This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch.
David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted.
In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!"
(Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out.
Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.
A lot of people cite Hot Fuzz as one of the best examples in filmmaking. Almost everything is a setup for a joke or scene that resolves later on in the film.
That movie is a long series of spoofs nicely spliced together to form a story. To the point that it even works in the reverse, you've seen Hot Fuzz and then years later you watch some other movie and suddenly you realize that's where they got it.
Airplane! also features tons of other TV and movie references doesn’t it? Basically what would have happened in these well known shows and movies when you add absurd scenarios while still playing it straight (the joke is never acknowledged of course!).
Not just jokes and scenarios - it's full of many actors that for years (and decades) played very serious "leading man" type roles. Seeing all these all-american heroes just being utter idiots helped make it so impactful.
In the 12th century a Welsh writer named Walter Map wrote the line "no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded". Not quite English but maybe he was already expressing the whimsy of the English kingdom.
For season 1 it very much satirises the early morning open university tv educational media format from the 70s through the early 2000s [1]. I'm not sure it'd land quite the same way for other countries or even for gen-z onwards.
I personally never liked it. All the characters were deeply unlikable and a lot of the jokes are just disgusting shock humour. When I used to live in a shared house, I always skipped it if it was on the television.
Well depending on your taste of TV shows and the general culture.
When I moved to the UK early 2000s I could understand but can't appreciate that type of humour. I think its rooted in culture. Luckily that was the golden era of British comedies and there were great diversities so you can pick and choose what flavour you like.
I actually didn't see that era as a Golden era and actually much prefer the sketch shows in the 80s and 90s such has the Fast Show.
I don't like any Mitchell and Webb stuff and don't particularly find either of them very funny.
David Mitchell's (at least on panel shows) brand of comedy is just doing a stupid face and making sardonic/cynical remark which is often some thinly veiled political jab, that the target audience often already agrees with. That isn't comedy. It is activism. Once you can see it, you can't un-see it and I find nauseating.
I saw Baby Driver, which I really liked but I haven't seen any of the three movies since that.
The Cornetto trilogy are excellent. I'm a big fan of Three Colours (my favourite is White) and I think that actually in the same way that Kieślowski clearly doesn't care about the supposed theme, he just wants money to make movies, we can say the same for the Cornetto movies. We're bringing the commonalities to it in our interpretation, Wright didn't pour great effort into ensuring that these movies "work" as a trilogy, but they do if you squint, in the same way that Kieślowski didn't put great effort into relating his three films to the French flag but if you squint you can make it work fine.
At the end of the day, Hollywood is a business unfortunately and his last two films did poorly
Last Night In Soho was a absolute cinematic treat but had mixed reviews. I was fortunate to see it a week before release in 35mm in NYC and it was truly a special moment. But lets be real, even with films being graded on a curve due to the pandemic, the movie still did poorly.
Ok fresh start a few years later with The Running Man. This time he got big money, three time more than Baby Driver. (34mil vs 110mil) and the result? Baby Driver brought in ~227 mil and Running Man? Just ~69 mil.
Maybe he is better off producing smaller budget films and while I want nothing but success for him since he's my all time favorite director: Hollywood is a business. They will not look kindly on someone that keeps losing money.
Hold on, wasn't the flak he got for the case before the show started actually because he was covering for his wife (who was also working on the case)? She was having an affair and left the evidence in her car where it was stolen. He didn't say anything so their daughter wouldn't know, and took the fall for the case's failure, even though it wasn't his fault at all.
I didn't quite get the same read on the show you did. It seemed like the dynamic was that Olivia Coleman couldn't imagine anyone she knew being the killer, contrasted against Tennant being aggressively willing to suspect anyone, which is how they were able to rule the various suspects out.
It's admittedly been years since I saw it; I don't remember the entire mitigating bit about covering for his wife, but a lot went on in that series finale and I've had covid a few times since.
I like your read on their dynamic as foils to each other; I'll have to give it another watch with your read in mind.
> Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent.
Something like this applies in the UK Midsomer Murders. Specifically, in the episodes where one of the suspects has a prior criminal record, they always get grief from Inspector Barnaby's current sidekick but are then proven innocent of the current crime. However, if an old police colleague from Barnaby's past offers to help, they are always guilty of something.
This very good description makes it sound like a comedy, which it absolutely isn't, although I note that Olivia Colman got her break in dark comedy Peep Show.
Ah, I should have made that clear, yes. We derived some unintended humor from the mismatch in cultural expectations, but Broadchurch is as serious as a heart attack.
(Didn't stop me and my wife from yelling MELLAR!! at each other across the house for weeks afterward.)*
*(He yells his partner Miller's name a lot in his Scottish accent.)
If you'd like some comedy in your police procedural, watch A Touch of Cloth
It's a parody of all British police procedurals simultaneously. It's the Airplane! of police shows... I won't say it's the Police Squad! of police shows, because that was spoofing US tropes, this spoofs UK tropes, but yes it's full of very serious actors saying very unserious things.
And yes, it has a gruff Scottish man (John Hannah) as lead D.I. Jack Cloth
Today I learned that I would make a terrible detective!
When I watched Broadchurch with my family, I thought he was doing a fine job at getting to the bottom of the case. Goes to show much crime drama I watch.
I see now that Tennant's character's actions are a plot device to reveal the drama amongst the other characters, not the workings of a good detective.
Slow Horses is so equal-opportunity with how it hands out ineptitude. About the only character on the show who isn't inept is Lamb (Gary Oldman), but is such a wretched character, you could actually hardly find a moment to root for him. It's fantastic.
Nooo, the character is such a wretched human that you can't help but root for him.
He's being an ass in order to push people to do better, and at the end of the day (over and over again) he cares about Justice or at least the National Interest, but he cares about the Slow Horses more (in his way).
The flatulanece (et al) works as a filter: can you see past the boorishness?
I'd argue that Coe is more than competent, just, you know, detached most of the time. Lamb always knows what needs be done, just never shares, and often lets things happen until what needs be done happens on its own or is inevitable.
Coe has extraordinarily high SA and makes decisions immediately. They might seem impulsive, but when he acts, it is always with forethought.
I like to think of Lamb as an inverse Columbo - he's rude and horrible to people rather than Columbo's charm. They share the grubby look and intelligence.
I would argue Taverner is meant to be very competent, although she of course has her own flaws, and his hardly a character for one whom is meant to feel sorry
Slough House denizens screw up in blatant, over the top ways. While the Park screw up in ways that leave geopolitical consequences festering for years or decades while being good at covering their own asses.
The plot is generally some evil, corrupt actions the Park took in the past are coming home to roost and only the bumbling losers in Slough House can fix it (kind of, eventually, in a "at least London wasn't blown off the face of the earth" kind of way).
> Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype.
…sort of, but the game does ultimately make clear that for all his faults, the protagonist is (and was, before the amnesia) exceedingly good at what he does.
Department Q is a weird one because it goes with the trope of the acerbic hyper-competent guy, but then… actually, I don’t recall, is he actually incompetent? Or does he just not quite live up to his over-confidence.
Also it is sometimes hard with these detective shows because the screenwriters might want a character to be hyper-competent, but they are people too, limited in their ability to portray super-competent abilities. This can result in characters lucking their way into clues.
My recollection is that the main guy is a highly competent at problem solving, but limited by an inability to work with others.
In some ways similar to Lamb in Slow Horses, though I think Lamb is a very good manipulator of people (he gets others to do what he wants without telling them directly), whereas the Dep. Q guy doesn't engage at all.
My take is quite different. EVERYONE in Broadchurch is at least nearly-criminally incompetent.
"Ooh, I'm an investigative detective in a homicide. I think I'll forget myself and beat up somebody in lockup!"
"What's that, evidence? I think I'll withhold it for minor personal reasons."
"Hey, there's a pedophile investigation going on. I think I'll lie about my 'alone time' with a teenage boy to EVERYONE, just to avoid arousing suspicion..."
Tennant's advantage is that, in season one, he's not emotionally tied up in this completely tangled small town. He's got some professional competencies over Miller, but not many.
I recently watched One Punch man which made me think about heroism, what a hero is and what it means. Saitama, and the top tier famous heroes in the story rarely risks anything. Their immense power just makes their actions an illusion of being heroic, theres rarely anything at stake for them, Saitama especially.
Mumen rider is an example of a true hero to me in that story, his only superpower being that he rides a bicycle, and he stands before certain destruction just to delay the monsters from hurting innocents for a few seconds. Risking everything.
By that definition, most superheroes, like the Avengers just look like power fantasies, does Spider-man or superman ever really risk anything substansial or acts in the face of certain destruction.
Same with Naruto. Naruto and Sasuke are both essentially nepo babies inheriting these amazing powers and breaking barriers on day one. They fall down, but get up like its a scratch.
Meanwhile, Sakura, born of no remarkable parentage and easily sidelined plays an initial supporting role to these two egomaniacs.
But, she uses what little power she has and finesses it to medical precision.
She still fails, but I care about her battles a lot.
In One Punch man the gag is that while everyone is fighting for their lives, Saitama is usually distracted by other priorities that are often trivial (such as getting some bug spray, or saving some money down the local convenience shop as they have a sale on noodles), he also rarely gets the recognised for saving the day once he does bother so show up.
I especially liked when he described his super hard training to an acolyte. "What do you mean 100 pushups, 100 squats, 100 sitdows and run? It is just a standard training, not even that hard!!!"
A big part of what makes Charlie Brown so endearing is his undying earnestness and optimism in the face of near constant bad luck and disappointment.
He is exactly the lovable loser archetype that this piece says Americans do not dig. Yet the Peanuts comics and cartoons and an American pop cultural institution.
OP here (though I don't claim any special insight, as I said).
It would be interesting to consider the differences between the Charlie Brown and Arthur Dent character archetypes.
One difference seems to me exactly the undying earnestness and optimism you mentioned: in a way, Charlie Brown and other American characters like him are simply not touched by failure (even if bad things happen to them), because of their optimism[1]. This makes them lovable: we appreciate them for this quality that we (most of the audience) do not have.
[1]: (or lack of self-awareness, in some other cases mentioned here like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin)
Arthur Dent, on the other hand, is not gifted with undying optimism. He's constantly moaning about things, starting with his house and his planet being destroyed. This makes him relatable more than lovable: he's not a “lovable loser” (and for the right audience, does not seem a “loser” at all), he is just us, “my kind of guy” — we feel kinship rather than appreciation. We relate to the moaning (if Arthur Dent were to remain unfailingly optimistic, he'd be… different), whereas if Charlie Brown were to lose his optimism or if Homer were to say "D'oh!" to complain about big things in life rather than hurting his thumb or whatever, they would become less of the endearing American institutions they are IMO.
I would not say that Charlie Brown is untouched by failure. He does descend to the depths of despair. But some how rises from it to try (and fail) again. This trope is seen best with Lucy pulling away the football every time he goes to kick it. Even though he knows he's failed every time, he talks himself into this time being different.
This does not contradict your overriding point, just adding nuance to the claim he is "simply not touched by failure".
Yes, that's the part that Americans miss and the previous commenter missed. Charlie Brown is still optimistic.
To dig the English comedy you need to accept that you are or the protagonist is a failure. Your or their life will never significantly improve and they made peace with it. You covet and enjoy small moments of happiness. Happiness is not the winning big but returning home.
Interesting. You have me thinking of Candide as an answer to Quixote.
In very broad strokes, Quixote says my perceptions and ideals are true and apparent evidence to the contrary must be a misunderstanding/ chance/ magic. His agency is to frame the world’s meaning in his own terms. Until finally he gives it up.
Candide accepts societal moral framings (i.e. rationalizations for wrongdoing) naively, but is slowly worn down by the evidence that they’re a sham. But in facing the seemingly intractable harshness of reality, he doesn’t become so cynical as to cede his own agency entirely—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
To me that feels like a wiser response than absurdity or despondency.
Almost all of Pratchett's greatest characters are highly flawed, morally complex and anti-heroic. This is the main point. This premise includes everyone from Cohen the barbarian, through Vimes, Rincewind, Susan, all the witches, Moist Von Lipwig, all the way to DEATH.
That's one of the main reasons that Terry's work comprehensively bridges the genre gap between "children's books" and "modern philosophy".
My favorite part about Pratchett is that the characters who are most competent choose to act in the best interest of the less competent “normies” who will never understand or appreciate what they’re doing on their behalf.
Even then, he goes through the typical heroic arc of:
1) Starting the story by Resisting the Call to adventure -- in a way that reveals strong character motivation (a strong desire to live)
2) He suffers a series of trials that slowly push him to the opposite view: That he must act boldly and selflessly if he is to survive (and thereby also save the Discworld)
3) He performs a heroic act (even if only armed with a "half-brick in a sock") contributing to the good side's overall victory
Although to be fair, he does tend to revert by the start of his next story.
