Pontypool (dir. Bruce McDonald, 2008)
The opening of Pontypool–a monologue about a missing cat, linguistic drift, and Norman Mailer’s theory about synchronicity–is what I wished listening to the radio was like. Podcasts can provide content like that, certainly, but they lack the crucial component of spontaneity: that you just happened hear a voice on a signal carried through the air. I’m sure that somewhere there’s someone giving these performances to no one in particular, but it seems like whenever I happen to turn on any sort of news radio, I always hear David Brooks talking.
I don’t listen to the radio very often for that reason, obviously.
Pontypool is a Canadian production set in the titular small Ontario town. You’ve read Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, so you understand what it’s like there and why Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) resents his position as a morning radio DJ in a tiny market after having been let go from his position in the city. His style and persona clash with the sensibility of Pontypool, though his assistant Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) is a fan. The station manager Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) just wants the show to run smoothly.
It’s Valentine’s Day, an ordinary day, but extraordinary things begin to happen as news of riots and mass violence come in. A broadcast in French cuts into their signal asking listeners not to use the English language and to avoid terms of endearment and babytalk. What is happening?
Pontypool takes the notion of language as a virus to its metaphoric extreme. Something in the spoken word is causing a glitch in the human mind. You repeat words, you babble, you lash out violently when others fail to understand. Memetics as an outbreak. The options open to you are to speak in non-English languages or to stop speaking at all, but as William S. Burroughs said:
“Modern man has lost the option of silence… try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.”
You might ask, couldn’t this just be a radio play? And you are correct. It in fact was made into one for the CBC. But only listening means you miss out on Stephen McHattie giving expression to every emotion a face is capable of making or seeing the singing family quartet Lawrence and the Arabians in brownface [1].
All of the performances are excellent, the dialogue is clever without feeling forced, and the central idea is strong enough to carry a whole film. It’s also defiantly Canadian beyond even the government policy of dual lingualism being a plot point. It’s the rare modern “zombie” film where the protagonists avoid violence, and are disturbed whenever they are forced to commit it. It’s not for nothing that so much in the film hinges on the phrase, “Kill is kiss.”
[1] The father is played by Tony Burgess, who wrote the screenplay based on his book Pontypool Changes Everything.
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