Brexotica

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been asked what I think about Harry and Meghan more times than I’d like for one lifetime. The honest answer is “as little as possible.” But then I started to be told how I felt – how all Britons feel – by commentators in the US and UK, and it set me thinking about bricolage and discourses and whether some aspects of Orientalism are always in play – not just in conditions of colonialism.

The thing that really set me off was this podcast from the NYTimes, where Sarah Lyall calls the monarchy “the glue that holds [British] society together.” According to Lyall, British people felt they had to be emotionless robots until former-princess Diana talked about pain in an interview, and that gave them permission to feel pain. With reference to Harry and Meghan: “the monarchy is sort of setting the tone here. It’s the rest of society. I mean, it’s as if they’re sort of waiting for license to discuss these things in a new way.” That struck me as strange because it didn’t reflect my own experience, growing up in Britain in the decades immediately preceding this apparently epochal interview.

Elsewhere in the interview Lyall allows that there might be two kinds of Brits – “establishment people, older people, men,” and “younger women, people who were unhappy in love, people who had struggled with mental health issues, people who maybe had eating problems or other problems,” but together they only form one kind of society, and that society needs permission from the royals to feel things, otherwise it will come unglued. And that set me thinking about some rather incautious anthropology I’ve read, like e.g. where Jim Siegel uses Freudian analysis on the population of Indonesia to claim they were collectively tramuatized by the death of Sukarno’s pet dog. Back before the rise of post-modernism it was quite common in anthropology to discuss the workings of the “savage mind,” to boil (neatly bounded) cultures down into a few phrases, to understand foreign Others as primitive emotional mechanisms, trapped in their backward mythologies. The discussion of the British and their fatally flawed relationship with their royal family looked to me a lot like bad old Orientalism.

Edward Said’s Orientalism is a book-length diatribe against this sort of superiority complex analysis, where the writer stands aloof from the people they’re looking at, maintaining an exterior perspective that allows for blanket judgments about whole populations. Said identifies the complex as a handy tool for colonialism but also a dangerous self-delusion, since  “cultures are always made up of mixed, heterogenous and even contradictory discourses.” But Said also claims that Orientalism is always wrapped up in colonialism – it only really functions to reproduce power distance between two populations. And I’ve often wondered, what if there are no relations of colonial domination in play? If we see the colonial-Orientalist thought pattern dominating cultural interpretations in non-colonial contexts, how would we know that it’s actually colonial and not just a basic interpretive framework linked, perhaps, to ideas of which communities we identify with or against?

So I was thinking all this when I finally got around to watching Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures and I realized that its Barbie palace setting was supposed to be 19th century Britain. Big deal, you say, it’s anime. Moreover, it’s Jojo, i.e. baroque anime (thanks Mateo). Season 1 Jojo draws on British (or American-dressed-up-as-British) gentleman adventurer genre conventions, so… sure. Japanese artists adopt another genre, fine. But when the “16th century knights” Bluford and Tarkus showed up, the misrepresentation started to be so blatant, so willful, that I began to think there was something deliberate going on.

Here’s Tarkus, sporting a horned helmet, like the Vikings didn’t wear. He’s supposed to be a knight in the service of Mary Tudor.

Here’s Ed Courtenay, an actual nobleman in the service of Mary Tudor, for comparison.
He’s not a knight but an Earl, but that really just means he can afford a more expensive portraitist.

I started wondering if these romanticized Vikings standing in for Renaissance dandies were some sort of comment on ignorant/careless depictions of Samurai and Ninja in Western media. If they were supposed to make me think more carefully about depictions of Japan, they were working. I also started thinking about Britain’s place in other countries’ mediated imagination – Japan was effectively in the US’s colonial orbit until the 1980s, the US was in Britain’s until the 1780s. Can UK/US relations be called non-colonial? Or does the colonial trace still apply two centuries later?

And that sent me back to Shonda Rhimes’s recent adaptation of Bridgerton, an old-fashioned bodice-ripper erotic/romantic fantasy that has the novel element of pretending that 19th century Britain could have had race relations that 2020 Hollywood would feel good about.

Bridgerton’s romantic leads. He’s been “traveling outside Britain for business,” which is as close as Bridgerton gets to mentioning colonies. She, obviously, has waited at home like a proper English rose for the precise moment of plucking.

For a while I couldn’t articulate what it was that bothered me about Bridgerton. Other people who complained about its non-traditional racial presentation were accused of everything from boring historicism to closet racism.

