PETER ROBERT BROWN
“WH I C H WAY YO U GO I N’ B I LLY?”:
MASC U LI N IT Y, G E N R E, AN D S E LF-R E F LEX IVIT Y
I N HAR D C O R E LO G O
Résumé: Dans cet article, j’explore le thème de la masculinité dans le « rockumentaire » Hard Core Logo, réalisé par Bruce McDonald en 1996. Plus précisément, j’examine comment McDonald puise dans deux genres, le road movie et le pastiche de
documentaire (documenteur) pour explorer la socialité des hommes entre eux ainsi
que la valeur accordée par ceux-ci à la domination. J’analyse d’abord le film comme
un road movie et j’examine les relations entre les membres du groupe punk Hard
Core Logo. Je porte une attention spéciale sur la relation entre le guitariste Billy
Talent et le chanteur Joe Dick, amitié homoérotique et possiblement homosexuelle,
mais aussi caractérisée par le désir de domination de Joe envers Billy. Ensuite, je
porte mon attention sur la relation entre le personnage fictif du réalisateur et le
groupe ; cette relation est aussi caractérisée par une volonté de domination. Je propose de considérer que parce qu’il s’inspire de plusieurs genres et qu’il utilise divers
modes de réflexivité et d’intertextualité, Hard Core Logo offre une critique convaincante de certaines normes masculines.
“Y
ou are my whole, babe, / My heart and my soul, babe, / I’d have nothing
to show, babe, / If you should go away.”1 So goes the chorus of the
Poppy Family’s 1969 hit “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” a song that plays in two
restaurants in Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald’s 1996 faux “rockumentary”
Hard Core Logo.2 One could interpret the song’s presence as a realistic detail; the
film is set in western Canada, and, given both Canadian content regulations set
by the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission and the
fact that the Poppy Family was a Canadian group, it is just possible that the song
received frequent airplay when and where the movie takes place.3 Moreover, the
song’s lyrics articulate the most pressing question raised by the film’s narrative:
will Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie), lead guitarist of the Vancouver punk
band Hard Core Logo, continue working with singer Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon)? This
matters deeply to Joe, who at one point facetiously praises the noticeably drunk
Billy before a small, rowdy audience: “Let’s hear it for Mr. Billy Tallent, the heart
and soul of Hard Core Logo.” Despite his sarcasm, Joe’s allusion to the song
reveals his deepest fear, that Billy will abandon him, thereby taking his heart and
soul and leaving him with nothing, no shows to play. But Joe is incapable of clearly
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communicating his feelings, and, after learning that Billy is going, Joe attacks
him as the band plays what will be its final gig. Moments later, Joe commits suicide by shooting himself in the head. All of this is captured by “documentary”
filmmaker Bruce McDonald (Bruce McDonald) who, at times, interferes in and
manipulates the events he is supposed to document.
With its focus on the camaraderie and tensions within an all-male punk
group and on the ambiguous friendship of Billy and Joe, Hard Core Logo thoughtfully depicts various aspects of male homosociality.4 It also critiques certain masculine norms, namely the desire for power and dominance, by representing their
pernicious effects; thus, the film offers a cogent and critical account of particular
forms of masculinity.5 I argue that that it does so through its generic and selfreflexive complexity. Like many films of the 1990s, Hard Core Logo is multi-generic
or hybrid; it is a road movie, a mock-documentary, a punk film, a buddy movie,
a rock ’n’ roll drama, and a queer film.6 Although I refer to most of these genres,
I read the film primarily as a road movie and mock-documentary, as these are
most salient to the theme of masculinity; not only does the film draw on the road
movie and mock-documentary as a means of examining masculinity, but it also
helps us to think about the issues the genres frequently address, namely, relations
among men and power in documentary filmmaking. What is more, Hard Core
Logo is an extraordinarily self-reflexive text, one that both consistently draws
attention to its constructed status and frequently alludes to other films and cultural phenomena, thereby placing itself within a rich intertextual matrix. These
features situate its discourse on masculinity in a broad cultural context and point
to the constructed nature of various forms of masculinity.
This is not the place for a detailed historical or theoretical account of road
movies or mock-documentaries, but some comments are in order.7 Critics disagree
about the properties and boundaries of the road movie, and their disagreements
stem from several related factors: which films they consider foundational to the
genre, how they view its history, and what they take to be its essential features.
For some, the road movie emerged as a distinct, identifiable American genre in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, and they typically name Easy Rider (Dennis
Hopper, 1969) as the canonical text, though different critics cite other films as
similarly foundational. David Laderman points to Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn,
1967), while Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson refer to Two Lane Blacktop
(Monte Hellman, 1972).8 Other critics suggest that the genre has a much longer
history that includes It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), You Only Live
Once (Fritz Lang, 1937), and Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940).9 We should not
exaggerate the significance of these discrepancies; all commentators insist on the
importance of the road journey to the genre, just as they agree on its American
origin. However, those who locate its emergence in the late 1960s and early
1970s typically offer more substantive characterizations of the genre that include
themes, plot structures, character-types, iconography, and other more abstract
88 PETER ROBERT BROWN
features, such as counter-cultural critique, precarious masculine identity, and
existential alienation.10 There are dangers in delineating the road movie too narrowly, since, like all genres, it has changed and continues to change.11 Although
I draw upon the more substantive accounts of it, I believe that many characterizations of the road movie are understood better as generalizations than as
categorical descriptions.
The mock-documentary has received less attention, but this is changing as
critics and theorists confront increasing numbers of mock-documentaries, refine
their conceptual tools, and expand the historical scope of their analyses; here, I
rely mainly on Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, who identify it as being comprised
of fictional texts that “appropriate documentary codes and conventions and
mimic documentary modes.”12 This description is straightforward and unproblematic, despite theoretical debates about such concepts as reality, truth, and fiction.
