BLAME CANADA Bruce LaBruce and Terence Koh

 

"When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy."

– The Log Lady, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

 

The more fucked up and surreal the world, demonstrably, becomes, the less David Lynch films become feverish, inscrutable, schizoid texts and, more straight forwardly, just the order of the day. The first time I saw Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in late August of 1992, I was in the midst of a quasi-nervous breakdown resulting from the messy end to a three year love relationship coinciding with a feature film stalled in post-production with no completion funding in sight. I went alone to see the movie on a sweltering summer afternoon in a wife-beater and tiny short-shorts at the now defunct Cineplex at the Eaton's Centre in Toronto, a slew of tiny, shoebox theatres in the dank basement of a shopping mall. The air-conditioning blasting, I sat shivering with my bare arms around my bare legs, identifying intensely with Laura Palmer, played by Sheryl Lee. I hadn't related to a character so strongly since Diane Keaton burned a hole in the screen as Theresa Dunn in Looking For Mr. Goodbar fifteen years earlier. There's something about Hollywood actresses playing promiscuous, burned-out drug addicts in female-identified movies that drives me, as a gay man, wild with passionate desire.

 

Enter Terence Koh. Mr. Koh and I had often talked about our love of the movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, arguing over who was more Laura Palmer, him or me. We also expressed a mutual fascination with the Bang Bang Bar from the same movie, situated, as it is, on Canada-US border. As fellow Canadians who often find ourselves striding that border, one foot in the more demure, polite, and wishy-washy Canadian identity, one foot in the aggressive, hard, and confidant American identity, we appreciate the metaphorical notion of walking across the floor of a bar and switching identities as easily as segueing from beer to hard liquor.

 

We also began talking about collaborating on an installation of degenerate art consisting of horizontal glory holes, envisioning cocks coming down from the ceiling and up from the floor like stalactites and stalagmites. After all, why should glory holes be restricted to the vertical axis? That's strictly for the birds – and Republican Senators.

 

Combining these two ideas, BLAME CANADA was born. After all, the US makes a habit of blaming Canada for a variety of nasty things: a porous border, lax immigration policies, Communist tendencies, multiculturalism, gayness (gay marriage is legal in Canada), Celine Dion… so why not give them what they want: a scapegoat, a whipping boy, a lapdog, a masochist, a Judas, a boot-licker, a cocksucker, a punk. In fact, why not give them two - Terrence Koh and Bruce LaBruce – two of the biggest faggots this side of Elton John.