Does he, though? I don’t think he acts heroically even once. Though I would not be surprise if Pratchett actually defies expectations and made him a genuine hero once or twice; it’s been a while since I read the Discworld books. Rather, acts that look heroic from the outside if you squint happen to him despite his best, incompetent efforts to stay out of it.
> Although to be fair, he does tend to revert by the start of his next story.
I'd say that's most of the Discworld series though. Protagonist is living peaceful, MacGuffin ensues chaos, Protagonist (or Arbitrary Thing) saves the day, the Disc goes back to normal, and the Turtle continues to move.
Discworld is my favorite series and I think Hogfather and Feets of Clay should be mandatory reads for people going into AI.
tbf Pratchett was blatantly mocking the heroic arc with that, and the series opens with The Colour of Magic which is basically the Hitchikers Guide to the Discworld in which Rincewind completely fails to avoid having a lot of adventures and actually ends up falling off the edge of the world: the resemblance to Adam's creation surely isn't accidental. Pratchett said Rincewind's narrative role was "to meet more interesting people"
Referencing does not necessarily equate to sentiment though. Similar to seeing Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on thing decals isn't representative to the admiration to the comic series. The "woop woop woop woop" adult voice is another core element to US culture making fun of authorative figures, but doesn't dismiss them as unneed aspects to life.
Those references are to the recurring gag with Lucy and the football.
There’s a lot more to the character than that so I hope 99% is an exaggeration and people are still reading Peanuts and watching the various animated versions. I’m pretty sure they are.
> Those references are to the recurring gag with Lucy and the football.
Probably, because that's the most popular example of Charlie Brown as a sucker who never learns, but it's a core part of his character and is shown by many, many other gags. There's also a recurring gag with Lucy and April Fool's Day. There's a whole family of them around baseball and Peppermint Patty. There's another recurring gag where he tries to fly a kite.
The comic can't depict Charlie Brown as able to learn - since he never succeeds,† if he could learn, he'd never do anything at all.
† There are a couple of temporary exceptions. When he runs away from home he meets a gang of littler children who respect him. When he has to wear a paper bag over his head at camp, he becomes a success for the duration.
I'm enjoying the discussion of Charlie Brown, but while Peanuts is indeed an American pop cultural institution, I never really thought of CB as a 'hero', or even really a protagonist.
While there were cartoons where he's the protagonist (I recently watched A Charlie Brown Christmas), his main medium is the comic strips, and Peanuts generally didn't tell a continuous story (if at all), unlike, say, the superhero comic strips. Instead, they're little vignettes of life, and like most serial comic strips, you're meant to relate to them, get a nugget of wisdom or insight, or a chuckle. We mostly read them as kids who were bored and wanted something like a cartoon until Saturday came around (I realize adults read them, too, but today that seems rare, almost unimaginable to me now). So I'm not sure Charlie Brown really counts as a counterexample, here.
Even the cartoons are not so beloved that they're widely rewatched by adults for their storytelling. People have nostalgia for them because they're something they watched as children. This is the main reason I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas recently, and it's kind of a mostly sad story with a weird resolution. Thanksgiving was practically unwatchable. The Garfield cartoons also do not hold up, imo.
I realize 'midtagonist' is a standard sloppy internet neologism, but technically it should be 'midagonist', or maybe 'mesagonist' to keep it fully Greek.
> I never really thought of CB as a 'hero', or even really a protagonist.
Yup totally.
As an european I always saw, as a kid, Snoopy as the hero who had lots of humor and who was likable. I'd describe Charlie Brown as "invisible" as I barely remember him.
Only a European, and one who grew up on US stuff, fondly so, charlie brown feels very low on the exposed and perceived American ethos / values. I saw a few strips and refs .. but that's about it.
I watched it at school too but just once. We all sat in the gymnasium. We also
had a magician perform, some type of band, and some other activities over the years. Looking back I think there was always some “special” day right around the corner.
Unrelated, in high school we watched History of the World Part I in World History and our teacher had a piece of cardboard that said “censored” or something that he put in front of the screen during various scenes like “Bishop humps Queen” but allowed the audio to play through.
So it's very much present as inner culture but not much an influence big mainstream productions (tv shows, movies) that we see as exports, is that right ?
I think it depends where you live. Peanuts seems to have fairly large presence in Taiwan and Japan--it's currently owned by Sony. It's one of the tentpoles on Apple TV.
According to Wikipedia, as a franchise it's brings in more revenue than Star Trek or the Avengers.
As iterateoften points out, the TV shows are mainly tied to US holidays, or at least how those holidays are celebrated in the US. This also makes Peanuts merchandise tied to those holidays very popular.
Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas are the major ones. I think New Year and Easter were added at some point but not as well known.
Having said that, it makes sense that those shows wouldn't translate as well to a non-US audience.
Honestly, in my experience the original stuff largely disappeared. I vaguely remember watching some of it back in the early 90's, but never in school. The holiday specials would be on TV if you went looking for them, but that's about it.
Snoopy was more ensuring than Charlie Brown, but even that was more "cute cartoon" than anything to do with any message.
Edit: I see some sibling comments that it's making a comeback, though I've no idea if any of it is all that faithful to the original.
Charlie Brown had a lot of Christian messaging reflecting Schultz's devout beliefs, and I doubt any of that will show up in whatever Apple and Target and current schools are putting together.
> Honestly, in my experience the original stuff largely disappeared. I vaguely remember watching some of it back in the early 90's, but never in school. The holiday specials would be on TV if you went looking for them, but that's about it.
Yeah, my dad (a Baby Boomer) loved these and would make sure to watch them every year. I and my Millennial siblings didn't really care, it just felt old-fashioned. I had no idea it was still popular at all.
Nope. Schoolhouse Rock, multiple Monty Python films, The Last Samurai, The Magic Schoolbus, Romeo and Juliet... but never any Charlie Brown. Oh yeah, and The Sandlot. 2 or 3 times I think.
Huh, we didn't get those either. Except Schoolhouse Rock. The only other TV I remember was we'd watch every Space Shuttle launch, up until the Challenger explosion, then we didn't watch them any more.
And of course, there was the Oregon Trail video game in middle school. But, as far as I can tell, that was a pretty short-lived thing.
Yes, a time when children entertained themselves outside interacting with other children, and adults were so peripheral to their lives that they could be portrayed always off screen by a mumbling voice.
Yeah. I remember thinking it was old and boring as a kid in the 90's... Have children born after the millennium even ever seen a newspaper, let alone read the comics?
He has more modern versions in Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin. But most of the failures or misfortunes they experience are quite mild or temporary, all things considered.
From Stephen Fry: "You know that scene in Animal House where there’s a fellow playing folk music on the guitar, and John Belushi picks up the guitar and destroys it. And the cinema loves it. Well, the British comedian would want to play the folk singer. We want to play the failure."
Homer and Peter Griffin are idiots but they smash the guitar. Charlie Brown gets his guitar smashed.
I think this is a distinction between comedy and non-comedy genres.
There are many examples of protags in American comedies who never get their way -- Party Down, Seinfeld, Always Sunny. Part of this is the need for American sitcoms to maintain the status quo over dozens of episodes / several seasons.
You rarely see Hollywood action heroes who are beset with unrelenting disappointment -- they usually go through hell, but by the end of the third act, achieve some sort of triumph.
A notable counterexample is Sicario, but I wouldn't call it a "Hollywood action movie."
In the first Indiana Jones, the hero makes no positive contribution to the outcome in the end. He is just along for the ride.
To be fair, it requires a little bit of thinking to see. The general audience might see it as success because the outcome was "good" even if it had nothing to do with anything Jones did.
Indy led Belloq to the Ark. Belloq was looking in the wrong place because he only had the side of the headpiece of the Staff of Ra that was seared into Toht's palm, thus without Jones in the movie, the Nazis might never have acquired the Ark, failing to "take back one kadam to honor the Hebrew God, whose Ark this is".
Moreover, if Indy had not gone to Nepal, then Toht (having obtained the headpiece) and Belloq might have used a staff of the right length to find the Ark. Had they also captured Marion and taken her along to their secret island base, Jones would not have been there to tell her not to look, and thus her face would have melted off too.
Of course, Toht and his henchmen might also just have killed her in Nepal.
Alternatively, as Toht and company followed Jones to Marion, and might not have found her otherwise, they might never have had even half the headpiece of the staff of Ra, and the Ark thus would have remained undisturbed in its resting place, leaving the baddies to deal merely with the wrinkles and creases associated with aging appearing on their faces in the fullness of time.
So: Jones keeps Ravenwood alive, and puts the Belloq and his Nazi colleagues in a position to have their faces melted off. Jones also offed a couple of Nazis and other baddies along the way.
After the Nazis opened the Ark, Jones was able to tell the Americans where to pick it up from. Otherwise when the Nazis sent a crew to look for the missing men they’d have just found and taken the Ark again.
To be absolutely fair, I think in that era of American cinema there was a norm that you very clearly delineate apart what the protagonist accomplishes from what comes about by an act of God. Indiana Jones does nothing because the Nazis have to get their comeuppance for blasphemy.
I'd say there are more. Courage the Cowardly Dog? Very much in the lovable loser camp. The Eds from Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy also fit, but I suppose you could say that's a Canadian show.
Indeed, also a great example of a failing bumbling lovable loser who is frequently considered a hero to many Americans is Homer Simpson. Homer Simpson is a hero to many people in America, especially among the working class. It's not a pure example, because Homer does inadvertently succeed often, but it's almost always because of some crazy luck, not because of some skill or even perseverance.
I largely agree with Douglas Adams assessment of the cultural differences. I think it's pretty clear that he is on to something in a general sense. But there are definitely exceptions in my opinion. It's just way too diverse and way too complex a formula to ratchet down in such a narrow way.
> Indeed, also a great example of a failing bumbling lovable loser who is frequently considered a hero to many Americans is Homer Simpson.
Homer maybe the lowest version of a protagonist "loser" tolerable to American viewers, but he still has far too much agency compared to a British loser. "Lisa needs braces" and "Do it for her" are very hero-coded, and would never happen in a universe where the Simpsons are a British family.
Another barometer is American remakes of British shows, where the loser character is given redeeming qualities or circumstances rather than just letting them be the losers they are, such as David Brent vs. Michael Scott in their respective "The Office" roles. I suspect soaked-in-the-wool loser characters don't poll well in American focus groups hired by studios.
That probably also explains the (repeated) failure of American Fawlty Towers remakes - Basil Fawlty is a loser, and Americans can't play them convincingly.
Homer is a great example for this. However, at the end of the day, through all his incompetence and bumbling, he wins. He has a wonderful wife, kids and a home. He has friends and always has an upbeat “winner” attitude. You see him and see a happy, successful person inspite of his failings.
Same with Peter Griffin but he is confident and fiercely dominant. He doesn’t feel like a loser.
Even Michael from the office who is a “loser”, has a lot of redeeming qualities like genuine care for his employees, terrific salesman and a position of leadership.
Great point! Would the Simpsons have done as well had Homer just gotten screwed over and miserable? I would bet not. In the American culture that sort of reality would have shifted the humor into more of a "feels bad man" that probably wouldn't have gone over well.
EEnE had a strangely surrealist quality to it that stands out in my memory. It’s goofy and slapstick, but it’s basically its own little vacuum of a world and even feels slightly unsettling at times. It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly. It tends to veer between Looney Tunes rules and being grounded in reality, but it doesn’t really spend much time making the two compatible. It just kind of swings wildly between them (see: their mouths when they eat jawbreakers).
Now that I think about it, that’s probably partially why there’s that old copy pasta about it being a dystopian setting. It lends itself well to the concept.
I think the fact that the kids are alone and unsupervised basically all the time is what makes it so unsettling. You never see adults in the show. It's always just the same small group of kids. About the only adult interaction with the kids is through sticky notes.
I think that need and loneliness is also expressed in the show. Which is different from other kids shows which are more cartoony (Dexter's Laboratory, for example, though the adults do make appearances)
Now this is making me wonder if there was a shift at some point… as far as I remember, kids shows in the past were mostly about the kids. Ed Ed and Eddy and the Peanuts might have taken this to an extreme as part of the joke. These shows were for kids, and so the kids were the focus.
I wonder if kids shows nowadays feel a need to include more adults because adults are more likely to be watching.
