"Your Bloody British Fetish": Hollywood's U.K. myths

UK author and historian Dominick Sandbrook voices his own dismay that “the Redcoats have conquered Hollywood,” once again:

The success of “The King’s Speech” is not the only example of what looks like a creeping Anglicization of American culture. Britain may cut a sadly reduced figure on the world stage these days, our military hobbled by cuts and our economy hamstrung by debt, but in Hollywood the Union Jack has rarely fluttered more proudly.

This coming summer, the final Harry Potter film seems bound to bring the world’s highest-grossing movie series to a lucrative conclusion, while no fewer than three iconic American heroes — Superman, Batman and Spiderman — are being played or are about to be played by British actors (Henry Cavill, Christian Bale and Andrew Garfield, respectively). Throw in the forthcoming Hobbit movies, based on a book by an intensely insular Englishman, the looming return of Daniel Craig’s James Bond, the success of Hugh Laurie in the Fox series “House” and the inexplicable popularity of Ricky Gervais, and you have an unmistakable pattern.

How does Goldfinger put it in Ian Fleming’s book? “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.”

For the NY Daily News, Sandbrook dutifully enumerates the occasions when the hoariest of Oscar traditions came into play, naming all the actors and actresses who ascended to the Oscar throne wearing the crown of historic British royalty. Then he bears down on deeper psychological analysis.

But it’s not hard to see why films such as “The King’s Speech,” “The English Patient” and “Shakespeare in Love” play so well in Peoria. They work as pure escapism, presenting American audiences with a world that seems at once reassuringly familiar (people speak English) and excitingly different (they like drinking tea and hate talking about their feelings). For two hours, they allow us to forget the messy anxieties of the present and wallow in an idealized, romantic past.

The silver screen Britain is a courteous, orderly place. Women wear dresses. There is no crime. Everybody is white. The political and social conflicts that marked Britain’s history — the strikes and demonstrations, the suffragettes and socialists — are entirely absent. It’s like Tolkien’s Shire, only with worse weather and stodgier food.

And behind all this is a brilliant British conjuring trick. We lost our international pre-eminence after World War II, during which we effectively bankrupted ourselves to beat the Nazis. There was no shame in that; if you have to lose the top spot, it’s best to do it in a good cause.

And here’s the cultural kicker:

But almost immediately, we figured out how to retain our influence. “We, my dear Crossman, are Greeks in this American Empire,” the future Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told a friend in 1943. “You will find Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans — great big vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are.” Britain, he explained, should run the American empire, “as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.”

We have been selling ourselves as the Greeks ever since, trading on our reputation for wisdom and cunning, posing as older, smarter, more experienced than everybody else. The irony, of course, is that just as Greece was actually a windswept backwater during the Roman Empire, so modern Britain is nothing like the place you see in the movies.

Glad a British citizen said it, though I suppose this last part appeals to my inner xenophobe:

The irony, of course, is that none of this matters. American audiences have sent “The King’s Speech” over $100 million not because they care about modern Britain but because they like the idealized version. The Britain of Firth and Mirren is the Britain of the imagination, a world of half-timbered cottages and country pubs, draughty palaces and foggy skies: an exact opposite, in other words, of modern-day America.

And what, you may ask, do people in Britain do for escapism? Where is our land of the imagination? Why, the answer is obvious. You’re living in it.