A spring in our step
Everywhere I go these days, I see happy people. I love it.
You could argue theme parks aren’t an ideal place for profound philosophical reflections and you’d be right but also wrong. I spent last Thursday at La Ronde with three teens and yesterday at Canada’s Wonderland with just one teen and other than a nicely sun-kissed nose and a mild kink in my neck from all the rides I’ve done, I’ve come away with a good feeling about the state of things. For the first time since the pandemic, my fellow bipeds appear to be at peace.
Amusement parks are places I visit frequently because for some reason I seem to have spawn thrill seekers. Perhaps this is my fault; I’ve been a roller-coaster enthusiast since the days when Le Monstre in Montreal was the most exciting thing in the country and La Pitoune a daring splash. Everywhere I take my kids — from Disney to Universal to a bunch of Six Flags — I delight them with historical tales of rides gone bust and I delude myself into believing they’re fascinated. Money well spent indeed.
I love theme parks because for a few hours there you try and shut out the world and focus on totally unnatural things like hanging upside down at warp speeds and eating funnel cakes. Notice how we never eat funnel cakes unless we’re at the fair? Nobody goes around thinking: You know what would be great right now? Deep-fried cardboard with cool whip from a can! But after three rides in a row on Leviathan, it beckons like one of those sirens in the Odyssey. That and the Hawaiian crunch Dippin’ Dots.
In past years, you could sense a certain tension in the air everywhere you went. Very much including OnRoute highway stops on summer weekends. My, are those ever loud and busy. And no, I’m still not getting used to Doug Ford’s reforms that made it possible to buy cold beer there. Not that I ever see anyone walking out of the rest stop with an overpriced six packs of cracked canoe.
This year, the mood is definitely more chill everywhere you go. Either because we’re getting used to living in a world that feels post-apocalyptic (and that’s just the US president’s reflecting pool) or else we’re somehow feeling hopeful that we’ve got what it takes to get through the current unpleasantness and get to the other side in style.
This is visible in other areas of life, too. Last weekend in Ottawa you could feel a lot of joy from people getting into the soccer thing and smiling at happy Moroccan fans celebrating their victory… before everyone switched to Belgium against USA and cheered that. Even the somewhat confused mess of jumbled protests on Parliament Hill were fun.
Saturday night I went to see François.e, a new Quebec film about a struggling TV screenwriter who decides to pretend he’s a trans woman in order to sell his new series to a gullible distributor and a cunning producer. The film opens in a shower where a group of middle-aged white men are scrubbing up after a game of recreational hockey. You hear them talk about nothing and everything and all you see is the camera panning from one groin to the next, a close-up view of half a dozen cocks, not blurred for a second. Let’s just say it set the tone for how direct and unvarnished the rest of the movie was.
I hung around after the movie ended to try and eavesdrop on people’s conversations about it. Most of the people in attendance were middle-aged or older and in what I presume were heterosexual pairs. People commented about the funny moments, about what they found touching (there is a scene in particular with the parents of one trans person that was a genuine tear-jerker) and how interesting it was to discover a community with whom few of us are intimately familiar. Not a single person in the audience left the theatre before the end.
If anyone hated the film, it didn’t show. I had a few issues with it myself, but they had to do with the way the story was developed (a few instances of narrative shortcuts and jumping of sharks I didn’t care for), not the story or subject matter. Even a year ago I don’t think I could have expected such a chill reaction to that movie.
Maybe we’re all exhausted by the culture wars or Donald Trump or both, but I don’t think so. I’m not seeing exhausted people. I’m seeing happy and upbeat humans being thrown this way and that or dangling between the sky and the earth on Yukon Striker, seemingly telling ourselves we’ve been through worse, we know that, and we’re starting to believe it again. I like it.