Polytechnique

As I sit and begin writing this piece, I have also just begun my first ever viewing of the film Polytechnique (2009) by famous Canadian director Dennis Villeneuve. With my free time this summer, I have been attempting to accomplish my goal set out earlier in the year of attempting to watch a set number of new to me movies, but also as a side challenge to watch movies that may push the mold too far in a variety of ways. Content, message or the nature of production itself all are interesting ways for a film maker to use their innate creativity to bridge difficult to stomach subjects. Polytechnique is, as depending on the published audience of this writing, a very familiar setting and story, revolving around the hate motivated crime of an anti-feminist that resulted in the deaths of 14 female engineering students at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. As engineers, this attack is ingrained into us from the very start and for good reasons, given the inherently political work that is engineering, and the often times incredibly biased and male heteronormative landscape it inhabits. But why then, am I an engineer, watching this movie about an event I already am deeply familiar with? There’s an obvious aspect of watching events unfold visually can be more thought provoking or poignant to an audience, but also that a film is one of few medians that can so effectively give such a feeling of physical discomfort. I know what will happen, yet I watch, locked in my seat with a pressing fear of fight or flight, but I also know that it will lead me to know more deeply about the events and specifically how evil and barbaric they are. We subject ourselves to difficult to watch movies in an effort to empathize with victims and to know better the evil presented as to not allow it to occur again.

One of the films most often cited as difficult to watch is Come and See (1985), revolving around the story of a Belarussian boy and his village in 1943, during the turning point of the soviet front of WW2. While the boy and the specific events of the film are not true, they are largely based around the true stories of hundreds of real Belarussian villages which were slaughtered en masse by retreating Nazi troops. I had wanted to see Come and See for years, before I eventually did. And while I understand the films critical acclaim, and why it is praised as one of the greatest films of all time, it is something I never want to see again. I will live the rest of my life without a need to see it again. That being said, it is still a movie I highly encourage that everyone should see once in their lifetime, as do many global agencies, purely to see and understand the true depravity of the Nazi’s and the effect their ideology had. Their true barbarity. While I had read about it, in books and even in memories as firsthand accounts of their evil and seen photos as we all have in our grade 10 history textbooks, seeing it all put to film without any filter was to say the least horrifying. We (myself and the people I watched it with in order to keep a sense a sanity over its course) were subjected the hard reality of what hate causes for 3 full hours.

There’s a discussion to be had about the different between an uncomfortable movie and its topic, and a movie that has an uncomfortable topic but is perhaps not in and of itself that difficult to watch. While not a film, but a short series, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffery Dahmer Story (2022) comes to mind. Upon even its announcement, there was concerns that the series would not do the justice that is so desperately needed for stories such as it, not to Dahmer but to his many victims, whose families are still alive. The show runners promised that the series would be in good faith and that there would be special attention paid to almost all of his victims and how their family’s lives were affected. What occurred in reality was that when the show was released on Netflix, also the production company responsible, that the stories of the victims instead were presented flatly, and seemingly non-emotionally, to a point at times that the victims themselves were self deserving to end up in the situations that resulted in their deaths (such as going out to a gay bar, as a gay man in the 80s), as opposed to Dahmer’s own family, who are shown in a positive light and extremely sympathetically. These stories still deserve to be told, the victims deserve to be remembered for longer than their perpetrators, but when a movie’s intention is not to tell us that, then there is little point to its existence.

I am now into the final part of Polytechnique as I enter also the final part of my thoughts here. While this movie has been extremely difficult to watch, both in content and personal relation, there is one thing that has become apparent over its run time. This movie is not about the perpetrator, whose name does not deserve mentioning, and not even specifically of the massacre itself. It is about the self resilience and effected lives of senseless violence. That we, as people are not characterized by evil, but our response to it. Polytechnique ends quietly, there is no final standoff with the police, dramatized from the real events where the shooter his own life after taking 14. Instead, it ends on the future, and how a survivor (seemingly a combination of two real survivors who went onto found the foundation PolySeSouvient) breaks the expectations of the ‘typical engineer’ and of the killer himself.