UPDATE: …and a lot of US racists did, indeed, complain about the race stuff on the grounds that they wanted to see white faces, not a mixture. I want to make it clear that my problems with Bridgerton are not, in fact, based on race – I actually agree with Robin Miles <a href=”http://<iframe frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” height=”130″ width=”100%” src=”https://www.wnyc.org/widgets/ondemand_player/wnycstudios/#file=/audio/json/1280710/&share=1″>here* that it is more important that non-white actors get jobs and that non-white people are seen in US media than anything I complain about below. Despite any foreign-looking window-dressing, at root the show is about “expanding the notion of who can be American,” and that should be expanded.

[* just in case that Miles link doesn’t work for you, it’s a segment on the New Yorker Radio Hour podcast from WNYCstudios.org called “An Audiobook Master on the Secrets of Her Craft”]

OK, but, from a critical perspective, the business around Harry and Meghan made me realize that what bothers me in particular about Bridgerton is that it deploys its fantasy Britain (or “Shondaland,” as the title card suggests) to have its cake and eat it too, dodging 2020’s arguments about representation by presenting itself simultaneously as fantasy and not-fantasy in a very Orientalist way.

It’s pretty obvious to me that Bridgerton chose to be notorious for its Progressive take on race, in order to avoid being notorious for its regressive gender politics – which are those of a remarkably traditional bodice ripper (a bold move when even Adventure Time has had a go at the genre’s cliches). That is, it’s nostalgic about women being submissive as a social fact, so that it can tell a story about how the heroine manages to get comfy in her bondage. So that explains why it’s set in 1813 Britain – because that setting “explains” the gender politics… except that Bridgerton’s alt universe, with its more acceptable 21st century casting, makes it clear that it’s not an Austen or a Bronte story, and so it doesn’t have to come to Austen or Bronte type conclusions. The leading characters are notably more interesting and sophisticated – more like the audience – than their benighted Regency supporting cast. They can have frank conversations about female masturbation on the model of Dr. Ruth.

Not like this lot, who are fine actors all, but not leading lady material. Also, they’re dressed in an acid-coloured parade of the worst fashions of the first half of the 19th century, as opposed to the lead’s more 1810s-by-way-of-1910s elegant simplicity.

So the show is simultaneously in and not-in Britain and its leads are simultaneously British and other-than-British – more specifically, the show is set in a fantasy Britain that rests on a particularly American conception of what it means to be exterior to British history, to be defined as not-British and to parade that difference in certain highly-reified ways (tea, polite skepticism, some obvious markers of the class system, dentistry). It uses British actors and is filmed in British locations, to reproduce a specifically American gaze. And it’s at base a US High School drama in historicist drag, where the costumes heighten but do not conceal the familiar plot beats and social framing of the High School drama genre. In the end it’s no closer to British history, really, than Jojo.

Negar Azimi calls the Orientalist view of the Orient “a skewed mirror upon which Europeans could project their motley desires and fantasies.” Applying that here, we see Shondaland obscuring any “real” British history, replacing Britain with stuff that might never make it onto the air in an outright US-in-the-US romance. Projecting subby desires onto a primitive, peripheral Britain allows them to be (a) depicted for the metropolitan US audience and (b) alienated from them, so they can watch it all without owning (up to having) the desires. Kinda like all those steamy French paintings about the sinful life of the harem, created to titillate/concern the bourgeoisie of the Second Empire. Imagine those poor white women, enslaved by the brutally moustachoied Moor!

Ingres, of course. The Turkish Bath. This one’s actually pretty tame, although a rare excuse to get a lot of naked women on one canvas. For the full-bore experience check out nearly anything by Gerome.

Returning to Harry and Meghan, their story is one of an American, sophisticated-sympathetic heroine, wounded by mean, racist, backward old Britain in the form of a shadowy Royal Family (“not the queen, though!”), her pain acknowledged only by her loyal leading man, who is willing to be rescued from his “unconscious racism” by her teaching… and I guess I see how this story has all the right receptors, both for making a statement in the current moment of US politics and for sweeping up any bits of Orientalism swimming around in the body politic. Britain already plays an important part in the American imaginary as a sort of villainous uncle the US has outgrown – it’s kept perpetually in the imagined position of a privileged bully, belittling the US, despite the fact that the two countries’ actual, practical relations have been completely reversed for at least 70 years now.

And I guess what I think about it is that, in this story, Britain is the less attractive, less interesting supporting cast, the perpetrator of racism and the holder of revanchist bad traditionalism, contrasted against our heroic leads… and that Britain might be standing in as a skewed mirror of the US – a method by which Americans can be called to stand together against racism in the US, soothing the tensions of last summer… as long as the visible racist enemy comes in the form of some inferior foreigners. We can all agree on the failings of Others.