“Mock-documentary,” also taken from Roscoe and Hight, stresses the imitative
nature of the genre while underscoring its “parodic agenda.” They propose three
“degrees” of mock-documentaries—parody, critique, and deconstruction—that mark
the quality and depth of a film’s commentary on documentary and that depend
on “the intersection between the intentions of the filmmakers, the nature and
degree of the text’s appropriation of documentary codes and conventions, and
the degree of reflexivity consequently encouraged for their audience.”13 I should
stress the intertextuality and self-reflexivity of mock-documentaries. As imitations,
they allude to and their meanings depend upon an expansive category of films,
and many of them draw attention to their own constructedness.14
Hard Core Logo can be called a road movie in terms of its setting, iconography,
visual style, and themes. Much of the story occurs on the road and many shots
follow road movie conventions of driving, landscape, and movement. The characters go on the road both to escape everyday life and to find something valuable.
Furthermore, certain incidents, such as an acid trip and Joe’s violent death,
allude to other road movies, most obviously Easy Rider. More specifically, Hard
Core Logo belongs to a subgenre of the road movie, what some critics have called
the “rock and road movie,” since it focuses on rock music, in this case punk, as
well as the road.15 As a road movie, the film explores a theme common to the
genre: male homosociality. It can be called a mock-documentary because, while
fictional, it mimics recognizable codes and conventions of documentary film. More
precisely, Hard Core Logo is a “mock-rockumentary,” since it imitates documentaries about rock bands; these often depict bands on concert tours, on-stage and
off.16 Since many rock bands are comprised only of men, rockumentaries frequently capture the homosociality central to rock music. As a mock-documentary,
Hard Core Logo parodies and critiques but does not deconstruct documentary
cinema. Finally, as noted above, Hard Core Logo’s multi-generic identity is traversed by its self-reflexivity and intertextuality.
At the film’s start, we meet Joe Dick and learn that the band is reuniting to
MASCULINITY, GENRE, AND SELF-REFLEXIVITY IN HARD CORE LOGO
89
play a benefit concert. According to Joe, his idol Bucky Haight (Julian Richings)
has been crippled by gun violence, and the concert is supposed to raise money
for him and promote an antigun coalition. We soon meet the other band members: the rambunctious and childlike drummer, Pipefitter (Bernie Coulson); the
thoughtful but schizophrenic bassist, John Oxenberger (John Pyper Ferguson);
and the serious and ambitious lead guitarist, Billy Tallent. Unlike his bandmates,
Billy has found some success playing with the LA-based group Jenifur of which
he hopes to become a permanent member.17 After the show, Joe entreats Billy to
undertake a brief tour of five Canadian cities. Billy agrees, as do Pipe and John,
and the band hits the road. But they do not do so alone, for Joe, who claims to have
“record company money,” hires filmmaker Bruce McDonald to film the reunion
concert, and the film crew accompanies the band on tour.
In the tradition of many rockumentaries and following the lead of This is
Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984), the movie traces the band on the road, where we
witness the everyday stresses of an impoverished punk band on tour and see
Hard Core Logo play live.18 They have enthusiastic audiences in several cities,
but other shows are disappointing. As with many road movies, we watch the
characters as they drive and see them stop at diners, restaurants, and motels.19
They make a “detour” to visit Bucky, who, we learn, was never assaulted: Joe
invented the story to entice Billy back to Vancouver and has used the money
from the benefit to bankroll the tour and film. At Bucky’s, the band and film
crew take acid with Bucky and his wife, Naomi (Samaya Jardey), and we are presented with a psychedelic segment reminiscent of scenes from Easy Rider and
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and whose soundtrack recalls the
Beatles’ “Revolution 9.” The next day, Bucky rebukes Joe for having used him
and tells Joe that he never wants to see him again. The band gets into the van
and leaves for its last two dates.
During the tour, tensions within the group intensify and deepen. Some stem
from individual crises: John cannot find his medication, behaves increasingly
erratically, and breaks down during the last show, and Billy loses the gig with
Jenifur but regains it shortly before the concert in Edmonton, though he does not
tell his band mates. Other tensions concern the group as a whole: Joe “parties”
with two prostitutes who subsequently steal the band’s money, and the show in
Winnipeg is cancelled. There is also stress among the group members, particularly between Joe and Bruce. Joe has continuously taunted Bruce and has
deceived him about Bucky and the source of the film’s financing. Bruce’s anger
mounts as the tour continues and finds expression when he ruthlessly informs
Joe that Billy is leaving the group; this precipitates Joe’s assault on Billy and his
subsequent suicide. The tour, Joe’s life, and the film end in Edmonton.
The tour ensures that both road trip and film share a narrative trajectory, but
the story is punctuated by non-narrative elements typical of documentary: interviews—with fans, with music industry insiders, and with band members both
90 PETER ROBERT BROWN
individually and collectively; clips from a home movie of Billy and Joe playing in
their teenage band, Peckerhead; and stills of CDs, magazine covers, and posters.
Moreover, various shots are accompanied by subtitles, and many of the interviews
with the band are filmed in black and white. Throughout the film, John reads
from his journal, thereby almost playing the role of narrator; however, his
“narration” is personal and questioning, and he makes no claims of objectivity.
