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THEMANITOBAN.COM
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The Manitoban is the official student newspaper of the University of Manitoba. It is published monthly during the summer and each week of regular classes during the academic year by the Manitoban Newspaper Publications Corporation.
The Manitoban is an independent and democratic student organization, open to participation from all students. It exists to serve its readers as students and citizens.
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The newspaper’s primary mandate is to report fairly and objectively on issues and events of importance and interest to the students of the University of Manitoba, to provide an open forum for the free expression and exchange of opinions and ideas and to stimulate meaningful debate on issues that affect or would otherwise be of interest to the student body and/ or society in general. The Manitoban serves as a training ground for students interested in any aspect of journalism.
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Any individual who qualifies as a volunteer staff member must be voted in by a majority vote at a Manitoban editorial board meeting. Elected representatives and non-students may be excluded from holding votes as volunteer staff members in accordance with the Manitoban Constitution.
The more things seem to change, the more they stay the same
A common phrase that we students have heard over and over during these past two-and-a-half years is that we are living through unprecedented times. Despite enduring the COVID-19 pandemic, two premiers that have failed to prioritize students, ever-rising tuition and everdecreasing provincial post-secondary budgets, one faculty strike and one almost-faculty strike all within the past two years, we have persevered.
Throughout these times, the Manitoban has continued to serve the U of M by providing objective, quality news coverage of issues that concern you directly, and has done so since Nov. 5, 1914.
Print issues of the ’Toban are finally returning to stands across campus for the first time since April 2020, and we saw this as the perfect time for a makeover. The paper’s new print banner returns to its 1998 iteration, while the rest of the cover calls back to when we didn’t even have the software to pull the design together at all.
In doing this, we’ve been able to acknowledge our past and give credit where it’s due. We can recognize the student journalists that paved the way for us, letting us grow into what we’ve become, the students who held those in power accountable and stayed true to their constituents — even during a city-wide general strike, the Great Depression, both World Wars and, most recently, a global pandemic.
Thank you for sticking around long enough to see that path stretch on all the way to our 109th year. I can’t wait to see what we can do for you next.
— Gillian Brown, editor-in-chief
News
pages 3 to 5
Editorial page 6
Comment page 8
Diversions page 10
Arts & Culture
pages 12 to 13
Bridging the mental health gap is the community’s job
Two years of online learning have taken a toll on students, now it’s up to us to fix it
Ivan Nuñez Gamez, staff
I never thought I would look back on my freshman and sophomore years of university and remember a Zoom screen with floating names. As far as I knew, conference call software was meant to be used by corporate employees. Little did I know it would become the norm.
When I thought about what university would be like, I always pictured the theatre-like lecture halls with a welldressed professor and an enthusiastic set of students willing to engage in the material being taught, yet instead all I got for two years were overpriced Zoom sessions with muted, faceless names and professors wearing the most enviable sweatshirts.
During those two years, there was not a moment where I did not question the efficacy of online classes, wondering if all students could empathize with both my academic and personal frustration. It was never about the class content or the pedagogical practices in place.
Rather, I came to realize it was about the feeling of not being able to move forward. It was about remaining static within my own living space to take classes, do coursework and merely exist, which can take a toll on anyone. Finding peace amid a storm is a difficult task many students were forced to comply with.
We were expected to push ourselves through deadlines and everlasting Zoom sessions to maintain a sense of what we thought to be normal. Though Zoom memberships have now expired without an expected renewal, sweatshirts are slowly wearing thin, and restrictions are essentially fully eased, one issue persists: the toll the pandemic has taken on the student body.
After two years of online learning, the longest professor strike in the University of Manitoba’s history and waves of COVID-19 contributing to tumultuous mental health, the student body is set for a huge in-person comeback this fall.
Though as a student-at-large, I took the news with excitement. However, I also reflected on the administration’s expectations of the student body.
More than simply complying with the health measures in place, I wondered if students were expected to academically excel. Was a decrease in students’ GPA foreseen? Will resources be available to guide students during their transition back into the University of Manitoba’s hallowed halls?
As I spoke with my peers, we realized our marks were not an accurate representation of our decaying mental health. Many students, including myself, found academics a distraction from the ever-worsening events that
/ Dallin Chicoine / staff
followed March 2020.
Many are immersed in textbooks and lectures, almost entirely dismissing the limited social interaction available. One of the in-person seminar courses I took this summer was expected to be a discussion-based course of about 30 people, but very quickly became an awkward conversation amongst four.
