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Fiends, friends and fools: screen images and/as rural struggle

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Notes

  1. Although the reference was to the contrast between what happened to the French monarchy as a result of the 1789 Revolution, and the capacity of caricaturists such as James Gillray to lampoon royalty in England, Baker was nevertheless making a broader point about the general political rôle of humour.

  2. This interpretation of humour as disempowering “those below” whilst empowering “those above” contrasts absolutely with the currently fashionable view informing the postmodern conceptualization of laughter as much rather the opposite: that is, disempowering “those above” whilst empowering “those below”. The latter perception stems from the uncritical embrace by postmodernism—see, for example, Stallybrass and White (1986)—of Bakhtinian theory about the political efficacy of carnival, a site of ritual comic/disrespectful discourse (= “bucolic poetry”) that corresponds to Menippean satire aimed at authority by “those below” (Bakhtin 1984: 106ff., 112ff., 122ff). Structured by the “oral carnival-folkloric” of “joyful relativity”, whereby the world is “fundamentally changed” and “all distance between people is suspended”, carnivalesque parody and laughter are said by postmodern theory to disempower the ruling class by portraying it as weak. Accordingly, postmodernism accepts at face value the notion that—because of carnivalistic acts such as the “mock crowning and subsequent decrowning of the carnival king”—the carnival is “a new mode of interrelationship between individuals” (= landlords, kings and commoners). Since it fails to distinguish between infrastructure and superstructure, however, postmodernism fails consequently to differentiate symbolic opposition from its “other”, an actual challenge to authority. The result is that postmodern theorists reify and thus exaggerate the transformational impact of carnivalesque discourse circulating within the domain of popular culture. What postmodern theory ignores, therefore, is the usual outcome of such transgression: that at the end of the day, when the carnival and all its display of ritual aggression has finished, the agricultural labourer returns to his/her hovel whilst landlord and king remain, respectively, in their manor house and castle. In other words, the existing hierarchy is still intact, and likely to endure until challenged “from below” not by (forceful) words but by (forceful) deeds.

  3. This underlines the systemic nature of ruling class power; consequently any struggle undertaken against the latter is likely to fail unless “those below” are prepared to confront and attack all the institutional forms of such power (economic as well as political and ideological).

  4. This kind of argument structured a response to Genovese (1994: 87) about what would have happened had the southern planter class not lost the American civil war: “A few years ago I dumped all this on a good friend who ranks among the premier southern historians in the country. “Face it,” I said, “notwithstanding all the airy incantations to safe methods of change, and notwithstanding your personal hostility to racism, if you folks had remained in power, black people would still be attending segregated [state] schools and would still be riding in the back of buses.” My friend took another swig of Wild Turkey and replied, ‘Now Gene, if folks like me had actually been in power, there wouldn’t have been any [state] schools and buses, and the problem would never have arisen.’” The assumption underlying this exchange is that any gains made by “those below” are substantial, and as such automatically and comprehensively negate all forms of “from above” power. In reality, however, the changes that do take place in these circumstances are largely cosmetic, the economic sources of “from above” empowerment and “from below” disempowerment—ownership of or control over means of production (mainly land)—remaining largely in place. What is important from the view of proprietors, however, is that in a discourse about history they should be characterized as losers, not winners. Not only does this invite sympathy—as it clearly does from Genovese—but (more importantly) the subtext is that a transformation involving material assets is complete. In short, no further process of redistribution/reform (= empowerment/disempowerment) is necessary.

  5. For the agrarian myth, see Brass (2000a). It is a matter of interest to encounter in an unexpected quarter confirmation of an argument made by me in an earlier text about the connection between the agrarian myth and the film Gladiator (2001), directed by Ridley Scott. In the notes of Pietro Scalia—a BAFTA winning editor who cut the film—is found the following observation (McGrath 2001: 140): “Although it’s an action film, its soul is about a man who wants to go home. Throughout there is a reference to Maximus (the General) as a man of the land who wants to return to his idyllic family life. It was shot to start with as a close-up of Russell Crowe [= General Maximus] standing in the middle of the battlefield. For the end Ridley shot a sequence where the gladiator rejoins his dead family in heaven with images of wheat. There was a ‘hand over wheat’ shot in this end sequence which I saw as a very powerful poetic image which could resonate throughout the whole film. So instead, I started the film with this shot and then cut to a close-up of Maximus. It’s in his head—that’s what he wants to do. This is a film about a man who wants to go home. So in the first two shots I state my thesis of the film completely” (emphasis added).

  6. My critique of the epistemology structuring this “new” populist postmodern discourse, showing why it is both historically old and politically conservative, has been developed from the late 1980s onwards. The most detailed presentation is contained in Brass (2000a).

  7. Replacing a discourse about economic disempowerment structured by class with one about a grassroots empowered by “popular” culture was precisely what neoliberals were attempting to do at that conjuncture.

  8. Hence the insistence by one exponent of postmodern theory (McHale 1987: 172) that “[p]ostmodernist fiction is the heir of Menippean satire and its most recent historical avatar”. For a similar view, see Collins (1989). It is necessary to distinguish the more useful component of Bakhtinian theory from its less helpful one. The more useful consists of the observation by Todorov (1984) that all speech is dialogic, in that conversation necessarily leaves unstated much of the context framing its utterances, or that which is understood by participants in order to make sense of what is actually said. The less useful aspect concerns the efficacy attributed by him to the language of carnival. Of these two components, it is unfortunately the second which has been taken up with such enthusiasm by those studying “from below” rural agency. Thus, for example, carnival and carnivalesque discourse (= “hidden transcripts”) are identified by Scott (1990) as one of the most potent kinds of opposition (= “everyday forms of resistance”) to the existing social order.

  9. There are a number of exceptions to this, in that a specifically political approach to discourses structuring film is evident is the seminal work of writers such as Potamkin (Jacobs 1977), Kracauer (1960) and Richards (1973, 1977, 1989). Unlike Potamkin, for example, Richards is not a Marxist; however, his foregrounding of politics and history when discussing the meaning of a film is useful, more so than the a-historical/a-political “decentred” framework employed by postmodern theorists who currently dominate cultural studies. Among the latter are Jameson (1988, 1992, 1994), Connor (1989), Bhabha (1994), Marcus (1997) and Gilroy et al. (2000). Perhaps because they eschew the possibility of history and politics, exponents of postmodernism tend to regard film as an hermetically-sealed linguistic discourse (= “the language of film”, or “film-as-language”), with no easily accessible referent outside of itself. See, for example, Metz (1974, 1982) and MacCabe (1985). In contrast, Richards examines film through an historian’s eyes, in terms of broad political content and historical themes. That said, a difference exists between his approach to the analysis of film and that utilised here. To begin with, Richards (1973) delineates films in terms of distinctive political discourses (American populism, British Imperialism and German Nazism), whereas the following presentation emphasizes the common strands unifying them. It has been argued in Brass (2000a) that conservatism, colonialism and fascism are ruling class ideologies that require a populist mobilizing discourse in order to generate and then sustain a wider politico-ideological acceptability. Because of this, the framework adopted here poses the question of the way in which positive/negative film images of landlordism are connected with a discourse about horror/terror and humour/laughter. None of the latter is considered by Richards in his otherwise useful analysis of film.

  10. As has been argued elsewhere (Brass 2000b), an important reason why Hollywood film discourse projects both the agrarian myth and populism is the power exercised by directors, producers and/or actors, many of whom either subscribe to the North American nationalist foundation myth (= the small farmer heroically struggling against railroad interests and cattle barons) or are themselves landowners. The significance of this is missed by Drazin (1999) in an otherwise illuminating analysis of the film The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed and scripted by Graham Greene. About the influence of David Selznick, the producer, Drazin (1999: 38–39) observes: “In the conferences Selznick sought to transform Greene’s no-hoper [the character Holly Martins] into an image of unsophisticated but big-hearted pluckiness. It was a view of themselves that Americans could accept with pride and were familiar with from the movies—Gary Cooper in Mr Deedes Goes to Town, or James Stewart in Mr Smith Goes to Washington…; the simple man reasserting civilized values”. A slightly different explanation of this intervention would go as follows. The populism of the agrarian myth, as embodied in the Westerns that Holly Martins writes for a living, and his continuing belief in Harry Lime’s elemental goodness, are undermined by the latter’s badness. It was this naivety—the belief in the reality of life as portrayed in the Westerns he wrote—that the film producer David Selznick wanted to recast as “big-hearted pluckiness”. In other words, he wanted to emphasize the reality of the populist vision to which the Holly Martins character adhered.

  11. This view is expressed in the following observation by Bagehot (1928 [1867]: 53): “Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about it you cannot reverence it. When there is a select committee on the Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” Earlier he indicates clearly the role of monarchy and why it will not in his view withstand close scrutiny (Bagehot 1928 [1867]: 35, 40): “[S]o long as the human heart is strong and the human reason is weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding…[hence the function of monarchy] to be a visible symbol of unity to those still so imperfectly educated as to need a symbol.” Since—like all myths—it requires an unquestioning acceptance of a non-rational discourse (= “feeling”) positing the “naturalness” of hierarchy, the power of the monarchy is ultimately dependent on a corresponding absence of grassroots political consciousness (= “understanding”). As with conservatism generally, this is only situation in which the reproduction of this ruling class institution is possible.

