Core Logo's show. Mary bridges the gap between her past and present life by doing so, whereas the rest of the fans still maintain the guise of a rebellious nostalgia. Mary has clearly moved forward from her life as 'the Fan', when she rejects Billy's advances and chooses to introduce the band to her family. When Billy discovers the existence of Billie, his reactions and expressions are definitively shaped by the circumstance and are not those of a seasoned actor performing a role. Later, when Joe and Billy are at the diner, Billy, asks, "Did you ever sleep with Mary?" before revealing that he did, years earlier (Hard Core Logo). The possibility that Billie is Billy's daughter becomes apparent to the audience, thus explaining Billy's erratic, troubled behavior. The documentary genre itself acts like a mirror to society, portraying life in real time. The mockumentary, on the other hand, sells fictitious life in the guise of reality. Without the use of special effects, the mockumentary implements the finer aspects of Canadian cinematic traditions, while delivering a notion of fantastical that plays on par with big budget, Hollywood productions.
Moreover, time is perpetually toyed with in Hard Core Logo. In a blatant allusion to time, Joe and Billy are sitting at a bar and joking about time travel. When Billy jokingly rifts through time, the motion and sound of the background people immediately halt, leaving Joe to frantically search for Billy. When Billy pops back into the present time, one cannot help but wonder if he was lingering in the past or floating into the future. Though, due to the fact he agrees to rejoin the band, closely followed by the flashbacks to Billy and Joe as teenagers in a band, one gets the distinct feeling Billy was revisiting a nostalgia that propelled him to agree to a tour he did not want to endure. As well, the opening of the film employs a voiceover of lead vocalist, Joe Dick, as he explains the etymology of the band's name. McDonald cleverly splices information cards between Joe's explanations, which reveal the story of what happened to the band. Rooted in present time, the audience discovers what occurred in the past, creating an ambivalent, yet, surprisingly expressive, disassociation with reality. The movie often jumps back and forth in time, usually through the implementation of voiceovers. With the voiceover, viewers are allowed to uncover future information, thoughts and feelings, while being firmly cemented in an even that has already occurred. McDonald continues this trend throughout the movie, especially at the end of the film when he reveals what the band members have accomplished after the filming of the documentary. This is only seen during the end credits, which is a fascinating and different approach to the standard 'where are the now's'. Choosing to incorporate the title cards during the credits, McDonald evokes a sense of finality�the symbolic end of the film Hard Core Logo, also acts as the end of the band Hard Core Logo.
In what is probably the most notorious scene in the film, becomes Hard Core Logo's distinctive break from documentary realism to explicit fantasy. After a chaotic bus ride, the band decides to visit Bucky Haight. While at Bucky's farm in Saskatchewan, they learn that Bucky is not injured. The scene is poignantly filled with a flashback to Joe expressing his disgust at how Bucky had been injured. Yet, where the film takes a sharp turn is with the discovery that Joe fabricated the entire injury, in order to call Billy back to the band. When the premise of the mock documentary becomes a lie as well, the viewer's perspectives becomes shattered. The space in which the movie occurs is now a site of relation, for we have grown used to the characters. What immediately follows this revelation is an acid trip that further distorts time. Sounds and sights are choppy and muted, but exaggeratedly indistinct. Through the calamity, there is a flash to Joe placing a gun to his head�the surprising and unflinching ending of the film revealed. The theme of death is continually re-mentioned in the drug-induced hallucinations. A goat is sacrificed�hacked to death with a chainsaw, and Joe is seen being shot, with a shotgun. The foreshadowing to death is not something that Canadian documentaries employ, but rather a film that dabbles in the fantastical.
While Canada does possess a fundamentally realist cinema, Hard Core Logo goes to great lengths to subvert said claim. The mockumentary genre itself poses a threat to realism, for it shows falsities under the guise of truth�it gives perspective to the fantasy elements of cinema and highlights the uncertainty that is reality. As a band, Hard Core Logo never existed. As a documentary of events, Hard Core Logo was extremely real. With a schism in time created that allowed Hard Core Logo to tour again, fans of the defunct band were able to transgress space and time and capture the glory of their past, all the while having Bruce McDonald confuse the audiences sense of time through his flash-forwards, voiceovers and montages. When one reminisces about what could have been, one needs only to think of Hard Core Logo.
