The Redcoats are coming! The Redcoats are coming! Welcome to the overzealous (sometimes even jealous) educational column, where the colonization of the mind is overthrown through peaceful discourse. Today I'm joined by a bunch of little kids who are versed in the Shakespearean language of our current culture. In other words, they watch blockbuster films. While not having perhaps the wit and wisdom of Shakespeare, Hollywood megahits increasingly employ Britishesque culture to give America the sort of authenticity that, well, we only see in the movies.
Most the of the major Hollywood hits of late are tinged, say even drenched, with the Queen's English. Well, perhaps not the Queen's, but certainly Pip's or Oliver Twist's. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" could not have taken place in America. Witches in America are somehow unsettling as the Protestant knee jerks into place and books and witches are burned alike. Yet, in England, witches seem to be a part of the history and mystique of the land, the result of living in a place with creepy dungeons and castles everywhere.
Catch phrase No. 1, a Brit slang term from "Harry Potter," is "wicked," a word synonymous with "cool" that, like the once popular "bad," means its opposite. Kids, can you say "wicked"?
The other big hit of the winter, "The Lord of the Rings," also happened to be heavily Anglican while having the veneer of a timeless fantasy world. Characters spoke with British accents, even Midwestern American Elijah Wood.
Similarly, other American actors have donned the accent in the hope of gaining cultural currency. It's as if America is one big Eliza Doolittle and we're all striving to be genteel. Angelina Jolie displays her accent in "Tomb Raider." Brad Pitt fumbles about with his tongue in "Snatch." "Austin Powers" drills us the his catch phrase, "Yeah, baby, yeah" and contributes the word "shag" to our lexicography.
Kids, can you say "shag"?
This is the plight of being "Great Britain: The sequel." While before the sun never set on the British Empire, in American cultural dominance, the sun quite frankly doesn't set at all (or need to) since we've got big bright lights shining on everything from Euro Disney to Hong Kong Disney. Welcome to the new Pax Americana.
"But didn't we kick England's butt?" asks a naive little underling.
Certainly we did, but that was when we were fighting for freedom from our oppressors. We abandoned their rules, but not necessarily their culture. Our new hegemonic position requires us to carry on with pomposity and who better to learn from than the very monarchy at which we thumbed our noses. Indeed, now the monarchy has been fed into America's cultural machinery and we find Prince William being incredibly "wicked" and Princess Diana's death a cataclysmic event.
True, some Brits are donning American accents too (e.g. Ewan McGregor in "Black Hawk Down" and Helen Bonham Carter in "Fight Club"), but by and large these are the exceptions. No one is jealous of an American accent. On the other hand, American girls tend to go limp with the accent that can make a dork like Hugh Grant seem like a dashing lover from a Jane Austen novel. (I called Hugh a dork. Jealousy is fun, no?)
George Lucas has certainly gone Brit on his new "Star Wars," with the Galactic Republic (read "British Empire") full of handsome jedis (read "chivalrous knights") and the odious chancellor (read "tyrannical monarch"). Just to contrast how much more enlightened the Brits are, Lucas gives the annoying, trivial characters, such as Jar Jar Binks and Ahck Med-Beq, silly Asian or Arab accents and names that sound like throat-clearing coughs.
Kids, can you say "racism"?
Now the new "Star Wars" will have us repeating a new catch-word, "blast" (pronounced blaaah-st), which means "damn," as in, "Blaahst! I just way-sted five pounds to see the new Stah Waws pit-chuh."
So cheerio and, kids, let's sing Hollywood's new theme song, "I am the very model of a modern major pseudo-British movie." God save Hollywood!
