The doomed antiheroes Spawn (created by a Canadian) and Wolverine (who is Canadian) show that to separate from Canada carries with it a grave penalty, even the loss of one’s soul to Hell itself. And yet there is a region of Canada that has nevertheless flirted, dangerously closely, with separatism. I speak of course of La Belle Province – Quebec.
As this is a series on Canadian culture, I will not delve too deeply into Quebec’s history or politics. Any discussion of Quebec culture, however, must reference the year 1759 and the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, just outside modern-day Quebec City, where British forces established themselves as the sole power in what was then Canada.
An obscure and quite short battle in the much larger Seven Years War, this event created the pretext for French-speaking Canadians to view themselves as a conquered and colonized people. To this day, Quebecois display “Je Me Souviens” (I remember) on the license plates of their cars, and antipathy towards the English royal family is common throughout the province while the Queen remains (mostly) beloved everywhere else. This is the result of the Quiet Revolution, a cultural and religious shift two hundred years after the French defeat at the hands of the British. The Catholic Church may have lost most of its power, but a giant cross still stands atop Mount Royal and adorns the Quebec National Assembly, the provincial seat of power, and Quebecers curse each other with religious epithets (Tabarnak! Va a diable! Crisse!).
Thus, the Quebecois are some of the most ardent nationalists in the country, and this Quebec nationalism is deeply embedded in their culture for better or for worse, such that expressions of Quebec culture are inextricably linked to political expression and identity, even and especially at the expense of Canadian national unity. Stories of Quebec’s drive for independence from the rest of Canada have spread beyond the province’s borders, and feature prominently in American works such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. But at home, Quebecers have embraced the French arts of caricature and circus – if you’ve ever seen a Cirque Du Soleil show, you know what I’m talking about – along with absurdist films made by wunderkind directors and biting political satire. For the Quebecois, cultural production is about survival – though a plethora of government issued tax-credits for such work certainly helps.
As I write this, however, the centre-right, immigration-skeptical, pro-carbon tax and decidedly anti-sovereignitist Coalition Avenir du Quebec (the hilariously named CAQ) has won a resounding victory in the most recent provincial election. Such a development puts the lie to uninformed takes on the province, such as this one, which oversimplifies Quebec’s desire for independence. The mercurial character of Quebec’s politics and culture cannot be captured so easily!
What the writer does get right, however, is that often bland and self-satisfied broader Canadian culture – the type we saw in this series’ previous installments on Scott Pilgrim and parts of Letterkenny and Essex County – is much derided in Quebec. Quebeckers who identified themselves with federalist interests were historically branded with the epithet “vendu“, or sell-out. The implication is clear: the unsophisticated Anglos are busy counting coins, but the authentic Quebecker resists, and invest his energy in making transcendent art. This money-ruins-everything attitude is of course tinged with Marxism, which became part and parcel of Quebec independence and nationalism, and, subsequently, culture. (I briefly touched on a similar notion in my deconstruction of Canadian critic John Semley’s take on Avengers Infinity War earlier this year. Spoiler alert: Maybe English and French Canadians had more in common than they thought all along?)
So now that I have cued up all of these facets of Quebec culture in your mind, does it seem appropriate that Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve – one of those enfant terrible filmmakers I mentioned earlier – was the one chosen to head up Blade Runner 2049, the sequel for one of the greatest and most influential sci-fi films of all time? For this frustrating and gorgeous film does recapitulate all of these Quebecois quirks, if perhaps unintentionally on Villeneuve’s part.

If you don’t see it yet, imagine that the angelic and oppressed replicants are Quebecers, while the greedy and racist humans are meant to be the Anglophones. Imagine that Ryan Gosling’s replicant, K, who shrugs off intolerance from his human overseers and ignores racial slurs written on his door, is the colonized and obedient vendu, who has sold himself out because of implanted memories and thoughts, put there without his knowledge. (Dave Bautista, cameoing as a replicant retired by K, doesn’t call K a vendu, but he does ask him how it feels, killing his own kind.) The replicants and the humans are visually indistinguishable, much like Quebecers and Anglophones, but they still kill and enslave one another.
Then imagine that Jared Leto’s insane industrialist and replicant creator Niander Wallace is a stand-in for both God and the Devil, an omnipotent madman speaking in riddles. “And God remembered Rachel, and opened her womb,” he intones, referencing Sean Young’s replicant Rachel from the first film. (There’s that stubborn last vestige of religion which the Quiet Revolution could not destroy!)
