I. I begin with a note on what this essay attempts to do, and what it does not. In considering the discourses and intertexts that surround Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique (2009), I continue a line of analysis developed in much of my pre- vious work: I consider the reverberations of Villeneuve’s film within the public sphere and examine some of the ways in which its stylistic and political choices shape the discourses that surround the film. I do not provide a “reading” of the film per se; others in this issue do so with a great deal of intellectual rigour and finesse. Instead, what concerns me is how the ideas in the film and, as impor- tantly, of and about the film, can be understood within a fairly well delineated public sphere, which includes those who know of the event to varying degrees, mostly located in Québec and Canada. When I first discussed writing this essay with the editors, I was given a remit I have not explicitly had before: namely to write from “a man’s point of view,” offering an account of the “crisis of masculinity” that underpins Polytechnique. What immediately became clear was that writing about the crisis of masculinity depicted in Polytechnique foregrounds my position as a man writing about a film inundated with broader questions of gender, feminism, and representation. It is therefore important to set the stage and outline the kinds of debates around mas- culinity, feminism, and the “crisis in masculinity” that were in circulation in the late 1980s at the time of the Polytechnique massacre. For instance, the role of CANADIAN JOURNAL OF FILM STUDIES • REVUE CANADIENNE D’ÉTUDES CINÉMATOGRAPHIQUES VOLUME 22 NO. 1 • SPRING • PRINTEMPS 2013 • pp 66-85 Résumé : Cet article examine Polytechnique (2009) de Denis Villeneuve, l’usage fait par le film de la cinématographie en noir et blanc et l’universalisation de l’expérience masculine présentée comme équivalente à l’expérience des femmes à la fois pendant et après le massacre. Considérant le film comme faisant partie d’un discours en constante création à l’intérieur de l’espace public québécois et qui concerne la signi- fication et les effets du massacre de Montréal, l’article examine quelque uns des nombreux intertextes déployés dans le film : des tropes venant du cinéma d’art, du documentaire et du film d’horreur ainsi que les discours entourant la soi-disant crise d’identité masculine. En procédant de cette façon, l’article place le film sur fond des discours changeants à propos du féminisme, de la masculinité, de la violence et de l’identité nationale au Québec. SCOTT MACKENZIE IT’S NOT ALWAYS THAT BLACK AND WHITE: UNIVERSALISM, FEMINISM, AND THE MONOCHROMATIC WORLDVIEW OF P O LY T E C H N I Q U E