I was thinking about the movie version of Godspell, with Victor Garber walking around an empty NYC as a Superman T-Shirt-wearing Jesus. (In Toronto, Victor Garber is ubiquitous; I walked past an ad for a new ensem-com just as I started writing this; lo and behold.)

But in Toronto, Victor Garber is sometimes the only familiar face. Thinking about other “empty city” images, things like I am Legend or Last Night, sets a thought or two in motion about Toronto, and why it’s never quite so strange to see it completely desolate on film, void of life.

Neighbourhoods exist in the city, yeah. You can make a show like King of Kensington or Degrassi or a movie like Scott Pilgrim and it makes sense that people know one another, have a neighbourhood crowd or community.

But think about any other show, image, notion of Toronto as a whole. Who’s interacting with one another as a matter of course? What’s the “feeling” of being there? Do people know each other, really, or are they just incidental to the conduct of business?

My weird question is that given how jarring it was to watch Superjesus walk around New York with nobody else in evidence, would it feel the same in Toronto? Given that the T.Dot is just a big movie set with scattered service jobs available on contract basis, would it feel at all weird to see a movie that depicted the whole city as an empty grid of streets and towers?

I take the same route down to work almost every day. I don’t think I recognize a single soul. And I’m writing this on an iPhone on the subway, so it’s not like I’m improving the situation.