To be clear, I’m not saying that this image of the British royal family is false, nor am I saying that I doubt Meghan’s story, nor anything like that… but I note that the interview had no very specific moment that it had to become news (it wasn’t urgent like a plane crash or a sport result). H&M had moved out of the palace months before. They weren’t going anywhere. It was a story with a long shelf life, waiting to claim its optimal moment in the US’s attention, and it does seem pretty relevant to the current moment – with Trumpist racism fading against hopeful Bidenism. A moment for resettling, clearing out dirty laundry, declaring that “we are not those people.” Certainly not those people. Those royals that we snubbed 250 years ago.

Coda:
so I wrote all this stuff about Orientalism and the interview and Bridgerton because I thought it wasn’t super obvious – because I had to work through what I thought about it, myself. But it bothered me that there might not be a clear enough link in this post between the stuff Said lambasted and the light entertainment on TV – if you weren’t familiar with the arguments, you might not see what I was seeing. But then last weekend I found Orientalism in all its vainglory, with the gloves off, in Hulu’s “anti-historical” comedy-drama The Great. If you watched Bridgerton and think I’m making the Orientalist discourse up, then this is what it looks like when fashionable opinion really doesn’t care about what its subject thinks.

here’s young Catherine, about to get beaten up by the ladies of the court under guise of rustic native dancing.
They’re wearing candy-coloured wigs to signal that they’re unseriously sophisticated, like that Marie Antoinette movie.

Ostensibly, it’s about Catherine the Great of Russia, and ostensibly, it’s a comedy. that last part is important to its selling points, so let’s start there.

What tells us it’s a comedy is really just its breakneck pacing and the fact that you can always tell what everyone’s thinking, because they say it out loud. “I am quite annoyed at you and I might have you killed, except that you’re also making me horny.” That sort of thing. If, instead of this, the characters turned half away with an unreadable expression for a few seconds and you had to infer their plots over the next few scenes, it would be straight back into premier TV territory, because under the pacing it’s an endless succession of intrigues and betrayals and imminent danger, just like Game of Thrones. And because it contrasts its antic palace parties with some gruesome death and dismemberment, it’s a black comedy. A satire. It tells us on the title card that it’s “occasionally true,” but it neglects to tell us which occasions. What tells us that it also intends to be taken somewhat seriously as a historical drama is its authentic…. Britishness. it’s shot on location in British palaces, with British accents. If you think that might prevent a certain distinctive Russianness from shining through, well, it was the enlightenment. Everyone was aping French fashion anyway. It’s up to the audience to navigate this hall of mirrors and decide which bricolage pieces are structural at any particular moment.

So it manages the sneaky internet troll trick of saying the cruelest, most brazen things, while claiming that it’s only kidding. It paints the Russian court as a wildly abandoned, wildly dangerous, non-stop orgy; Russian religion as laughable, magic mushroom fueled, cynical superstition; the Tsar’s family as a bunch of lunatics; and the nobles as terrified sycophants, getting drunk and throwing each other out of windows for the Tsar’s amusement. In other words, it repeats exactly the image of the Russian court that western Europe constructed in the 16th-19th centuries – as being an Oriental despot’s whorehouse, dressed up in European clothes. “Scratch a Russian and you’ll find a Tartar,” as the French moralist Joseph de Maistre said, while Catherine was on the throne. And it gets away with repeating these old formulas with the satirist’s disclaimer that nobody escapes its sharp tongue – Catherine, the one foreign viewpoint character, is just a whisker more reasonable when she first arrives, but quickly has to adapt to barbarism in order to survive.

But what is it satirizing? What work is its Orientalism doing? Well….. if, in today’s USA, it is safe to hold prejudices about Britain, it is downright dutiful to hold prejudices about Russia. Putin plays up to the part of a Bond villain, the ever-more-intolerant laws of his regime seem designed to offend US progressives, and his meddling in US politics on Trump’s side (whatever its actual aims) serves to give him a particular kind of US political identity. “Scratch a Russian” is as relevant today as it was two centuries ago. Against that, Russophiles can hold up Catherine the Great as a rare moment of progressiveness in Russian history – Helen Mirren’s recent miniseries was straight-up laudatory, maybe an appeal to Russia’s better angels, comparing Catherine with Britain’s Gloriana, hinting that Russia might find friends over here if only she could remember her more enlightened moments. The Great, in contrast, tells us that Catherine represented a momentary deviation from the normal Russian character – she was a naive foreigner who briefly thought there was a rational mind under the bear’s fur. Her illusions are brutally crushed by a flurry of huzzahs and thrown glassware. As Viktoria Riyabikova notes, underneath its costumes it’s really about Russia today – or about Russian-British-American relations. I think Riyabikova might be being too charitable, though, in thinking that it wants to talk to Russians about reform. I suspect it just wants to talk to Americans and Britains about how irrational the bear, and court systems, and power and politics really are.