Mark Myers’s The Tower That Built a City, a film about the erection (pun intended) of Toronto’s CN Tower and its importance for the city, is about as boring as the most cynical among us expected it to be.
Using archival footage and interviews with the men responsible for building the CN Tower (it’s all apparently men; more on this later), Myers tells the tale of how and why the 553-metre-tall tower was built in the 1970s. Spoiler alert: a lot of concrete was poured.
Myers then moves on to explore the tower’s cultural impact. It was, until the Burj Khalifa was completed in 2004, the tallest building in the world, and helped Toronto form its cultural identity. For example, CityTV’s transmitter sits at the tower’s highest point; when the station created MuchMusic to rival MTV, it established the city’s reputation as a place that produces good music and art. And when the SkyDome was built at the base of the tower to serve as a permanent home for the city’s professional sports teams, the tower became a symbol of civic pride.
I suppose the film was somewhat interesting — I learned a lot about concrete and Toronto’s desire to one-up Montreal. But it might better be understood as a liberal wet dream. Myers claims to delineate “the evolution of Toronto, told through its defining landmark.” But the Toronto captured in this film is painfully one-dimensional: a beautifully diverse city, where people work hard to achieve their dreams and where nothing bad ever happens.
According to the film’s talking heads — a group composed of CEOs, white architects, sports people and other rich men, including media personality George Stroumboulopoulos and rapper Kardinal Offishall — Toronto’s only chronic ailment is its low self-esteem.
To that point, Kardinal offers a poignant metaphor: Toronto, he says, is like a girl who wears baggy clothes in high school, unaware that she is attractive. But after one summer, she returns wearing form-fitting clothing, finally realizing that she is beautiful. The CN tower, the argument goes, arrived just in time to boost the city’s sagging confidence. (Montreal had, until the CN tower opened in 1976, been Canada’s cultural hub). The erection of the CN Tower, the film suggests, was the Toronto equivalent of a hot-girl-making summer. Riveting stuff!
This narrative, however, is rooted in a mythology that Canada often projects on itself: Canadians are a polite people who undersell their wonderfulness, not because they are modest, but because they are simply unaware of it. This lie effectively masks a litany of national sins, papering over and therefore defanging its long history of colonialism and other forms of state violence. The Toronto of Myers’s film is utopian and faultless.
At one point, a talking head makes reference to the civil unrest that erupted across America during the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. While those cities were “burning” down because of protests and collective action, Toronto remained a calm and peaceful haven for hardworking people, especially American draft dodgers.
Yet there is no mention of the city’s long history of political strife, inequality and racism, no depiction of the myriad ways in which the city fails its homeless population. Myers’s Toronto is clean and quiet, drumming steadily along to the beat of sleek capitalism. The only problem, of course, is that pesky self-esteem.
A woman interviewee doesn’t show up until an hour into this 90 minute film. The majority of its run time is instead dedicated to men waxing poetic (and occasionally orgasmic) about concrete and sports. Its most self-aware moment takes place when a talking head points out that men love a good pissing contest; love having the biggest penis in the room. This love, he argues, has led to the erection of a great many buildings. The argument here is, effectively, that all of humankind’s achievements can be credited to a man’s desire to be the best hung. Sure!
The Tower That Built a City is a clean and whitewashed story of triumph. The people of colour who appear in the film don’t challenge the system either, but have benefited from it.
As such, it is an exercise in control: control over the sky, the airwaves, and over culture itself. A story for CEOs and rich men, told by CEOs and rich men, the film gives these men credit for everything good that has happened to Toronto, while ignoring any of the criticisms or demands for change being voiced by the “hardworking” marginalized people who they claim to love.
It’s pure mythologizing, sweetness and light, leaving no space for anything else, and harbouring no curiosity about or empathy for those who are hurt by the system. This film is an ad. It’s propaganda. I hated it so much.
