By Kevin Potvin

Citizen Sam, which debuted at The Rio Theatre on Broadway at Commercial February 6, is one of the strangest films you’ll ever see. Even Anti-Poverty Coalition activists, pumped for action outside the theatre, were struck dumb inside the whole film long (except for a weak heckling, in observance of custom, at the very beginning). But they didn’t have comments to make even after being directly and generously prompted by CBC personality Avi Lewis on stage for a discussion after the screening with filmmaker Joe Moulins.

The film is 80 minutes of strung-together clips mostly shot by Moulins who appears to have been able to run his camera constantly pointed at Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan during his six-week Vancouver Mayoralty campaign in the fall of 2005. But the bits I found most intriguing—and most disturbing—were not shot by Moulins at all, but rather were shot by Sullivan himself, nearly whispering into a grainy black-and-white low-resolution fish-eyed camera, all alone, late at night, in a sort of Blair Witch Project reprise.

In these clips, Sullivan anguishes over questions about whether he really wants the job of mayor, whether he can keep going on the campaign, and whether he is doing anything right at all. He winces at the camera, he squeezes his eyes, he clenches his jaw. In a film already notorious for indulging the public’s insatiable voyeurism into the lives of the famous and the powerful, these spy-cam-like clips appear to take us still further up the river into the very heart of darkness inside the politician.

Memoirs? Moi?

But wait. Unlike the Blair Witch Project tapes, which were found after the young filmmakers disappeared, or so the premise had it, the Sam Sullivan Project tapes were made by Sullivan with the full knowledge they would be footage available to a director already making a documentary about him. Meullins explained to me that Sullivan easily took to the idea of these late-night and alone “confessionals,” as he called them, because he already established the habit, having long ago begun dictating similar daily “confessionals” to a paid stenographer as part of a long-running memoirs project.

Memoirs are a troubling thing for anyone under 65 to be caught writing, unless they’ve done something truly great, or knowingly face an early demise. Sullivan has thrice been elected councillor and then mayor in Vancouver, and has done a great deal for the disabled community (he is a quadraplegic and has been confined to a wheelchair since a skiing accident at the age of 19), but he hasn’t really distinguished himself as a public figure to the point he can reasonably hope a publisher might want to take a chance on his memoirs. That’s why most people who create memoir material keep it a secret unless and until they achieve true greatness, otherwise it looks terribly pretentious, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, and borderline delusional. He’s acting!

But there is something stranger yet about these “confessionals” attached to the film. They would appear to be discussions with himself about his daily doings, cast in the aura of raw material to be filed for his own memoir to be edited sometime in his imagined, retired, future. But of course, he knows, as he’s making the clips alone and in the dark by himself, that they are for public consumption in a film that will be shown in the midst of his term as Mayor. Should he win the election, he must have imagined, there would be considerable public attention drawn to the film. Therefore, he’s acting. The rubbing of the eyes, the pained expressions, the self-doubt, was all staged to project some kind of persona to the public, to counter or enhance, we must conclude, the material being captured by the filmmaker during the more public and out-of-his-control daytime hours. It may have ended up on the cutting-room floor, but curiously we never see Sullivan anguished over what effect the filmmaker is having on him, and will have on him in the future when the film is released, even though the constant presence of a camera and a director capturing everything from getting dressed to getting out of the bathtub to intricate political strategizing would be a prominent element in anyone’s life well worthy of comment in a diary. But for him to notice on film the filming itself would be to acknowledge an ulterior motive.

The Sullivan-alone-at-night clips reveal a split personality type of character: at once public, campaigning confidently, even viciously (he speaks of ripping his opponent’s throat out, of stepping on his neck till he dies, and other such violent metaphors), and at the same time, paranoid, doubtful, and distressed. Indeed, Sullivan himself talks often in the film about this dual nature of his character, talking about how he plays nice, “letting them pat me on the head” before “ripping their throats out,” about being grossly underestimated at every step of his career, about his dichotomy of being a former recipient of social housing subsidies, and now a political leader cutting back on social housing projects.

