Platinum

1. Uses Canada and Canadian issues to structure its story on the music industry; Platinum, the company, resembles Canada in its make-up and struggles with a bigger, richer competitor
2. Demonstrates options open to Canadian culture; co-operation with cross-border influences (Jessica); resistance (Ophelia); hybrid (action boy); also shows how English Canada so often overlooks our successful Canadian culture found in Quebec.
3. Canada has myths that we can use to tell identifiably Canadian stories, and to address Canadian concerns; at the cultural level, the need to have a Jessica to make money to sustain our own culture—echoed in our readings, and in Bruce McDonald’s own story as a director who makes TV shows and commercials to support himself, in order to make independent Canadian films.
4. Canadian myths include: nation’s founding, multiculturalism, federalism, language disputes, religion, our relationship to the US and global marketplace—all are used to frame this contemporary story. But where do our myths come from? What is the role of popular culture in their formation?
5. Peter Harcourt: “one of the most extraordinary features of writing about Canada is its recurring nostalgia for a rural past that has never actually existed. There is a yearning for the pastoral, which seems incongruously inappropriate both for the severity of our climate and the harshness of our terrain.

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