On a beautiful, early spring day last week I opted for the dark side and went to see Polytechnique, the recently released English version of the movie about the Montreal massacre of 1989. (The movie has been out in Quebec since February.)
I left the theatre disoriented, blinking in the waning afternoon sunlight and marvelling how a dramatic recreation of an event nearly 20 years ago could not only be so freshly devastating, but could also reawaken such disturbing questions.
This event has, of course, come to mean something more than the horrific killing of 14 female engineering students at Montreal's L'École Polytechnique by disturbed gunman Marc Lépine, who said before killing them and eventually himself that he hated "all feminists." A ritual observance of the event every year on its anniversary, Dec. 6, enshrines it as our most potent symbol of misogyny and male violence against women.
For me, the most horrifying aspect of director Denis Villeneuve's short movie -- only 76 minutes long and shot in black and white -- is the utter passivity of the young men and women. When the gunman burst into a classroom, waving his shotgun and ordering them to split up, men on one side, women on the other, they followed his instructions to a tragic T. The camera portrays incomprehension and dread on their faces, but the men dutifully troop out of the classroom, leaving the female students to their fate.
Maclean's columnist Mark Steyn has been busy firing up the blogosphere, insinuating that these young men were cowards -- and typically Canadian cowards at that.
He seems infuriated that, years later, we still don't want to acknowledge that "the men's fatal passivity" lies at the tragic heart of this event. (Like many others, he thinks that passengers on the bus when the psychotic Vince Li beheaded a young man last July should likewise have rushed forward and done something, but that sadly it's not part of our Canadian psyche.)
But Mr. Steyn, who argues we have created a false feminist mythology -- "utter twaddle" -- around the Montreal massacre, seems to have bought into some pretty heavy mythology himself: that men not only should save the day, but can save the day.
Is it really so odd that no one was willing to disobey a crazed guy who fired a shot at the ceiling before he ordered them around?
Being conciliatory or submissive in the face of violence is not just a Canadian trait. Sometimes police even advise us to submit: So we do what we are told, praying that we and others will survive a gunman's wrath.
Even if they had refused to split up, the chances are that Mr. Lépine - who is not named or explained in the movie - would have just shot them all together. Maybe there is a slight chance that, because his mission was to shoot only the women, he might have been destabilized long enough for the class to overpower him, but we'll never know.
We can take heart, I suppose, from the possibility that stories like this might make another classroom more effectively resistant when a wild-eyed, armed murderer sets off on a rampage. But I doubt it. There will be another shooting, we know that for sure. And all will be chaos and scattershot survival.
In the meantime, wrenchingly recalled in this movie, the story of Polytechnique eats away at our gender preconceptions and our frustrated hunger for heroes.
My 21-year-old daughter thinks that if the situation had been reversed, and the gunman had ordered all the women out of the room and shot the men, no one would ever have questioned their decision to go.
There is still no onus on females to stay and fight. We place that burden solely on our boys and men. We expect them to be sensitive and yet demand that they be brave enough to value their lives less than that of any woman around them.
Twenty-year-old guys, it seems, have no right to be terrified into submission. And certainly no right to run for their lives.
Instead, we enshrine the stories of heroes who go down in blazes fighting bad guys - and, of course, we always hope that one of those manly heroes will be handy when we need him.
So much attention has rightly been paid to the women, both victims and survivors, of L'École Polytechnique, but I would also love to hear from the men. They would be almost 40 now. Was there an element of shame as they got on with their lives? One male student who was a witness to the killings later killed himself. A similar character is portrayed in the movie as being so anguished that he whispers "I'm sorry" to a girl on a stretcher being wheeled out. She whispers in return, "It's not your fault."
Each year, I wonder whether it's time to relinquish this tragic story as a feminist marker and return it to the private anguish of those most personally affected. Ironically, this movie, a haunting summons to think humanely about something a little more complicated than misogyny, may help us let it go.
