ABSTRACT
In 2018, a small art gallery in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside displayed a shabby, mid-century modern chair before a heavy desk and ominous black cabinet packed with files. On the wall hung a poster of a grainy horizon with the blurred form of a UFO hovering in the sky, and the words “I want to believe.” The FBI office of Fox Mulder from The X-Files had been recreated with original set pieces as part of an exhibition on the history of so-called Hollywood North. While the exhibit is a staged example, the shadows of film sets and television series can be mapped all over the city, with Vancouver often doubling as other American and European settings. Tourists walk the city’s corridors in search of the filming locations of crime dramas and blockbuster movies, traversing a landscape reimagined with salacious horrors, extra-terrestrials, and supernatural disturbances. Author Erin Ashenhurst uses personal narrative entangled with the fictions of film and television to address the nature of the city as illusive – both everywhere and nowhere, real and unreal. Vancouver becomes a simulacrum, a space held captive in frames of footage.