  12. An example of the latter approach is Paxman (2006), a journalist who has a reputation as a radical. The final paragraph of his book encapsulates precisely the contradiction between an acceptance of the anachronistic role of the monarchy and an insistence that the institution is “not worth bothering about”. Hence the concluding argument (Paxman 2006: 288): “Certainly, if we were devising a system of government for the twenty-first century we should not come up with what we have now. The arrangements are antique, undemocratic and illogical. But monarchies do not function by logic. If they work, they do so by appealing to other instincts, of history, emotion, imagination and mythology, and we have to acknowledge that many of the most stable societies in Europe are monarchies, while some of the most unstable and corrupt have presidents. It would theoretically be possible to pull one thread out of the rug woven by history (although we do not know what other threads might then unravel). We could easily pack all of them off to live out their lives in harmless eccentricity on some organically managed rural estate. But why bother?”.

  13. At the start of his justly famous ghost story “The Ash-Tree”, M.R. James—the embodiment of this ancient multi-stranded institutional matrix—puts the following declaration of love both for the country-house and for the life of a landowner into the mouth of his narrator (James 1931: 54): “Everyone who has travelled over Eastern England knows the smaller country-houses with which it is studded—the rather dank little buildings, usually in the Italian style, surrounded with parks of some eighty to a hundred acres… [P]erhaps most of all I like fancying what life in such a house was when it was first built, and in the piping times of landlords’ prosperity, and not least now, when, if money is not so plentiful, taste is more varied and life quite interesting. I wish to have one of these houses, and enough money to keep it together and entertain my friends in it modestly.”

  14. The way the components of this institutional matrix interacted during the 1920s and 1930s is chronicled in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh (see below). This world, according to Lodge (2003: 162), was “inhabited by characters who were for the most part upper-class and in some cases aristocratic, educated at public school and Oxbridge, many of them idle, dissolute,…seldom seen occupied in useful work, their time mostly spent shuttling from party to party or from country house to country house, with occasional adventurous excursions Abroad.” For an earlier and similar view advanced during the late 1940s by Orwell in an unfinished essay, see Davison (1998: 74–77).

  15. On this see Richards (1983), who argues that—together with the Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and the entertainer/film star Gracie Fields—King George V was a major contributor to this political consensus. The King embodied the nation, the Prime Minister the countryside and the entertainer the urban industrial sector. Not the least effective input came from Gracie Fields, a working class female whose public persona radiated optimism (= hope) amidst economic crisis, and whose films projected an unambiguously (“we’re all in this together”) nationalist sentiment. Because he downplays the element of class struggle during the 1930s, however, Richards fails to identify what each contributor to this consensus had in common: namely, a specifically populist role in deflecting or pre-empting the formation or reproduction of consciousness of class.

  16. Much the same case is made regularly in relation to the monarchy. Hence the recent claim by Paxman (2006: 281) that “[l]ooked at from a distance, the royal spectacular…looks hardly changed from the days when kings made war and law and had bishops burned at the stake. But it is something of an illusion. Not only does royalty not have the power it once had, it does not live as high off the hog.”.

  17. This refrain—the demise of large landowners and landownership—is encountered most frequently in the pages of the house journal of the British aristocracy, Country Life. Not the least effective part of this discourse is the periodic reproduction in the latter publication of black-and-white or sepia photographs of large country houses, the impression created being that such habitations, together with their owners and acres, are now a thing of the past. See, for example, Strong (1996). This idea is itself reinforced by the frequent absence of landowners and workers from these (seemingly empty) country houses and their surrounding fields.

  18. Hence the pessimistic entry in his diary for November 1946 by Evelyn Waugh, a sympathetic chronicler of the pre-war landowning class, “as to what I should shake off here” by leaving England to live elsewhere. He writes (Davie 1976: 661): “The certainty that England as a great power is done for, that the loss of possessions, the claim of the English proletariat to be a privileged race, sloth and envy, must produce increasing poverty; that this time the cutting down will start at the top until only a proletariate [sic] and a bureaucracy survive.” In his subsequent entry (Davie 1976: 662), however, Waugh gives the game away, and recognizes that nothing much has changed or is likely to: “Why do I contemplate so grave a step as abjuring the realm…? What is there to worry me here …? I have a beautiful house furnished exactly to my taste; servants enough, wine in the cellar. The villagers are friendly and respectful; neighbours leave me alone. I send my children to the schools I please. Apart from taxation and rationing, government interference is negligible.” Later that same month, Waugh nevertheless declares once more his political beliefs (Davie 1976: 663): “The French called the occupying German army ‘the grey lice’. That is precisely how I regard the occupying army of English socialist government.”

  19. Such claims were rebutted most effectively by those who were themselves from aristocratic backgrounds. During the 1830s, for example, Bulwer Lytton (1836a: 24–25), made the following observation: “Without the odium of separate privileges, without the demarcation of feudal rights, the absence of those very prerogatives has been the cause of the long establishment of their [= aristocratic] power. Their authority has not been visible; held under popular names it has deceived the popular eye;—and deluded by the notion of a Balance of Power, the people did not see that it was one of the proprietors of the power who held the scales and regulated the weights.” (emphasis added). Over a century later much the same point was made by Mitford (1959: 47): “Most people, nowadays, take it for granted that the aristocracy is utterly impoverished, a view carefully fostered by the lords themselves… There are still many enormous fortunes in the English aristocracy, into which income tax and death duties have made no appreciable inroads…”. Significantly, it was this aspect, one small part of a much broader argument concerning aristocratic “difference”, which elicited criticism from defenders of aristocratic privilege.

  20. The argument linking the survival both of Oxbridge and of the public schools to the way in which such institutions have been depicted in the domain of popular culture has been made on a number of earlier occasions, in a celebrated 1939 essay “Boys’ Weeklies” by Orwell (1946: 57–82), and more recently by Richards (1988) and Carter (1990). None of the latter, however, connects this ability to resist abolition specifically to the humorous portrayal of ruling class institutions as disempowered, and thus in essence as “not worth bothering about” politically.

  21. Those who subscribe to the decline of aristocracy thesis include Cannadine (1990) and Daniels (1994).

  22. When questioned in the course of a BBC2 television programme—“Whose Britain is it Anyway?”—broadcast in January 2006, as to how they justified continued ownership of so much rural property, aristocratic landowners responded by deploying precisely these arguments.

  23. For a comparison of landowners in the 1890s with those who owned land over a century later, see Cahill (2001). At the turn of the millennium, the continued economic efficacy of landownership in Britain was underlined by the following report: “The multi-million pound riches of Britain’s 20-something sports stars, entrepreneurs and entertainers are still eclipsed by the enormous inherited wealth of young aristocrats…the really big money is still old money. The fortunes earned through developing computer software, singing in a band [and] importing drugs are dwarfed by the huge sums which will be inherited.” See “Old money still backs Britain’s young rich,” The Observer (London) 11 April 1999.

  24. Hence the anxiety about the effect of “allegations about [expenditures on] moats, helipads, horse manure, chandeliers and swimming pools, all claimed by some of the most senior Conservative squirearchy. The Tory brand had been retoxified overnight…David Cameron’s marketing men have worked to freshen his party’s ‘aroma’. But the chief smell hanging over it right now is horse manure—merely one of the claims submitted by Tory grandees that have reminded the public how the other half lives. From mole traps to moats, these country life expenses have restored the view of Conservatives as privileged and greedy.” The Guardian (London), 16 May 2009.

  25. One way in which a ruling class institution threatened with abolition deflects/disarms criticism is to claim that it performs a socially useful role, and this is indeed the kind of image which permeates much popular culture. Evidence of this influence is the chivalric code of the landowning class, passed down to the film noir tradition via the unlikely influence of Raymond Chandler, who wrote scripts (or on whose books scripts were based) for classic film noir such as Murder, My Sweet (1944), Double Indemnity (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), The Blue Dahlia (1946), The Brasher Doubloon (1947), Lady in the Lake (1947), The Long Goodbye (1973), and Farewell, My Lovely (1975). As is well known, the plots of film noir feature a lone and honourable individual—usually a detective (= “decent cop”)—conducting a struggle against invariably unseen forces of evil in a dark and threatening urban landscape. The Hollywood producer John Houseman reports that their enduring friendship was based on “the surprising premise that he and I…were British public school men—and consequently Gentlemen… [i]t is not always easy to remember that Chandler, whose literary territory was bounded by Malibu on the west, Long Beach on the south, and San Bernadino on the east, and whose writing gave the world some of its most ruthless documentation on the seamier aspects of Southern California society in the twenties and thirties of [the twentieth] century, had spent most of his adolescence in England and had been educated in the classics at Dulwich [and loved] the English public school system…”. Cited in Bruccoli (1976: x). The connection between film noir and public school values is not difficult to discern: Chandler’s lone private eye possesses many of the same characteristics as the “gentleman” heroes, swashbucklers whose values are those of the knightly class. The latter, as Richards (1988: 4, 5) points out, were “embodied in the chivalric code [which] dates the historical scope of the films from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries, when this code prevailed… The typical swashbuckling hero is the gentleman hero, well born, comfortably off, a man of breeding and polish, daring and humour, gallantry and charm. He maintains a decent standard of behaviour, fights for King and Country, believes in truth and justice, and defends the honour of a lady… The Code is, of course, the Code of the ruling class and its prominence strongly implies an Establishment mentality behind the films”. The specifically populist element—and conservatism—of the knightly code is equally clear: “The plot-lines of swashbucklers often involve unscrupulous individual members of the aristocracy, who plot to gain power for themselves and who, during the course of the film, perpetuate all kinds of outrages against the people. The monarchy, on the other hand, is seen as embodying fair-minded and disinterested central government… The interests of the monarchy are thus identical with the interests of the people.” And just as swashbucklers protect both kingly authority and the common people against self-seeking and “unscrupulous” members of the aristocracy, so the lone detective of film noir upholds the rights of the people and—it is inferred—what are the decent values of the existing (capitalist) system against dark forces which threaten to corrupt these.