In many road movies, the road is depicted as a primarily masculine
domain. 20 Some critics argue that the road of road movies is derived from the
frontier of Westerns and that it offers men a sphere in which they can engage in
masculine behaviors suppressed in normal social life.21 Others cite Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road and suggest that the road is a realm that allows for homosocial intimacy and for mystical and spiritual experiences and modes of being.22 These
ideas of the road are often combined in road movies. Perhaps because Hard Core
Logo is Canadian, the road as frontier is not very important to it.23 The images
of the prairies portray a land that has been settled and cultivated, a landscape
very different from the ambiguous desert of many American road films.24 There
are several shots of the Rockies, but these focus mostly on the highway and tunnels
that pass through them. Moreover, the characters do not seem to be searching for
a frontier experience; in fact, they seem to want to return to their past. We
should note, however, that John often wears a cowboy hat and a fringed leather
jacket which link him to Billy in Easy Rider and through him to Western heroes.
And there is a slow-motion shot that could connote Westerns: as the group enters
the motel in Regina, they swagger towards the camera. Joe is wearing a cowboy
hat, and the men resemble a gang of bandits.25 But this owes as much to rock ideology—rock ’n’ rollers as outlaws—as it does to road movies, despite the tradition
of outlaw road films.26 More central is the road as a male homosocial realm.
The homosociality of the road often involves the marginalization of women.27
John and Pipe happily leave their girlfriends in order to go on tour; both women appear
on screen, but we do not hear them speak and never learn the name of Pipefitter’s
girlfriend, perhaps because Bruce, who also leaves his girlfriend behind, views
women as relatively unimportant. On the road, all of the band members except
John disdain most of the women they encounter.28 Joe contemptuously tells a young
female interviewer in Calgary to “fuck off.”29 Backstage in Regina, we meet a
woman identified by a subtitle as “Mary the Fan,” another indication of Bruce’s
sexism. Joe warmly receives her and her husband and daughter, whereas Billy
drunkenly tries to kiss her on the mouth.30 Later, Billy asks Joe whether he ever
slept with her; Joe replies, “No. Fucked her in the back of the van once.” Joe’s
crude glibness belies the kindness he has shown her and illustrates instead the
detached way that some men speak about their sexual experiences. Presumably,
Joe also “fucks” the two prostitutes whom Billy derisively refers to as “Thelma
and Louise.” Pipe apparently sleeps with Victoria, the student who manages the
band-house in Edmonton and, the next morning, rudely demands that she make
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him breakfast. Although the band members rely on women to prop up their masculinity, women are excluded from the male sphere of the band and are incidental to the men’s real purpose, being together.
On tour, the four band members interact in stereotypically masculine ways,
behaving like adolescents and reverting to established patterns of behavior. They
swear and drink continuously and partake in much name-calling and teasing.
They do not, however, go on tour only to regress to adolescence or even to recapture lost time and opportunities; rather, they want to be with each other, and, in
an extended interview segment in which the screen is divided à la Woodstock
(Michael Wadleigh, 1970), each describes the band as a family in which they
assume shifting familial roles. Their words might be clichéd, but they capture the
closeness, love, and intimacy that exists between the men. John puts it most
forcefully in his journal, where he admits that he can be truly honest with only
these people. Thus, being on the road enables the band members to fulfill their
homosocial desires and experience emotions that otherwise elude them.
The homosociality of the road is inseparable from the homosociality of the
band. Joe repeatedly refers to the group as a gang, and, as Simon Reynolds and
Joy Press have illustrated, this is a common, androcentric way of describing rock
bands, one that stresses loyalty and unity and connotes illegality and violence.31
Like the road, the stage is a site where men can “play” together. The only women
we see on stage are members of Lick the Pole, whose singer presents herself to
the audience and camera primarily as an object of male sexual desire by baring
her buttocks, thereby conforming to one of the roles traditionally available to
women in rock music: the tramp.32 Jenifur, named for a woman and apparently
modeled on woman-led alternative bands like the Breeders and Hole, is more
threatening to the all-male sphere of Hard Core Logo, but we never see the band
play. So the stage remains male-dominated.33
At the centre of the stage and the band is the relationship between Joe and
Billy. Several scenes demonstrate their exclusionary intimacy. When Joe initially
asks Billy to go on tour, they play a “time-traveling” game. The player pretending
to time-travel closes his eyes and holds his hands in front of him. Billy does this,
and Joe, feigning concern, shouts, “Where’s Billy?” When Billy “reappears,” Joe
says that he was scared. Seconds later, Joe time-travels, but Billy gets up to leave.
Joe affects resentment at Billy’s pretended apathy and says, “That’s not buddies,”
his words supporting the reading of the film as a buddy movie.34 Remarkably,
when the characters time-travel, the ambient noise disappears, and the only
sounds we hear come from the two characters; this break with (fictional and documentary) realism draws our attention to the film’s construction and illustrates
the nature of Joe and Billy’s friendship which, like many long-term relationships,
includes rituals whose meaning and history are known only to those involved.
The game’s historical significance is underscored by the editing—the scene is
cross-cut with footage from a home movie of the teenaged Joe and Billy playing
92 PETER ROBERT BROWN
Band on the road: the boys enjoy the homosociality of the road and of rock and roll. Left to right:
John Oxenberger (John Pyper Ferguson), Pipefitter (Bernie Coulson), Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon), and
Billy Tallent (Callum Keith Rennie) in Bruce McDonald‘s Hard Core Logo (1996).
music together—and we can assume that they play it in order to reestablish intimacy. They engage in other private activities on the road; in an extremely
allusive scene, they play the “last letter/first letter game” with film titles. Here,
the first player names a film, and the second player tries to name another whose
title begins with the last letter of the named film; then the first player tries to do
the same, and so on. One of the films they name is This is Spinal Tap, and both
characters pause, seeming to consider its significance; more generally, the intertextuality of the scene places Hard Core Logo itself within the broad world of
film. The scene also stresses the exclusive nature of Billy and Joe’s relationship;
Bruce tries to join the game, but Billy dismisses his response: “The category is
cool movies not dumb-ass movies, Alex Trebek.”35 On the road, Joe and Billy are
able to “play” together, both onstage and off, and can recapture and affirm their
closeness. They also conspire.
