The national broadcaster confirmed Thursday that it will enter the continent's premier sequin-based proxy war, offering up a beloved domestic icon to be summarily destroyed by a Norwegian man in a wolf mask.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation announced its intent to join the Eurovision Song Contest next spring; the decision betrays a staggering misunderstanding of the pageant’s structural semiotics by treating what is fundamentally a glittering, post-Cold War airing of geopolitical grievances as though it were a mere talent show. To deploy an established, earnest luminary into this gladiatorial arena of strobing LED screens and politically motivated Cypriot televotes is to fundamentally misread the text of the modern continent, echoing the tragic hubris of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the alienating spatial voids of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, and the narrative climax of the 2009 Kevin James vehicle Paul Blart: Mall Cop.
The very proposition of a North American entrant disrupting the delicate ecosystem of European resentment is an aesthetic failure before the first pyrotechnic has even detonated; the contest demands a narrative of national suffering sublimated into high-camp eurodance. It is a genre wherein the historical traumas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire are traditionally resolved via a key change and a tear-away pantsuit. Canada, burdened only by a polite inferiority complex and an excess of freshwater reserves, brings no such gravitas to the stage, offering instead the slick, frictionless competence of a Nashville recording studio to a demographic that specifically craves the raw, unpolished terror of a Croatian rock band dressed as military dictators.
We are thrilled to sacrifice Ms. Twain to the old world, fully expecting her to place seventeenth behind a Moldovan saxophonist singing about the agrarian struggle.
The domestic fan campaigns urging the deployment of the ninety-million-record-selling artist seem blissfully oblivious to the psychic toll exacted by the competition's final phase; it is an agonizing ritual wherein the Baltic states systematically distribute points to their immediate geographic neighbors with an exclusionary precision that renders Billboard chart supremacy entirely moot. Rather than a coronation, Canada’s entry will serve as a three-minute demonstration of hemispheric irrelevance, culminating in the sublime indignity of receiving precisely zero points from the San Marino jury.