Folks care a lot about the representation of people, but aren’t usually concerned at all with the representation of place. There are good and valuable arguments about how different aspects of personal and collective identities - like gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, class, physical and/or cognitive ability, age - are depicted in visual media, but no one (as far as we can tell) is all that worried about how different countries, cities, towns, villages, or whatever show up exactly. While we’re sensitive to or critical of, say, a person of a certain nationality playing a person of a different nationality, we are not at all troubled by a city of a certain country “playing” a city of a different country. We are also, for whatever reason, entirely unbothered by blankly green rooms made to resemble real places by way of computers.
The clearest rationale for this disregard for true (?) or authentic (?) or accurate (?) representation of specific places is because most films or television shows are rarely ever “about” specific places in any strong sense. Sure, The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984) is about Manhattan, but most films are (sadly) unlike The Muppets Take Manhattan. Most films treat their setting as more or less incidental.
Take, for example, the recent box-office sensation The Wizard of Oz (1939). Does it matter that the film opens and closes in Kansas? It seems that - in the world of the film - Kansas only matters insofar as it’s a place that a young person like Dorothy might see as unexciting or lacking in opportunity and - more importantly - is subject to tornados. Kansas as such doesn’t really matter. Dorothy could be in any small, rural community that is prone to windy disaster and it would be the same movie. If you swapped out every reference to Kansas in The Wizard of Oz for a reference to Nebraska, you’d have essentially the same film.
Now, it might be the case that Kansas as such is not a meaningful part of the narrative world of The Wizard of Oz (e.g. it could be substituted with any place with similar properties without issue), but the fact that the film is explicitly set in Kansas is definitely a meaningful part of the non-narrative world (i.e. where we all mostly live). For better or worse, our view of the real Kansas is somehow informed by the Kansas that shows up in The Wizard of Oz. And if our view of Kansas is affected by the film, then the chances are pretty good that our view of people from or in Kansas is affected too. So, even if a specific place is immaterial to a narrative, its presence in a narrative has or can have a material impact on the world beyond that narrative.
So, the representation of place is meaningful, fine, but how meaningful is it that we use other places or totally digital images to represent those places? Does it matter that the Kansas of The Wizard of Oz was created out of nothing on a soundstage in California? Does it matter that the New York of all those Marvel movies was/is a bunch of computer-generated images? Does it matter that a plethora of cities across North America and Europe have been represented by way of Montreal?
We’re really not sure.
We are sure, though, that Montreal is all over the movies. We are also sure that it almost never shows up as Montreal. Without knowing it, you’ve probably seen this city (in a certain sense) dozens of times. Brooklyn (2015)? Montreal. White House Down (2013)? More like Montreal House Down. Wicker Park (2004)? That’s right. Once Upon a Time in America (1984)? Obviously. We could do this for a while. If you watch movies, you’ve seen Montreal. Chances are good, then, that your view of certain places in the world is partially cobbled together out of bits and pieces of our fair city. Does that matter? Do you care? Should you care?
Again, we’re not sure.
The fact that places stand for other places really doesn’t strike the same kind of chord it would if we were talking about people. If we said that people from Azerbaijan are regularly represented by people from Armenia, then there might be a concern. We might want to say that Azerbaijani folks ought to represent Azerbaijani folks. We’d also, if the practice were rampant enough, probably say that there should be more opportunities for Armenian people to play Armenian people. We don’t, though, feel altogether that way about place. Anywhere can be anywhere without any seeming concern.
We’re truly and deeply undecided about whether this is good or bad or neither or both.
The whole thing bothers us in the way that we were bothered to find out that grape juice was a primary ingredient in our favorite storebought cookies. We aren’t against grape juice, to be clear, but we really didn’t think to expect its presence in our Snickerdoodles. We’re not complaining exactly, but we were surprised and a little put off. Grape juice should make itself known! It shouldn’t be secretly present. Right? And so too places! Peru should be Peru! That said, those cookies are good, so maybe Montreal pretending to be France might also be good? Or at least it might be totally fine or something. We really don’t know how we feel about the representation of place (or those cookies now that we’re thinking about them again).
Part of us wants to say that what a city is used for is less meaningful than the fact that it’s used. If, for example, Montreal were chosen as the perfect shooting location for Ugly Rat Trouble in Big Bad Garbage Town (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2025) then we might not love the idea of our city being associated with that film or its places, but it would maybe be good for the city economically. The shoot would employ local people in addition to bringing in folks from elsewhere to stay in hotels, buy food, etc. etc. etc.
Another part of us worries that this practice of using places to stand in for other places messes with people’s view of the world (in potentially harmful ways) and also thwarts opportunities for the places represented to represent themselves and thus benefit financially (and otherwise) from hosting a film shoot. Big Bad Garbage Town, in other words, should always play itself! This would ensure that folks get a (more?) accurate picture of what Big Bad Garbage Town is like, but it would also benefit Big Bad Garbagetonians directly.
Yet another part of us, though, is mostly just sad that Montreal (like so many other places) is viewed as an interesting place to tell all sorts of stories other than its own. For a variety of reasons, the cultural landscape is dominated by representations of a few select cities or locales. We’ve all seemingly accepted or welcomed the idea that regional specificity is a hindrance, distraction, or burden to effective, popular storytelling. Moreover, we’ve all seemingly accepted or welcomed the idea that regional stories that account for the specificities of place are unmarketable, unpalatable, or otherwise uninteresting. We don’t like that. We wish it were otherwise.
Still ANOTHER part (we contain multitudes, etc.) wonders whether all this care and concern for specificities (of place or otherwise) is just an outcropping of worm-brained ideology. We are tired of stories about New York like we are tired of namebrand socks, so we search out stories about particular, small regions to spice things up like we search out bespoke, artisanal socks to liven up our wardrobe. What we ought, then, be concerned about is not the particularities of place (or anything else), but the market forces that commodify or otherwise reify the world into mere products to be vacuously consumed for specious entertainment. We shouldn’t be concerned with what is represented, but how it is represented and how we comport ourselves in regards to it.
AND YET STILL ONE FINAL PART OF US (so many parts!) hates us for being at all concerned with representations of any kind. What do movies or television shows matter when the world is on fire? Who cares about the politics of aesthetics when the rest of everything is so incessantly rotten? Is worrying over fictional stuff and associated matters really of any good to anyone? Are we helping ourselves or anyone else by agonizing over whether Atlanta does a good job representing Atlanta?
Are those all the parts of us? Probably not, but, needless to say, we have some stuff to work out regarding the representation of place (and Montreal in particular) and we’re not going to be able to work it all out here and now.
This whole post was meant to just be a quick preamble to what we actually wanted to write about (namely, a couple films shot and set in Montreal, the question of whether they are “about” Montreal, and what it means to say that a narrative is “about” a place in any meaningful way) - but our brain isn’t right and this got out of hand. We’ve decided, then, to just make this the first part of a two part thing rather than sending you an egregious number of words all in one shot. So, if any of this is passingly interesting, stay tuned for Part 2. It’ll be in your inboxes on whatever day is the day after tomorrow.
As a special treat, here’s a still from one of the films we’ll be talking about in 48 hours or so! Do you recognize it? Does it scream Montreal? Does it matter that it does or does not scream Montreal? Why would it scream at all? Is this a clue? Who knows! Whatever else it might be, it’s pretty. Is that an indication of where this argument is headed??? We’ll see!!! Ok. That’s enough teasing suspense… for now!
If Montréal is bland enough to represent so many cities, what does that say about its unremarkable skyline, culture and people? I don't like where this is going...
(green screen studio)*
Port-au-Prince is lovely this time of year.
*image of