  26. Some long ago recognized that any challenge to aristocratic power which did not at the same time expropriate the material basis of such power—land—would fail. Thus, for example, in his critique of the English landowning class, Bulwer Lytton (1836b: 262–63) noted presciently: “Believe me then, that if you institute a republic tomorrow, it would be an aristocratic republic… And for one evident reason—namely, the immense property of our nobles and landed gentry! Recollect, that in this respect they differ from most other aristocracies, which are merely the shadows of a court and without substance in themselves. From most other aristocracies, sweep away the office and the title, and they themselves are not; but banish from court a Northumberland, a Lonsdale, a Cleveland, a Bedford, or a Yarborough; take away their dukedoms and their earldoms, their ribbons or their robes, and they are exactly as powerful, with those broad lands and those mighty rent-rolls, as they were before. In any republic you can devise, men with this property will be uppermost; they will be still your rulers…”.

  27. Perhaps the best-known examples of a comic portrayal of disempowered English ruling class institutions (aristocracy, public schools, imperialism, colonialism) are those found in the 1930s literary fiction of Evelyn Waugh, among which are Decline and Fall (Waugh 1951a [1928]), Vile Bodies (Waugh 1951b [1930]), Scoop (Waugh 1954 [1938]), and Black Mischief (Waugh 1962 [1932]). Hence the bathetic description (Waugh 1951b [1930]: 50) that starts by listing the sonorous titles acquired historically by two aristocrats at a party, and ends with a reference to the much diminished status and modest occupational position of the current incumbents: “At Archie Schwert’s party the fifteenth Marquess of Vanburgh de Brendon, Baron Brendon, Lord of the Five Isles and Hereditary Grand Falconer to the Kingdom of Connaught, said to the eighth Earl of Balcairn, Viscount Erdinge, Baron Cairn of Balcairn, Red Knight of Lancaster, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Chenonceaux Herald to the Duchy of Acquitaine, ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Isn’t this a repulsive party? What are you going to say about it?’ for they were both of them, as it happened, gossip writers for the daily papers.” In a similar vein, the socio-economic advantages conferred on members of a ruling class by private education are not merely downplayed but inverted in the observation (Waugh 1951a [1928]: 188) that “…anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison.” The description by Waugh (1962 [1932]: 46ff.) of members of the English ruling class representing their country abroad portrays them as harmless (= powerless) old buffers, “not worth bothering about”. More concerned with gardening and social minutae, the upper class head of the British Legation in the fictional African State of Azania is depicted by Waugh (1962 [1932]: 54–55) as disempowered (“But is there no news about the war?” “No, I don’t think so. Can’t remember anything particularly. I leave that all to [the Secretary], you know, and he’s down with fever at the moment. I dare say when he comes back we shall hear something. He keeps in touch with all the local affairs…There were some cables the other day, now I come to think of it. Was there anything about the war in them…d’you know?”). In another novel on this subject (Waugh 1954 [1938]: 149), the same head of the British Legation in the fictional African State is depicted as uninterested in politics (“Don’t like any politics…”), the classic “above politics” stance of populism. In keeping with this is the humorous and benign image of the English aristocrat as an innocent abroad (Waugh 1954 [1938]: 59–60). To a French colonial administrator who asks since the African country to which they are both travelling “is not rich at all…Why do you wish to take it?”, the main character –a member of an old English landowning family—replies: “But I do not wish to.” Both these stories portray British imperialism as acquisition by accident rather than design, and the rôle of the landowning class in this as peripheral and/or incidental. Significant in this regard is the following observation by the Earl of Birkenhead (Pryce-Jones 1973: 138–9), who was at Oxford with Waugh: “It was also obvious that Evelyn had formed a withering contempt for the jeunesse dorée…[he] saw them as arrogant scions of noble or county families…It was therefore not without amusement that one discovered, as his tastes matured, that when Evelyn began to find pleasure in aristocratic society and the houses these people inhabited, the [jeunesse dorée], once objects of his loathing and mauled in his writings, became numbered among his closest friends.” In truth, the mauling (or more accurately “mauling”) by Waugh of the English landowning class– mistakenly reified by Lodge (Pryce-Jones 1973: 215) as “subtly subversive of upper-class pride and prejudice”—was never anything other than friendly. The same cannot be said of his views about those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. When asked his opinion about the Spanish Civil war, and if he was for or against fascism, Waugh replied (Pryce-Jones 1973: 3): “I am not a Fascist nor shall I ever become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism.” This statement of political belief, widely dismissed as unserious, is in fact much rather the opposite: it encapsulates as accurately as possible the view taken by much of the European bourgeoisie and its organic intellectuals at that conjuncture, who—though not “natural” allies of the far right—were nevertheless prepared to support reactionary movements in cases where socialism was gaining ground in the class struggle.

  28. For the details about this process, see Brass (2000a: Chapter 1). In the case of 1860s Russia, for example, most landowners were (Lampert 1965: 14) “intensely suspicious of anything that might serve to strengthen the differentiation and industrialization of Russian society, because such tendencies uprooted the peasantry, destroyed primitive simplicity, and snapped the ‘organic’ ties of tradition, deference, and obligation…[in their view] maintenance of ‘organic’ relations between landowner and peasant (including police supervision by the former over the latter) would somehow preserve the Russian soul from being corrupted by the disruptive, constricting, and formalizing spirit so powerful in the bourgeois society of western Europe.”.

  29. The importance of the vampire story to the discourse of the agrarian myth has been examined by me elsewhere (Brass 2000a: Chapter 7).

  30. Hence the following observation (Kipling 1895: 151) by one of the colonizers: “No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English Ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black.”.

  31. In his story “The Phantom Rickshaw”, Kipling (1895: 131) notes: “One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never coolies and carriages. The whole thing is absurd. Fancy a ghost of a hillman.”.

  32. Accurately described by his biographer Pfaff (1980: 425) as “the best known English writer of ghost stories in [the twentieth] century”, and by Graham Greene (1951: 81) as a writer who “with admirable skill invented ghosts to make the flesh creep [and someone who] astutely used the image which would best convey horror”, Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was Provost both of Eton and of King’s College, Cambridge. Not only was he an impeccably establishment figure in terms of occupation but his political outlook and religious beliefs were undeniably reactionary. Thus, for example, his politics have been described in a sympathetic biography (Pfaff 1980: 210, 348, 397–98, 420 n86) as conservative and rooted in the eighteenth century (James “delighted in the old-fashioned mode of life”). In their collected form, these stories have “remained in print almost continuously ever since, having been reprinted by the original publisher, Edward Arnold, at least 12 times”. See James (1931) and Pfaff (1980: 412, 416, n74). His nearest rival as a writer of ghost stories over the latter part of the twentieth century was Kneale (1922–2006).

  33. Commentators on the political right—for example, Kingsley Amis (1970: 125–35)—deny that the ghost stories of James refer to any temporal phenomena, and are certainly not explicable in terms of the socio-economic identity of the protagonists involved.

  34. On the influence of the film versions of the Quatermass stories, and their role in consolidating the popularity of films produced by Hammer Studios, see Pirie (1973: 28ff).

  35. For the published versions of these scripts and stories, see The Quatermass Experiment (Kneale 1959), Quatermass II (Kneale 1960a), Quatermass and the Pit (Kneale 1960b), The Year of the Sex Olympics and Other TV Plays (Kneale 1976), and The Quatermass Conclusion (Kneale 1979).

