In Part 1, we wrote about how the representation of place in film, tv, or popular visual media more broadly differs in execution and reception from the representation of people even though place (within the world of a film and/or outside it) has a meaningful impact on how people from or in that place are perceived, the activities they get up to, etc. We don’t broadly care how, say, a city is represented so long as the people in that city are represented well, authentically, justly, etc. You can see how this indifference (or more carefree attitude) towards the representation of place plays out by attending to how some cities (like Montreal) are used to stand in for other places (like NYC). This indifference to how we represent places also seemingly extends to an indifference regarding which places end up represented in popular movies and all the rest.
Now, let’s get to Part 2 (of 2, don’t worry) of our worrying over how the environments we see on screen do or do not match up with the world and whether that matters in any way at all.
We don’t blame you (much) for thinking that all this talk about place is just a bunch of downstream, academic nonsense that couldn’t possibly have any bearing on much of anything. And you might be very right to think this. We’re not going to sit here and say things like “It’s maybe concerning that popular media presents the world as a set of generic, homogeneous, and interchangeable places because that means either a) the world itself has become a set of generic, etc. places (e.g. North American suburb, European city, etc.) or b) the particularities of the world are being deliberately ellided, tacitly devalued, and subtly replaced with a set of clandestine pseudo-universal norms.” And we’re definitely not going to add that “where a person lives has meaningful and complex effects on how a person lives and thus who a person is such that if the “where” part of things is rendered uniform, nonspecific, etc. then the “how” and the “who” parts are going to (eventually) succumb to the same fate.”
Someone who said things like that could be accused of being the kind of person who “thinks too much” and we definitely don’t want that. So, having not said any of that, let’s just look at the representation of Montreal on film for a little while. For the unbridled pleasure of it!
Obviously, at the very top of everyone’s ranked list of the “Best Films Shot and Filmed in Montreal” and featured elsewhere on lists like “Best Low-Budget Horror Movies That Seem Far More Focused on a Deadly Parasite that May Lead to the End of the World Than They Are With the Representation of the Metropolitan Places in Which They are Set” is David Cronenberg’s first feature film: Shivers (1975).
[We don’t believe that films or anything else worth actually engaging with can be spoiled, but we get that others do. If you want to watch this movie before learning about its plot, etc., you can see it for free on DailyMotion. It’s worth noting that the film features some nudity, violence, sexual violence, and a bunch of moderately gross stuff - so maybe skip it if that’s not your kind of thing. It’s not for everyone. This post isn’t (directly) about any of the upsetting content - it’s about place, remember! - so you’re safe from all that here. Just, y’know, viewer discretion is advised and so on.]
Shivers opens with an advertisement for Starliner Tower Apartments.
The film is very quick to situate these luxury residences in the world. They’re “a mere twelve-and-a-half-minutes away” from downtown Montreal, but not on the island of Montreal itself. They’re on a separate, little island called Nuns’ Island in the real world and Starliner Island in the film. On this little island off a bigger island, “the noise and the traffic of the city might as well be a million miles away.”
If this island strikes you as desolate af, don’t worry, Starliner Island itself is irrelevant.
The appeal of Starliner Tower Apartments is that it is a self-contained little village. It has everything you might need. A vast underground garage, picture windows, the latest namebrand appliances, an indoor swimming pool overlooking the St-Lawrence River, a golf course, tennis courts, a restaurant (including take-out service), various shops, a delicatessen (!), dry cleaning, a pharmacy, and dental and medical clinics! Thanks to StarCo, a division of General Structures Incorporated, you can “cruise through life in quiet and comfort” without ever having to leave Starliner Tower Apartments.
Are Starliner Tower Apartments real? No. Do they have anything to do with Montreal in particular? Maybe!
What makes Shivers such an interesting film about Montreal are the ways that merely by saying the name, by situating the story specifically in this city, it invites viewers to consider whether, how, and why what transpires might relate to the setting. Cronenberg could have easily set his film anywhere. He could have excluded any and all mentions of the real world. But no. This is Montreal. Why set a story about a self-contained apartment building and its inhabitants in Montreal?
