This coming July will mark the United States’ sestercentennial: two hundred and fifty years since the Thirteen Colonies announced their desire for independence.
In their declaration, the Founding Fathers detailed their precise grievances with the British state: the imposition of taxes without fair representation, the presence of standing British armies in the colonies and the existence of legal barriers preventing them from trading freely with the world. On these points, it is clear how the Founding Fathers foresaw an independent United States: a nation able to organise its own government, fiscal policy, diplomacy and commercial activity. But what of the culture of this new country?
Even after two and half centuries, the US feels inseparably wedded to Britain. Shared history and language has produced a cultural superhighway between the two countries. Though it may seem an equal relationship, Britain still wields some of its old power over its former colony. We just aren’t seeing it yet.
The Cultural Desert
While the sciences were closely studied in the colonial United States, the arts were never treated with the same weight. New England was deeply Puritan. Literature and theatre, thought too worldly to hold religious significance, had little space to flourish. Histories, such as Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), and more practical works, such as Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack (published annually between 1732 and 1758), were the most popular texts of the time. There was no burgeoning American alternative to the poetry, drama and writing of the Old World.
This becomes clear after a close reading of the Declaration of Independence. One might expect the text to have a fundamentally contemptuous tone. After all, was this not the moment for the Fathers to show their disdain for the Empire with as much rebellious zeal as possible? Did they not want a revolutionary call to arms?
And yet, curiously, the text criticises King George III ‘for abolishing the free system of English laws’. Instead of disregarding the Empire, the Fathers present themselves as defenders of it. To cite as a reason for their secession from Britain the fact that the King has forsaken his own country’s legal tradition is a curious political move. Perhaps this motive was manufactured, or at least exaggerated, to give greater legitimacy to the American cause. To argue that they were more English than the English, or the upholders of proper English values, may just have been contrived to convince some of their right to independence. And yet, this argument points to a deep-seated imbalance in cultural power in the Anglosphere. When Britain sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.
The Remake Jungle
American culture has clearly moved on since Franklin’s era. Americana, Elvis, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, McDonald’s. To even begin a list of American cultural artefacts feels a daunting task. But, putting these icons and corporations to one side, let’s look at how culture permeates and moves across the English-speaking world on a more structural level.
If we focus on film and television, for example, we see a superhighway of ideas flying across the North Atlantic. This is the cultural ‘special relationship’. The UK and the US exchange more concepts and media in this space seemingly than any other two Anglophone countries.
The remake jungle can be hated or adored, but never ignored.
Some survive the journey and some do not. The rewards for successfully making it across the Pond can be tremendous. The US Office has debatably been much more culturally impactful than its British brother, especially among Gen Z who grew up on the myriad memes that the series spawned. However, the cost of failure is also sky-high. The American version of The Inbetweeners has been widely described as a prime example of how comedy spectacularly misfires when it is not adapted for a different audience.
The remake jungle is cutthroat. Studios, networks and producers must constantly consume IP from the other side of the Atlantic and regurgitate it in bizarre and often tasteless re-imaginings. In the jungle, it doesn’t matter how many of your remakes turn out like Us & Them (the woeful US version of Gavin & Stacey) as long as you eventually back a winner like Total Wipeout, Geordie Shore or Gladiators. There is no space for qualms about integrity. Even cultural titans like Saturday Night Live are fair game.
Kind Hearts and Coronets
1949 was a ridiculously good year for film. At only the third edition of the BAFTAs, critics had to choose between some of the best products of Ealing Studios’ post-war heyday, including Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore!, and The Third Man, arguably the best film noir and the best British film ever made. Alongside these entries was another classic of world cinema, a comedy that is still thought of today as one of the greatest ever.
Kind Hearts and Coronets is a film that defies straightforward description. The elevator pitch would go something like this: We’re in Edwardian England. Our main character is related to the landed aristocracy through his mother. She is disowned by her family, when she chooses to marry for love. After she dies, he resolves to kill eight members of his extended family, in increasingly outlandish ways, so that he can inherit his family title and estate. Oh, and all the family members are played by Alec Guinness. Even the women.