After the gig in Saskatoon, Joe asks Billy to continue playing with him, possibly without Pipe and John. Billy agrees but insists that Joe commit himself to
music rather than cocaine.36 Joe tells Billy that he loves him, but his words seem
flippant, even ironic; the depth of his feelings will not become apparent until the
last concert. In Edmonton, Billy backs up Joe’s lies by gruesomely telling Victoria
that he has touched Bucky’s “stumps.” Billy clearly has strong feelings for Joe and
says that he loves him more than anyone he has met since he was thirteen, but
he also resents Joe’s lack of professionalism. While he loves Joe, his loyalty is
conditional, and after learning that he has been rehired by Jenifur, he disregards
their agreement. Joe’s feelings are more complex.
His complicated love for Billy is the (hard and soft) core of the film. Above,
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I suggested that being together was the real goal of the band members; this needs
to be qualified. Many road movies include quests, and each member of the group
has a reason for going on the road: Pipe thinks that they have one more chance to
“make it,” John wants to be among those with whom he can be honest, and Billy
is biding his time and hedging his bets. Joe goes on tour to be with Billy, as he
makes clear when he admits to Bruce that he lied about Bucky. He is possessive
of Billy and acknowledges his jealousy of Jenifur. Joe reveals Billy’s importance
to him when he explains the positions in the band: he says that he is number
one and that Billy is number two but adds that one and two “is [sic] basically the
same thing” and that they “kind of coexist.” Joe is offhandedly describing the
structure of the group, which follows traditional rock hierarchy, but he is also
exposing Billy’s significance to his own sense of self. Billy is part of him, and he
cannot see a future without him. While all of the relationships among the band
are characterized by homosocial desire, Joe’s desire for Billy goes beyond this.
In the home movie, the two wrestle—a common form of male teenage
homoeroticism—and the homoerotic aspect of their friendship persists into
adulthood. They sometimes assume the well-known rock posture where singer
and guitarist share a microphone; given the proximity of their mouths, the pose
is charged with homosexual possibility, despite the accompanying displays of
machismo. Joe kisses Billy and John at the start of the reunion show, but this
seems as much public performance as genuine affection.37 During the gig, the
band members spit on each other, and the initial exchange between Billy and Joe
is especially intense; in a clear parody of pornographic “money shots,” Joe opens
his mouth to receive Billy’s saliva. Even more intense is John’s claim that Joe
once had anal sex with Billy.38 Steve Gravestock suggests that we question John,
“given how far gone he is,” but such an incident makes perfect sense as an outcome of the intensity of their friendship and their life on the road.39 Robin Wood
and Marsha Kinder note that in many buddy movies the possibility of a homosexual relationship between buddies is diegetically ruled out, either by references
to their families or by their homophobic comments, and Joe does call members of
the band Flash Bastard “fags.”40 But, if we trust John, Joe’s sexuality is more
ambiguous than his macho deportment indicates.
Hard Core Logo was made after some of the gay and queer road movies of
the early 1990s, and it could be situated within this subgenre.41 This does not
mean that Joe is a repressed gay man; perhaps he is, but the film does not insist
on it. We can identify him as somehow “queer,” since he is not simply or exclusively heterosexual, even though there is no indication that Joe would accept this
description.42 On the contrary, Joe maintains his heterosexual, macho demeanor,
and his “fucking Billy in the ass” seems to stem as much from his desire to dominate Billy as it does from homoerotic love. During a tense roadside stop, Billy
reproaches Joe for maliciously frustrating his ambitions; he yells, “You go out of
your way to fuck me!” Given what John has said, we cannot help but interpret
94 PETER ROBERT BROWN
Billy’s words sexually. According to John, who can only speculate on Joe’s
motives, Joe’s fucking Billy involved hostility and led to violence between the two.
What is more, Joe penetrated Billy, thereby possibly feminizing him and perhaps
increasing his own phallic power. After all, Joe’s last name is “Dick,” a term that
combines aggression and sexuality, and he wants to retain access to Billy’s talent.43 But Joe cannot control him, and he readily capitulates to Billy’s demands.
Joe loves Billy, but his love is bound up with other desires. Furthermore, Joe
seems to resent the intensity of his love, for Billy has metaphorically penetrated
him, has entered his heart and soul, making him extremely vulnerable. When he
learns that Billy is leaving, he expresses his sense of betrayal only through
silence and, later, violence.
After the band plays the appropriately foreboding “Something’s Gonna Die
Tonight,” Joe announces, “This has been a very special evening. Not only is it
the end of our hugely successful reunion tour. It’s also the end of Billy Tallent’s
fucking life.” He then sucker punches Billy, instigating a fight that recalls their
teenage wrestling but whose tone is decidedly different, and when Billy spits at
Joe, there is no longer any homoeroticism, only contempt. Joe then smashes a
guitar that Bucky gave Billy, and the destruction of this fetish is a personal
attack. Following his outburst, Joe attempts to make peace with Billy; he stands
on the stage holding two glasses, but Billy walks away. Throughout, John prattles
into the microphone, his logorrhea resembling improvised beat poetry until he
settles into the refrain of “And in the end it’s love.” His words, likely an allusion
to the Beatles song “The End,” perfectly describe the situation, and Joe knows
this.44 His love for Billy is destructive, partly because he is incapable of speaking
honestly and directly to him: even if his love is not exactly homosexual, it is one
that dare not speak its name. Gravestock contends that the film explores “the
dark side of machismo and arrested development” and argues that Joe’s suicide
illustrates his inability to move on and grow up.45 These claims are undeniable,
but Joe’s suicide stems from other sources. It is a response to his despair at losing
Billy, but it is also a final assertion of his masculine desire for control; although
Joe is at the end of the road, he still drives the narrative.
