American Whiskey Bar

by Michael Turner

If you are from Canada, you will no doubt be aware of a number of regional generalizations concerning the behaviour of inhabitants of the country's three largest cities. You will also, no doubt, perhaps indignantly, perhaps vehemently, be aware of exceptions to these general rules. In order to refrain from contributing to the petty-minded regionalism that is tearing this country apart, let me say right now that I, too, am aware of the exceptions. But that doesn't reduce my pleasure in generalizing one whit.

For example, people from Toronto like to sit in cafes and talk loudly about themselves, often on cell phones, using words like "poststructuralist" and "Foucault", whether or not they know what they mean. People in Montreal have sex four times a day and kept wearing those plushy velvet jester hats long after everybody else in the world realized how dumb they looked and, blushing, buried them in the backs of their closets. And people from Vancouver have two choices: they can either wear Goretex and go mountain biking and get all faux-rasta/native/deadhead and grow long blonde dreads and keep saying "irie", or they can dress up in lounge gear and spend all day sipping expensive cocktails and name-dropping.

I'm not just bringing this up because of an overweening desire to pick at national scabs, although that's part of it. I'm also mentioning it because I just finished reading "American Whiskey Bar", and I swear to God that Michael Turner is one of those Vancouverites who likes to wear bowling shirts and talk about celebrities as though he didn't give a shit, even though deep down he really, really does.

It's not that the book is all bad. In fact, it's tricky, because the way it's set up is really cool: it's a movie script, with a foreword by Turner about why the script is so bad, and then an introduction by the woman who supposedly directed the movie that was made from the script, and then an afterword by a film critic who has purportedly seen the movie. All these parts add up to a gripping tale of intrigue in the Eastern European porn industry, and Turner gets full points for that. But the really tricky part is the actual movie script, which takes up 140 pages of a 182-page book, and which really actually is very terrible. Which is very clever, because the other 42 pages are all about why it's so terrible and so forth, but there are parts of the script that are clearly bad on purpose and other parts that seem like they might be bad by accident, and so instead of shaking my head in admiration I am compelled to throw up my hands in dismay. Here is an example of a bit of dialogue that I think might represent a failure of imagination on the part of the author:

Okay, can you imagine anyone who's not from Vancouver even thinking those lines? No! Which is why it doesn't work, even as a satire (all the characters are supposed to be Americans, by the way) (but they're so patently West-Coast Canadians) (which might be the point) (but I really don't think so). So, even though this book is very poststructuralist, from a Foucaultian perspective I cannot endorse it.