There's a difference between peanuts and the eds. In peanuts, adults were definitely around but the words they said weren't understandable. As a result they basically were just background noise. It wasn't the case that the kids felt unsupervised. They still went to school, rode the bus, talked with their teachers and parents (even if you never saw them.) And they never expressed a feeling like the adults were missing.
In the eds, if you'd said "their parents have long been dead and the kids are clinging on to what was left", it'd fit right into the story. Eds had dark and serious moments around the lack of adults.
Huge difference in tone between the shows, 100% agree. I just think they are both sort of lampshading the fact that they don’t have any focus on adult characters (in completely different ways).
Oh yeah, this is absolutely a thing, though I think it's more to include a potentially additional audience rather than a way to make it fun for the kids. As a parent, I've loved it because it allows me to be able to stand and even get a joke here and there while watching shows with my kids.
No doubt that contributes but there’s also something about the way they interact with each other and how they physically exist in space/the Looney Tunes style physical gags that really stands out to me. It’s often a little… grotesque? Feels like a strong term but it’s the word that comes to mind
Not just Charlie Brown. The entire cast of the comic.
* Charlie Brown will never talk to the Red Haired Girl. His kites will always be eaten by a tree. He'll never win a baseball game. He'll never kick the football. He has abominably low self-esteem.
* Lucy's infatuation with Schroder is clearly one-sided; likewise Peppermint Patty / Charlie Brown; also Sally/Linus.
* Snoopy will never get the Red Baron, nor enjoy publishing success
* Linus will never stop believing in The Great Pumpkin and is disappointed every year.
Probably loads more. The comic is about losers, and losing.
I don’t know anything about Charlie Brown, but I’m not sure constant bad luck and disappointment capture the spirit of the British humour being discussed, as that can just as easily be used to describe slapstick humour. Perhaps it’s the existential futility/resignation that’s missing? Charlie Brown is a child, so they perhaps have optimistic naïveté instead (such that their failure be viewed with pity instead of kinship, which is really the distinction here).
Charlie Brown is actually pretty big right now- my gen z daughter has her entire classroom decked out in him and he's over Target, etc. He fits in with the cozy subculture part of gen z.
Bro literally everyone I know has watched at least the Great Pumpkin and Charlie Brown Christmas. People my age regularly make memes based on the football gag. It’s a cultural icon.
As a general rule actually, I’d say that Gen Z is more likely than may be expected to know about culture from before our time - the internet, after all, is a back catalogue of the best hits of humanity. That’s why spotify thinks we all have a listening age of 70.
> As a general rule actually, I’d say that Gen Z is more likely than may be expected to know about culture from before our time - the internet, after all, is a back catalogue of the best hits of humanity. That’s why spotify thinks we all have a listening age of 70.
I heard many people who grew up before 2000 remark younger people listened to more varied music than they did at the same ages. And I heard none remark the opposite. But some of the same people remarked knowledge of older television and movies had declined seemingly. And none remarked the opposite.
Apple just created a new Charlie Brown series and my 6-year-old daughter has already devoured it. I'm trying to get her to say "good grief!" more often.
Columbo is anything but a failure, though, and the audience knows that. His genius is leveraging humility to convince killers that he's a bumbling idiot, while in reality he's onto them from the first encounter.
_Slow Horses_ came up in another thread. I'd argue that Columbo has more in common with Jackson Lamb than with Charlie Brown.
Most Americans wouldn't consider Charlie Brown the "hero" of his strip, they would consider him a loser who gets what he deserves, and that's the joke. He isn't cool the way Snoopy is cool.
I think the article is correct that Americans don't feel sympathy for the underdog who doesn't overcome and succeed in the end so much as contempt, due to their inborn sense of entitlement and belief that failure is caused by a lack of moral fortitude and excess of laziness rather than systemic injustice and inequality.
Americans are a pretty diverse group, but the most iconic image anyone has of Charlie Brown is perseverance. Lucy sets up a football promising potential success, and despite the fact that she's pulled it away from him at every opportunity, he still tries to kick it anyway.
I think that's a quintessentially American fable. Most people will never achieve great success, but they can experience the thrill of imagining opportunity, and even if they know it's illusory, that moment of faith and effort before failure is the heroic action.
People will do stupid things like bet their life savings on a game or a bad idea, but they feel heroic for having tried regardless, knowing that if enough people keep trying, someone is going to succeed, and they get to experience that success vicariously in some small amount because they tried just as hard as the one who succeeded, experienced the same struggle, and somebody made it, even if it was never going to be them.
The football bit has a subtle touch that I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere. Because it’s not just kick(trust/risk) or not kick(distrust/preservation). When he kicks, he gives it his all, resulting in massive failure if he’s tricked. Yet, he never gives it half effort. Half effort would mean even if she moved the ball, he would still be standing there with only a minor whiff. Then he could slap the ball out of her hand and make her the laughing stock. Point is, he has a lot more than two options that are presented. And I think this says a lot about his character. He’s portrayed as a kid who will likely be a better adult than child. He’s more mature than his peers. I think that is the subtle part of his personality and character that is a little deeper than the obvious.
That's how I see Charlie Brown, as do many of my friends. We frequently use the "CB missing the football" as an analogy for the Democratic Party - over the past several decades years, the party has been a long series of swing-and-misses (notably their ability to win the popular vote but lose an election, and even more their inability to beat Trump, twice).
That works as reference to a frustrating situation, but Charlie Brown doesn't just miss. We assume that if the football was left where it was promised, he would have kicked it.
Maybe you suspect a similar situation with the Democrats, that those holding power sabotage their efforts, or maybe the analogy doesn't work in that way, but I think that people like this Charlie Brown trope because his failure isn't the result of a lack of ability; it's an excess of hope and trust.
I've heard plenty of people say that Americans are idiots because they don't realize the system is rigged against them and they believe the American Dream that anyone can achieve success. I think plenty of them know that the world is a harsh place with untrustworthy and adversarial people and that they are at a personal disadvantage compared to the wealthy and powerful, but they choose to persevere regardless because they believe hope is better than nihilism.
That can work against them. They might vote for a political party even if it fails them. I'm not saying that kind of hope is sane or rational from a game theory perspective, but it's very American to keep it up anyway.
They turned their back on their base voters to cater to tiny special interest groups. It's not surprising that the other side was able to draw them in with deceptive messaging. The funny thing is that the other side has perfected the art of constantly pulling away the football while blaming others to reinforce their support.
Nature itself ensures that life is short, brutal, violent, and punctuated with horrors. Happiness is a transient state that loses its power if it is present more than part of the time, and joy can only exist in a backdrop of disappointment, or it just becomes another day in the life. We are wired for a life of failure, disappointment, trauma, tragedy, and loss.
That we have wrested a comfortable civilization from these dire circumstances is a great testament to the resolve and resourcefulness of men and women.
We have the great privilege and responsibility of living in this elevated plane, with a long (as biologicaly possible) life lived in relative comfort, and even insulated from the horrors of life by the drapery of civil machinery.
Even so, the only justice in this world is the justice we create ourselves.
The universe owes us nothing, and sometimes collects its debt for the entropy we take from it.
When you go out of your way to bash American culture for no reason (with some bonus racism thrown in a few comments down!) it really drags the discussion down. I really wish you wouldn't do that, it's just making the site worse for everyone.
>When you go out of your way to bash American culture for no reason (with some bonus racism thrown in a few comments down!) it really drags the discussion down.
This discussion is about American culture, and I have reasons for my criticisms. That you can't conceive of any such criticism as having any possible rationale beyond randomness and racism is what makes good faith discussion difficult here. Forgive me if I've given up even attempting nuance after having my efforts be met with snark and midwit dismissals time and again.
But in the future I will keep in mind that only pro-American views are allowed in threads like these. I keep forgetting this is supposed to be a safe space for the very people responsible for the myriad problems we're not supposed to mention. Sorry for harshing the vibe.
Stu from Rugrats was a wonderful homage to the 90s everyman and the incoming new reality of men taking up some of the domestic drudgery. It was one of the few shows at the time that had some incredible adult insight and humour for a 'kids' show and never spoke down to its audience - Hey Arnold being another exemplar.
The episode where Angelica breaks her leg and Stu is basically forced into indentured servitude as a result is a masterpiece:
Didi: Stu? What are you doing?
Stu: Making chocolate pudding.
Didi: It's 4:00 in the morning. Why on Earth are you making chocolate pudding?
Calvin is such an interesting character. He never "learns", similar to Charlie Brown, but his outlook is that of a scientist who just wants to "see what'll happen". Anything to occupy his hyperactive mind, whether it be spaceman spiff or a trip to the Triassic, or closer to reality, pranking Susie Derkins or trying to get the better of Moe (or Hobbes for that matter). He's not optimistic, but cynical. But his cynicism is irrelevant because he's driven by his avoidance of boredom.
> Most Americans wouldn't consider Charlie Brown the "hero" of his strip, they would consider him a loser who gets what he deserves, and that's the joke.
I don't think you speak for most Americans. That's the cruelest interpretation I've ever heard of Charlie Brown.
The enduring success of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (despite its hokey Coca-Cola sponsored origins) strongly runs counter to this idea. The other kids in the special are outright mean to Charlie, but at the end no one identifies with the other kids' perspective, nor do they themselves.
Part of the reason the Halloween Special never gained the same cultural relevance/popularity is probably because it doesn't have the same progression. The other kids are mean to Linus and he persists despite it all, but ultimately it ends with no resolution to the mocking.
[Content warning: this post has been written while the author is on cold medicine and before having any coffee. Read at your own risk!]
But you know those other kids are going to go right back to being assholes as soon as "the magic of Christmastime" wears off.
It seems like the message is kind of, "It's ok to be an asshole, as long as at certain, 'special' moments, you show a token gesture of goodwill."
I haven't watched the whole show through in decades, so it's possible my memory is faulty, but I don't recall any of the mean kids making any sort of apology or atoning for their behaviour. It's just "and now we're all friends because Christmas!"
And then the next day, Lucy's back to tormenting her ostensible "friend".
It's easy enough to interpret Peanuts as being that. But Charles Schultz was not trying to present that. He was presenting the world as it is, and how one person can still maintain his optimism in spite of all that. This is made abundantly clear in some of the other strips, like the Father's day strip where he explains to Violet that no matter what, his dad will always love him, and he doesn't care that Violet's dad can buy her all the things.
Schultz was a relatively devout Presbyterian (though still very much a free thinker and criticized the direction American Christianity was going and its attitude about the various wars during the 60s-80s). He was incredibly optimistic about humanity, but he showed in Peanuts the reality of our "default" state, especially among kids.
Keep in mind that these are all 2nd and 3rd graders in the story.
In the Christmas Special, the kids come to see Charlie Brown as right and are fairly vocal about this ("he's not a blockhead after all", etc.). It is somewhat tethered to the religious elements voiced by Linus, which gives the turnaround to Charlie's perspective a kind of cultural weight, i.e., the audience is intended to understand the kids as wrong in some kind of fundamental way. It's not as simple as "the magic of Christmas".
In the Halloween Special, the kids don't do the same for Linus, apart from Lucy who pulls him out of the cold and tucks him into bed.
The dynamic between Lucy and Charlie is a lot deeper than her cynical kicking the ball trick. Schultz uses their interactions (the psychiatry booth, him keeping her on the baseball team even though she's consistently terrible) to reinforce an overall theme that optimism is better than pessimism. Occasionally he directly peels back the layers behind Lucy's crabbiness like when Charlie's in the hospital.
It appears from your other comments that you're American too. So the question is, are you that cruel too, or you do posit yourself as the one magical exception to the rule?
I'm not the one magical exception, no. But I and Americans like myself are clearly not representative of mainstream culture or politics here. You can't argue for the overall humanism and empathy of American culture after we voted for Trump twice and while 40% of us still support the administration, ICE and everything that's happening here.
And of course when I say "mainstream" culture I mean "white." The cultures of oppressed people necessarily harbor more empathy than the culture of the oppressors, because their survival depends on it.
And yes I'm white, too. Your gotcha didn't work. Better luck next time.
> 40% of us still support the administration, ICE and everything that's happening here.
This number is misleading. Overall job approval does not entail equal approval for "everything." Typically, job approval depends a lot or even mostly on the economy. There was a famous expression from the Bill Clinton Presidential campaign...
Anyway, back when I studied math, 40% represented a minority, not a majority. And I'd like to see your polling on Charlie Brown; it feels like you're just projecting your personal feelings onto that rather than relying on any empirical data.
98.15% of American voters in 2024 voted either for a party funding, arming, and abetting a well documented genocide; or for one that promised to fund, arm, and aid that genocide even more.