As in many road movies, the road leads to death; however, Joe’s death comes
not from Southern rednecks, the police, or other representatives of society but
from his own hand. Yet, because Joe’s apparent understanding of his manhood
relies upon conventional norms of masculinity, he is, in part, killed by the norms
that he has internalized and with which he identifies. For the most part, we infer
Joe’s sense of manhood from his words, lyrics, and actions, but early in the film,
he explicitly articulates his understanding of masculinity. Explaining the meaning
of “hardcore” to Bruce, he says, “Move or fucking die. If I want your cigarette, I
will come and get it. I will take it from you. But if you’re smart, you’ll just give it
to me because that way it avoids confrontation.” Clearly, Joe is posturing, but his
desire to assert his will and dominate others is central to his manhood.
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Simultaneously, he wants to remain emotionally invulnerable, even though he is
unable to do so. Although the film does not depict the “hysterical male subjectivity” that Timothy Corrigan claims is central to the road movie, and although it
does not involve explicit counter-cultural critique that Laderman finds in many
road films of the 1960s and 1970s, Hard Core Logo does illustrate the dead-end to
which certain notions of masculinity can lead. Thus, the film forcefully questions
one of the road movie’s most consistent themes.
Joe’s will to power informs not only his relationship with his bandmates,
but also his interactions with Bruce. He mocks Bruce throughout the film, even
claiming that he and Billy control the making of the film, that they decide everything “about the way this thing’s shot.” Joe is bragging, since Bruce has control
over the final edit of the film, but his assertion points to the central theme of the
film as a mock-documentary: the dialectical play of domination and submission
between filmmaker and subject.
Near the film’s start, Bruce tells an interviewer, “Joe made me an offer I
couldn’t refuse.” His allusion to The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) suggests that Joe has some kind of power over him; as the film progresses, Bruce
attempts to reverse this. Their struggle is apparent in Bruce’s film, which combines documentary styles, including observational, interactive, and reflexive
“modes.”46 Often, Bruce follows the conventions of cinema verité and simply
films what is before him; most of his film is in this observational mode, which is
often seen as objective, even if the camera’s presence affects the behavior of those
filmed. However, individuals sometimes demand that Bruce turn off the camera;
such moments can be interpreted as interactive and reflexive, since viewers are
reminded of the presence of both filmmaker and camera. Much of Bruce’s film
is in the interactive mode, as we frequently hear Bruce interview the group. Bruce
and the crew interact with the band more frequently as the film progresses, especially when they take acid at Bucky’s and produce a psychedelic episode that
“documents” the acid trip. (The acid trip sequence is a complicated moment in
the film; if we seek to read the film realistically, we must assume that the
sequence is assembled during editing, especially since it includes a proleptic shot
of Joe shooting himself. I will return to such moments below.) Eventually, Bruce
interferes in the action by telling Joe that Billy is leaving Hard Core Logo. This
too can be interpreted as reflexive, since we are made painfully aware of the
power of the filmmaker. The most overtly reflexive moments of Bruce’s documentary include stylized images of CDs, posters, and magazines, and obviously
fictional shots of confused highway markings, a toy van, and a life-preserver
inscribed with the letters “NC-17.” These are reminiscent of some of Errol Morris’s
work and underscore the constructed nature of Bruce’s film. In Hard Core Logo,
the three modes are not easily separable, and each directs our attention to the
film’s status as artifact and to Bruce as its maker or author. The reflexive aspects
of Bruce’s documentary are part of the film’s more general self-reflexivity, and
96 PETER ROBERT BROWN
A toy van on the road. Stylized road movie iconography like this is reminiscent of some of Errol
Morris’s reflexive documentaries.
they emphasize it as a mock-documentary, a fiction that parodies and critiques
documentary.
As noted above, crucial here is the play of power between filmmaker and
subject. Like many documentary filmmakers, Bruce depends on the continuing
cooperation of his subjects who can cease to collaborate whenever they desire,
which is what they do when they tell Bruce to turn off the camera. Thus, Bruce
is subject to the band. But presumably Bruce wants not only to create an accurate portrayal of Hard Core Logo, but also to make some kind of argument about
the band, so his goal is to incorporate the group into his own discourse; initially,
it seems that he wants to highlight the affection and tension between Joe and Billy
in order to explain the group’s failures and successes. This is apparent to Joe, who
accuses Bruce of playing him and Billy against each other; Joe’s accusation is justified, since the interview with Joe follows one with Billy. But even if Bruce
attempts to dominate the group discursively, he is simultaneously manipulated by
Joe, who uses him just as he uses Bucky. Once Bruce learns that Joe lied about
Bucky, he calls Joe a “fucker,” and on the morning that they leave Bucky’s, Joe
asks Bruce whether he is still angry with him. Bruce replies, “Fuck you.”
He remains angry for the rest of the film and takes revenge on Joe as the
film nears its climax. Billy learns that he has been rehired by Jenifur shortly
before a radio interview; he tells the interviewer but asks him not to mention it
on air. He then approaches Bruce and the crew and says, “You didn’t hear that.”
