Hollywood's Cheap B*tch: "The Last of Us" Proves Canada Has Zero Cultural Confidence

Every time a new season of a blockbuster show like HBO's "The Last of Us" drops, a pathetic national pastime begins in Canada: a desperate game of "spot the landmark." "Oh look, that collapsed overpass is the Gardiner Expressway!" "That abandoned town is clearly Canmore!" This pathetic excitement, this thrill at seeing our own country disguised as post-apocalyptic America, is a symptom of a deep-seated cultural disease. It's the "cultural cringe" of a nation with so little confidence in its own stories that its greatest artistic achievement is being a cheap, versatile, and disposable backlot for Hollywood.

For decades, federal and provincial governments have thrown billions of taxpayer dollars at American mega-productions in the form of tax credits. We pay them to come here, use our scenery, employ our crews (at a discount), and then pretend we're somewhere else. We celebrate our ability to look like Montana, or New York, or a zombie-infested Boston. We have subsidized our own erasure.

Where are the Canadian epic stories? Where is the investment in productions that tell the world who we are? Instead of building a robust, confident national cinema, we’ve chosen to be the world's most accommodating stand-in. We have a film industry that is technically proficient but culturally neutered, a servant to a foreign cultural empire. So by all means, enjoy spotting the Canadian locations in the next big American show. Just know that every time you do, you're cheering for a nation that has sold its artistic soul for a supporting role in someone else's story.