  36. This theme informs a number of ghost stories by James. In “A Warning to the Curious” (James 1931: 561–87), for example, a Saxon crown long buried in the soil on the east coast of England is said always to have protected the nation from foreign invasion. Its discovery leads to the haunting and death of the individual who finds it, despite the fact that he and friends succeed in restoring the crown to its original hiding place. Hence the “warning” is clearly aimed at those who interfere with ancient kingly power still engaged in defending the nation. A similar narrative is encountered in “The Uncommon Prayer-Book” (James 1931: 490–513), a story about the supernatural power exercised in the present by an edition of the Prayer-Book printed after the execution of Charles I containing a condemnation of Oliver Cromwell. The aristocratic owner of the house and chapel during that epoch was an ardent royalist, even during the Commonwealth, “one in whom love for Church and King had gradually given place to intense hate of the power that had silenced the one and slaughtered the other” (James 1931: 503). Most significantly, the victim of this occult force is a book-dealer from London who, it is inferred (James 1931: 501–3, 506), is Jewish (according to a plebeian voice, “he weren’t a reel Englishman at all”). Once again, therefore, the supernatural is mobilized on behalf of kingship. In “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (James 1931: 151–79), by contrast, it is wealth accumulated and hidden by the church that is defended, but—as in “A Warning to the Curious”—the person finding it is similarly compelled to leave it untouched. A longstanding intra-dynastic struggle is depicted in “The Mezzotint” (James 1931: 36–53), a conflict resolved by the abduction and murder of the sole surviving heir to the lord of the manor, a ghostly drama enacted in the eponymous mezzotint. Although this particular story appears to be about the revenge of a poacher on a landlord who condemned him to execution, like the latter the former also belongs to a very old family that itself used previously to own the manor. As in the case of the other stories, therefore, this one is also about the class structure in the English countryside, where longstanding and ancient forces still exert their power exercised through the supernatural domain.

  37. Significantly, perhaps, whereas in the early Quatermass stories—The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II, and Quatermass and the Pit—the identity of this ancient power is known, in the final story (entitled The Quatermass Conclusion) published two decades later it has neither name nor origin. In the latter text (Kneale 1979: 52, 161, 168), therefore, the ancient power assumes an immanence lacking in the earlier stories, and is only halted, not destroyed, by science/scientists. Possessing the same kind of characteristics as it has in the earlier stories, the ancient force as depicted in the final story (Kneale 1979: 261) is situated underground, in the earth, where it has been for the past five thousand years. Again like the earlier stories, it returns and destroys gatherings of people (in this case, the young) in particular rural locations. Described by Kneale (1979: 52, 96–97, 106, 229, 231, 269) as possessing “hellish powers”, this ancient force is regarded as diabolic (“evil”, “satan”), and takes the form of bolts of lighting which strike in (from) places—Neolithic burial grounds, stone circles, and cathedrals—long associated with ritual worship. Although this force is described by Quatermass himself as “a machine”, it is never seen, nor (unlike in the earlier stories) is its true identity ever revealed.

  38. Kneale (1973: x) comes close to accepting this when he observes of the ghosts in stories by James that “[o]ften they possess the most basic threat of all… [t]his stirs a dread that must go back to our primitive past…”.

  39. Thus, for example, one of his less well known ghost stories, “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance” (James 1931: 439–58), concerns the revenge of a village churchman, a rector murdered by two puppeteers travelling with a Punch and Judy show. The latter were plebeian elements who, it is inferred, objected to his strictures concerning the suitability of their entertainment for the rural inhabitants in the locality. That James should defend the old socio-economic order—monarchy, aristocracy, church, public schools, Oxbridge—is understandable, not just because of his conservative outlook but also in the light of his own very restricted milieu. Hence the following observation by his biographer, Pfaff (1980: 424): “Nor is it surprising that, given his personality and background, he moved most easily in the intersecting aristocracies of the bright and the well-placed; the majority of those he influenced most strongly [at Eton and Cambridge] belonged to at least one of these categories, and a person who was in neither was probably not likely to become an intimate friend”. As Provost of King’s, James not only took a close interest in the sales and/or rental of land owned by the College but was part of a deputation to the Chancellor of the Exchequer seeking exemption for colleges/universities from land taxation (Pfaff 1980: 213).

  40. Criticism of the discourse informing James’ ghost stories should not detract from his very considerable skill in composing them. As his biography notes (Pfaff 1980: 415), the convincing fashion in which he constructs these narratives is due in no small part to “the brilliance of the antiquarian background”. To this must be added the understated—not to say the restrained—manner in which an apparition finally manifests itself. Hence the effectiveness of unease and disquiet generated by seemingly banal details: for example, the way in which distant ghostly figures move rapidly—“it’s a rustling-like all along the bushes, coming very quick, either towards me or after me”—and horror is conveyed in “A Warning to the Curious” and “Rats” simply by the (skeletal) feet of a ghoul the face of which is never described (James 1931: 526).

  41. Unlike scientists and philosophers, neither of whom believe in the supernatural, those at the top and bottom of the class structure are depicted not only as superstitious but correct in holding to their beliefs. Hence the observation in “The Tractate Middoth” (James 1931: 220) that “the country people say he [= a person long dead, has] been seen about there in his old black cloak”, a view that underlines the efficacy of “from below” rural folk wisdom. Similarly, in “The Ash-Tree” (James 1931: 69) a Bishop warns the landlord about the dangerous proximity of the tree in question, noting that “[y]ou could never get one of my Irish flock to occupy that room…our Irish peasantry will always have it that it brings the worst of luck to sleep near an ash-tree…”. In the event this superstition held by “those below” is vindicated. That this view about the efficacy of rural folk wisdom is shared by “those above” is evident from the story “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”, in which it is the Colonel who rescues the academic when the latter is attacked by a ghost. An emblematic figure of the Victorian establishment, the Colonel is presented as someone who respects tradition and who—in contrast to academics—counsels against questioning ancient forces. Observing that he “remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India”, the Colonel endorses rural plebeian belief in the efficacy of the supernatural, commenting “my experience is, mind you, that there’s generally something at the bottom of what these country-folk hold to, and have held to for generations” (James 1931: 138, 150).

  42. For James, therefore, “Sadducee” is term of disapprobation, attached to disbelieving scientists or philosophers who—initially dismissive of the occult and contemptuous of its exponents—are compelled subsequently to acknowledge both the existence and the efficacy of the supernatural. In his “My Own True Ghost Story”, Kipling (1895: 155) makes a similar allusion, noting that in India the howling of a hyena “would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the Dead—the worst sort of Dead”. This is because the Sadducees were a Jewish religious group that believed only in the written law, and rejected oral tradition. In their view, the former possessed a validity which the latter did not. James saw no difference between them and Victorian scientists or philosophers who scorned myth, tradition and oral sources. In his story “The Mezzotint”, for example, the power of the non-rational is dismissed contemptuously by the “Sadducean Professor of Ophiology”, while in “Oh, Whistle, and I”ll Come to You, My Lad” the “Professor of Ontography” maintains similarly that “I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view that such things [= ghosts] might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all that I hold most sacred” (James 1931: 53, 123). The same character insists subsequently that “my own views on such subjects are very strong. I am, in fact, a convinced disbeliever in what is called the ‘supernatural’”, to which the reply is that he “must be little better than a Sadducee” (James 1931: 138–39). Inevitably, the disbeliever is compelled by subsequent events to reassess his opinions: thus, “the Professor”s views on certain points [= the existence of the supernatural] are less clear cut than they used to be” (James 1931: 150). The same befalls the disbelieving scientists in “Casting the Runes”, and also the innkeeper in the story “Number 13”, who initially describes himself as an “educated man [who] has no business with these superstitious notions” (James 1931: 87, 235–67). This hostility to those—particularly scientists—who challenged traditional beliefs is borne out by Pfaff (1980: 424), who notes that a criticism levelled at him at Cambridge was that “James hates thought”, and “he did not like a certain kind of question, especially from a certain kind of person (e.g., a Bloomsburyite asking mockingly about religion)”. Among the “un-godly” to whom James objected as “too modern” was the economist John Maynard Keynes and the philosopher Bertrand Russell (Pfaff 1980: 213–14, 246).

  43. An opinion attributed by James (1931: 514–15) to one of his characters is clearly his own: “Remember, if you please…that I am a Victorian by birth and education, and that the Victorian tree may not unreasonably be expected to bear Victorian fruit. Further, remember that an immense quantity of clever and thoughtful Rubbish is now being written about the Victorian age.” At the time of the First World War, one of his friends wrote to him complaining that existing beliefs/certainties were increasingly being dismissed by a “generation whose loose thinking has been doing immense harm to national life and international politics” (Pfaff 1980: 256).

  44. This link is evident from, for example, the fact that Kneale (1973: i–xi) himself provides an introduction to the Folio Society edition of ghost stories by James.

  45. As in the case of the ghost stories by James, those by Kneale repeatedly depict scientists/academics/intellectuals being wrong footed by local folklore and oral sources. Examples include not just his early stories but also television plays such as Quatermass and the Pit, The Quatermass Conclusion and The Stone Tape (see below), where under the rubric of folkloric wisdom, traditional belief about the supernatural is vindicated. In Quatermass and the Pit a librarian wrongly dismisses such information about spectral appearances during the mid-eighteenth century with the following words (Kneale 1960b: 89): “street pamphlets are your best source for that sort of thing—nonsense stories and wild rumours. Amazing what they’d believe in those days.” The same is true of the final Quatermass story (Kneale 1979: 34, 79, 111, 197, 253), where amidst threatening graffiti (“Kill Science”, “Feel Not Think”) scientists are challenged—by the masses and political leaders alike—both to “lay our imperfect intellects aside”, to “unlearn” science, and to “stop trying to know things”. As is well known, anti-intellectualism is a central emplacement of agrarian populism.