Those same parties have raised ICE's budget every year since its inception, inflicted sanctions that have killed millions of innocent civilians over the last couple decades, and spent trillions upon trillions in a 'war on terror' that has only increased instability. Not to mention the bipartisan support for torture, mass surveillance, surveillance of world leaders, threats to ICC judges, sanctions on UN Rapporteurs, threats to The Hague, massive subsidies to polluters, etc etc etc etc etc.
You can argue all you like that the voters were trying to be practical, that there were no other truly viable options, or try and say that history's most documented genocide of all time wasn't a real genocide somehow...
But it says an incredible amount about the character and quality of modern US society. None of it good.
Right, so you don't really have any strong evidence for opinions about Americans at all. You have extremely strong opinions about Israel/Palestine which you're transferring onto Americans.
His point of high church vs. Protestantism is a good one. We in the US practice a kind of competitive Protestantism designed--at least partly, if not mostly--to make the adherents feel good about themselves. There is a distinct difference between submission and proselytizing.
There is also something to the state of empire as well. The British empire had been in steady decline for a very long time before Adams or Fry started making people laugh, whereas the American empire has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer.
On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.
I think there is a lot of truth in that. It led to the death of patriotism (which is now considered embarrassing outside of sport), national purpose, institutions, empire, and coincided with the decline of heavy industry (which only happened much more recently in the US).
EDIT: Saying that, there is still a strong positive national identity. We're just too embarrassed to express it strongly (see patriotism), because of our fall from grace.
WWI "coincided with the decline of heavy industry" ? I can't think of any UK-based heavy industry that didn't dramatically expand between the end of WWI and say, 1958.
I also think there is a breaking point, and we're seeing the resurgence of right wing parties in the UK and across Europe as a backlash to anti-patriotism and praise for everyone except those with a long history in their own nation.
"Anti-patriotism" doesn't really sum up the sense that many among Europe's owning and intellectual classes would prefer to "dissolve the people and elect another" via immigration. The example that shocked me, as an American, was when a story came out that certain schools in the UK had stopped teaching about World War II and the Holocaust because (second-generation, in many cases) immigrant parents objected to their kids being preached-at about the history of someone else's country. This was presented by, IIRC, the Guardian or the BBC, as a fairly reasonable objection.
To my American mind, for everything wrong with our country, come on, if you're an immigrant to the USA, it's your country. Taking on American history as your history is what it means to be part of the common civic project, and insisting that "the Allies beat Hitler and built the liberal international order and then we saw off Stalinism too" is somehow insulting to your family because those Allied soldiers weren't your blood ancestors sounds outright treasonous.
The history curriculum is (like nearly everything else) nationally set. The content of the leaving exams is also not set by the school (but by the national boards). It's possible that one school has decided to do something daft, but honestly not likely.
The story reads like ragebait, TBH. Brits are absolutely as keen on extolling WW2 heroism as anyone else.
"In England, by law children are to be taught about the Holocaust as part of the Key Stage 3 History curriculum; in fact, the Holocaust is the only historical event whose study is compulsory on the National Curriculum. This usually occurs in Year 9 (age 13-14)."
So not Province of Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales.
Note that WW2 is not a statutory requirement in any of the key stages although it does feature in the examples (which are non-statutory). And a reminder that history is a required subject only to Key Stage 3, so many students won't take it after they are 14 and won't study for an exam.
Reporting on education in the UK does tend to be rage-baity and most situations are more complex when you look at them a bit closer.
(I have never taught history and never taught in the school sector)
Totally agree, WW1 is really the root cause of all of Britains problems.
Victory wasn't worth the cost. It would've been better to give the entire empire to the Germans to maintain peace. It'd be lost anyway in a short amount of time. Even forcing King George and Kaiser Wilhelm to marry would've been better for them than German Republicanism and the British Royals becoming Kardashians with crowns.
and that's a very good thing. I only recognise our nation from 1945 onwards, establishment of the welfare state, the idea the government cares for its people. The idea that victims matter. While it wasn't just overnight and was many years in the making, there was this element of cruelty, a survival of the fittest, seen in the victim blaming of street urchins with rickets in the early 20th century.
In 1966 there was an industrial disaster where a school was submerged in coal waste and 116 children died. The coal company offered £50 per child as compensation. There was a national outcry that marks the change in attitude and the compensation was increased tenfold to £500 (quite a lot back then). Did we see this in Flint with the polluted water, or in Ohio when that train derailed with all the chemicals?
There's something about having absolutely everything in the world and then pissing it all away in an enormous own goal of world wars that is extremely humbling and I'd like to think that plays a key part in the British psyche and I think its for the better.
My grandparents were the war generation I knew, having lived through the blitz, and all they wanted was to sit in the garden and have a nice cup of tea. They didn't want to be the best or were looking externally for validation. Just a nice sit down and a chin wag and I think that's a positive way to be, as opposed to what I imagine was the driving force of the Imperial era in always wanting more and trying to prove how "great" our nation should be. We proved how great we are in two of the most destructive wars in the world's history where the entirity of Europe lost. We suck.
A large portion of the UK hasn't really accepted or internalized the fact that the British Empire is no longer a thing, and they're not the most powerful nation in the world, nor anywhere close to it.
(...And yes, that does sound like what it looks like is coming for the US, though it's not quite there yet.)
I do know the type of person you are talking about and I don't think it's the Empire as such (which is long gone) but the lingering on of the kind of exceptionalism that was used to justify the Empire. Wonderful sayings like:
"Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life." Cecil Rhodes
Mind you - perhaps I'm just bitter because I'm a Scot ;-)
I visited London several years ago, and in the house we were staying was a relatively short book describing, for lack of a better term, "British exceptionalism", and it resonated with me as an American. I don't recall that much, but I do remember the idea, for example, that the European Union was seen to be a good thing in the eyes of the archetypal Brit "for the continent", and not for the British isles. Always exempting themselves from international cooperation/norms/laws, etc. I think America inherited a lot from the British (certainly not an original idea of mine).
"Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last 500 years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it's worked so well?"
That's quite true. On a recent trip I got talking to a girl from somewhere in Europe. She spoke perfect English, of course. At some point she remarked, rather bluntly, "It must be strange for you guys because you used to rule the world." I made a joke but internally I was reeling: used to? I'm almost 40 and still hadn't realised this.
Later I was talking to another 20-something, British this time, who didn't know Dr Martens were British. I asked where he thought they were from, "I guess I assumed they were American". Sigh...
In Japanese culture the failed hero is also revered, but in a solemn rather than comedic way.
Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Kusunoki Masashige, The Standing Death of Benkei, Saigo Takamori (the last samurai), the Kamikaze pilots, even Yukio Mishima...
What's interesting is that unlike the British fatalism, Japanese failed heroes are driven by duty and honor and tradition above all (even at the cost of themselves). To an outsider they are foolishly stubborn and unwilling to accept an imperfect or changing world. But in Japan that is something to be admired.
I find more modern American humour much easier to relate to, probably because it has veered more in this direction. A show like Always Sunny seems incredibly British-compatible because it's about terrible people getting their comeuppance, yet still being sympathetic despite their failings.
To go full British, you need characters like David Brent, who aren't sympathetic. They have no redeeming heartfelt goodbye. No-one is sad when they're gone, life moves on.
I would also say that the Always Sunny gang really aren't sympathetic either, but it's a para-social trick of having spent so much time "together" with them over so many episodes.
I suspect a new viewer coming to watch the latest series of IASIP would not see them as sympathetic. That's quite different to The Office (US), where a new viewer skipping to later seasons would not have the same opinions as a new viewer watching season 1, where Scott was much closer to a Brent type character, before he was redeemed and made more pitiable than awful over the seasons.
A more recent show to compare would be the UK vs the USA version of Ghosts. I like both shows but it is interesting how in the USA version all the main Ghosts are basically good people while the UK Ghosts have more serious flaws. And in the UK version, money is a constant problem while in the USA version it isn't nearly as big of a problem.
You're right, there are plenty of sympathetic ones too, but it's the unsympathetic ones that really don't do so well to a US audience. There's a reason that The Office (US) hard pivoted Michael Scott after season 1.
> I would also say that the Always Sunny gang really aren't sympathetic either, but it's a para-social trick of having spent so much time "together" with them over so many episodes.
I'd say they're charismatic and funny, but irredeemably bad people. It was refreshing that the show didn't shy away from that; in lots of comedies, the characters are basically psychopathic if taken literally, yet we're still supposed to like them and to see them as having hearts of gold if they make the occasional nice gesture. Always Sunny just leaned hard into portraying them as terrible people who were only 'likable' in the shallow sense needed to make the show fun to watch rather than an ordeal.
But I think the creators eventually lost sight of that -- I remember the big serious episode they did with Mac's dance, and I just find it baffling because in order to buy into the emotion we were evidently supposed to feel, we needed to take the characters seriously. And as soon as we take the characters seriously we are (or should be) overwhelmingly aware that we're watching people who have proven over the previous umpteen years to be irredeemable sociopaths, which kind of takes the edge off the heartwarming pride story.
I only watched the first few seasons of IASIP, but I don’t remember them being sympathetic characters at all. The whole concept, and what made it funny, I thought, is that they really are all terrible people who just drag each other down.
Yeah, the conceit of Seinfeld was that the characters were crappy, but you liked them because they were funny. But they didn't actually lean into that as hard as, say, the finale would suggest. All of the characters have something sympathetic that you can like about them, even if you can buy the thesis that they are unsympathetic broadly.
The genius of IASIP is to just lean all the way into this trope. The characters are never sympathetic and never redeem themselves. It's almost an experiment in whether you can make people feel sympathetic toward awful (but entertaining) characters just through long familiarity with them. (Yes.)
They were more human and relatable in the very early seasons. It was just a bunch of people dicking around trying to run a bar (for the most part).
As time went on, they become more and more awful.
I'd say it has a pretty decent parallel with Breaking Bad. In season 1 almost anyone can relate to and cheers for Walter. By the last season, you hate him and are happy he dies.
They were committing various felonies in the first season, if I recall. It couldn’t have been more clear that these characters are bad people who will do almost anything to get what they want. The humor lies in the arbitrary and inconsistent boundaries they set for themselves and each other.
Contrast with the initial good intentions of Walt in Breaking Bad. The IASIP characters never had good intentions.
Walt never really had a good intentions. That is what first season done - he had an out and legal access to money. But he was likable and all of the consequences were not yet known.
No way. Everyone hates Walter at the end. If he had plausibly maintained the "I was doing it for my family" pose, then maybe, yeah. But the whole point of the last season was putting that idea to bed, demonstrating that it was always destructive selfishness.
It's just not gonna generate a lot of discussion to say "the intended interpretation of the character is correct". The reason Skylar gets a lot of discussion is that there's a lot of disagreement on the interpretation of that character.
On that topic, I think the perspective you're replying to is cope. It would have been better for everyone (else) involved if he took the money from his smarmy friend, took the abuse from his dick boss at his second job, took the abuse from his asshole rich student, took the subtle jabs from his family. Generally, if he swallowed his pride.
Of course, the whole reason the show had a plot is that he was too proud, too toxically masculine, to go that route. And I think the show's implicit thesis is that self-immolating as Walter did was preferable to enduring the indignity of his life. Certainly, it was more fun for the audience.
This is contrary to you and GP, making the (what I observe to be) common assertion that the show is a parable about the danger of toxic masculinity, and anyone who doesn't believe this is too stupid, sexist, or both to "get it" (parenthetically, where you differ I agree with you - people who think Walter is cool and Skylar annoying are legion). The reason I'm calling this "cope" is that reading the show as a morality play condemning toxic masculinity allows one to enjoy it without guilt. This is moral art! If only all that human filth on the internet were smart enough to realize it!
I just don't buy it, though. I think the show is about how being a monster is cooler than being responsible, in large part because all the people who depend on you to be responsible are so damn annoying.
It's not about masculinity at all, it's just "pride comes before the fall". That is not gendered. Both men and women are entirely capable of being destructively prideful. The reason Walter is a villain is that his prideful destruction isn't merely a self-destruction. He also tears apart a bunch of other lives, including those of his wife and children. Again, I'm sorry, but gender isn't the issue with this, if it were a woman who carved a path of destruction through her family and community, she would also be a villain. (And of course these stories exist too.)
The binary options you've proposed to somewhat vindicate Walter's choices were not the only options available to him. The whole point is that he's so brilliant that he can take over a whole regional drug trade in like a year. Well I'm sorry, but if he could do that, he could also have put his brilliance toward some other wildly successful business venture that would not have required blowing people up and putting his family in danger from like three different gangs of violent criminals. There were other options besides eating shit from his rich friend and boss.
He did what he did because he liked it, and he's responsible for the damage that did to the people around him.
