Family Stories: Gender and Discourse in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter

Abstract

While being deposed in a class-action suit instigated by townspeople who have their children in a tragic bus accident, Nicole Burnell, an adolescent girl who has survived the accident, constructs a lie about what happened in order to sabotage the prosecuting attorney's case. Mitchell Stephens, the lawyer who seeks someone to blame for the town's loss, is obsessed with creating a cause-effect narrative to ex plain the accident, largely because he, too, has lost a child and struggles to under stand how and why: the class-action suit to which he is drawn becomes his vicarious means to compensate himself for the fact that his daughter abuses drugs and may die of AIDS. But Nicole is deeply suspicious of the narrative line which Stephens wants to impose on the accident. Not only is she aware that his story is a construct and that the accident was simply that?an accident, no one's fault?but her relationship to her own father, Sam Burnell, is troubled by the narrative that he has constructed for her. Sam promises to turn his daughter into a rock star, and Nicole, initially seduced by this dream, enters into a sexual relationship with her father. Thus Nicole is a sur vivor not only of the accident but of incest as well. These two plot lines merge in the film when Sam becomes involved in the lawsuit because he wants to further use Nicole, who has the use of her legs in the accident, for material compensation. Nicole, who comes to recognize herself as an object in both Stephens's and Sam's stories, sees a way to write herself out of both narratives: knowing that the town will drop the suit rather than prosecute one of its own community members, she falsely testifies that the bus driver was speeding at the time of the accident. With her lie, the suit ends.