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There are certain words and phrases that stop you in your tracks. When I hear the words "Montreal Massacre" I am flooded with emotions. Anger. Fear. Grief. Overwhelming sadness. On December 6, 1989 a man walked into Montreal's L'École Polytechnique and looked for women to kill. Every year on December 6, Canadians remember the fourteen women that he murdered. We remember because, as Her Bad Mother put it so well, it was the day someone came to kill all the women. So when I see the words "Montreal Massacre" followed by the words "film" or "movie", yeah, it kind of floors me.
I tend to live in a bit of an information vacuum when it comes to "entertainment" that falls outside books so I didn't even hear about Polytechnique until I saw this article in MacLean's magazine last month.
We know, or pretend to know, why it is that on Dec. 6, 1989, Marc Lépine entered the Université de Montréal’s École Polytechnique and murdered 14 women before taking his own life. Few, though, know exactly how he did it. It is this question, thorny as it is, that filmmaker Denis Villeneuve attempts to answer in Polytechnique, the first major film to deal with what happened on that snowy, wretched day nearly 20 years ago.
The next article I saw about it dealt with the criticism the film was garnering. It was the expected dueling views with one side saying that enough time has passed and it's time to look at it and start to let it go while the other side says the wounds are still open and no one wants to relive it. My brain is torn. It has been almost twenty years. The rational part of my brain thinks that enough time has passed, that we're ready to look at this. The other half of my brain is kicking, screaming and wailing a bit long, "Nooooooooooooooooooooo." My heart? My heart will never be ready for this movie. It couldn't even handle the trailer for this movie.
I didn't know any of the fourteen women that were murdered. I don't know any of the survivors. Yet there is something about their story that has shaped part of who I am. I was a mere ten years old when it happened. My exposure to it was minimal at the time - the evening news - but each year on December 6 the women's names would be read over the PA system at school. I'm old enough that I remember not knowing the man's name because for many years there was a media blackout on using it. To this day I cringe when I read it because more people now know his name than the names of the women he killed, just like he wanted. When I was ten I had no idea that within a decade I'd be living in Montreal as a student. I was in Montreal on the tenth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. The significance of the events of December 6th increased for me as I was able to put myself in their shoes. My school was not their school but their student community was, in essentials, no different than my own. I walked places some of them would have walked. I shopped places some of them would have shopped. I saw the faces of those fourteen women reflected in the faces all around me, including the one staring back at me in the mirror.
Alison's TV or Not TV reflects on what the murder of those fourteen women meant to her at the time and what it means to Canadians, then and now.
In the days that followed, I recall thinking that the dead girls had much in common with my peers. They were young, most in their early 20s, studious, ambitious and hoping to make a go of it in a profession that didn’t always welcome women.
Coverage of the story became full of rancour and often divided along gender lines. Journalists argued - and still do - about whether or not Lepine’s actions reflected sexism in Canadian society.
Womanist Musing was horrified to learn the film was made from a male perspective.
I am in no way denying that the men who witnessed this event were traumatized however, the first time that this story is told on the big screen should not be from the male perspective. These 14 women died