  46. This theme surfaces in two of his early stories. One, “The Pond” (Kneale 1949: 222–30), concerns an old man, an amateur taxidermist, who hunts frogs in a local pond by imitating their calls, catches and then kills them. All these frogs are skinned, stuffed and arranged by him in “historical tableaux”. Lured to the pond one night by the mass croaking of (non-existent) frogs, he is himself attacked by an “elemental” force (of nature) that emerges from deep within the pond. When found next morning, he is not only dead but also stuffed and stitched, in the manner of the frogs he caught. The same is true of his story “Minuke” (Kneale 1949: 34–48), where a modern house built on Norse gravestones is also haunted by an “elemental” force coming up from the ground beneath its foundations. In the highly influential television play Quatermass and the Pit, the atavistic power is located in an ancient cylinder that– like the crown in the James story “A Warning to the Curious”—is similarly buried in the ground. It is a sinister object that has throughout history given rise to claims about numerous ghostly apparitions in the locality. Excavation of the site reveals it to be a spaceship from another planet the original mission of which in the distant past was to colonize Earth. Reactivated as a result of the excavation, this power assumes a diabolic form (“Hob”) which threatens both London (= the urban) and the nation. Although the ancient power is in the end destroyed by science, in a subsequent play this situation is reversed. Accordingly, in his 1972 television play The Stone Tape, scientists working in a country house long haunted by the ghost of a servant girl believe they have solved the problem of the “apparition”, maintaining it is nothing more than an image given off by the stone walls of the house (Kneale 1976). Having eliminated this image using electronic equipment, and apparently solved the problem of the house long “haunted” in this fashion, the scientists turn their attention elsewhere. A more ancient supernatural force then materializes, and kills a female scientist, who in turn becomes a ghostly image. Both symbolically and literally, therefore, the domain of “the traditional”/“the irrational” has defeated that of “the modern”/“the rational”.

  47. This is especially true of the final Quatermass story, set in a dystopic future where society has disintegrated and England is under the anarchic rule of plebeian gangs, or two kinds of “mob-in-the-streets”. The first are vigilantes belonging to opposed political hues (socialists and rightwingers), who conduct killing/looting sprees in abandoned urban contexts, and between whom it is inferred no difference exists. The second consist of New Age groups (= “Planet People”) who wander the countryside, and—according to Kneale (1979: 36)—“are violent in a different way…[t]o human thought”. These New Age people have reverted to a “primitive” form of existence, and not only subscribe to magic/mythical beliefs, but perceive the violent manifestations of ancient power as positive and redemptive (Kneale 1979: 34ff.). For them, science is equated with “sin”, the forbidden knowledge that led to the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the loss of their arcadia (Kneale 1979: 152ff).

  48. Humanity, it is inferred, is no different from animals; it has an “animal nature” and is “naturally” violent. This Darwinist view not only structures Quatermass and the Pit but is uttered by characters who are scientists. One of the latter comments on the manifestation of “primitive” behaviour generated (= “the Wild Hunt [that] appears in legends the world over… The phantom ride of devils or witches”) by the excavated cylinder in the following manner (Kneale 1960b: 113, 149, 150–51, 178): “The will to survive…it’s an odd phenomenon… I think we may have seen ritual slaughter, to preserve a fixed society—to rid it of mutations. You find something like it on Earth, among certain termites and wasps… I wanted to kill you…Why? Because you’re—different. I could feel that—you weren’t—one of us. You had to be destroyed. Destroyed.” Significantly, the object of this Darwinian behaviour is a conservative one: “to preserve a fixed society”—to reproduce the status quo, in other words.

  49. The conclusion, uttered again by a scientist, adopts an unmistakably Darwinian tone: “the ancient, destructive urges in us, which grow more deadly as our populations [become larger and more complex]… Every war crisis, witch-hunt, race riot, and purge…is a reminder and a warning” of our descent from this ancient power (Kneale 1960b: 188).

  50. Thus in Quatermass and the Pit when a priest challenges a scientist to account for the ancient power (“I understand you’re scientist—are you going to explain all this away in fashionable [= rational] terms?”), the latter replies in the following manner (Kneale 1960b: 137): “[O]n the contrary, I agree with you…what has been uncovered is evil. It’s as anciently diabolic as anything ever recorded”. Later the same scientist is depicted as having been affected by the diabolic force unleashed from the buried cylinder—in effect, become “one of them” (Kneale 1960b: 177). In short, what occurs is the conversion of a practitioner of “the rational” into its opposite: an adherent of “the irrational”.

  51. Given the exclusively male society in which James lived, it is scarcely surprising that female characters are peripheral to his ghost stories. As one of his close friends noted when extolling the virtues of college life, women were regarded as an intrusion: “Chapel, Combination Room and the [Provost’s] Lodge is a combination nowhere else attained. The club, the country house…all rolled in one with the added freedom—may I say it? We are alone—of a single sex…” (Pfaff 1980: 216).

  52. Hence the principal female character in Quatermass and the Pit is in the main identified with anti-scientific/anti-modern/“irrational” views. Not only is she the one who investigates the background history to the haunting in the locality, therefore, but she is also the person who presses the efficacy of this explanation on the scientists, arguing that the latter know nothing about what they are doing (Kneale 1960b: 86–7). The same character also turns out to be the most “receptive subject” (“a memory stored for millions of years in that hull…and now picked up by the susceptible brain of a young women”) when the influence of the ancient power is released from the long buried cylinder, thereby confirming the link between gender and “non-rational” explanations and forces (Kneale 1960b: 146, 149). Much the same could be said of the main female character in The Stone Tape, who occupies a similar role in relation to long-standing occult powers. Similarly, the main female character who belongs to the group of surviving scientists in the final Quatermass story (Kneale 1979: 109, 116–17), is not only depicted stereotypically as an “earth mother” in charge of subsistence cultivation, but also quickly drawn to the forces of the “non-rational”.

  53. While it is true that both James and Kneale depict plebeian elements as subscribing to a belief in the efficacy of the supernatural, an important difference exists. James portrays them as peripheral to the main story and passively accepting the ancient power confronting them. In Quatermass and the Pit, by contrast, Kneale (1960b) shows plebeians actively engaged in resisting the attempt at recolonizing the nation (a view, however, that changes with the publication in the late 1970s of the final Quatermass story—see below). Similarly, scientists are presented as wanting plebeian support in this struggle. Thus, the scientist in charge of excavating the cylinder observes that “I want the man in the street on my side” (Kneale 1960b: 18). The co-optation of plebeian elements in the struggle for the nation is also a theme in a film for which Kneale co-wrote the script: HMS Defiant (1962), directed by Lewis Gilbert. Set on board a English fighting ship during the Napoleonic wars, its narrative, script, characterization and depiction of life below decks are all much better and more plausible than the gung-ho naval film Master and Commander (2003) directed by Peter Weir. What is of particular significance is that when a captured Frenchman attempts to make common cause with the mutinous crew of the English warship by invoking a revolutionary internationalism, the only support he receives is from a villainous/murderous malcontent (“to hell with England”). Not only is the latter subsequently killed by members of his own crew, but they then make common cause with their captain—who appeals to them in nationalist terms (“if you care for the safety of your country”)—in a final battle with the French. This portrayal of plebeian elements mobilized by nationalist sentiment—the displacement of class struggle, in other words—and joining with their rulers in a united front against an “external” enemy is a populist discourse that Kneale deploys in historical drama, ghost stories and science fiction alike.

  54. There are obvious parallels here with the Arthurian legend, which posits the return of the king and his knights to defend the nation at such a time when England is in peril.

  55. By the final Quatermass story, plebeian elements in general—and the New Age groups in particular—have become complicit with the ancient power itself. Here Kneale (1979: 231ff.) inserts a generational divide into the narrative, the old being depicted as thinking repositories of scientific knowledge, while the young by contrast are represented as easy converts to anti-rational/anti-scientific discourse.

  56. Indiana Jones persists with his quest, despite being advised by a helper not to pursue his search for the Ark (“it is not of this Earth”).

  57. The choice by Spielberg of archaeologist-as-hero is also significant in other ways. From the early nineteenth century onwards, when both the French and the British not only looted artefacts from Egypt but also inserted Egyptology into a discourse about the historical lineage of nation and empire, archaeology and archaeologists have been deployed by imperialist states in two interconnected ways. First, to establish an ideological kinship between nineteenth century empires and their ancient counterparts, in terms of both being examples of advanced civilizations. And second, to validate conquest as a civilizing project undertaken by empire-builders for the benefit of colonized populations. Much the same is true of the kind of antiquarianism practiced by M.R. James and celebrated in his ghost stories, where the object was similar to reconstitute the ancient past as firmly located in—and thus part of—the present, the inference being that traditional forms of power are never vanquished, and as such continue to be efficacious.