I'll admit I gendered it because that's the discourse I always see.
But anyway - you're speaking to whether Walter's actions were moral. I'm more interested in what is the show's attitude towards his actions. Is the show condemning, or glorifying. I think it's closer to the latter, regardless of how poorly things went for Walter in the end.
> The whole point is that he's so brilliant that he can take over a whole regional drug trade in like a year. Well I'm sorry, but if he could do that, he could also have put his brilliance toward some other wildly successful business venture that would not have required blowing people up and putting his family in danger from like three different gangs of violent criminals.
Sure. But, again, I think this is just another implicit thesis of the show. It's easier and more fun to be an amoral asshole without regard for any of your obligations to anyone else.
Right, the show's position is that he took the "easier and more fun" way, because of his selfish pride, and ended up hurting everyone he cared about, which is why he's the villain. It's very clear about this!
Does he do evil, despicable things? Absolutely. Are most of those things done because of jealousy, rage, or a failure to bother to understand the context in which he's operating? Definitely. But, like, unless you've never been jealous, blindingly angry, foolish, or far too hasty, you can see where (assuming turning yourself in to the cops isn't an option [0]) you might end up making similar choices. [1]
Is he prideful, wrathful, did he do many evil things? Yes, yes, and yes. It's not unreasonable to call his (in)actions -on balance- monstrous. But he's also relatable/understandable in a -er- "Greek tragedy" sort of way. He's a blunderer and a wrecker who probably deserved far worse than he got, but I find it dreadfully difficult to hate him when I consider the entire story.
[0] Which it pretty much immediately absolutely was not. Even at the start, all the money he made would have been forfeit and (because the USian "Drug War" is batshit crazy) prosecutors probably would have found a way to take the house and cars, leaving his family way worse off than if he'd done nothing at all.
[1] Having said that, there are so many points of decision that the odds that you'd walk his path exactly are approximately zero.
As a Brit, I generally prefer American Humour when it comes to comedy. My favourite films are Happy Gilmore and Tropic Thunder. A lot of British Humour is around that everything is crap, it gets tiresome after a while.
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode)
Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
I think this one is a miss. TOS is inspired by _british_ naval history. Loss, fear, and failure are central to the show. In this era of TV, leading characters still had large flaws. Kirk is frozen by choice, Spock believes himself superior, Bones is a bigoted luddite. We as viewers get to see the pain this causes and their efforts to improve. It's wholly different than modern US television including all other ST media. Meanwhile, 70s Dr. Who is packed with automatic weapons fire and explosions and the formula has always been the Doctor knows best. (I am a huge fan of all the mentioned shows.)
For a good, modern example we can look at Ghosts (suddenly renamed "Ghosts UK" on my streaming services) and Ghosts US. The adaptation is agonizing. They stripped the important aspects of the story but kept a boy scout, toy soldier, and an interracial marriage. I found that telling.
I'd argue that DS9 was pretty stand-outish as well.
Worf continues to grapple with honor and restoring his family name, but he's too stubborn and proud to "debase" himself to defeat his political opponents.
Sisko refuses to accept that his fate is preordained, leading to one disaster after another every time he tries to go his own way. His loyalties are also split because of his status as Emissary, straining his relationship with both sides - not to mention the cultural issues.
Odo's pride is his constant downfall, and despite arguing that he's an island unto himself, he's miserably lonely and constantly pining.
Kira can't get over the trauma of her past, and although she does mellow out as the series goes on, when she gets triggered she goes on a rampage.
Dax's past hosts leave her in constant conflict, and she's usually trying desperately to appear in control, even when it's obvious she is not. In Jadzia it's particularly bad due to her issues with Curzon and Joran.
Nog is desperate for adult approval, and is in constant search of ways to gain respect, sometimes to disastrous results.
Red Dwarf was hilarious. Highly recommend the books, as they contain a lot of jokes that wouldn't translate to screen easily and would resonate with anyone who enjoys humour in the vein of Adams.
Tbf, Star Trek TOS was also a sci fi show with an FX budget of two shoelaces and a pack of gum, and had to be carrier by great actors and writing, which it absolutely was. It's still my favourite Star Trek to this day.
I think the problem with how the US makes shows is that once something get successful, it gets a budget, which means the writing needs to appeal to a broader audience, which makes the whole thing blander.
I might be ignorant of US television pop culture, but I think, at least before the 90s, the UK produced much more memorable scifi shows (and even in the 90s, a lot of those US shows were secretly Canadian)
As I just commented above, I do think The Office fundamentally maintained this foundation of comedic failure, but I also think it wouldn't have worked as well for American audiences (and indeed, wasn't working as well in the first season because of this) if not for the much larger emphasis on the likable-character love story with Jim and Pam. Maybe the upshot is that you can have a British edge in American comedy, as long as you sand it down a bit with some other element.
I see a similar kind of dynamic in Parks and Recreation, which is maybe a more culturally native take on the same kind of show, where Leslie is also ultimately a comedic failure, but with the edge sanded down by a certain amount of (mostly fruitless) competence and especially a seemingly inexhaustible well of enthusiasm and optimism that can't help but infect most of the people around her.
the UK Office had fourteen (14) episodes. The US one had 201 episodes.
if you don't lean on things like inter-office romance there is nothing to put on screen.
the jim-pam thing was a direct riff on the tim-lucy interactions in the UK version, they just didn't, you know, have 100+ more episodes to build on it.
hell, you can even see when that ran out of steam in later seasons of the US version and they just start jamming celebrity guest stars in there
But I also think it's correct that the US version is much softer-edged and that it would not have been so wildly popular were that not so.
I mean, there are harder edged comedies in the US, but they certainly aren't as popular. Would they be more so in England? I dunno, maybe. I suppose the US version of The Office was probably more popular across the pond than the homespun version as well?
I have only seen very little of both, but I did get the distinct feeling that the US office was just plain better executed in many ways. I do remember that reading online forums, fans of UK Office scoffed at the US version at first, but that turned around.
True, after the first season. But I kind of question whether there is really a difference between "better executed" and the cultural difference we're discussing here. It's rare to have a show change tone from one season to the next, so it gives us a pretty unique way to look at what changed. I'm not sure what the "execution" issues were in the first season, except that it seemed (to me, as an American) more cold and self deprecating, where later it was warmer and more lovable. It had the same actors and sets and everything, but just different writing and changes to the personalities and storylines of the characters. But I think this might just be restating the differences between American and British humor that kicked this thread off?
Yes, definitely a culture thing. I had a very difficult time finding most British humor funny when I was younger, but my personality combination of loving humor and comedy and also being incredibly interested in people, drove me to want to understand why British humor was funny when most of the time it just seemed so absurd.
It was a multi-decade path so it's very difficult to identify progression points, but slowly through exposure I began to "get it" and now I adore British comedy and humor. I still adore American comedy and humor as well, but the more exposure to the culture I got, the more I understood it.
Obviously that's just anecdotal, but I personally find it strong evidence that the humor divide is indeed cultural. The more similar cultures are to begin with, the easier the leap is.
To me the most exciting part of this is that it means there are thousands of other cultures on this planet that have humor that I have not unlocked yet. Someday I hope to!
Edit: for a very fascinating example of differences, I love comparing the UK version of the office to the US version of the office. To many Americans, David Brent mostly just came off mean and an asshole, even a poisonous one, whereas Michael Scott comes off as eccentric and clueless and unable to read the room, but overall a mostly good guy. That perception makes David Brent kind of hateable whereas Michael Scott kind of lovable.
Another fascinating point of comparison is the UK version of ghosts, versus the US version of ghosts. I'll leave comparisons and contrasts on those to others as I haven't watched all of the UK version of ghosts yet. I'd be fascinated to hear what others think of that, and the office for that matter.
It's the opposite for me - the 'you can't change anything, the world sucks, the best you can do is endure and be snarky about it' attitude appealed a lot more to me when I was younger.
I watched both versions of Ghosts, and found them to be quite similar honestly. The US version can be a little more slapstick and a little more goofy, but that's about it.
David Brent is poisonous, and indeed hatable. The point of the British version of the show is not that he's more tolerable or likeable to the British. If anything it's more pointed how awful he is this side of the water, given the preponderance of bosses exactly like this. What makes the show work in the UK (and Ireland), is a greater cultural willingness to see the worst aspects of reality reflected in entertainment. Versus the focus on escapism in even the most grim US television - i.e.: Tony Soprano is a monster, but he also has charisma and glamour. Walter White is dying and becoming more and more amoral, but he also goes from being a dork to a badass. Both characters are utter glamorisations of what their real life counterparts would be like. Along with the surrealism there's a genuine existentialism to the darkest of UK comedy - from early Alan Partridge to Nighty Night. An actual interest in examining the nature of cruelty and suffering.
> i.e.: Tony Soprano is a monster, but he also has charisma and glamour. Walter White is dying and becoming more and more amoral, but he also goes from being a dork to a badass. Both characters are utter glamorisations of what their real life counterparts would be like.
I'm not actually disagreeing with you, but I wonder how you think you know this to be true?
Very interesting! Except I noted that he referred to David Brent from The Office, and we have a direct corollary to that character, of course, in Michael Scott from The Office. They really didn't change the formula for American audiences, he's absolutely still a comedic failure. Starting in the second season, he becomes a bit more of a lovable comedic failure, but the basic point of the character stands. And he is beloved by American audiences!
As an American I'm a huge fan of HHGG and Rowan Atkinson (not just his Bean character). I'm also a huge fan of Conan O'Brien and his Harvard generation's work for The Simpsons. Would be far ahead of Adams' time. Though while I find them _okay_ I never laughed so hard that my face and stomach hurt from laughter when watching Monty Python anything, not even Black Adder. For other American comedy what made me really, really laugh so hard was Kenan & Kel and The Lonely Island's work for SNL.
I've tried to find something as funny as HHGG for so long that I've read P.G. Wodehouse as Adam's main inspiration. Also watched Fry & Laurey. I guess Sacha Cohen as British humour? Since he's Cambridge Highlights alum after all. Found his works extremely hilarious though the parody of racism was disgusting.
I also really enjoyed After Life (with Ricky Gervais). I wouldn't call him a hero, but then again maybe I would. So honest, so pissed off, so intelligent.
Sick Note with Rupert Grint, same thing. Brilliant.
I'm currently reading the Bobbiverse series. Sure the guy is sort of a hero. But he is also an antihero forced to do heroic things, while he just wants to geek out and enjoy his coffee while making star trek references.
The sketch show format has been pretty much entirely killed off by TikTok & Instagram.
It's very hard to do a sketch that hasn't already been done on TikTok with a tiny fraction of the budget.
Absurdist humour still exists everywhere, it's less popular than either Python in the 70's / 80's, or the flash era in the 2000s, but it's still everywhere, but I'd also wager it is not to your taste.
At the risk of offending just about everyone, I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom, which in turn was that generations' "Bring me a shrubbery!".
Sketch shows in particular don't work well for TV in this era. Mitchell and Webb tried hard to return with one this year and it just fell flat, the jokes feel telegraphed from a mile-away, taking a minute to get to a punchline in a era when the same jokes are told in a 10 second short.
The downside of the tiktok/insta model, is that the more successful people on Insta end up just re-telling their one good joke over and over. ( Or indeed, re-recording someone else's one good joke. ).
Not that sketch shows didn't also repeat jokes sometimes, but they could at least play around with a punchline in unexpected ways, or have callbacks and nods to earlier sketches in a series. That kind of non-continuity doesn't work when you don't know which tiktoks will go viral, or which order your audience will see them in, as the algorithm dictates all.
I think there's something to this. But I'd also say the reason it feels so dead is because consumed media has shattered into a million pieces. With the death of broadcast TV and somewhat the death of movies, it's actually getting increasingly harder to find shows with common consumption.
The reason "Bring me a shrubbery" is funny and why people endlessly quoted Holy Grail is because almost everyone in the US watched Monte python at one point or another. Part of what made people do those quotes is the fact that regardless audience, you know you'll get a laugh because they too know the context for the phrase.
I don't think there's a single piece of media like that. Not at least in the last 10 years. I mean, funnily, I think you've nailed Skibidi as a rare exception, at least for the younger generations.
If you are saying sketch shows like "Thank God You're Here" "Fast & Loose" and "Who's Line is it Anyway" are being killed off by short/low budget replacements on TikTok, we must be living in different worlds.
I haven't seen anything like them on TikTok and I'm on there enough to have noticed. Maybe you're talking about the dumb alien short videos of them telling a joke to each other and snickering, that doesn't compare.
"TikTok doesn't live up to the best of TV" is true, but that's not the argument I'm making.