Two Mr Sullivans

A clue might lie in his own description in the film about how he picked himself up after contemplations of suicide following his skiing accident. Sullivan explains that the former Sam Sullivan died, and that a new Sam Sullivan had arrived to take over the now lame body, to lead a whole different life. This Phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes theme repeats itself in Sullivan’s telling of the tale of his own life in the film as well as elsewhere. He surprised City Hall watchers by winning a seat at Council in the first place, he surprised many more by winning re-election two times after (because he had been such a non-entity as a councillor), and then he shocked everybody by beating back a challenge for the NPA Party nomination for mayor by former provincial education minister Christy Clark, who had arrived in town for an expected crowning. The introduction to the film plays the theme up further still, with subtitles saying “the consensus in Vancouver was that he didn’t have a prayer,” after he emerged as the surprise NPA candidate for mayor in mid-2005.

But that’s not true at all. After he defeated Clark at the NPA nomination meeting in May, he became the front-runner to win the election for mayor in November. His by-then tired “come-from-behind” act played so poorly he almost lost the election that was his in a cake-walk. So conflicted was Sullivan, being at once the king-killer while also trying to portray the “Kid with the Dream” act, that he totally flopped at his key appearance in front of the Vancouver Board of Trade, at times inaudibly mumbling his speech that itself was a rambling senseless mishmash of juvenile policy suggestions and stammered claims to experience. Perhaps, at 6 am, it came too soon after his customary morning swig of scotch, or “mouthwash” as he calls his alcoholism. (A full 40 oz bottle opened one day was replaced with a new full bottle only a few days later).

The filmmaker touched on the conflict, too, in post-screening discussions on stage at the Rio. Moulins was asked about why there was no material in the film documenting his battle with Christy Clark to win the NPA nomination for mayor—surely the bigger fight since, by then, it was clear the reigning left-wing party at City Hall, split in two and gone completely dysfunctional, would not stand a chance of retaining the Mayor’s office against the newly re-united NPA. Moulins had to leave it all out because, he said, “I couldn’t have a dragon-slayer right from the beginning of the film.” It would destroy the story of the Little Engine That Could. Yet, that is the real story: Sullivan, in reality, entered the campaign for mayor already dubbed a dragon-slayer, and the campaign, in reality, if it had any drama to it at all, was about how he almost blew it to Jim Green, a constantly steaming expressionless hit-man of a candidate from the totally destroyed and officially split-up party on the other side who should have been easy to beat by anyone from the NPA.

Narcissism

What the film is really about then, or what it ends up portraying—no doubt counter to the wishes of its subject and the intentions of its director—is the pathetic attempt of a delusional guy trying to live and re-live some adapted version of the Rocky films, which similarly lost, by the fourth or fifth retelling, all their drama, their allure, and their purpose. Since becoming mayor, Sullivan has nothing left to prove, no more little-guy-up-against-impossible-odds scenarios to engage with, which is why he has done nothing as mayor. Winning was and is everything for Sullivan—he even teases his partner Lynn, saying all she is in it for is the free ticket to Turin, site of the 2006 Olympics, from which the new mayor would triumphantly return with the flag to Vancouver, the next winter Olympics host. But it’s he himself who is focused on that prize more than anyone else. Why be mayor?

At no point in the film do we see Sullivan or his campaign team talk about policy to implement once they win the Mayor’s office. Something to do once he gets there doesn’t seem to have been a consideration for Sullivan or anyone around him. And so the central mystery of the film, the thing that makes it so bizarre, is answered: Why did he ever allow such a film to be made? Because it is the making of the film that is the point of making it. It tells a story in which he is the central figure, and that’s the purpose of telling the story. It’s a bit like all those celebrities who are famous for being famous. What they do, what they are about, is irrelevant to being famous, just as what Sullivan does, what he is about, is irrelevant to his being The Mayor. To be the mayor is why he wanted to be the mayor, even if the city comes totally unglued in the meantime as a result of this power vacuum in the Mayor’s office.