  58. Such attributes are fairly common in the kind of heroes depicted by Hollywood films. In many respects, Harry Steele (played by Charlton Heston), the central character in a much earlier adventure film, The Secret of the Incas (1954), directed by Jerry Hopper, prefigures Indiana Jones. Not only does Steele look like Jones, down to the fedora hat and leather jacket, but he also exhibits the same cynical and world-weary outlook. Like Indiana Jones, therefore, Steele is an American abroad (in Peru), an individualist adventurer-cum-tomb-robber who is interested only in the exchange-value of archaeological finds. Again like Indiana Jones, having found a valuable relic (= the sacred sunburst of the Incas), he nevertheless returns it to the indigenous peasant farmers in whose cultural system it features centrally.

  59. The film script, by Harold Pinter (1971: 285–367), is closely based on the novel by L.P. Hartley (1985 [1953]).

  60. This same theme—a child misunderstanding what is seen—informs the way relationships are depicted in both book and film versions of Atonement.

  61. The sympathetic portrayal of the monarchy is evident from a number of things. For example, from the observation by one film critic (Kemp 2006: 29) that the director “draws from Helen Mirren [who plays the Queen] a performance that even convinced republicans may feel moved by.” According to the same source, moreover, the “script digs that carefully constructed façade, showing us the Queen gradually losing control and unable to deal with it.” Collecting the 2007 BAFTA and Oscar awards for that performance, Mirren lost no opportunity to express her own admiration for the monarch and the monarchy.

  62. This is in keeping with the critique made elsewhere (Brass 2000a: 208, 233, notes 94, 95, and 96) of the mistaken interpretation advanced by the majority of commentators—those on the left included—to explain the impact of that episode. For all the latter the reaction of the monarchy to the death of Diana and the funeral oration of Earl Spencer amounted to an attack on the monarchy as an institution, a fundamental change in its fortunes, and thus the dawn of a “new” political era. As would have been clear to those who examined the discourse structuring that whole episode, it was not a challenge to the monarchy but much rather a defence of it.

  63. That this was a conscious objective is confirmed both by the art director (“What the film needed was a rambling country house which would look as though nothing had been changed for years before the high Edwardian summer in which the action takes place”) and by Pinter, who wrote the script (“Looking back at [the first draft of The Go-Between], I realised that I had missed a whole aspect, perhaps to me the most important aspect, of the book…the role of time: the annihilation of time…”). See Taylor (1970: 202–203). Sir Joseph Duveen (1869–1939) who, as an international art dealer, was familiar with the views/opinions expressed in English ruling class circles, accurately captures this sense of timelessness. He writes (Duveen 1930: 6): “Looking back at England at the beginning of this century I seem only to see a happy sun-lit landscape; villages unspoilt by hoardings and advertisement signs; a tranquil people whom the topical worry of the Boer War had not seriously upset, a people who had no premonition of the terrific cataclysm awaiting the next generation. Queen Victoria was almost a synonym for immortality.” Although events are situated in the summer of 1900, The Go-Between conveys the sense of well-being enjoyed by those at the apex of the rural class structure in Edwardian England. The brief period between the turn of the century and the 1914–18 war is generally depicted, both in literature and films, as a period of “lost content”—the fact of agrarian class struggle notwithstanding—that vanished in the post-war era. “My generation of Englishmen,” noted John Strachey (1934: 63–4) at the beginning of the 1930s, “remembers the [pre-1914–18] world…as a vision of childhood; and for a well-circumstanced English child what a golden age of peace, calm, plenty, and security it was! Those who had not lived before 1789, said the French, had never known ‘la vrai douceur de la vie’. For me, the word ‘pre-war’ evokes always a memory of midsummer afternoons. A choisa bush grew at the garden door of my parents’ big sitting-room in their country house. Brick steps, warm in the sunlight, led down from the wide shady room into the hot garden”. The same kinds of sentiments were expressed more recently by the landowning Conservative MP, Alan Clark. In his diaries (Clark 2002: 135) he laments the passing of and hankers after that same era, when his great-grandparents—also landlords—enjoyed what he accepts was easy living (“What a style!”), described by him thus: “Three large and expensive houses (plus the lodge at Poolewe and the villa at Cap Ferrat), the yatch, hordes and hordes of domestics. My own structure still shadows it….”.

  64. This sense of loss, a result of the supercession of the landlord pastoral variant of the agrarian myth, is a lament projected both at the outset of the narrative and repeated at its end. Hence the final words of the book by Hartley—“this hideous century we live in, which has denatured humanity…”—echo the more famous ones (“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”) with which the story begins.

  65. The same kind of nostalgic vision of a benign but soon-to-vanish landlord class informs another film—The Shooting Party (1985), directed by Alan Bridges—that in many respects (conjuncture, context, plot, characterization, and discourse) is very similar to The Go-Between. Based on the novel of the same name by Isabel Colegate (1980), The Shooting Party is set in the autumn of 1913 and concerns events occurring in the course of a shooting party—composed mainly of the landed gentry—on a large country estate in England. The central episode involves the accidental shooting and killing by a visiting aristocrat of a local poacher acting as a beater, whom the landowner comforts as he lies dying. Although symbolically this event prefigures the slaughter in the trenches that was to take place in the 1914–18 war, it is also a lament for a paternalistic landlordism to the subjects of whom, it is inferred, the element of noblesse oblige was important.

  66. This “not worth bothering about” approach has been influential in the depiction on film of landlordism in India, on which see Brass (2000a: 284–5). It also informs the humour of Hollywood. Woody Allen, whose comedic persona projects the image of a self-deprecating bourgeois intellectual, as someone who—although occupying an elevated position in the class hierarchy—depicts himself as a disempowered “loser”. That is to say, as being something “other” than he actually is. The opposite is true of Bob Hope, whose humour similarly inverts the socio-economic position of the subject, but in a different way; in his case, therefore, comedy derives from the over-inflated self-image on the part of a (usually petty-bourgeois) film character—for example, The Paleface (1948), directed by Norman Z. McLeod, and Son of Paleface (1952), directed by Frank Tashlin—who actually is a “loser”.

  67. Criticism of this claim came recently from what for the writer is an unexpected source. Going through the papers of my father Denis Brass (1913–2006), I came across the following note: “Suffocating complacency about [the] risk of Hitler. Seems all inconsistency—lack of study of fascist leaders—Hitler tended to be regarded as a kind of Charlie Chaplin—few politicians read Mein Kampf. As a student in Germany during 1935, I became rapidly aware of the danger.” Epitomised in the domain of popular culture by cartoons and caricatures in the 1930s press, fascism and fascist leaders were portrayed humorously, a corollary of this depiction as non-serious being that they were seen as unthreatening. This political complacency about the rise of fascism culminated in the film The Great Dictator (1940), directed/scripted by and starring Charlie Chaplin, where even in wartime rightwing European dictators are still depicted as figures of fun. That such images circulated in Germany is evident from the following account (Palmier 2006: 58–59): “When [Reck-Malleczwesen] met [Hitler] in a Munich restaurant, together with his friend Friedrich von Mücke, they burst out laughing at his clumsy manners. They were persuaded that a fellow like that could not be dangerous. The same unawareness is shown by Ernest Jünger, who seemed to observe the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s with an amused scepticism.”.

  68. For an example of this view, see Cannadine (1997: 9). The reasons for this derision, it is frequently argued, stem from the institutional demystification of monarchy, as exemplified by the cumulative rendering of its actual/potential incumbents as “ordinary” (= sociologically non-other). Among the factors contributing to the latter are on the one hand exposure to and active participation in the media (documentaries, game shows, television interviews), and on the other the public expression of fogeyish views (about architecture, medicine and education). Both these combine to dispel the mystique of royalty, by confirming that its members are in their interests and opinions no different from the majority of those they rule. While this is perceived by some to be an advantage, in that it demonstrates the extent to which the monarchy “represents” the people over whom it is set, such elimination of “difference” also erodes all the ideological components that are said by its political supporters to justify the “otherness” of monarchy in the first place. Non-democratic power exercised by those who are in effect no different from those over whom such power is exerted is, in the end, politically indefensible. In this connection, see also the point made by Bagehot.