OP asked for "newer", and yet you've not named anything created in the last 10 years. ( And named a 30+ year old improv show, which is definitely not the format I'm talking about. )
You're not alone, one second-cousin comment even went with the phrase "more modern", then named a range of shows that are at least over 20 years old. Green Wing was the 90's, that's closer to the time of Python's Life of Brian than today.
Clearly things aren't fine if there isn't fresh blood coming through.
Sketch shows never were the best of TV, they are a format where you throw a lot out there and then the very best bits of each episode might be particularly funny, with a bunch of filler in-between.
That can't compete with a medium where people just swipe the second they're not finding a particular piece funny or to their taste.
I agree the shows I named have aged, but I think my point stands. There really isn't anything _like_ those shows on TikTok that I am aware of, and maybe you've made a bigger point that there isn't anything like these shows at all anymore. (To be fair I don't watch much traditional TV anymore -- maybe that was your point all along and I just missed it)
> I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom
Beyond the first minute or two, I'd not class Skibidi Toilet as any kind of humor. It's a serialized silent (late-era-style silent with synced foley but no dialog) sci-fi action war epic told without intertitles.
I had the opportunity to meet and talk to Harry Secombe just a couple years before he died. He was quite surprised to run into an American who knew who he was. Most American's only know Peter Sellers.
I was looking for I Think You Should Leave, which I think is great. But it might be the exception that proves the rule, at least for newish shows in the US.
Key and Peele and Chappelle's Show were also this kind of show, but are pretty old now.
As a fellow older American who loves Monty Python, the more modern British shows I've enjoyed the most were Green Wing, League of Gentlemen, Peep Show, and Doc Martin. Of those, League of Gentlemen and Green Wing have the most Python-like absurdity, while Doc Martin has the most subtle humor. Peep Show is hilarious, but the most crass humor of those listed, although League of Gentlemen doesn't shy away from crassness either.
> I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing
These kind of comments always puzzle me. Hollywood makes stuff for the entire world, not just for a domestic audience.
Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, pretty much any big sitcom you can name is in syndication in most countries around the world, because of how relatable it is.
It's often not sophisticated, and can be quite shallow (See Two and a half men or Big Bang theory), but it being hard to relate to is unlikely to be an issue.
Don't underestimate the power of big media corporations to push a world view. When I was a kid in NZ, British culture was impressed on us via the media. These days, there's more American influence. I don't think that's to do with the inherent quality of those cultures.
Of course not. But I think the US is unique in having it's shows be syndicated to such an extent globally, that isn't true for most other countries even English speaking ones. I assume that feeds back to them having that in mind and trying to please the lowest common denominator.
The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
Yes. See also Fleming’s James Bond. Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. *
This phenomenon is post-WWI and post-WWII and losing the greatest empire in history in a single generation trauma being retconned as if were the historical English perspective.
* Removed previously incorrect statement including Edgar Rice Burroughs who is an American although Tarzan is English
I'm not sure I understand the Burroughs example as relevant to the UK, but another good illustration is Thomas Hardy. His books sold well but were never seen as consistent with the UK cultural mainstream, and the reaction to Jude the Obscure in 1895 stopped him from writing novels entirely. Yet post-WWI he came to be seen/adopted as a mainstream cultural icon.
As much as I love American upbeat-ness (I'm American) I think that our hatred of failure and our strained optimism puts a tremendous psychological pressure on us. Sometimes, we fail, and that's okay. Sometimes, we lose, and that's just life. I think that's an essential part of growing up, and our collective denial of that makes me feel like we, as a people, are not quite mature.
I think (we) Americans hate failure only when people give up.
We have a very long tradition of failure leading to success, everything from Edison trying hundreds of lightbulbs to Don Draper in Mad Men reinventing himself after failure.
Our bankruptcy laws are different from other countries in how lenient they are towards the debtor. And, of course, the entire culture of Silicon Valley is about failure after failure followed by success.
And it's not even conventional, economic success that we want. We're happy when someone finds happiness even if not financial success. The rich-person-gives-up-everything-for-love is a familiar American trope.
We don't like failure, but we forgive it, as long as we keep trying.
I think you're over optimistic about the mindset of the majority of Americans. Americans love a winner and hate losers, that's why they elected Donald Trump.
At least for American technologists (if not technologists more broadly, or Americans more broadly) failure is not at all seen as a bad thing: it's seen as a data point that XYZ didn't work, so now we'll pivot to ABC and give that a go.
Edison's quote about not having failed, but rather, discovering 1,000 ways not to do something captures this well.
It’s a good counter point, but I don’t think it mimics the kind of failure embracing that Clark talks about.
It is more a reframing of failure as a success of learning and growing. E.g, while the project failed, you didn’t. You learned lessons and are stronger and better for it. You succeed.
The Charlie Brown counterpoint is interesting, but I think the distinction might be about narrative framing rather than outcomes. Charlie Brown fails repeatedly, but the narrative frames this as poignant perseverance. British failure comedy frames it as absurd cosmic joke - you're not meant to root for the character to eventually succeed, you're meant to recognize the futility. Arthur Dent is Adams's own synthesis: British everyman dropped into American-style adventure, surviving galaxy-ending events through baffled persistence rather than heroism.
Although I have very little experience with British humor, I find it interesting to compare British fiction I read as a child/teenager that became popular hits in the US (Harry Potter, Alex Rider). From this article's perspective, those protagonists are the epitome of American heroes (autonomy, mastery, purpose). No wonder they garnered such acclaim in the US. Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction? Is the comparison unfair, since these stories were not written with the comedic genre in mind?
What i find in dr who is that, at least at the beginning of every episode he doesn't even attempt to control what's happening even when his life is threatened. He's perfectly happy to let events unfold before stepping in.
And he hates using guns. He walks into danger with zero ability to defend himself besides some weird tool with painful limitations. In a way he's the most un American hero possible.
> And he hates using guns. He walks into danger with zero ability to defend himself besides some weird tool with painful limitations. In a way he's the most un American hero possible.
I mean, that description works almost as well for MacGyver as for The Doctor, so I am not sure it is the most un-American hero possible.
At least in the case of Harry Potter specifically, there's actually a few things that contributed to its success outside of it having a traditionally successful Real American Hero™.
First off, we need to remember that it was cribbing from a lot of other "kid goes to magic boarding school" books out there. The difference in sales success is down to the fact that JKR got a better US publisher. Scholastic has an unfair advantage in the young adult and graded reader markets called the "Scholastic Book Fair". Basically, it's a travelling bookstore event set up in US schools where they sell kids books. If you wanted to start a YA phenomenon in the US, especially back in the 2000s, that was the perfect way to do it.
For similar reasons, Bone outsold a good chunk of other western comics purely because of the fact that Scholastic was the only company willing to touch it.
Another factor is that its obvious Britishisms come across as fantastical to American audiences. I mean, who in America even knows what a boarding school is? This is the same reason why Naruto did so well in America, even though most of the things that seem unique about its world are just fantastic versions of bog-standard ninja tropes.
[0] This is the same reason why Naruto arguably did better in America than in its native Japan.
There is also the phenomenon that serial failure Donald Duck is still a very popular character in several European countries, while we don't care about Mickey Mouse at all. Isn't it the other way around in the US?
Mickey always does good and always wins, that's deeply boring. Donald is flawed and relatable.
Interestingly growing up as an American, I watched Duck Tales which while tangentially related to Donald Duck it’s about his ultra rich uncle going on awesome adventures and just being so smart and awesome. Donald shows up every once in awhile but I don’t really remember much about him.
Duck Tales is basically an attempt at doing Carl Barks era adventure style minus Donald, but Scrooge being made more heroic/sympathetic (he's pretty much a lovable jerk at best in the old stories). I think Disney really wanted to tell the Donald stories Europe loved to Americans.
The persistence of Carl Barks and Don Rosa style stories here is surprising even to me. My son, born 2005, seems to know every single Barks story by heart - and I can't say I pushed it that hard.
This made me think about another contrast, Hayao Miyazaki. His characters ("heroes" or "villains"), usually are more morally complex and nuanced than the ones you would find in the works I typically see depicted in Hollywood. They are not just good or evil. You may not agree with their actions, but you understand the logic of it.
Ironically, Ghibli's adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea (written by Le Guin, an American author) flopped in part because Miyazaki made it much more about heroes versus villains than the original story.
This does not surprise me - and America is a big place, and I'm sure there are areas where Arthur would be seen in a similar light but I've worked in the US and the UK and this type of things reminds me of the phrase 'separated by a common language'. Slightly off topic perhaps but another area where I see a strong divide in sensibilities are the NewYorker cartoons - my wife (born in north America) thinks the are hilarious. I usually don't understand what's funny about them.
What a great response by Adams! I think the acceptance, and even the celebration of failure is present among the “maker” community in the USA to some extent, which has really drawn me to it.
I wonder if there’s the same outlook on failure among other creatives, would be interesting to compare the hobby communities opinions between the USA and UK.
That's a very interesting observation. You see it a lot in "tradesy" videos on YouTube, machinists* and welders and woodworkers and the like. The humor and self deprecation - far more apparent than in most other genres of American media - is really quite close to feeling British. As a transplanted Brit, it's pretty comforting stuff to watch.
*This Old Tony's channel is a particularly good illustration of this point, among many.
And the weird thing is, these are the people who actually make thing.
I think the success (not necessarily financialy, but in the public eye) of the American tech elite can be partly attributed how much more relatable these peole were than the previous ones.
For someone who was used to seeing these corporate types with their perfectly tailored suits who spoke in press releases, I think it was a refreshing change to see Mark Zuckerberg give interviews in his college hoodie in his typically awkward fashion.
I think this created a perception in the eyes of the public that these guys are different, and tech has coasted on this goodwill for quite a while.
Yep. I haven't found any metalworking channel that isn't. Woodworking channels can be a bit more... confident, "I know best so follow my hack if you want to keep your fingers," but many of the established, higher production channels like Lincoln St, Blacktail etc. are all just as deprecatory as the metal stuff.
Intersting. I used to be a professional woodworker, and can't stand the wood working channels. I love This Old Tony though.
I feel like doing a channel that brings in the reality of being a chippy. Tools that look like they were used outside in all weathers, having to make do with the tools you have with you. The crap timber that we have to deal with...I won't ever get around to it though.
A lot of the woodtubers are playing the influencer game for sponsors and views and their content devolves into product placement and reviews. The machinist channels are largely devoid of that with one main exception.
The exception that immediately sprung to my mind is "the Dude" from The Big Lebowski. Maybe other Coen brothers’ "heroes" also fit the bill, but I’m not so familiar with the rest of their œuvre.
I'm on board with the feelings of the mentioned classmate about nihilism, but to be honest, reading The Sirens of Titan from Vonnegut, which is considered a comic novel for some reason, has the same impression on me, and that is an all-American classic. Neither are bad books per se, and also I can understand the reasons also why Vonnegut had such a bleak view on affairs, as he had gone through a lot, and was in a hard situation at the time of writing, but it is not a comedy, and not funny.
Note: The interpretation on the difference between American and British view of affairs is almost Eastern-European (/me Hungarian), but you can set up that relation to Britain and Eastern Europe also, so this may be related geographic longitude :)
> In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk
I'm having rouble reconciling the first sentence with the second. At Dunkirk, the English displayed massive control over their own fate. Yes, I suppose it was a military defeat, but it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort. Perhaps that's the American in me speaking.
> it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort
The day was more saved by lots of French soldiers who fought heroically, quite a few of them to end up stranded and then utterly forgotten in the British collective memory. Had they not held the Germans for so long, there would not have been that many British to send across the channel. The standard British vision of Dunkirk is highly misleading.
100% seen it in business too. My UK colleagues often use self-deprecation while providing their business updates. But my US colleagues present their accomplishments directly with confidence.
It's not just deprecation, it's systemic understatement. It drives non-British people insane because everyone is talking in code.
And some of the meaning is hidden in intonation.
If someone says "Interesting..." that can mean "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard" or "Might be worth a look, but not a priority right now." Or maybe "That's very suspicious."
"That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
There is the famous case in the Korean War at the Battle of Imjin River where the British commander of the Gloucestershire regiment reported to an American General, 'Things are a bit sticky, sir'. The American General thought that meant a good thing, like they were holding the line, when in fact they were fighting a heroic last stand outnumbered 25:1!
> "That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
This is backwards from the conventional British use of "quite". In American English "quite" is a positive modifier, so that "quite good" is better than "good". In British English, historically, it's a negative modifier so that "quite good" means "not as good as good".
I certainly use the word "exciting" in ways that that might be non-standard, like for instance describing when everything has gone catastrophically wrong.
