ABSTRACT
In 2006, Bon Cop, Bad Cop, a fully bilingual buddy cop film, became a box office phenom in Canada, purportedly beating out teen sex comedy Porky’s as Canada’s top-grossing domestic box office hit. Bon Cop, Bad Cop is hardly a monument of Canadian cultural analysis, and of course, Canadian national identity is made up of more than a reverence for hockey and all it represents. And yet, the film has much to tell people about twenty-first-century Canadian mores and anxieties. The setting of the opening crime on the border between Ontario and Quebec speaks to the centrality of questions of borders—and, relatedly, liminality—to both crime fiction and Canadian literature. Crime fiction provides a powerful perspective on key questions of social, cultural, and political identity for any national literature. As Catherine Ross Nickerson argues, crime narratives “represent the most anxiety-producing issues and narratives in culture”.
