Cinecism: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, Dead Lover and Canada’s Moment
Words: Maia Wyman
It’s been a tough year for Canada. If it wasn’t crippling tariffs, it was the Toronto Blue Jays suffering a brilliant defeat to the LA Dodgers at the World Series. If it wasn’t the Hudson’s Bay Company shuttering 96 percent of its stores, it was a brutal humiliation at the Winter Olympics when Canada’s hockey team lost to the U.S. at our own national sport. I moved away from Canada a year and a half ago, having suffered my own series of personal losses and defecting, like other Canadian creatives, for greater opportunities in the place that continues to suck my country dry. So when I sat in the theatre to watch the ostensibly goofy Canadian buddy comedy, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, it was unsurprising to me that I wanted to cry.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s feature length answer to a failed attempt at running a third season of their hit 2008 web series (Nirvanna the Band the Show, duh). In the film version, we find ourselves back in the Toronto home of best friends and bandmates Matt and Jay, right where we left them. It’s been nearly two decades, and society is almost unrecognisable, as is the city of Toronto. Yet Matt and Jay are hot on the pursuit of their perennial goal: to play a show at The Rivoli. After a disastrous attempt to gain recognition via plummeting from the CN Tower into a Jays’ game at the SkyDome, the two embark (Matt excitedly and Jay against his will) on their zaniest plot yet. What if we time traveled back to 2008, a time when we may have a better shot?
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is full of Toronto inside jokes that I, a Torontonian, was pleased to pick up on. My friend and I were the only two in our sold-out NYC theatre to guffaw at, say, a jumpscare of a billboard for Q with Jian Gomeshi, or a pedestrian repeatedly saying “what is gwanin’ as he takes pictures of the time travel bus. It felt uncanny to be swelling with pride in a place full of Americans about a Canadian identity that they don’t get, and one we didn’t even realise we had, in a movie that was actually written and produced in Canada.
Canada’s film industry had been kept in a sorry state more or less since its inception. If you’re non-Canadian and racking your brain for a popular Canadian film that’s come out in your lifetime, I can point to some reasons: filmmakers having to jump through tiny hoops for risk-averse funding bodies, tax shelters for American productions like Toronto and Vancouver which produce lots of jobs but little domestic art, and a century of slowly draining our creative life force south of the border (see my CBC series, Chasing Hollywood for more info on this). The oeuvre has thus far been dominated by films that are safe, slow, and funded but largely unseen. There’s a well of talent in Canada which has been consistently undermined by systemic forces. That is, until now.
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“Having spent the last year and a half bucking jokes from supposedly like minded Americans about my country’s prospective annexation, I felt a great deal of relief knowing that, at least on the artistic front, Canada is going to be alright. “
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is, I hope, on the precipice of a Canadian filmmaking wave. Adding to the success of Crave’s Heated Rivalry (which stars some of my old schoolmates - Canada is a small town), a sexier, more provocative group of films are starting to make their way outside Canada’s borders. There’s Nirvanna. There’s Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, a horny John Waters-style romp about a smelly gravedigger and the dismembered finger of her lover. There’s also Young Female Playwright, a knotty exploration of womanhood, artmaking, and the oppressive cautiousness of the theatre world, forthcoming from Pony Nicole Herauf (for Torontonians: YFP is set to screen as part of TIFF’s Next Wave programming on May 20th at 6:30pm).
Nirvanna is as ridiculous as you can get. Two well-meaning doofuses chasing the dopiest of dreams in the ilk of buddy comedies that flourished in the poop-humour zeitgeist of the aughts. But in the hands of Johnson and McCarrol, two artists who have in fact never defected, the film deftly slips in a rather poignant and sophisticated mediation on friendship, art making, the passing of time, and most abundant to me, the Canadian spirit. While you’re chortling at Matt glances at the camera in horror as a 2008 audience laughs in unison at the use of the f-slur in a screening of The Hangover, or staring open-mouthed at what appears to be the two actors actually jumping off the CN Tower and wondering how they did that, what is working into the unconscious are powerful revelations about the importance of place.
Toronto is a city with, in Gertude Stein words, no “there there.” In Nirvanna, Matt and Jay run around the Queen St West of 2008 with wonder in their eyes, backdropped by institutions that have since fallen to American corporate colonisation. Matt gestures to the Much Music building, which used to host Speakers Corner for passing music fans to get their moment on TV, now totally quiet. Jay runs wildly past a group of eccentric thrift and record stores that are now Popeyes and vape shops. Even the premise of the show, to play the Rivoli, is dated. The Toronto of 2008 we see through cleverly integrated leftover footage from the original show is one where a distinct culture and spirit - musical or otherwise, could be found in our great city. The film mourns its losses, but it puts on a Canadian smile.
Having spent the last year and a half bucking jokes from supposedly like minded Americans about my country’s prospective annexation, I felt a great deal of relief in that theatre knowing that, at least on the artistic front, Canada is going to be alright. Over the course of Nirvanna, Matt and Jay come to understand the futility of their dream. Yet in the end we’re right back there in the apartment, pen to the whiteboard, and the dream persists.