Bruce responds, “We’re cool,” but once Billy leaves the room, he adds, “We’re cool
Billy-Boy. Just wait. We’ll show you how cool we are.” That night, in the dressingroom before the final show and as Joe lists the ten “lessons” of the “great rock
MASCULINITY, GENRE, AND SELF-REFLEXIVITY IN HARD CORE LOGO
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’n’ roll swindle,” based on Julien Temple’s 1980 mock-rockumentary of the same
name, Bruce asks Joe how he feels about Billy leaving the band. The camera
sadistically records Joe’s reaction, and even though he tries to remain stoic, we
know that his world is collapsing. In telling Joe of Billy’s imminent departure,
Bruce becomes an intervener rather than a recorder and asserts dominance over
both Joe and Billy. Joe momentarily turns the tables one last time. His suicide is,
in part, an act of aggression against Bruce, since before shooting himself, Joe asks
Bruce whether he has got everything he needs and says that he and Bruce are
“buddies,” suggesting that Bruce has somehow taken Billy’s place. He offers
Bruce a drink, says, “One more shot and salute,” and fires a bullet into his head.47
By killing himself on camera, Joe forces Bruce to witness his death and confront
his involvement in it. Insofar as viewers are epistemically aligned with Bruce,
they might consider their possible complicity in Joe’s suicide. Although the film
ends with Joe’s death, Bruce has the last word, since he is responsible for the
final film. Exaggerating somewhat, we might say that Bruce “authors” Joe, and, in
the fiction, Bruce relies on Joe’s nemesis Ed Festus for financing, as the opening
“mock-credits” indicate.
The fight for supremacy between Bruce and Joe is as central to the film as
Joe’s love for Billy, and McDonald suggests that the desire for power is always a
potential danger of documentary; not only do filmmakers inscribe their subjects
within their own discourses, but they also risk interfering in, disrupting, and
even destroying their subjects’ lives. At its most general level, then, Hard Core
Logo critiques the role of power in documentary. Although McDonald exposes
certain tendencies within documentary, he does not critique documentary per se,
and Bruce’s interventions are not typical of documentary filmmakers. Somewhat
more theoretically, Hard Core Logo highlights the ways in which documentary
filmmakers can abuse their epistemic and discursive authority, and it depicts the
constructed nature of documentary film. However, it does not suggest that documentaries are in any meaningful sense “fictions (un)like any other,” as Bill
Nichols would have it; in fact, the film’s critique of the abuse of power presupposes that, even if total objectivity and absolute truth are unobtainable, documentary films can be more or less true, more or less objective, for Bruce’s drive
to dominate the group trumps what should be his ethical and epistemic commitment to modest notions of truth and objectivity.48 Even though Hard Core Logo
shares many features with Man Bites Dog (Belvaux, Bonzel, and Poelvoorde,
1992) Roscoe and Hight’s example of a deconstructive mock-documentary par
excellence, it does not deconstruct documentary as discourse but points to the
moral risks that accompany the power relations inherent in making and viewing
documentary film.
The theme of power unites the film’s two primary generic sources: Joe’s
desire for control over others and himself partially drives the film as a road movie,
and the struggle for supremacy between Joe and Bruce is essential to it as a
98 PETER ROBERT BROWN
Joe Dick (Hugh Dillon) reacts to Bruce McDonald‘s sadistic revelation that Billy is leaving the band.
mock-documentary. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Hard Core Logo
subverts or transforms either genre; rather, McDonald employs both genres (and
others) in order to offer forceful criticisms of the ways in which the desire for
power continues to infect contemporary norms of masculinity. What is more,
while the film neither celebrates queerness nor condemns compulsory heterosexuality, it explores the centrality of homosocial relations to male interaction.
The film’s self-reflexivity and intertextuality—the latter is really a special
case of the former—are central to its thematic concerns. The unrealistically
numerous allusions to films, songs, and other texts suggest that the norms of
masculinity to which both Joe and Bruce adhere are inscribed within popular
culture, whose pervasive representations of masculinity are internalized by many
men. Because Hard Core Logo consistently draws attention to its construction
and fictionality, it underscores the constructed nature of its own representations
of masculinity. Ultimately, the film suggests that many of our concepts of manhood are themselves social and cultural constructions that ought to be questioned and critiqued, and this is just what the film does.
In concluding, I return to the Poppy Family song. By film’s end, Billy has
gone, and Joe believes he has nothing. Joe’s basically conservative sense of masculinity, his need to assert himself over others, leads to the destruction of everything he values, and Bruce’s film documents Joe’s stunted manhood and helps
to propel him further down his road to ruin. Conventional norms of masculinity
are not challenged within the fiction, since Bruce ambiguously triumphs over Joe
and is able to incorporate Joe into his own filmic discourse. But McDonald’s film
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99
is more subtle than Bruce’s, for Hard Core Logo criticizes the masculinity of both
Joe and Bruce, and the real questions the film raises concern men and maleness
in general: which ways are men going and which ways should they go?
NOTES
I would like to thank the editors of CJFS/RCEC and two anonymous readers for
their comments on a previous draft of this paper; the essay has benefited much
from their suggestions.
1.
The Poppy Family, “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” Which Way You Goin’ Billy? (London:
London Records, 1969).
2.
For some discussion of the film and of McDonald, see the following: Christopher E. Gittings,
Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference, and Repetition (London: Routledge,
2002), 154-8; Marc Glassman, “Rockin’ on the Road: The Films of Bruce McDonald,”
Take One 8 (1995): 14-19; Noreen Golfman, “Hard Core Logo: A Love Story,” Canadian
Forum (March 1997): 30-1; Steve Gravestock, “Outlaw Insider: The Films of Bruce
McDonald,” in North of Everything: English-Canadian Cinema Since 1980, ed. William
Beard and Jerry White (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002), 242-255; and
George Melnyk, One Hundred Years of Canadian Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2004), 211-217. Hard Core Logo is adapted from a verse novel by Michael Turner,
Hard Core Logo, 2nd ed. (1993; repr., Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1998). There is
also a graphic novel that adapts both Turner’s novel and McDonald’s film: Nick Craine,
Portrait of a Thousand Punks: Hard Core Logo (Concord, Ontario: Anansi Press, 1997).
