Her Winnipeg is pretty strange and surreal, too
I grew up in Winnipeg, but when I watched Guy Maddin's autobiographical film "My Winnipeg," which opened Friday, I was surprised at how little I knew about the place.
For example, I'd never heard anything about Ledge Man, protagonist of Winnipeg's daily TV drama. During each episode the oversensitive hero reacts to some imagined insult and threatens to hurl himself off the ledge of a tall building.
Nor had I heard of the fire at the racetrack one fall in the 1920s that sent terrified racehorses galloping into the Red River, which froze so fast they were trapped the whole winter, their solidified heads poking up above the clogged ice like scary knights on a chess board.
How could I have missed the city ordinance that prohibits disposing of old signs? How come no one ever told me that the Arlington Bridge over the railway tracks was originally destined for Egypt, to span the Nile? Why didn't I know about the elderly ladies who linked arms and encircled an elm tree that was about to be sawed down on
The average person watching the film may have figured out a lot sooner than I did that "My Winnipeg" is what Maddin calls a "docu-fantasia" - a surreal hallucination of a movie that takes the essence of Winnipeg and embellishes it, jumbling fact with fiction, legend with lore.
But if you come from Winnipeg this is not so clear. There is so much about Winnipeg - at least my Winnipeg - that is strange and surreal that Maddin's version of it actually seems plausible. (For the record, the bridge and elm stories are true. Well, mostly true.)
Maybe the strangest thing about Winnipeg is that 650,000 humans continue to live in this frigid prairie wasteland where winter can last for eight months. A place so isolated, barren, and flat it's said you can watch a dog run away for three days. A city so cold the TV weather channel distinguishes between "uncomfortably cold" (-40 to -49), and really cold ("Frostbite can occur in less than 2 minutes.")
In my Winnipeg, snow drifts don't melt but become icebergs, curling brooms hang in every back hall closet, and children wear Halloween costumes over snowsuits, their breath condensing inside their molded plastic masks until their faces get soaked and little noses are numb and white with cold.
My Winnipeg boasts the largest population of Icelandic people outside of Reykjavik, and "Old Norse Mythology" was a popular elective at the University of Manitoba, my alma mater. Until I moved away, I thought everyone studied "Nyal's Saga." Seriously.
Winnipeg. Always winter, the film intones. Snowy sleepwalking Winnipeg.
To this I'd add: Boring, nothing-ever-happens Winnipeg. Until something does, and then it's spectacular. Like the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike when thousands of workers staged a revolutionary work stoppage. The 1950 Red River flood when eight dikes gave way and 100,000 people were evacuated. The great gold heist of 1966 when career criminal Ken Leishman - known for his three-piece suit and smile - stole $400,000 worth of gold from Winnipeg's airport.
Peanuts compared to the Gardner Museum art heist, perhaps, but my father was Leishman's insurance agent. Remember, this is my Winnipeg.
I've come to believe that a peculiar alchemy happens when cold bumps up against isolation: Judgment gets impaired, inhibitions decline. A place gets strange. Maddin was mostly serious when he says demolition is one of the city's major growth industries. In 2002 the city fathers razed the beloved Eaton's building, the city's cherished landmark of a department store, to erect a new hockey arena - or as Maddin puts it, "a zombie in a cheap new suit."
When I was a reporter at the now-defunct Winnipeg Tribune - another historic building that met the wrecking ball - the biggest story I had was the bizarre tale of Jean Jawbone, a young woman who drank too much, passed out on the street, suffered hypothermia, yet survived after clocking the world's longest recorded heart stoppage. (Three hours 40 minutes.) Years later, I heard she died in a house fire, a Maddin-esque twist if there ever was one.
My Winnipeg is an eccentric Winnipeg, but is it as eccentric as Maddin's? Troubled by one of his assertions, I had to find out. Did the Sherbrook Pool building really house three separate pools stacked vertically atop one another - one for families, one for girls, and one, in a dark, dank basement, for boys?
I called my mother in Winnipeg, who pondered it for a moment. "I don't think so," she said.
So I called the Sherbrook Pool and asked for the supervisor. (Another strange thing about Winnipeg is that supervisors answer their phones.)
"Do you have three pools?" I asked her. "No!" she said without hesitating, as though she'd been waiting for my call. "We were actually just discussing this." Apparently other Winnipeggers saw the film and were just as baffled as I was.
"We've had lots of people come in and ask to see the pools," she told me. "So we let them come in to look and they run up and down. But there's definitely only one pool."
To be honest, the people in my claustrophobic, circumscribed Winnipeg (the North End) rarely ventured into Maddin's more urban Winnipeg (the West End.) But one thing we evidently have in common was our escape fantasy, and the reluctant realization that even if you do leave Winnipeg, it never really leaves you. It haunts you for the rest of your life, sucking you back in, like Maddin's biomagnetic bison.
"Winnipeg. My home for my entire life. I must leave it. I must leave it. I must leave it now," Maddin muses in one of his dreamy train scenes. "What if I film my way out of here?"
That's his approach. Many in my profession, myself included, have tried to write our way out of there. But it never works, as you can see.
