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Saturday 18 December 2021

Life through a Guardian lens



Need a warped, tortured or evil character for a Hollywood film? Cast a British actor

Nick James, former editor of Sight and Sound magazine, wonders if the “otherness” of British stars can also operate as a shortcut, or at least a shorthand, so that the American viewer knows this is a character they should be worried about. “It’s possibly also that the current need to therapise the bad guys, to give them a broken home type motivation (as in Joker), requires that the US audience detect strangeness in them. Brits are strangeness in this context,” he said.


I'd expect Democrats to be a much more potent route for discovering fine examples of warped, tortured or evil strangeness. 

5 comments:

Sam Vega said...

The classic zombie is a shambling creepy man who has immense power but is completely controlled by others. I guess that's too close to home for most Americans.

Doonhamer said...

Plus they can act.

DiscoveredJoys said...

I've often thought that American society is not very subtle. The coastal states are held to be 'sophisticated' and the fly-over states rude mechanicals, but all tend to get carried away with various enthusiasms. Think Prohibition, Macarthyism, the War on Drugs, foreign wars to 'encourage' regime change, and now Wokeism.

So anyone who shows 'depth' or evenhandedness, even British actors, is 'creepy'. You can't tell from their accent what beliefs they hold to be 'true'. Therefore they are 'other'.

Scrobs. said...

We watched 'South Pacific' the other night (a first for me), and I swear that during the final rendition of 'Sam and Janet evening', a mobile phone went off!

Now that's acting!

A K Haart said...

Sam - and the strangely garbled utterances must be too close to home too.

Doonhamer - certainly far better than Nancy Pelosi who can only do insanity with any real conviction.

DJ - I don't know, but the media seem to cause many problems in the US as they do over here. They don't act as a rational brake on those enthusiasms.

Scrobs - it could have been a an early version in a varnished wooden box carried on the back with big leather straps.