‘Nothing But Hill and Hollow’: The Canadian Border as American Frontier in the Hollywood Northern

Abstract

The Northern genre historically has been Hollywood’s primary vehicle for relating stories about Canada. While these films are set in Canada, feature Canadian characters, and purport to tell Canadian stories, they are structured around the conventions of the standard Hollywood Western. The Canada-US border regularly plays a pivotal role in the Northern, a pattern that weights these films with important implications for the self-understanding of American audiences. An emphasis on the border implies to viewers that Canada and Canadian history derive meaning from the context of the US. Thus, proximity to the US and Americans becomes an essential feature for understanding Canada. The broad impact of this tendency is to reconfigure the Canadian setting as the American frontier. It reduces the country to an inert, wilderness backdrop and naturalizes the presence of the iconic American cowboy in Canadian territory. Canada becomes the scene wherein epic struggles between good and evil and between order and chaos are decided by American virtues of strength, freedom, and individualism. In this process, the Hollywood Northern generates a sanctified and exaggerated understanding of American agency and scripts Canada as a natural and inevitable outlet for the projection of American power and authority.