On being British and being American

[avevale_intelligencer]

I've been rereading Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse's Bojeffries Saga, which first appeared promisingly in the pages of Warrior, the comic that gave us, well, Alan Moore, mostly. The Bojeffries Saga was (as Moore says) largely inspired by Henry Kuttner's Hogben stories, about a family of backwoods hillbillies all of whom are in some way fantastically or SFnally different, and who regard this difference as merely part of normal life. I like both, but the differences between them become more obvious toward the end of the later work, and highlight two core axioms which recur in British and American culture and media.

In America, it's believed that any loser can become a winner if the loser is simply ingenious, determined, or unscrupulous enough.

In Britain, it's believed that winners and losers are born and die that way, that most of us are losers, and the only way to escape loserdom is through the intervention of a kindly, paternalistic winner.

There are numerous exceptions, of course, and there's some conscious pushback on both sides of the pond against these assumptions, each of which is equally sometimes-true and equally utter-nonsense-as-a-principle. But they do pop up everywhere. America produced The West Wing; we produced Yes Prime Minister. America, Star Trek; Britain, Red Dwarf. America, Columbo; Britain, Lord Peter Wimsey. The Doctor was, in his earlier incarnations if not his first, a kindly, paternalistic winner, an aristocrat from a race of aristocrats with secret powers who had given up his status to help the underdogs. America's version of Doctor Who would be more like Peter Cushing's in the two movies; a backyard inventor, scorned as crazy by his peers, who makes good by inventing a time machine. He would be Doc Brown.

Thus, Kuttner's Hogbens, while dirt poor and the kind of people just made to be roasted alive in their burning shack by an angry, torch-wielding mob, survive and even thrive in their strangeness. The Bojeffries family start out promisingly, but get chewed up and absorbed by the inanity of post-Thatcher British media culture; losers to the end. Their strangeness evaporates and blows away in the pitiless gaze of the Big Brother eye.

Which is rather sad. Of the two wrong beliefs, I think I slightly prefer the American one.

Comments

[batyatoon]

The real problem with the American wrong belief is what can happen when people are as determined and ingenious as they can possibly be, try their goshdarned hardest, and still lose: they feel they've been cheated and someone else must have stolen their rightful win. I've been leery of that principle ever since reading/listening to Sondheim's Assassins.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Very true. Both wrong beliefs foster a sense of entitlement, but in Britain it's mostly confined to those who've already got what they think they're entitled to, whereas in America it can strike anyone. Of course this is a huge generalisation, and as I said, exceptions abound both ways; there are lots of Brits who feel cheated by "the old boy network," and, I'm sure, lots of Americans who feel part of an entitled class.

What fascinates me are the cultural ramifications, and the comparisons keep cropping up. I could list several more without much effort. When something appears which is American (or Canadian) and yet has the British "feel" to it, like Carnivale or Brimstone, it's quite a shock, and to me something of a letdown, since I prefer the more uplifting kind of story myself. But at least it does happen; I think British shows with the American sense of hope and scope (if I can put it that way) are very much rarer, if they happen at all.