  69. An example of how the “not worth bothering about” approach defuses a political challenge to a traditional ruling class institution by portraying it humorously as disempowered is the British public school system. The way in which film depicts the educational privilege such institutions confer (and in particular the political, economic and ideological advantages gained thereby) as non-existent is the series made during the late 1950s about a fictional school for girls, St Trinian’s, based on the cartoons by Ronald Searle. This comedy series consisted of three films—The Belles of St. Trinian’s (1954), Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s (1957) and The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s (1960)—all directed by Frank Launder and produced by Sidney Gilliat. It would be easy, but misplaced, to dismiss them as “merely humorous”—and thus innocent and non-efficacious, particularly since they all adhere to a symptomatic discourse about the advantages/disadvantages associated with the kind of educational institution shown. In each one of the films the school is presented as an institution bereft of efficacy and influence, and as such certainly incapable of conferring advantage of any sort on those attending it. Not only is St. Trinian’s (“not one of the better public schools”) financially bankrupt, non-functioning educationally, and disconnected from the exercise of political power at the national level, therefore, but its pupils are shown to have the same interests as (and be allied with) plebeian characters. This, to put it no more strongly, is just the kind of “not worth bothering about” image any traditional ruling class institution under political threat—as at the time was the public school system—would attempt to project. Of particular interest are two additional aspects: the position of these films in a similar cinematic lineage depicting ruling class characters, and the related establishment stereotypes portrayed within the films themselves. Thus, Launder and Gilliat not only scripted The Lady Vanishes but also invented its two characters—Charters and Caldicott—who epitomize upper class “Englishness”. The surface appearance of such upper class characters as the object of humour serves to disguise an underlying courage, ruthlessness and efficiency that emerge very quickly in times of struggle. In keeping with the effectiveness of this camouflage is the way in which other class stereotypes are deployed in the films about St Trinian’s. The actor Terry-Thomas, who played the main upper class colonial rôle (Cadogan de Vere Carlton-Browne) in Carlton-Browne of the FO (see below) is in The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s a similar establishment type but, significantly, down on his luck, an undischarged bankrupt now operating a dubious travel company. Much the same is true of another actor, Thorley Walters, who plays incompetent military officers in both films (Colonel Bellingham, Major Whiteheart). In line with this, the British military in charge of a colonial outpost in the film Blue Murder at St. Trinian’s are—laughably—a mobile bath unit. What all the latter share is the depiction of powerful elements belonging to the British ruling classes—colonials, officers—as disempowered: as ineffective, straightforwardly risible, or having experienced a decline in social position/influence. In other words, as politically “not worth bothering about”.

  70. An example of this as applied to royalty is the fictional reconstruction of the memoirs written in first centry Rome by the Emperor Claudius, in which the latter—before becoming Emperor—is warned by friends to “act dumb” in order to avoid being murdered. The two books—I, Claudius and Claudius the God—by Graves (1960 [1934], 1960 [1934]) formed the basis of the successful 13-episode television series, first broadcast in 1976 and repeated in 2006. “‘Now listen!’, Claudius is told (Graves 1960 [1934]: 112), ‘Do you want to live a long busy life, with honour at the end of it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Then exaggerate your limp, stammer deliberately, sham sickness frequently, let your wits wander, jerk your head, and twitch with your hands on all public or semi-public occasions. If you could see as much as I can see you would know that this was your only hope of safety and eventual glory.’” Claudius does indeed survive the political intrigues and murder plots within the ranks of the landowning nobility and the imperial family, eventually to become Emperor. This he does by exaggerating his own physical disabilities, the object being to portray himself as a fool—in his own words, “‘I saved my skin by playing the imbecile’” and “Instead of keeping quiet about his stupidity, Claudius explained, in a few short speeches, that it had been a mere mask assumed for the benefit of Caligula, and that he owed both life and throne to it” —and thus to be seen by those around him as “not-worth-bothering-about”. See Graves (1960 [1934]: 389) and Suetonius (1957: 203). Although in this particular instance the threat comes from members of the same class, and not “those below”, the principle at work is the same.

  71. Depicting life in the English country house at the beginning of the twentieth century, these stories outline the extent to which Wooster, an affable but bumbling and ineffective aristocrat, depends on his servant Jeeves, a “gentleman’s gentleman”. Although subordinate to his aristocratic master, Jeeves is nevertheless adroit and knowledgeable, and called upon constantly to rescue Wooster from what are no more than undergraduate pranks (stealing a policeman’s helmet, romantic entanglements, etc.). In keeping with this approach, an aristocrat who is leader of a fascist party—Sir Roderick Spode and his “Blackshorts” —is also depicted humorously, as someone who is similarly “not-worth-bothering-about” politically.

  72. As the example of Don Quijote and Sancho Panza underlines, this theme of a wise servant (= empowered plebeian) coupled with a stupid master (= disempowered aristocrat) is a common one in literature. A variation on this theme is found in Scoop, a 1930s novel by Waugh (1954 [1938]: 18ff.), where retainers and servants are permitted by the landowning family to continue living in the country house long after they have ceased to be employed in service. Here, too, it is the servants, not the landowning family, who are portrayed as empowered (= “in charge”): for example, one plebeian resents “the interruption of his ‘elevenses’—a lavish and ruminative feast which occupied the servants’ hall from ten-thirty until noon.”.

  73. There is a tendency to dismiss the political significance of the comedic way Wodehouse portrays his plebeian and aristocratic characters. This is true of Orwell in his defence of Wodehouse for having agreed to make propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis during the early 1940s. Accepting that Wodehouse is “not anti-upper class”, Orwell (1946: 164) maintained merely that “a harmless old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work” (emphasis added). The harmlessness of this image—of an aristocracy that is disempowered, in other words—is precisely what is questioned here.

  74. During the late 1960s, when the aristocratic pastoral version of the agrarian myth was on the ideological defensive, even some conservatives questioned the validity of its arcadian depiction of rural existence. One such was Angus Wilson (Wilson et al. 1971: 17–18), who accepted that: “Until quite lately Englishmen have spent all their emotions in lamenting a lost country Paradise: I am enough traditionalist to believe that such craving for a vanished natural scene is as necessary to spiritual health as is the new urban realism and dandy style that have risen now to redress the excess of nostalgia. Nevertheless, this persistent strain of backward-looking pastoralism has been a weakening drug for England’s cultural health in the days of her international decline; and this has been so, I believe, because it has always been based upon a hypocrisy, a refusal until only very recent times to admit to the disgusting social degradation of England’s rural poor”.

  75. The political significance of humour in relation to film was noted in the mid-1950s by the film director Lindsay Anderson (2004: 226), who objected that “the adoption [by a film critic] of a tone which enables [him/her] to evade through humour. The fundamental [political] issues are balked.” To dismiss films as escapism, he insisted rightly (Anderson 2004: 225–26), was to underestimate their ideological significance, as was the attempt of criticism to adopt an apolitical stance on film (“without politics, without class”). Against those who maintain “that a critic’s function must be restricted to an examination of the aesthetic form of the film under discussion”, he (Anderson 2004: 227) argued—again rightly—that “I hope I will be pardoned if I say that this distinction between form and content somewhat naïf.” What Anderson detested above all, however, was the use of humour against film—to dismiss it as an art form, in other words—and not within film (as deployed by me here), as a protective method of camouflaging landlordism. To object to the way humour trivializes art is not the same as pointing out how film comedy disguises the continued exercise of class power.

  76. The film script is included in Taylor (1974: 195–264).

  77. In the words (Taylor 1974: 218) of the main protagonist, Louis Mazzini: “My mother was a member of the D’Ascoyne family. She married, as they thought, beneath her, and from that day, they refused to recognize her or my existence”.

  78. It is evident, therefore, that as Louis Mazzini moves closer to the title, he relishes the prospect of becoming a landowner. This is clear from his observation (Taylor 1974: 250) that “[i]t was pleasant to stand on the battlements [of Chalfont Castle], and know that the acres, which stretched out as far as the eye could see, would soon be mine”.

  79. The main character in the film resents being categorized as a plebeian, and constantly proclaims/presses his aristocratic antecedents. As each member of the D’Ascoyne family between him and the Dukedom is killed off, and Louis Mazzini succeeds in bettering his economic circumstances, he increasingly adopts the hauteur and snobbish views of the aristocracy. Hence the description (Taylor 1974: 224–5) by him of a lover as “pretty enough in her suburban way….[b]ut her face would have looked rather out of place under a coronet”. Similarly, throughout the film he voices the stereotypical disdain of the landowning class for those “in trade”. Thus, trade is referred to as an “ignominious occupation”, and shop assistants as “being commonly regarded as an inferior race who never emerge from the other side of the counter”; subsequently he complains that “[w]hen I was a draper’s assistant, and you a rich father’s son you showed me no kindness”. See Taylor (1974: 210, 211, 239).

  80. In what remains—rightly—the best analysis of Ealing films, Barr (1977: 119–30) seemingly misses this crucial aspect informing the discourse of Kind Hearts and Coronets; namely, that it is not an attack on English landlordism by dissatisfied plebeian elements, but rather a defence of the aristocracy. Hence the argument (Barr 1977: 128) that “[d]iscount his [low] birth and he [Louis Mazzini] is still as good a man as [the D’Ascoynes]—we are all sons of Adam. Whatever Louis’s motives, whatever his own snobbery, he acts as an agent for quite radical class resentments” (emphasis added). This is ironic, since when examining another film in this genre—Went the Day Well? (1943), directed by Alberto Calvacanti—the focus (Barr 1977: 29–33) is on precisely the betrayal by the village squire of the national cause during wartime, and his subsequent death at the hands of the one of the villagers heroically defending “rural England/Englishness” against German invaders. This, Barr (1977: 31) notes, is a situation in which villagers are no longer prepared to “defer automatically to well-spoken officers”, and as such—it could be argued—symbolizes the passing of the pre-war rural social order. This may well be true in terms of cinematic discourse, but this challenge to the power structure in the British countryside was thwarted by the “from above” struggle conducted by the landlord class, a struggle depicted in other Ealing films like Kind Hearts and Coronets.

