Need a Villain? Any Brit Will Do

In Hollywood movies, this has been a bad summer for the British, and the English in particular. In two major films we have seen our history distorted, stamped on, swallowed up and regurgitated in a form quite unrecognizable to most of us. And, in another, our status as the planet’s villains of choice has been consolidated. You need a bad guy? Reach for a Brit.

It wasn’t always thus. Hollywood used to look no further than America’s real political enemies of the time for its villains; Russians or Germans used to fit the bill perfectly. Failing that, any clearly unsympathetic group would suffice--white South Africans during the era of apartheid. In the past, bad guys have taken even vaguer forms; it was enough that they committed nefarious acts on behalf of “the government” or some unnamed global corporation. But these days? Forget that we English have been constant American allies--since the birth of movies, anyway. A clipped English accent is now a signifier of unimaginable evil.

The summer’s most egregious example of Hollywood’s anti-Brit agenda is “The Patriot,” starring Mel Gibson, a fanciful account (to put it mildly) of the Revolutionary War. Gibson is Benjamin Martin, a wise but stern father and widower, a farmer (but not a slave owner, oh no!) initially opposed to the war. We’re given to believe he’s a virtual pacifist; but when psychopathic British officer Col. Tavington (Jason Isaacs, with a plummy English accent) murders his son, Gibson’s character has no choice but to take up arms and engineer the dawning of a new nation.

In “M:I-2,” we find Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt locking horns (not to mention motorbikes) with his adversary Sean Ambrose, an all-round bad guy who has stolen a virus that could threaten the world. And what nationality is this quintessential villain? British, of course.

This travesty follows a stirring story of British heroism being airbrushed from history this spring in “U-571,” in which American submariners enter enemy waters in the Atlantic to capture an Enigma code machine aboard a damaged German U-boat. This really happened, but it was British Royal Navy crewmen who effected the capture. The incident on which “U-571” is based occurred in May 1941, seven months before America entered World War II.

In “The Patriot,” next to Gibson and his noble Colonist band, the British seem a decidedly scummy bunch, killing injured rebels rather than taking them as prisoners of war, lynching others and locking dozens of villagers (women and children, mostly) inside a church and setting fire to it. These war crimes have a disturbingly 20th century ring in their familiarity. The bodies hanging from trees evoke images of African Americans being strung up by white racists in the South, where church-burning has been a more recent favored tactic of race-hate groups. The sight of innocent people being herded into the church also recalls the mass slaughter of Jews in Nazi gas chambers.

One need not be English, or even Anglophile, to find our portrayal in “The Patriot” offensive. New York Post film critic Jonathan Foreman calls it “a kind of blood libel against the British people.” It’s hard to imagine any other ethnic group being represented in this way with such impunity. African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Jews, Italians or Arab Americans understandably would protest vociferously if Hollywood studios decided to represent them thus.

Maybe we’re just hardened to it; an anti-English subtext pervades some of the most lauded films of the last 10 years. Take the xenophobic “Braveheart,” surely the most crudely written movie ever to win a best picture Oscar. It also stars Gibson, this time as Scottish patriot William Wallace, who takes arms against the English only when they abuse and murder his wife. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? But in the end those horrid Englishmen execute our hero brutally. In a recent letter to a London newspaper, Michael Burleigh, a research history professor at Cardiff University, writes that “Braveheart” is a popular video with the Ku Klux Klan and the White Aryan Nation, who see in Wallace’s struggle a parallel to their wish to secede from multicultural America.)

Then there’s the highly respected “Saving Private Ryan,” which conveys the impression U.S. forces were solely responsible for the victorious D-day landings. Not so: British troops played a nearly equal part. But, in the film, our role is reduced to a single line, uttered by Ted Danson playing a U.S. captain, declaring disdainfully that British Field Marshal Montgomery was “overrated.”

And what of “Titanic”? Contrast the scene below decks, where the carefree, happy-go-lucky blue-collar Irish dance, sing and play music all night, with the bridge, where grim-faced, upper-class, uptight English naval officers incompetently steer the luxury liner to its icy doom.

Add to these examples depictions in films ranging from the “Die Hard” series to historical melodramas such as “Rob Roy” and “Michael Collins” to “Lost in Space” and “The Lion King,” with villains played by stage-trained English actors, adept at cackling malevolently and chewing scenery: Step forward Alan Rickman, Jeremy Irons, Charles Dance and Tim Roth. I guess it’s a compliment to English drama schools that they keep getting hired.

I’m rather proud to be English, though I’m not blind to our faults. Our soccer hooligans are appalling. There’s a boorishness about our public life today, and an infantile attitude to sexuality in our media. Customer service in England? Lazy, surly, resigned--it is a cause for shame. We are tiresomely suspicious of our European neighbors and constantly overestimate our importance in a world we have not dominated in almost 100 years.

Could the Accent Be the Problem?

Yet these are not the English shortcomings that offend Hollywood. Instead, the problem may be our accent. The assumption seems to be that anyone speaking as we do must be cold and snobbish. There may be a grain of truth there: As a people we’re certainly reserved. We have emotions; we just tend not to share them with others. We’re not interested in locating our inner child, and we certainly don’t do group hugs. Englishmen do not speak of chasing their dreams. We distrust sentimentality, and we don’t believe emotional dilemmas can be magically resolved in the length of an average movie. In short, the English aren’t really sappy enough for Hollywood.

But does all that justify the treatment meted out to us in film after film--either erased from the picture entirely or portrayed like Nazis? OK, we’ll give you Dougray Scott in “M:I-2,” since everyone was only watching Cruise anyway. “The Patriot” is a more serious matter: We English rarely feel oppressed or singled out for harsh treatment, but that film was an insult.

As for “U-571,” one could have almost understood replacing the English characters with Americans to assemble a starry cast: Sign up Cruise, Damon and Willis, and you have a sure-fire hit. But in what amounted to a double insult to Brits, the cast was headed by low-wattage Matthew McConaughey. And look at his co-stars: Thousands of American teenagers now think the tide of World War II was turned by Jon Bon Jovi and the guy who plays that horrid Dr. Dave on “ER.” The story could have remained strictly factual with a bunch of unknown young English actors hired; “U-571” would have grossed just as much.

Of course, erasing Britain from history is a time-honored Hollywood tradition. Errol Flynn starred in several films suggesting America won World War II single-handedly, including “Objective Burma” (1945), in which U.S. paratroops dropped behind enemy lines in the jungle. It never happened; the British 14th Army won the Burma campaign. Flynn’s name became reviled in Britain, and the film was not released here until 1952. Oh, how we British laughed when 20 years after Flynn’s death his biographer Charles Higham revealed him as a Third Reich sympathizer who hung out with a pro-Nazi crowd in Hollywood during the war.

Despite such historical precedents, people here remain puzzled by Hollywood’s apparent anti-British stance. Theories to explain it abound; the most intriguing suggests that, although Britain is too insignificant for Hollywood to care about one way or another, studio films vilify the British as an indirect attack on America’s East Coast WASP elite, those patrician bluebloods who have patronized and condescended to Hollywood folk for years. It looks unpatriotic to cast other Americans in a bad light, the argument goes, so hit the WASPs by insulting their forebears.

It’s possible, I suppose. But if it’s true, then speaking as a lone Englishman for no one but myself, could you keep us out of this, guys? Maybe fight your own battles? We’ve been dumped on enough.