In business I find Americans oversell their achievements and I constantly have to decode "the absolute best", "knocked it out the park", "most amazing X" and figure out what has been redefined this month for that to be true. They use incredible contortions in language too to mislead and cover up and make themselves look good
Colleagues also managed to have the most amazing coffee or literally — literally — the best taco ever, every week. It's quite something!
We also get self deprecating in front of Americans because they're purposefully intimidating. Big characters, loud voices, huge military they're not afraid to use etc. UK is often bullied by the US Gov. It's deference too
> There was a wonderful book published, oh, about twenty years ago I think, by Stephen Pile called the Book of Heroic Failures. It was staggeringly huge bestseller in England and sank with heroic lack of trace in the U.S.
I have this! Thumbing through it randomly, it includes The Least Successful Pigeon Race, The Fastest Defeat in Chess, The Worst Canal Clearance, The Worst Mishap in a Stage Production, The Least Successful Naval Repairs, The Most Unsuccessful Attempt to Work Through a Lunch Hour ("At ten past one a cow fell through the roof"), and The Worst Hijacker:
'Take me to Detroit', he said.
'We are already going to Detroit', she replied.
'Oh...good,' he said, and sat down again.
Interesting. The other book this makes me think of is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I think Gaiman lives in America now, but he’d only recently moved as of when Neverwhere was published, and it’s a very British novel.
I love the world and plot of Neverwhere, but the protagonist, Richard Mayhew, always pissed me off because he’s such a loser. I never understood why Gaiman chose him to be in charge of the story.
Now I’m wondering if that’s my American sensibility.
Same but with The Graveyard Book. Discovered Gaiman's Scientology history and his continued support with 30K/year and submitting his daughters.Mixed feelings ever since.
I think it could just be that America is a much bigger market with much higher production values in TV and Film, so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media.
America has plenty of beloved sad sacks too. Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore (originally British but very popular in America and popularized by Disney) to name a few.
British media has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, but British people are also consuming other English language media.
And you also have plenty of British media where the hero is competent, triumphant, masterful, and autonomous with (frequent if not ubiquitous) standard happy endings. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who.
One big difference between the two cultures, is the British caste system.
It's important for us to Know Our Place. Me mum[0] was British, and I used to see this attitude, all the time.
Climbing is OK, but you need to do it properly. Americans are told "Don't take that shit! Force them to accept you!", while British are told "Tsk. Tsk. You can't do it that way! You need to join their club, before you try going to their level."
A "lagniappe" is a bonus, so the videos are just bonus tracks.
(if you want an exercise with them, however, attempt to figure out by which means the folks depicted in which video make a living:
a) by what they do "gur guvatf jr yvxr qba'g pbfg n ybg bs zbarl"
b) by what they own "ubzvrf ba ybpx sbe vafvqre genqvat"
c) by what they know "V chg gur BT va 5.0 TCN"
> US national fiction is "the US is a classless society"
I wouldn't say that.
It's just that we believe that there's no birthright caste. Mobility is possible between all classes. Sometimes, though, it's really difficult; just not impossible.
What makes the firepit so heartbreaking is that it’s almost an example of attempting upward mobility the correct way, since — as you note — in the upper echelons of the American class system, taste and style and behavior are what really stratify people. The problem is that the purchaser lacks the class background to understand the shibboleths and so gets led terribly astray. It’s like some poor fool trying to seem very educated and cultured by reading The New Yorker (if you want to impress, try the New York Review of Books, or better the London Review of Books).3 This information asymmetry is what defeats so many attempts at direct social climbing. You can’t make a frontal assault on the class above you. They will see you coming.
It's heartbreaking that hackers (and "technocrats", with the sole exception of the above masters of p-hacking??) have not really taken into their system that cultural mobility >>> economic mobility, given how much easier it is on paper..
(I'd say HN is a laudable attempt tho at uh CULTURAL REVOLUTION that parallels this admins' :)
I think someone else said that even the "Jobs-Powell dynasty" is going to take a couple generations to get close to the Drumpfts? (How about the Vance dynasty?)
Oh. I try to remember theres often an implicit downward in front of mobility
And of course you get just as much snobbery from your own class about wanting to climb.
It is possible for a working class person to become Middle class. But you have to be born to the Upper Classes. You can get some way by sending your Children to public school (The perverse name for the most exclusive private schools!). The kids might make it, but you will always be 'new money'.
One problem I have with this is that the word Hero has multiple meanings and I'm not sure we are talking of the same thing. Like which of these characters follow the classic Hero's Journey, which are just the leading characters in books, which are heroes to another character, which are labelled as a hero as pretext, which are anti-heros treated as heroes, etc. These are all very different things.
One of my favorite details about Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is the name he chose for his main character: Hiro Protagonist. It's not just a lovely bit of wordplay, it immediately makes you think about whether the protagonist is a "hero" or not.
This overloaded meaning of the word "hero" is especially pertinent when discussing the differences between the interpretation of "hero" in US culture and other cultures. Outside overt dictatorships, the US is the only country I know of where people are taught that anyone who serves or served in the military is automatically a "hero", regardless of whether they've actually done anything that would normally be considered heroic.
That's something a bit odd about Douglas Adams's reply. Arthur Dent isn't heroic, but he's the hapless protagonist. The protagonist doesn't have to be a hero. I'm not sure in what way he has "non-heroic heroism".
I feel like the divide is very evident of each countries version of the show "The Office". Probably a common trope at this point, but not even the dialogue, already the aesthetic tells you a lot about the perspective of the characters. While the UK office is grey, washed out and gloomy, the US office is warm, surprisingly full of life and outside shots are mostly sunny.
IIRC, Ricky Gervais advised the showrunners of the US adaptation to make Michael Scott more optimistic than his UK counterpart. Quite savvy on his part.
Someone mentioned Charlie Brown as a counter example, which lead to an insightful discussion.
Similarly I’d like to ask about the Simpson, which in the early 90s was seen as the worst role models on TV for being losers, but still incredibly popular. I guess Bart started out as a proper hero, but Homer being a loser and idiot pretty quickly became the mainstay theme of it all.
The article and the comments herein remind me a conversation a few years ago with an ex RAF pilot who had done a few exchanges with the USAF. Among other things, pilot/personnel evaluations in the two organizations were worlds apart. In the RAF, at least during his time, they were what I would expect, more or less factual: Bloggins is good at X, needs to improve Y, excels at P, shouldn't do Q at all.
Meanwhile, in the USAF, anything that could even be perceived as negative was a career killer, so ratings started at mildly superlative and went up from there: Bloggins is an X top gun, is very good at Y, walks on water doing P, and is good with Q.
YMMV, of course, those are my recollections of beery convos with a former Tornado jockey.
As far as I know, all branches of the US military write up a "fitness report" for each officer once a year. "Above Average" is a certain career killer.
But somebody who was a dean at (I think) Virginia Tech wrote that the British "His work is quite sound, actually" could be higher praise than the American "His work sets the standard we all aspire to."
Exactly! Another, semi-related difference between the cultures: When Alexander chooseEitherOrBothOf(provided instructions, gave orders) during the Sicilian campaign, American generals took them as orders and did them, sometimes to their detriment, while British generals took them as intent/direction, and asked questions.
Eventually, the allies realized they had very different command cultures and learned to work together. It may be that Normandy, et al, would have been far different if they hadn't have figured this out in Sicily.
I forget where, but someone was talking about a similar difference in American vs British comedy looking at The Office (the American one) and Parks and Rec. In both, the format tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> resolution, with the episodes almost always ending on an upbeat tone. In contrast, in a British show, it tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> kick them while they are down. Things can get worse, the characters can be unredeemed, and the fun is they are inept, unlucky, arseholes that don't get out of the situation with a happy ever after.
Americans like that humor as well (see Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, etc.) but it definitely is less prevalent.
I think the early episodes of Bob's Burgers leaned heavily this way as well - usually, at the end of the episode, the family was no better off and sometimes was worse off.
Americans don't celebrate the Alamo as a failure, they celebrate it as a catalyst for the Texas revolution afterwards. If that hadn't occurred Americans wouldn't even mention the Alamo in their history books.
Americans don't celebrate Custer's last stand. Indigenous people obviously do, and should, but white people don't consider him a hero.
Americans don't celebrate MacArthur getting chased out of the Philippines, they celebrate his declaration "I will return" and the Allied victory.
Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.
Look up Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Perhaps the biggest celebration of the losing side in history. Or the first Rocky movie.
> Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.
By that definition the by far most cited example on the British side, Dunkirk, doesn’t count because Britain won in the end.
No one celebrates someone who was defeated if the defeat wasn’t memorable. Usually that was because it was an inspiration to rally a cause that was later successful.
Plenty of white people celebrate Custer. Search for “Custer statue” or drive around out west and see how many paintings of Custer’s last stand you can spot hanging in bars.
On the contrary ... we LOVE the perennial underdog who stays in the fight. Like the British, once you start winning consistently you quickly earn our contempt.
Mirroring this divide, Denmark has a TV-show called "Klovn", which is basically a copy of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (down to the , except that while the main character in Curb is the cause of a lot of cringe moments, he always ends up getting his redemption and being the hero (at least to the viewer). In "Klovn", the main character ("Frank") causes a lot of cringe moments in the same way, but he is a tragicomic character and is almost always in the wrong.
I wonder if Wodehouse ties together both types of heroes in Bertie and Jeeves! Though it's been decades since I read a Wodehouse book, I'm just uncontrollably laughing now just thinking about it! My grandfather had pretty much the whole collection.
What brings me back to hacker news are these posts that ask questions yanked unexpectedly directly from my own soul, in words more articulate than I could manage. And then somehow manages to answer those questions. Thank you.
Although the Anglican Church is a hybrid of Reformation era Protestantism and of Catholicism, I think that the US tradition of Protestantism is generally (not always) more positive and less fatalistic.
I believe that the cultures of both nations are heavily derived from their religious traditions; even if you never practice religion in either nation you imbibe its effects from early childhood in the cultural values and norms that it influenced.
For example, one of the key aspects of Protestantism is evangelism, which would not make sense if people thought they could not be successful.
So I think a lot of American culture in particular is based on this tradition that encourages optimism and repeated trying even in the face of failure. Hence the way we select heroes.
The primordial form of American Protestantism is Calvinism. A bit hard to get more fatalistic than that. Calvinists see work as a duty before God, not something you engage in for benefits in this life or even the next—God's elect have already been chosen, arbitrarily, to receive mercy and salvation, and nothing you do or don't do can change this selection. They also favor frugality. Hard work and frugality can lead to abundance, and it was only after generations of applying this ethic that the kernel of the "American dream"—that with perseverance one can achieve success—began to take shape.
In some flavors, Protestantism is quite focused on self-scrutiny and skepticism about human nature, making people suspicious and even actively hostile towards supposed heroes.
Other flavors of Protestantism seem to have completely lost that, though. Evangelical Protestantism somehow inculcates a need for leaders to love and worship and an ability to completely suspend rational judgment about them. Their relationship to charismatic pastors and other leaders is a mystical, ecstatic experience that they have an unlimited appetite for. No matter how many times their leaders are shown to be flawed, and in many cases quite detestable and corrupt human beings, they eagerly look for the next leader to worship.
Two stereotypes that illustrate the extremes of this massive cultural difference in Protestantism are the rich WASPs of the northeast and the poor Southern Baptists of the deep South.
WASPs know that heroes are myths, and are unsurprised when the real people turn out to be real pieces of work. Southern Baptists kind of know this on some level -- I think they're actually a bit attracted when a man has a whiff of charlatanism about him, because it shows he knows what they want -- but when they choose their hero, they give themselves over to complete and sincere belief in him.
The "Losers" framing is a bit American, but tragedy has a long history, illustrating the difficulty of being subject to conflicting forces (typically moral, since societies push their interests as such) as a way for understanding to at least explain the pain, taking away the panic and sometimes the isolation. Suffering with some kind of style shows that one is still free, and thus independent of the forces (think Mark Twain humor). Willa Cather's work is more about realizing the big picture itself makes our personal suffering relatively small.
The British do have a difficult or perhaps just different relationship with heroes vs the US IMO. Some study has been made of this in the past. Even in comic books, where writers have traditionally been afforded more freedom (morally, philosophically, martially/violence, sexually even). Even in pure fantasy/sci-fi (take WH40K as an example). There are many fine US creators/studios, and excellent output, but I don't think the satirical and political elements could have come from there.
As divided as the US is right now, there's a bunch of things like this that every American seems to agree on without even realizing that it's not the same in most of the world.
For example, "work ethic". Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could write "worked very hard every day" on someone's tombstone, and almost every American seeing it, regardless of politics, will think "That was a good person". Someone to look up to.
