Like Mona Charen, I liked Simon Schama’s “History of Britain”. For a long time, only academics paid much attention to the revision of the whig interpretation of the English Reformation by such as Christopher Haigh, Eamon Duffy, et al. so, it was refreshing to see it in this popular documentary.
Now apparently Schama is vexed over popular American reception of Downton Abbey for fear that Americans will start believing that maybe, just maybe, something was lost in the great modern egalitarian leveling process. Mrs. Charen notes in her article that “Downton Abbey doesn’t succumb to the modern prejudice of portraying all aristocrats as morons or monsters, the better to grind the ax about the evils of the old class system. The earl is an honorable man who tries to live up to the code of the gentleman. His mother is spoiled and willful but basically decent.” For of specific example of this “Upper class?! rawr!” portrayal, I am reminded of the dreadful Altman hairball Gosford Park. To know all you need about that movie, please take a moment and absorb this from James Bowman’s review:
For decades Hollywood lived by the philosophy that the only good Indian was a dead Indian. Savage red men bit the dust in their thousands for the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, so that anyone who ventured into a Western could be sure of what he would see. Why did it take people so long to get bored knowing that every Indian would be nothing but an Aunt Sally for soldiers’ or settlers’ bullets? I don’t know, but eventually they did get bored — and Hollywood promptly flip-flopped. For the last thirty-five years, you could be equally certain going into a movie that any cinematic redskins would invariably be the good guys: decent, honorable and, as sure as shooting, victimized by the white man.
And we are still not bored with it. Maybe in another 30 years we will be. In the same way, I reckon that it has been at least 40 years since an aristocrat of the silver screen has been anything but a thorough rotter and a cad. You have only to call a character Lord something- or-other and your audience knows immediately what to think of him. Why don’t we get bored with this? Once again, it is a mystery. But one possible explanation is that we need the myth of the wicked upper classes to confirm us in our taste for vulgarity and sloppiness. If we thought that manners and what they used to call “breeding” were anything but a cover for the basest kind of behavior, we might have to cultivate them ourselves once again instead of letting it all hang out.
He has it cold I dare say. Downton Abbey by contrast gives everyone a fair shake. It spends much time showing modernity creeping in like the vines in Love in the Ruins (more reactionary entertainment for you by the way), and the producers of this series, presumably not reactionaries, give the good things of modernity their due. That is, they try to split the middle. But advantage reactionaries, because we all sit in a smouldering pile of rubble that was once Western civilization, and you can’t watch this show without knowing where it all eventually leads. My only quibble based on the few episodes I’ve seen is the nagging sensation that I’m watching a version of Brideshead Revisited that has been sanitized of Catholicism so to speak, but it is still worth the time.
*Apologies to “proph” of Collapse: The Blog for my blatant aping.