Well, Montreal is or at least was host to a utopian architectural experiment that we now call Habitat 67. It was originally conceived as essentially a suburb within a building. Shops, school, healthcare, work, recreation, and living spaces were all going to coexist in one massively dense, modular building. This utopian vision of a sustainable, self-contained community never (altogether) became a reality, but the apartment part did.
And where is Habitat 67? It’s a mere twelve-ish minutes away from downtown Montreal.
This isn’t to say that Cronenberg’s Shivers depicts or represents Habitat 67 exactly, but rather that by setting the film in a specific place it opens parts of the film up to certain, particular interpretive associations anchored to the world as it is or was. And what do those associations matter? Good question! We’re not sure. SHIVERS!
The whole film, as you might expect, more or less takes place in and around Starliner Tower Apartments. There are a couple of scenes elsewhere - an office at an unnamed university as well as an apartment somewhere else in the city - but for the most part we, and all film’s characters, roam the halls of a building, visit its many similar living spaces, and occasionally see the green of the surrounding grounds.
And what happens at Starliner Tower Apartments? Is it, as the advertisement says, paradise on earth? Do people coexist blissfully in this artificial community built lovingly by “General Structures Incorporated”? Is it a veritable slice-of-life story about Montrealers doing Montrealer things? Yes! And by “Yes!” we mean “No!”
See, Shivers is about what happens when a scientist believes that people are insufficiently horny and creates a parasite that is part aphrodisiac (for to make the people horny) and part sexually transmitted disease (for to ensure that the horniness spreads). People, Dr. Hobbes believes, have become too intellectual and insufficiently labidinal. “Man is an animal that thinks too much!” We’re all mind, no body! He can fix that! With parasites!
These parasites are, well, very good at what they do and they get loose in Starliner Tower Apartments. Dr. Hobbes’ first test subject was, we learn, his very young, schoolgirl mistress who - because of the parasites? - has been hooking up with a few of the building’s men and women. Slowly, over the course of the film, infected folks aggressively attack the uninfected and this self-contained domestic, commercial, and recreational utopia becomes something quite different.
Despite the premise, Shivers isn’t Canada’s answer to Salò. There really isn’t anything particularly graphic or explicit at any point in the film - but via dialogue and insinuation we’re led to believe that this place unmoors itself from any and all sexual taboos. While the film is unsettling and disturbing in all sorts of ways, it is hard to say what (if anything) it’s trying to say about sex itself. The violence of the film is all very much centered on the act of transmission, on the fact that the parasites within one body want to get into another. Once the parasites are within a body, though, the horny folks just do horny things (sort of) voluntarily.
And what does any of this have to do with Montreal?
It’s hard if not impossible to take Cronenberg’s ambivalent depiction of (a certain kind of) sexual liberation as an (admittedly oblique) comment on Montreal itself. The city’s very long association with sex work (past and present) and more open attitudes towards sex more broadly can’t be irrelevant to Cronenberg’s beautiful, mindless orgy. The shockingly secular character of this horror film - fairly rare even now - also seems to point to the Quiet Revolution (a period during the ‘60s in which Quebec’s government aggressively secularized the education system amongst other things and turned its back on the Catholic Church). Shivers, then, can be seen as an extreme representation of what many may have feared Montreal would become (or already was) in the ‘70s, namely, a godless sex island.
And the hero (such as he is) of Shivers? We haven’t mentioned him yet. He’s a doctor. Dr. Roger St. Luc. He’s blonde. What’s he up to? Well, he’s very committed to getting the sexually transmitted parasites out of all the bodies. He doesn’t ask questions or care much about the origin of these parasites. He just wants to help people remove them. Does that maybe remind you of real world doctor from Montreal? Perhaps a doctor who wanted to help people with a very different kind of sexually transmitted parasite (i.e. fetuses)? Perhaps a certain Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who, in 1969, opened an abortion clinic in Montreal, trained doctors around Quebec to perform the procedure, campaigned tirelessly for abortion rights in Canada, and was arrested multiple times in the early to mid ‘70s (when Cronenberg was writing and shooting Shivers) for acting in defiance of what he saw as an unjust law?
So, is Shivers about Montreal? Is it, specifically, working through certain concerns about sex, secularism, and Quebecois nationalism that were circulating in Canada during the 1970s? Does the film’s ending - in which the residents of the building head for the island proper - intimate a broader, Canadian concern that Quebec’s wayward cultural ways will spread far and wide if left unchecked? Or, in other words, are the specifics of place a meaningful aspect of this kind of schlocky, but deeply interesting Canuxploitation film?