Bart Beaty considers adaptations of Hard Core Logo in “Imagining the Written Word:
Adaptation in the Work of Bruce McDonald and Nick Craine,” Canadian Journal of Film
Studies 13.2 (2004): 22-44.
3.
Those interested in Canadian content regulations can consult the CRTC website at
http://www.crtc.gc.ca/.
4.
I am drawing on the influential work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, especially Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985).
5.
The study of masculinities is a burgeoning academic field. Decent introductions are John
Benyon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2002) and Chris
Haywood and Máirtin Mac an Ghaill, Men and Masculinities: Theory, Research and
Social Practice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003). For considerations of masculinites in film, see Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., Screening the Male: Exploring
Masculinties in Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993).
6.
For some discussion of the complexities of concepts of genre, see the following: Rick
Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Barry Keith Grant, ed., Film
Genre Reader III (Austin: University of Texas, 2003); Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood
(New York: Routledge, 2000); and Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1981). For a discussion of “hybridity,” see Janet Staiger “Hybrid or Inbred:
The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History,” in Grant, 185-199. She suggests
that critics avoid the word “hybridity” because of the “very particular political sense” of
the term found in the work of Homi K. Bhabba.
7.
I have relied on the following: Michael Atkinson, “Crossing the Frontiers,” Sight and
Sound (January 1994): 14-17; Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, eds., The Road Movie
Book (New York: Routledge, 1997); Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema Without Walls (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994): 137-160; Ron Eyerman and Orvar
Löfgren, “Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility” Theory, Culture
and Society 12 (1995): 53-79; David Laderman, Driving Visions: Exploring the Road
100 PETER ROBERT BROWN
Movie (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Katie Mills, The Road Story and the
Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2006); and Jack Sargeant and Stephanie Watson, eds., Lost Highways:
An Illustrated History of Road Movies (London: Creation, 1999). I have found Laderman’s
book especially useful.
8.
Laderman, 50-81 and Sargeant and Watson, 6.
9.
See the essays in Cohan and Hark, including the editors’ introduction, 1-14.
10.
Laderman traces the contradictions between cultural critique and social conservatism in
road movies; Corrigan suggests that road movies illustrate male hysteria; and Cohan and
Hark stress the romanticizing of alienation in road movies, 1.
11.
Katie Mills argues that Corrigan’s influential description of the road movie as a genre
concerned with hysterical male subjectivity is historically limited and therefore inaccurate, 10-11.
12.
Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of
Factuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 1. Other references will be
given by page numbers in the text. See also, Del Jacobs, Revisioning Film Traditions: The
Pseudo-Documentary and the Neo-Western (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000)
and, for a short discussion, Thomas Doherty, “The Sincerest Form of Flattery: A Brief
History of the Mockumentary,” Cineaste 28.4 (2003): 22-4. Ethan de Seife’s discussion of
This is Spinal Tap has valuable comments on mock-documentary; see This is Spinal Tap
(London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Lastly, informative essays can be found in Gary D.
Rhodes and John Parris Springer, eds., Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of
Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2006).
13.
Roscoe and Hight, 67. Roscoe and Hight are not using “deconstruction” in the Derridean
sense.
14.
See Gerd Bayer’s “Artifice and Artificiality in Mockumentaries,” in Rhodes and Springer,
164-178, and see the introduction to the volume, 1-9.
15.
Laderman 285n.23 and 296n.15.
16.
Again, de Seife has helpful comments, 47-51. See also Barry W. Strachett,
“‘Rockumentary’ as Metadocumentary: Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz,” Literature/Film
Quarterly 22.1 (1994): 28-35 and Jeanne Hall, “‘Don’t You Ever Just Watch?’: American
Cinema Verité and Don’t Look Back,” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings
of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1998), 223-237. In the same volume, see Carl Plantinga’s
“Gender, Power, and a Cucumber: Satirizing Masculinity in This is Spinal Tap,” 318-332.
17.
There is the suggestion that Billy has “sold his soul” in leaving Canada for the United
States and Jenifur; in some scenes, Billy wears a bandage on his finger, a reference to
McDonald’s film Highway 61 (1991), in which individuals “sell their souls” to “the devil”
and sign their contracts in blood by pricking their fingers. I owe this point to the entry on
Hard Core Logo at the Internet Movie Database:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116488/trivia (accessed 26 November 2008). The notion
of authenticity is central to popular music and to punk rock and culture, and at several
points in the film, the other members of Hard Core Logo taunt Billy by calling him a
“rock star,” suggesting that he has abandoned punk values. Much popular and academic
criticism of rock music focuses on notions of authenticity; see Hugh Barker and Yuval
Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York: W.W. Norton
and Company, 2007) and Michael Coyle and Jon Dolan, “Modeling Authenticity,
Authenticating Commercial Models,” in Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity,
Appropriation, Aesthetics, eds. Kevin J.H. Dettmar and William Richey (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1999), 17-35.
18.
For two analyses of This is Spinal Tap, see de Seife and Plantinga.
19.
Significantly, the characters do not own the van that they drive. This complicates the relationship between human and machine that, according to some critics, is central to the
road film. See Laderman, 18-19.
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20.
See Corrigan, Laderman, 20-21, and Stuart C. Aitken and Christopher Lee Lukinbeal,
“Dissociated Masculinities and Geographies of the Road,” in Cohan and Hark, 349-70.
21.
See, for example, Laderman, 23-4, Sargeant and Watson, 9, Cohan and Hark, 1-3. See
also Shari Roberts, “Western Meets Eastwood: Genre and Gender on the Road,” in
Cohan and Hark, 45-69.
22.
