-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,652527,00.html
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Americans love our snobbery
If that's what it takes to make them notice us, we'll play it up
Decca Aitkenhead
Tuesday February 19, 2002
The Guardian
For much of the British population, last week was devoted to working
out whether the tragically scandalous Princess Margaret was above or
beneath her subjects. The time left over went on wondering if Will's
triumph in Pop Idol indicates a British inclination to vote for
plummy public school boys who speak nicely. Those too high-minded for
such trivia debated instead the troubles of the beleaguered Speaker.
Is Gorbals Mick the victim of SW1 snobbery, or an ill-bred oaf?
Britain has always been obsessed with class. Interestingly, we seem
now to be growing just as preoccupied, if not more so, with the
obsession itself. Do we really think we are a nation of snobs? Is
deference still the people's birthright? Questions about class-
consciousness are becoming as pressing as the once relatively simple
matter of identifying the class to which one belonged. And so the
film we have all been queuing to see is, natur
ally, a study of our class system: Gosford Park.
Gosford Park is a film about the pre-war relations between upstairs and downstairs.
Ostensibly, then, it is a British film about British social class. However, it is
clear from the start that the film is primarily concern
ed to address and amuse American viewers. The arrival at the country house of two
guests from Hollywood provides the film's very first crowd pleasing line, and the
Americans' incomprehension of the household's rigid class
distinctions is a continuous source of humour. "Americans," Helen Mirren observes
drily to her domestic staff, "do things differently." Cue wry smiles across 50 states.
This sort of remark is designed to delight American audiences. In effect, it sums up
the whole film - and the fact that this is how a study of British social class has
been conceived for cinema says a great deal, not simp
ly about social mores in the 1930s, but about relations between Britons and Americans
today. The famously classless US perhaps has much more to do with maintaining our
arcane class system than we might have imagined.
The casual assumption has always been this: Americans are class-free, and the British
are snobs, but as the UK becomes more and more like the US, its class system will
steadily dissolve. In fact, the literal opposite is p
robably true. Proximity to America is making us more class conscious, not less - and
has been doing so for the best part of a century.
The affectations of snobbery shown by Gosford Park's aristocrats towards their
American guests are a thin disguise for star-struck curiosity. The American guests
know this, and so are amused by the rudeness, for they know
that every character from the duchess to the maid is thrilled by their presence, and
electrified by Hollywood's orbit. Modern British audiences feel as if they are
watching a period drama, but of course, they are in trut
h secretly thrilled in just the same way as the characters in the film, over-excited
to see British social mores enjoying the attention of Robert Altman's Hollywood. If
acting like snobs is what it takes to get us noticed
, then this is a deal we are willing to strike.
When Rudy Giuliani came to London last week to be knighted, Britain was in theory
honouring him. In reality, of course, the former mayor of New York was honouring
Britain. The canny New Yorker made the correctly humble ex
pressions of respect to the throne, but he must have seen which way the honour was
transmitting as clearly as anybody else. A busy man, he surely has better things to do
than travel the world treating total strangers to h
is reflected glory. So why did he come?
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that he came because, like many Americans, he finds
the heady rush of our class system irresistible. A royal prize is Britain's one and
only international trump card - and so we play it
to Americans the way ugly businessmen cut out lines of cocaine for unattainably pretty
girls in hotel bars. Our snobbishness looks cute to Americans, for it makes them feel
better about themselves, happily superior to our
transparent, resentful insecurity. So it makes them interested in us - these funny
Brits, with their quaint aristocratic ways - and, crucially, this in turn makes us
feel important. Like cheap nightclub tarts who must fl
ash their underwear to turn heads, we will gladly turn snobbish tricks if that is what
it takes to win a shot in the limelight.
Anti-royalists are right to identify the British monarchy as the source and sustenance
of our class system. But ironically, its greatest safeguard is our love affair with
the US. Our relationship with America is the last
thing on earth that could induce us to give up royalty - and so the
sorry chain of snobbery and class that filters down from the throne,
all the way from Princess Margaret to Pop Idol, is ultimately
guaranteed - by the classless republic across the Atlantic.
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