These structural and technical peculiarities underline the wider source of the film’s comedy. In essence, Kind Hearts is a comedy about eccentricity, both of the individual and of his environment. Our (anti)hero, Louis Mazzini, who narrates his whole biography and the full details of his plot in exquisitely self-congratulatory style, is our window into a world, dictated by social standing and positioning within an iron-clad class system. The D’Ascoyne family are a delightfully grotesque image of aristocratic snobbery, which is presented to such intelligent comic effect that the audience finds itself siding with Mazzini.
Though, from an objective and perhaps more Freudian perspective, we would read Mazzini as a victim of deranged illusions of grandeur and a crippling inferiority complex, the film’s hilarious deconstruction of British notions of social hierarchy encourages us to increasingly root for his cause. We cannot help but laugh at the glee with which he reports that a bout of diphtheria has killed his newly-born cousins or at his pithy, rhyming description of how he murders Lady Agatha D’Ascoyne while she is distributing suffragette literature from a balloon over London: I shot an arrow in the air; she fell to earth in Berkeley Square.
All this eccentricity makes Kind Hearts an incredibly British film. The film is simultaneously a critique of Britishness and an advert for it. In biting satire, the film asks a series of questions. Why does Britain have all these frightfully posh families with large country estates and even larger egos? Why should we pretend that they are our betters, when they are as immoral and cunning as us? Why do we honour them with long titles and ceremonial robes? Yes, the lengths that Mazzini goes to are ridiculous but, crucially, no more ridiculous than the uniquely British family he has been born into.
Kind Hearts is a behemoth on the world’s cultural stage. Jaw-achingly British, it waited for so long with all its haughtiness and pomposity, defying filmmakers the world over to consider remaking it. Succeed and scalp one of Britain’s biggest cultural assets. Fail and become another victim of the remake jungle. The fact that a remake was even considered points to a telling power dynamic. Swapping concepts for TV shows may be one thing, but rummaging through another country’s catalogue of classic films in the hope that you can spin it better smacks of a chronic lack of American imagination.
How to Make a Killing
Kind Hearts and Coronets is an impossible film to transpose directly to an American setting. The film is unashamedly about Britain, and a particular part of British history at that. How to Make a Killing was rumoured to only be inspired by the 1949 original. However, when the film was released in February, it was clear that this was a direct remake.
Many signs suggested that this foray into the remake jungle would be fruitful. As critics have pointed out, the film looked good on paper; the film’s two stars, Glenn Powell and Margaret Qualley, are very much in vogue. However, the movie fails to capture any of the subtle social commentary that feeds the comic motif of eccentricity in Kind Hearts. Mazzini is re-imagined as Becket whose mother is disowned by her wealthy family after she refuses to have an abortion. Finding himself unhappily working as a suit salesman, Becket devises a path to his family fortune. Without the dazzling allure of reaching the height of the British establishment, the plot in How to Make a Killing is what its title suggests: a straightforward commercial exercise. There is no intrigue beyond the desire for the financial profits of revenge.
A better remake could have just focused on the original’s premise. The idea of cutting down your family tree to precipitate an inheritance could perhaps be re-written for a modern US audience. Luigi Mangione still sits within the country’s cultural memory, as does a wider backdrop of growing wealth inequality. The film needed to lean into these American themes more, instead of feeling obliged to replay a British story that was told with much more impact almost 80 years ago.
The Future of the Anglosphere and the Movies
A comparison of these films is enough to make the case for ending our obsession with the remake jungle. However, it seems that we won’t quit our obsession; we are doomed to continue traversing the North Atlantic in the hope that we’ll be able to find something on one side that we can sell on the other.
In recent months, the case for Europe to decouple itself from established American systems of power has become increasingly convincing. The ongoing war in Iran makes that case almost impossible to argue with. Governments across Europe have promised to increase domestic defence spending. The President of the European Central Bank has called for Europe to develop its own financial payments technology to end its reliance on Visa and Mastercard.
The same argument can be made for Britain’s cultural prestige in the English-speaking world. In spite of all that has changed over the last quarter of a millennium, this island still holds a strong place in the Anglosphere. When this country held the largest empire in the history of the world, it made sense that it was a pre-eminent global cultural power. Now, but a land of 70 million people, it is amazing that we still hold this status. The remake jungle can be hated or adored, but never ignored. Our cultural power has never diminished. It is now time to leverage it on the world’s stage.
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