Laderman refers to Kerouac, 10-12, as do Cohan and Hark, 6-8. Mills has an extended
discussion of the Beats and On the Road, 35-63.
23.
Gittings interprets McDonald’s Highway 61 as, in part, a Canadian commentary on the
American genre of the road film, 154-7. Similar arguments could be made about Hard
Core Logo.
24.
Golfman notes that some shots capture “rare moments of unpeopled allure” (31).
25.
On the commentary track of the DVD version of the film, Hugh Dillon notes that the four
men resemble gunslingers. “Commentary,” Hard Core Logo, DVD, directed by Bruce
McDonald (Canada: Video Service Corp., 2004).
26.
Simon Reynolds and Joy Press comment on rock musicians as outlaws and rebels
throughout The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock ’n’ Roll (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995). Laderman touches on images and concepts of the outlaw throughout his book; for a more specific discussion, see Corey K. Creekmur, “On the
Run and On the Road: Fame and the Outlaw Couple in American Cinema,” in Cohan and
Hark, 90-109.
27.
See Laderman 20-21. As well, see Marsha Kinder, “The Return of the Outlaw Couple,”
Film Quarterly 27.4 (1974): 2-10 and the Roberts essay referred to in note 22 above.
Mills disputes the extent to which women have been marginalized in road films, see
especially chapter 6 of her book.
28.
John’s differences from others lead Thomas Waugh to suggest that John “transgresses
the strict codes of homosociality,” in “Cinemas, Nations, Masculinities: The Martin Walsh
Memorial Lecture,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 8.1 (1999): 40.
29.
Joe refers to the reporter as Tiffany; this might be her name or Joe could be being ironic.
Tiffany, a 1980s teen pop singer, would have no credibility in punk circles, and perhaps
Joe means to belittle the interviewer by comparing her to what he sees as a hygienic
and prepackaged image of young womanhood.
30.
There is the suggestion that Mary’s daughter, who is also called Billy, is biologically Billy’s
child. The intertitles that appear at the end of the film tell us that Billy is currently
involved in a child custody dispute.
31.
Reynolds and Press, 66-84.
32.
For some discussion of women in rock music, see Reynolds and Press and Sheila
Whiteley, ed., Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (London and New York:
Routledge, 1997).
33.
For a discussion of the role of women in punk rock see Reynolds and Press, as well as
Lauraine Leblanc, Pretty in Punk: Girls’ Gender Resistance in a Boy’s Subculture (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), Dave Laing, One Chord Wonders: Power
and Meaning in Punk Rock (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), Neil Nehring,
Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger is an Energy (Thousand Oaks: Sage,
1997), 107-79, and Lucy O’Brien, “The Woman Punk Made Me,” in Punk Rock: So What?
The Cultural Legacy of Punk, ed. Roger Sabin (London and New York: Routledge, 1999),
186-98.
34.
For some comments on buddy films, see Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to
Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 222-244 and Ina Rae Hark, “Fear
of Flying: Yuppie Critique and the Buddy-Road Movie of the 1980s,” in Cohan and Hark,
204-229.
35.
As some readers know, Alex Trebek, host of the popular television game-show Jeapordy,
was born in Canada. Many Canadians are aware of their compatriots who have “made
it” in the United States.
102 PETER ROBERT BROWN
36.
Although we never see Joe snorting cocaine, we do see him sniffing and wiping his
nose.
37.
Philip Aulsander considers rock performance in Performing Glam Rock: Gender and
Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
38.
This occurs in neither Turner’s original novel nor Craine’s graphic novel version.
39.
Gravestock, 251. It seems to me that Gravestock exaggerates John’s lack of coherence,
since this scene occurs relatively early in the film.
40.
Wood, 228-9 and Kinder, 2.
41.
For queer road films, see Robert Lang, “My Own Private Idaho and the New Queer Road
Movies,” in Cohan and Hark, 330-348, and Estella Tincknell, “Queens of the Road: Drag
and the ‘90s Road Movie,” in Sargeant and Watson, 182-92. For more general discussions of queerness and cinema, see Thomas Waugh, ed., The Fruit Machine: Twenty
Years of Writing on Queer Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000) and Harry
Benshoff and Sean Griffin, eds., Queer Cinema, The Film Reader (New York: Routledge,
2004).
42.
This expansive use of the term “queer” is not uncontroversial. For some discussion of the
politics of using the term, see the title essay in Calvin Thomas, ed., Straight with a Twist:
Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2000), 11-44.
43.
For a discussion of the relationships between anal eroticism and femininity, see
Catherine Waldby, “Destruction: Boundary Erotics and the Refiguration of the
Heterosexual Male Body,” in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, ed.,
Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (New York: Routledge, 1995), 266-77.
44.
“The End” is the penultimate song from the Beatles’ last recording Abbey Road. It is the
last song of the incredible medley on side two, and, for some, anticipates the break-up
of the Beatles.
45.
Gravestock, 252.
46.
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991), 32-75. Roscoe and Hight draw on Nichols, see especially
19-22.
47.
Joe is making a complex pun. Most obviously, the word “shot” refers to both Joe’s drink
and the bullet in his gun. But the term also refers to Bruce’s last shot of the film and to
Hard Core Logo’s last “shot” at making it.
48.
Although the film is sympathetic to feminist critiques of particular masculine values, it
does not suggest that documentary cinema is an expression of a dominating male gaze
that is itself an aspect of male subjectivity. I have in mind critics and theorists working
under the influence of Jacques Lacan and some of the “French feminists.” The canonical
example of Lacanian feminist film criticism is Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1989), 14-26.
PETER ROBERT BROWN is Associate Professor of English at Mount Allison
University, where he teaches twentieth-century British and American literature
and critical theory. He is currently conducting research on the theory and philosophy of punk.
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