Howard Ho hho@media.ucla.edu
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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!