Not "did good work", not "their work helped many people", definitely not "lived well". Even "was very productive" sounds too suspicious - being productive is great and all, but a productive person might be doing 10h worth of work in 5h and then call it a day, and that's just unacceptable, so that's not going on your tombstone either.
Just... work hard. The protestant ideal. Going on vacation and being too sick to work is literally the same thing, because it stops you from working hard.
There's a pretty big generational divide on this point, I think. I don't think many people under the age of 45 or so still see the "never took a sick day" thing as a laudatory statement.
(Also probably a regional divide too. I worry that I'm wrong about this when it comes to some places on the coasts, but I think it's accurate for most places in the country.)
Anecdotally (under 45; American), I agree that "never took a sick day" is indeed not a laudatory statement, but I also strongly believe that working hard is a prime virtue.
How many days off do you take per year? For context we get ~43 legally protected paid days of leave per year in Australia, sounds like the UK is about the same.
This might be a Polish thing but hero has to die. Does not matter if accomplishes a goal, just that hero put it all on the line against incredible odds.
This reminds me of the differences between the US version of The Office and the UK one. I’m actually fond of both but the boss character (as played by Ricky Gervais) in the UK version is absolutely reprehensible. And he’s the main focus of the show. The US version started that way but it just didn’t work at all. By the second season Steve Carrell’s character was a lovable doofus and the show was much better for it.
(I also think some line of thinking like this applies to politicians. British people almost always hate their politicians, even the ones they vote for. By comparison, in my experience, Americans really want to root for their candidate. Be that Obama or Trump, there’s a passion there you rarely see in the UK)
Reading this, I am immediately reminded of Al Bundy in Married with children, isn't he An American hero quite similar to Arthur Dent? Other than that I always thought of the Show King of Queens as similarly depressing, ... would be curious how that fits into the narrative of American heros
Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.
> Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his U.S.-American counterpart?
Pee-wee Herman, perhaps, at least in his original adult-comedy form?
Pee-wee was originally created because Paul Reubens couldn't do jokes in the traditional stand-up comedy sense. So he created a character who told jokes that always miss, but had the mentality of a child and thought his own material was hilarious.
> “Iran can't hit back over Soleimani's killing.¹ Who will we take out? Spider-man or SpongeBob SquarePants? They have no real heroes.”
But, fwiw, I don't think I agree with you. Mr bean is just as fictional as charlie brown, the medium or original intended audience doesn't seem very significant to me at all. Also george costanza is in there and I think 90s-2000s american sitcoms actually have a lot of the kind of character you have in mind.
¹: I don't agree with the quote either. As this article and comment section makes very clear, heroes and the definition of heroism are culturally embedded and not fully legible to outsiders, like probably every culture's heroes.
An “Americanism” I noticed in the show Heroes first but now I see everywhere is that every hero just wants to be normal. Claire Bennet — who’s only special ability is healing — whines about the burden of this for several seasons! Just shut up already! You have what everybody wants and there’s basically no downside! Just put away the costume and get an office job if you want to be a normie.
Conversely, any metahuman that fully maximises their extra abilities is almost invariably labelled as evil. Magneto is the obvious candidate here, but Wolverine is even better: same powers as Claire Bennet but he leans into them… so he’s got to be an anti-hero type.
I feel like these lines are getting increasingly blurred. Eg "The Recruit" is basically "what if Mr Bean (could say entire sentences and was young and handsome and) would get a junior legal gig at the CIA". It's very American, action packed, everybody is steaming hot and there's conspiracies behind every corner, yet it is also all about the humour in failure and the extreme escalation that results from the protagonist's screwups.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it.
He's not in the book or miniseries but the film adaptation gave him some arc iirc about doing something heroic on John Malkovich's planet to get the girl (Trillian). That all seems highly intentional based on the OP.
And once again with one sentence Adams is able to all but completely articulate an incredibly nuanced cultural topic:
> Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!
Some people can communicate on a truly different level.
Okay, literature aside, I've often discussed this with my SO. I feel like Americans are obsessed with heroes/villains. Every single issue that arises and is discussed online, is always viewed from the angle of "who do we support and/or who do we hate". During COVID it was Fauci and Dolly Parton, now it's Bovino and Good. I feel like Americans often have a need to put a single person on a pedestal as if they yearn for a symbol. A true cult of personality, for better or for worse.
There's more than one form of English humor. Last year I played through Thank Goodness You're Here!, which I think borrows from a lot of late-20th Century tv including Monty Python. It might be "nihlistic" in the sense that it's absurd but not depressing.
> You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Burroughs and Tarzan. Or even Fleming and James Bond.
Not to detract from your broader point, but Burroughs was an American writing a British character in Tarzan.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it, but from memory all the situations are so absurd that I never felt myself yelling at the hero to make a more logical, or “herioc” decision because there wasn’t really a lot of sense in that sort of thing
I think so. He's more storm-tossed survivor than Moses parting the waves, but he makes the best of the endless shit he's dumped into and preserves his sense of self throughout. I think he responds heroically, far more than he fixes anything external. For example he finds himself marooned on a strange planet and sets up a Perfectly Normal Beast sandwich shop, living very comfortably for a while.
For what is he fighting against? Nothing really, he's just adrift in the universe. There's no antagonist beyond existence itself and his own circumstances. He faces off against both quite effectively.
I think Forrest Gump's major quality is an indomitable spirit and an ability to overcome. (War Hero, runs across American, gets the girl)
I'm not so sure it applies to Arthur Dent, who tends to roll from one situation to the next. There is resolve, but it never really rises above.
I think there is similarity in the storytelling, that both characters find themselves in extreme situations, and somehow navigate them despite their own limitations.
Ja, storm tossed survivor /accidental stoic who do we have .. Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind.. Bit of a tossup innit?
From memory so long is a bit of a departure from the rest of the series and felt like adams was giving dent a vacation/term of being the deliberate stoic
Been years too but yes, he gets to live back on earth and shacks up with his girlfriend if I remember correctly. I remember even as a kid thinking it was tonally a bit weird but I need to re-read the entire series with adult eyes.
I was going to reply to jacquesm's comment above about Forrest - they both embody some stoic qualities - but you touched on that anyway.
> Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind
Yossarian! Outstanding. Bit of a cynic more than a stoic perhaps? You're right about Bilbo. Frodo I think not so much. And Samwise of course is pure American.
I call this take pseudo-intellectual indulgence form, so called, academic intelectuais.
Lord of the Rings is very much English Literature, and the biggest epic form the 20th century and has none of that. Ditto for Harry Poter (I’m not saying Harry Potter is on the same level of literary grandeur as LOTR, but it’s still an important epic series for newer generations).
You can always find examples for one side or the other of the argument. But, of course, only “social” scientists would be tick enough to claim some clear divide here as it suits their argument.
I don't think Adams is talking about how reluctant the hero is but about failure and misfortune.
Frodo definitely doesn't want to be there but he is far from being a failure. He saves Middle-earth, goes home to the Shire and saves that too, and is regarded as such an incredible mortal that he's invited to live in Valinor with the elves (this is a very big deal and I believe has only ever happened for Frodo and his buddies).
The same goes for Harry Potter. He's a loser at the beginning but after going to Hogwarts he's very much a hero that saves the day by being good at everything and exceptionally brave.
Also, I'd say there are plenty of reluctant heroes in American literature and film. Luke Skywalker hesitates to go save Leia in the first film, Spider-man straight up quits being Spider-man multiple times, John McClane just happened to be there when terrorists attack.
Frodo is determined and reasonably competent, but he ultimately fails his quest. In the end, Frodo is not strong enough to let the Ring go, but he instead claims it as his own. Middle-earth is only saved, because Frodo decided to spare Gollum earlier. Gollum proves treacherous yet again, fights for the Ring, wins, and falls to his doom.
When the hobbits return home, Merry and Pippin (and to lesser extent Sam) are the ones leading the liberation of Shire. Frodo has been traumatized by his experiences and no longer wants to see any violence, no matter the cause. But he cannot adjust to civilian life either. He is invited to live in Valinor. Not as much as an honor, but because his involvement with the One Ring has made him a relic of the past, like the elves. Middle-earth is no longer a place for him.
There’s absolutely no nihilism about Frodo. Not there isn’t any acceptance of pre determined fate when it comes to save Middle Heart.
LOTR is not empty, nor nihilist. It’s got many heroes, big and small, that fully embrace their part and fight against insurmountable odds with no expectation or any reward other than knowing they did the right thing.
The text is trying to tell us that English heroes are the exact opposite of that description.
I guess Frodo is the main hero. He is left the ring and is forced to leave his home. His shortcut through the old forest nearly kills the entire party until he's rescued by Tom Bombadil. He then nearly dies in the barrow until he's rescued again by Tom.
He doesn't know what to do at Bree until Strider helps him. He succumbs to the temptation to put on the ring at Weathertop and then becomes a burden to the rest until Rivendell.
He doesn't know how to get into Mordor until Gollum helps him. He gets stung by Shelob and captured by orcs and it's only because Sam took the ring that the whole mission isn't blown.
He runs out of strength climbing Mount Doom and again he's saved by Sam carrying him. When he gets to the Cracks of Doom he fails to destroy the ring and is saved by Gollum attacking him.
And even back in the Shire, he can't settle and ends up leaving.
He's just not a very heroic figure and more affected by circumstance, continually requiring rescue. Maybe a bit more like Arthur Dent than it first appears. :)
Indeed, I think what Frodo would like most is for it all to just end. Exactly as Adams said of Dent when discussing his motivations/desires with Hollywood producers.
I disagree, he is extremely courageous. The fact that he does it not out of some sense of innate heroism and adventuring desire makes him even greater. He's not there due to anything else other than is sense of right and wrong.
There are several heroes in LOTR:
- The more "heroic" archetype of Aragorn
- The flawed character of Boromir that atones himself for his sins with one last heroic stand
- The unwilling but ultimately acceptance of Frodo
- The more laidback silly courage of Merry and Piping
- The devoted courage of Sam
- Even Galdalf, when he faces that fiery beast (I don't remember the name right now) and Sauruman.
- And there are many side characters that also fit the role (like the Rohirim)
It is truly a tale full or heroes and several acts of great courage. Many of them might not have gotten into it willingly, but they surely took on the role seriously and honorably.
> LOTR is not empty, nor nihilist. It’s got many heroes, big and small, that fully embrace their part and fight against insurmountable odds with no expectation or any reward other than knowing they did the right thing.
And yet all these heroes only hold back the tide for so long before evil pervades everything and Beauty leaves this world. These heroes might save the day once, but decline is relentless.
The Lord of the Rings itself might be a bit optimistic because it’s about the protagonists. And even then, Frodo leaves irremediably scarred, having failed his task; Arwen rejects immortality; Eowyn turns away from conventional heroism, having been traumatised by her losses and the war; and Merry and Pippin come back as strangers in their own homeland. In the end, the world still keeps moving on, towards its inevitable decay.
As Tolkien said: “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”
You mention Frodo is exactly the kind of reluctant hero the text talks about. Really? The brotherhood of the ring starts exactly when nobody is expecting or asking Frodo to step up, and he, a little hobbit, shouts above a fighting crowd : “I will take the ring to Mordor!”.
It's hard distill entire countries like this (especially based on one guy's comments, told second hand). I understand Adams' quote in the context of Hollywood, but there's more to American culture than Hollywood. These are diverse nations & diversity is good.
Please don't post derogatory comments about nations or perpetuate national stereotypes or engage in political/ideological battle on HN. You've done this more than once. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I bumped into this when using the YC cofounder finder a few years ago.
In Australia we share the Poms' attitude to failure and success, and have refined it into "Tall Poppy Syndrome". In Australia, it is bad form to boast of your successes too much. You need to have some humility, some awareness of luck and privilege, give credit to others, and don't come over too egotistical, to succeed here.
Obviously in the USA the opposite is true; any failure must be explained away, talk about as much success as possible, and claim all the credit for yourself.
It resulted in a few very strange conversations. I thought most of the US potential co-founders I met were arrogant, boastful, dickheads [0]. I didn't trust that any of their claimed successes were real, I didn't believe they'd done half the things they said they'd done, and I didn't want to work with them. And I'm sure they thought I was a complete loser, incompetent and unable to succeed at anything I tried.
I occasionally hear US VCs and investors complaining about this when they visit Straya; that people here don't celebrate our success, and we're not ambitious enough. I see this as a culture gap that they're not navigating successfully.
As has been said about the US/British relationship; "two countries divided by a common language"
[0] apologies if you were one of them. I'm sure you're not really!
David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted.
In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!"
(Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out.
Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.
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