For one of my peers, discussion posts fostered a more comfortable environment for debate. She had never taken the in-person discussion-based courses because of the switch to remote learning. As students, keeping within our comfort zones helps us feel
safer. Now that we’ve grown accustomed to that, making the switch back to in-person, though exciting, will be a tough change for many.
Though I am a firm believer in the benefits that come with 21st technology, the pandemic has allowed us to grow comfortable with social distancing, with or without health measures in place. What once were tools to bridge the learning gap — a product of the restrictions that responded to COVID-19 — have now fuelled both academic and personal insecurities.
UMSU has moved forward with mental health initiatives and events to help rebuild the sense of community that
was once the standard for University of Manitoba students, but more needs to be done to ensure a smooth transition to in-person learning on all ends of the spectrum, from administration to the student body.
Though the incoming academic year comes with both new and existing challenges, it will be resilience — the same resilience that helped us persevere through two years of online learning — that will ensure we accomplish our personal and academic goals.
editor@themanitoban.com
graphic
David Cronenberg’s past futures
Cinematheque presents two films by the Canadian body horror legend
Alex Braun, staff
Fresh off his new feature film Crimes of the Future, which premiered earlier this year at Cannes to a six-minute standing ovation, David Cronenberg has been having a renaissance of relevance as of late.
The 79-year-old Toronto native has spent much of his career presenting grotesque techno-dystopias in which the mental and physical human forms are distorted by our technological surroundings.
As our own reality becomes more and more of a techno-dystopia, Cronenberg’s films offer an exhilarating and disturbing perspective on the intersection between biology and technology.
Programming coordinator for the Cinematheque, Olivia Norquay attributes Cronenberg’s return to body horror in his new film Crimes of the Future, as “an amalgam of his filmography in a way.”
“He revisits familiar elements of body horror and sexual politics that we see in Crash, Videodrome, Dead Ringers and The Brood,” Norquay said in an email interview.
Cinematheque is playing two of Cronenberg’s earlier films that deal with these ever-relevant ideas — Cronenberg’s original 1970 version of Crimes of the Future, and the 1983 cult classic Videodrome
The ’70s version of Crimes of the Future, a film that shares a title with Cronenberg’s latest despite being largely unrelated, is one of the director’s first features. Norquay describes the two films as being thematically similar and complimentary.
“While Crimes of the Future (2022) deals with art and the body,” Norquay said, “the original short film from 1970 examines the body and humanity in relation to the environment and what lengths those in power will take to ensure their own survival.”
The film follows Adrian Tripod, director of the dermatological centre known as the House of Skin — the centre having formerly been directed by Antoine Rouge, Tripod’s mentor and the namesake of a horrible venereal disease that has killed off most of the world’s sexually mature women.
The movie is a difficult watch. Filmed in silence and only soundtracked by Tripod’s unreliable and stiffly delivered voiceover, we follow Tripod as he wanders around the University of Toronto’s myriad of modernist buildings, licking himself, studying people’s feet, finding amateur inventors of body implants and eventually joining up with a group of pedophiles who are looking to artificially induce
puberty in young girls.
The result is a Kafkaesque fever dream that shows us a vision of an imagined near future that feels completely out of time. In fact, it feels shocking that it was filmed in 1970, especially in its restored form.
Videodrome shows a much more confident Cronenberg presenting a future that is no less disturbing and confusing.
Once again utilizing the simultaneously sleek and grimy buildings of Toronto, the film follows Max Renn, a sleazy TV programmer who stumbles upon Videodrome, a feed of violent pornographic footage that entrances him. As it turns out, watching too much Videodrome creates a brain tumour in the viewer that causes their reality to become warped to the point where they start to live Videodrome and transcend the need for their old body.
Visually, Videodrome is a real treat — nocturnal, lit by the enticing neon glow of the TV and deliciously disgusting in its horror elements.
Over time its plot has only become more relevant as our lives are being lived out more and more virtually. Not that Videodrome is a didactic screed against watching too much television.
In a lot of Cronenberg’s work there is an interesting dichotomy of horror and empowerment, mainly, of being freed from the shackles of humanity.
Videodrome is a perfect example of this, as Renn finds a sort of new life in his new flesh.
Norquay sees this metatextual examination of entertainment and mass media as one of the film’s great strengths.
“ Videodrome is a really fascinating film because it’s challenging its own medium and film audiences,” Norquay said.
“The medium is the message,” she continued. “And suggest[s] that access to graphic images have changed our brains and how we function in the world.”
Both films are fascinating and are wildly entertaining glimpses into the mind of a unique genius, adding context and thematic background to his twisted obsessions.
Cinematheque is showing Crimes of the Future from Jul. 27 through 31 and Videodrome from Jul. 27 through Aug. 3.