You can see it in the film’s silent condemnation of environmental devastation, and in how the same snow that covered the Plains of Abraham now falls on the Los Angeles of 2049. There is, of course, the heroic replicant resistance, headed up by Freysa, and the miracle of the birth of a replicant child, who naturally turns out to be a creative designer of dreams, independent from Wallace and his world-scouring greed. The dream of Quebec independence may have been but a replicant’s fantasy, but the spirit of resistance burns even within K himself, as he finally chooses to lie and rebel against the humans.
Then, finally, there is that famous Blade Runner ambivalence. In the first film, there was only one tantalizingly unresolved point: Was Harrison Ford’s Deckard a replicant or not? In the sequel, there are countless questions: Why is the Wallace jingle a few notes from “Peter and the Wolf?” Why does Deckard quote Treasure Island when he finally meets K? Are K’s memories implanted or not? Is K actually the male child of Deckard and Rachael (because we are told at one point a boy and a girl were born) or is the actual “child” the replicant revolution? Like Quebec itself, this is a film that takes a very long time (two and a half hours!) to set up endless debates that can never be resolved.
But in recapitulating the history of Quebec resistance, Villeneuve overlooked one crucial element: That ALL Canadians experience the same sense of unreality, of ambiguousness, and desire to separate. He forgets that Western Canadians, particularly Albertans, have wanted to break away from the federation, as have Eastern Canadians from the Maritime regions. Even Toronto has talked about establishing itself as its own province. They just haven’t felt the need to refight the Battle on the Plains of Abraham over and over again.
Still, Villeneuve’s reimagining does help to convey a crucial part of the Canadian identity – the sense that we are all just enslaved replicants, in the shadow of other world powers, and that we are compelled to resist somehow, even though our own implanted memories tell us differently. Another strange and unsettling medium of Canadian art – the animated cartoon – beckons, and it has much to tell us about this Canadian uncanny valley. We shall explore it next week, through the haunting CGI images of “Reboot” and “Transformers: Beast Wars”.
So now that I have cued up all of these facets of Quebec culture in your mind, does it seem appropriate that Quebecois director Denis Villeneuve – one of those enfant terrible filmmakers I mentioned earlier, and one that is particularly obsessed with ambiguous and strange imagery, such as a talking fish narrator – was the one chosen to head up Blade Runner 2049, the sequel for one of the greatest and most influential sci-fi films of all time? For this frustrating and gorgeous film does recapitulate all of these Quebecois quirks, if perhaps unintentionally on Villeneuve’s part.
If you haven’t see it yet, imagine that the angelic and oppressed replicants are Quebecers, while the greedy and racist humans are meant to be the Anglophones. Imagine that Ryan Gosling’s replicant, K, who shrugs off intolerance from his human overseers and ignores racial slurs written on his door, is the colonized and obedient vendu, who has sold himself out because of implanted memories and thoughts, put there without his knowledge. (Dave Bautista, cameoing as a replicant retired by K, doesn’t call K a vendu, but he does ask him how it feels, killing his own kind.) The replicants and the humans are visually indistinguishable, much like Quebecers and Anglophones, but they still kill and enslave one another.
Then imagine that Jared Leto’s insane industrialist and replicant creator Niander Wallace is a stand-in for both God and the Devil, an omnipotent madman speaking in riddles. “And God remembered Rachel, and opened her womb,” he intones, referencing Sean Young’s replicant Rachel from the first film. He is the ultimate antagonist, the one who must be rebelled against, but unlike Dr. Tyrell in the first film, he is never destroyed – much like the remnant of the Catholic Church which still maintains its presence in places of power.
You can see it in the film’s silent condemnation of environmental devastation, and in how the same snow that covered the Plains of Abraham now falls on the Los Angeles of 2049. There is, of course, the heroic replicant resistance, and the miracle of the birth of a replicant child, who naturally turns out to be a creative designer of dreams, independent from Wallace and his world-scouring greed. The dream of Quebec independence may have been but a replicant’s fantasy, but the spirit of resistance burns even within K himself, as he finally chooses to lie and rebel against the humans.
****

Photo by Ronald (Ron) Douglas Frazier