  81. There are many similarities between the film Carleton-Browne of the FO and Scoop, the 1930s comic novel by Evelyn Waugh. Both project the same kind of benign images, not just of English identity and British imperialism but also of a member of the ruling class charged with upholding colonialism. At the centre of each narrative is an incompetent (and thus “harmless”) son of an old family—a landowning one in the case of Scoop—characterized as “not worth bothering about”. In both cases, this individual accidentally finds himself in an impoverished foreign country (as diplomat or journalist) where rival powers (Russia and Germany in the 1930s, Russia and the United States in the 1950s) contend for control of its mineral wealth. Each emerges as an improbable hero, the epitome of the kind of gentlemen amateur whose achievements reproduce the stereotype of imperial acquisition in a fit of absence of mind.

  82. The British colonial ruling class stereotypes in Carleton-Browne of the FO—played by actors such as Terry-Thomas, Thorley Walters and Miles Malleson—are all depicted as figures of fun, incompetent and thus non-threatening. The opposite is true of the colonized “others”, who fall into one of two categories. The first is composed of Gaillardian politicians (such as the Prime Minister Amphibulos, played by Peter Sellers) who are uniformly undemocratic, corrupt and self-serving. The second consists of Gaillardian royalty, who by contrast are honest, democratic, represent the true interests of all their people, and lead the nation to its independence. In short, a discourse that is doubly populist, by virtue of depicting the British colonial ruling class as disempowered (it wasn’t) and the ruling class of the ex-colonial nation as empowered, enlightened and democratic rulers of a Third World country independent of imperial ties (none of which was usually the case).

  83. As the epigraph cited at the head of this article demonstrates, at that conjuncture even film directors who considered themselves to be on the political left—as did Lindsay Anderson – subscribed to this view about the disempowering effect of the comedic depiction of the British landlord class.

  84. The parody is all the more effective for being carried out by actors who are generally assigned plebeian rôles. This is particularly the case where the principal characters are concerned: thus the colonial ruling caste, Sir Sidney and Lady Ruff-Diamond, are played by Sid James and Joan Sims, actors who are more usually seen in stereotypically working class parts (crooks, taxi drivers, maids, harridans). Perhaps the most perceptive comment in the film on the centrality of sang-froid to “Englishness” comes from Kenneth Williams, who as the local Indian ruler (the Khazi of Kalabar) shrieks in an uncomprehending rage that the colonizers keep their cool under fire but, if a guest pours tea into a cup before the milk, they lose their temper. What disconcerts the invariably unflappable demeanour of the English is a lapse in manners, and certainly not an uprising by the local “natives”, the latter being as a consequence dismissed by the colonizer as trivial.

  85. Not all such applications of a “not worth bothering about” approach to the British landlord class at this conjuncture involved a comedic representation. Reviewing the 1981 television adaptation of the Waugh novel Brideshead Revisited, a celebration of the British upper classes, Kingsley Amis (1990: 85) observes that an actor portraying one aristocrat “does wonders with the part, arousing pity and concern for a helpless victim”, thereby suggesting that humour is not necessary for a sympathetic depiction of the ruling class.

  86. As with many other post-1960s comedians, those who were associated with the Monty Python team were themselves establishment products (public school, Oxbridge). The objects of their humour not surprisingly reflected this background, in that targets were not just those above them socially (the aristocracy) but also those below them (plebeians, socialists). Not only are ruling class traditions (associated with colonialism, the aristocracy and landlordism) all portrayed as absurd, but an additional target of ridicule– most famously in the films Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975) and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)—is socialism, the adherents of which are presented as equally risible and self-deluding.

  87. The final scene consists of a small shop wedged incongruously into the entrance of an imposing aristocratic home surrounded by extensive acres (“Lord Bartlesham and the Honourable Miranda Fyffe-Moncrieff, Duchess of Lincoln: Chemists’ sundries, accessories, douches a speciality”), while the declared aim (Palin and Jones 1980) of its aristocratic owners is “[t]o be able to throw off the shackles of wealth and privilege, and live as we’d always wanted to live, as simple shopkeepers…”.

  88. Significantly, perhaps, this was not the case with regard to theatre at that conjuncture, where the non-threatening aspects of laughter were to some extent recognized by those playwrights labelled “angry young men”. Hence the observation by one of the latter (Osborne 1957: 69) that “I can’t go on laughing at the idiocies of the people who rule our lives. We have been laughing at their gay little madnesses, my dear, at their point-to-points, at the postural slump of the well-off and the mentally under-privileged, at the stooping shoulders and strained accents, at their waffling cant, for too long. They are no longer funny, because they are not merely dangerous, they are murderous. I don’t think I want to make people laugh at them any more because they are stupid, insensitive, unimaginative beyond hope, uncreative and murderous.” The difficulty with this kind of protest was that, although it accurately identified what it was against (broadly speaking, the interlocking components of the British “establishment”—monarchy, the church, Oxbridge, the BBC, the Conservative Party), it was rather less clear as to what it was for. Despite the fact that Osborne (1957: 69, 83: 77ff.) claimed to be a socialist, he avoided both intellectual engagement (beyond generalities) with and political commitment to this kind of politics. Hence the following admissions (Osborne 1957: 69, 83): “All art is organized evasion. […] I am not going to define my own socialism. Socialism is an experimental idea, not a dogma; an attitude to truth and liberty, the way people should live and treat each other. Individual definitions are unimportant.”.

  89. That these films lampoon everyone, and thus adhere to an undifferentiated concept of satire, is certainly the view held by Roy Boulting about the films produced/directed by him and his brother (“…we turned a satirical and jaundiced eye on the pillar institutions of the Establishment—the Army, Law, Foreign Office, City of London and Trades Unions and, finally, the Church…”). Cited in McFarlane (1997: 79).

  90. Hence the following observation (McFarlane 1997: 79) by Roy Boulting about the evenhandedness of the mockery dispensed in I’m All Right Jack: “Both John [Boulting] and I at the time [late 1950s] felt the idea that one particular part of society should be held guilty and responsible for the failures of society at large, and that some other area should be free of blame, was ridiculous. We felt that all areas of society shared some common blame, and this is what we had to address ourselves to. I do remember that both John and I, at that time, felt we could see the terrible inadequacy of all those accepted beliefs within society.”.

  91. On occasion the image shifts from one to the other, in the sense that a figure of fun becomes its “other”, as a comedic/“harmless” identity is replaced by a threatening one. Orwell (1937) noted just such a transformation in the way workers were perceived by members of what he termed the “lower–upper-middle class” or the “shabby-genteel family” of the 1930s. He describes this shift in the following manner (Orwell (1937: 156–57): “An attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred. Look at any number of [the humorous magazine] Punch during the past 30 years. You will find it everywhere taken for granted that a working-class person, as such, is a figure of fun, except at odd moments when he shows signs of being too prosperous, whereupon he ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a demon.”.

  92. The existence at that conjuncture of “a danger to the nation” is evident from what is stated by Roy Boulting (McFarlane 1997: 79), the producer of I’m All Right Jack and brother of the director: “We shied away from the trite escapism to which pre-war British films had been wedded. War itself had brought liberation and a national identity to the British film for the first time in its history. We didn’t want to lose that.” That trade unions were considered to be too powerful also emerges from an interview (Sorensen 1996: 163) where Roy Boulting reveals that “[w]e worked at Denham [Studios] just after the [1939–45] war when things were, in industrial terms, rather difficult. The unions had got completely out of hand”.

  93. This portrayal of the church as a benign and disempowered institution may be contrasted with the altogether different image of the Roman Catholic Church contained in the German play The Representative (Hochhuth 1963) about the failure of Pope Pius XII to condemn the Nazi extermination of the Jews.

  94. Not only is the theme of religious salvation paramount, but two of the main characters (Flambeau, Lady Warren) depicted sympathetically are members of the French and English upper class.

  95. The film was a runaway box office success (Curtis 1994), having grossed over US$200 million worldwide. The original budget was no more than US$6 million. Nominated for two Oscars, the film won three BAFTA awards in 1995 (for best actor, best actress in a supporting rôle, and best film).

  96. One of the main characters, Tom, who is described (Curtis 1994: 11, 33, 35) as a “very affectionate and very stupid aristocrat”, has a castle in the country with 137 rooms and admits to being not “the richest man in England” but only the seventh richest. He comes close subsequently to conceding the central argument made here (landed aristocracy = “not work bothering about”), when stating that “I think I’ve fooled them so far—the great advantage of having a reputation for being stupid—people are less suspicious of you” (Curtis 1994: 102). Another film in the same genre was Notting Hill (1999), directed by Roger Mitchell, and for which Curtis also wrote the screenplay. Common to both Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill is the pursuit of (dominant) American females by (subordinate) English males, a variation of the relationship depicted in the novels of Wodehouse (and the Jeeves and Wooster television series of the early 1990s), and the 1996 film Richard III.

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Brass, T. Fiends, friends and fools: screen images and/as rural struggle. Dialect Anthropol 34, 105–142 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-009-9125-6

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