Maybe. Or, rather, all this historical and cultural particularity is available to the viewer by dint of Cronenberg’s decision to locate his story in a specific place. Now, you might have a couple objections here. Namely, wouldn’t a similar reading of the film be available sans geographical or historical particularity? That is, couldn’t anyone just watch Shivers and say that it’s obviously about sex, secularism, and maybe also abortion regardless of its particular setting?
Yes. Sure. Fine. That’s also possible. But! If place doesn’t matter, why is it there? We assume that there are no arbitrary decisions in films, that every part of every scene is there for a reason or can be said to be there for a reason. We comport ourselves towards cultural objects as if everything in them is meaningful (or can be made meaningful), so the appearance of specific references that lead to real-world associations is hard to resist. We make connections between the narrative and reality which, hopefully, sheds better or different light on both!
But, then, well… are we thinking too much? Are we behaving precisely like Dr. Hobbes says we are? All mind, no body? We’ve seen Shivers several times now and even on the first pass we weren’t particularly scared or anything else. We were thinking hard. About place! This was also true in Part 1. We were thinking so much about how representation does or ought to work. We even thought really hard about the feelings that followed from all the thoughts and, as result, didn’t at all know how to feel!
So, then, is Cronenberg’s film about the harm of “thinking too much”? Are the specific references, the subtle historical parallels, the nods to Quebec, etc. all just meant to tempt the overthinking viewer, to trick them into sympathizing with Dr. Hobbes’ crazy idea that we shouldn’t overthink our relationship to the world and each other? Does thinking as such get in the way of base pleasures like sex or very sex-obsessed horror movies? Is Cronenberg suggesting that we should give in or cede ground to the horny parasite within us all? Or is he saying that overthinking is good and the only way to ensure that civil society as such (with all its moral imperatives) remains in good order? Is Cronenberg even saying anything at all? Is he maybe just out to make us scream?
We want, in effect, to overthink our cake and fuck it too. So, now what?
We want to say that it’s important or special somehow that this film is set in Montreal, but we also don’t want to force a set of historical connections so forcefully into view that the crux of the film (i.e. sex) is obliterated and obscured. We also want to say that the particularities of place ought to be represented such that popular media showcases the wealth, variety, and strangeness of the world as completely as possible - but also want to say that representing human experience and potentially universal (or at least widely shareable) topics of concern untethered from any cultural or geographical specifics is also valuable on lots of fronts.
We want truly opposed things at one and the same time.
So, then, we leave it to you. Is one beautiful, mindless orgy just one beautiful, mindless orgy? Or is there more there? Is Montreal a meaningful part of this film? Trivial? Does it, in a meta-sense, matter whether Montreal is meaningful or trivial? Is the representation of place a matter worth concerning ourselves with? Or are all places just distractions from the broadly human stuff that transpires in them?
As a pleasurable cerebral and/or bodily exercise, you can pose all these questions in regards to Cronenberg’s second film, too! Rabid (1977) (which you can watch for free on Tubi) is very similar to Shivers. It’s set in Montreal (!). It involves a transmissable disease that is associated with physical intimacy. It invokes very specific historical and cultural referents - the October Crisis in particular (in which the government declared Martial Law across Montreal due to the threat of a guerilla group called the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ)) - and is, like Shivers, very seemingly uninterested in saying anything definite or specific at all.
There’s something fun about vague, suggestive stuff, right? About things that dance around a series of points and perspectives without settling on anything final or altogether clear? It’s nice to watch a film or (as a random example) read a bit of writing that is far more interested in experimenting with different possibilities and leaving the conclusions entirely in the hands of the audience or reader. It’s fun and frustrating in equal measure. It’s exasperating and interesting to be left, hand unheld, to sort through the mess of suggestions and possibilities that may or may not be meaningful. We’re talking about Cronenberg’s films here and nothing else. Obviously. Don’t overthink it.
Much ado about nothing, I would venture... It's the money, buddy boy! It's was probably much cheaper to shoot the film in Montréal. No brainer.
"We want truly opposed things at one and the same time." Story of my life ♾️