Giant toddlers? In this economy? It's always great to be a Dangerous American until you realize that simply reading the sentence “Michael Caine is playing a man who has been given plastic surgery to look like Michael Caine” is enough to level you for weeks. I don't know how I'm going to recover.
One of the things that makes this idea of the Dangerous American so interesting is that we *also* believe that we're "in need of hard-won, old world wisdom." If it's a misunderstanding, we enter into it together. I mean have you SEEN how nuts we are about Downton Abbey? Find me an average American dad who wasn't just as excited as I was to see what withering remark the Dowager Countess would offer up this week, and I'll find you a man who's LYING.
To this day, I think the average American harbors a low-grade anxiety about our lack of wisdom and pedigree as compared to our forebears. I remember my US History teacher saying that we have a parent-teen relationship with England, and we had to break out on our own but in the grand scheme of things, we nestled back into a comfortable relationship pretty quickly afterward. She chafes us sometimes and we act like a childish jerk but we will still always love and respect her.
As a kid, a British accent struck immediate fear or awe into our hearts, which you could parlay instantly into a consummate villain (Scar in the Lion King) or a mysterious, debonair hero (James Bond?). But at the time I couldn't have told you the difference between Michael Caine and Johnny Rotten. I just knew that they had accents and that meant they were fancy.
One of the things I didn't have the space to include was the weird thing conservatives used to do over here, which was compare themselves with respect to the Americans as the Greeks with respect to the Romans. The Romans idolised Ancient Greek culture and noble Romans would recruit Greek advisors, which is how the British liked to think of themselves, but on the other hand the Romans had conquered Greece as part of building the biggest Empire of the ancient world and a lot of those advisors were slaves. It feels like that comparison contains a lot of the two-way cringe - the British showing off their classical education while admitting that they're now very much a subsidiary power, the Americans at once revelling in and ashamed of their quasi-Roman identity as idealised farmer citizen soldiers: backwater rubes who were none-the-less more moral and pure for not being corrupted by the more ancient civilisation.
At least it means that the greats of the British stage can always pay for a new house by playing a suave villain in a Marvel movie (or, increasingly, a suave hero in a Marvel movie)
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this! I am not sure how you expect anyone to not want to watch The Jigsaw Man after that opening paragraph but I take your point.
Your referencing of Martin Sheen in The Dead Zone is interesting. I’d always seen him as a comment on a particular sort of ruthless ambition separate to his nationality. Stephen King’s writing often features these sort of power hungry megalomaniacs but I had not considered it a particularly American attribute.
That's a good point about King's villains - I think it was the way it coincided with Reagan's sabre rattling of the period that struck me. It feels to me that that character has a kind of quasi-religious zeal that does beyond just being a megalomaniac.
As for 'Jigsaw Man' I will bear no responsibility if you subject yourself to it. I told you so.
Giant toddlers? In this economy? It's always great to be a Dangerous American until you realize that simply reading the sentence “Michael Caine is playing a man who has been given plastic surgery to look like Michael Caine” is enough to level you for weeks. I don't know how I'm going to recover.
One of the things that makes this idea of the Dangerous American so interesting is that we *also* believe that we're "in need of hard-won, old world wisdom." If it's a misunderstanding, we enter into it together. I mean have you SEEN how nuts we are about Downton Abbey? Find me an average American dad who wasn't just as excited as I was to see what withering remark the Dowager Countess would offer up this week, and I'll find you a man who's LYING.
To this day, I think the average American harbors a low-grade anxiety about our lack of wisdom and pedigree as compared to our forebears. I remember my US History teacher saying that we have a parent-teen relationship with England, and we had to break out on our own but in the grand scheme of things, we nestled back into a comfortable relationship pretty quickly afterward. She chafes us sometimes and we act like a childish jerk but we will still always love and respect her.
As a kid, a British accent struck immediate fear or awe into our hearts, which you could parlay instantly into a consummate villain (Scar in the Lion King) or a mysterious, debonair hero (James Bond?). But at the time I couldn't have told you the difference between Michael Caine and Johnny Rotten. I just knew that they had accents and that meant they were fancy.
Anyway I'll JUDO CHOP! my way out now. 🫡
One of the things I didn't have the space to include was the weird thing conservatives used to do over here, which was compare themselves with respect to the Americans as the Greeks with respect to the Romans. The Romans idolised Ancient Greek culture and noble Romans would recruit Greek advisors, which is how the British liked to think of themselves, but on the other hand the Romans had conquered Greece as part of building the biggest Empire of the ancient world and a lot of those advisors were slaves. It feels like that comparison contains a lot of the two-way cringe - the British showing off their classical education while admitting that they're now very much a subsidiary power, the Americans at once revelling in and ashamed of their quasi-Roman identity as idealised farmer citizen soldiers: backwater rubes who were none-the-less more moral and pure for not being corrupted by the more ancient civilisation.
At least it means that the greats of the British stage can always pay for a new house by playing a suave villain in a Marvel movie (or, increasingly, a suave hero in a Marvel movie)
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this! I am not sure how you expect anyone to not want to watch The Jigsaw Man after that opening paragraph but I take your point.
Your referencing of Martin Sheen in The Dead Zone is interesting. I’d always seen him as a comment on a particular sort of ruthless ambition separate to his nationality. Stephen King’s writing often features these sort of power hungry megalomaniacs but I had not considered it a particularly American attribute.
That's a good point about King's villains - I think it was the way it coincided with Reagan's sabre rattling of the period that struck me. It feels to me that that character has a kind of quasi-religious zeal that does beyond just being a megalomaniac.
As for 'Jigsaw Man' I will bear no responsibility if you subject yourself to it. I told you so.