The Culture Blog For Connoisseurs Of Everything

Rita Byrne Tull explains her test for revealing the cultural divide between America and Britain…

First I must make it clear that I am not now nor have I ever been an imbiber of Coca Cola. So no statements made herein should be taken as either an endorsement or a critique of the aforementioned product. Phew! Now I’ve got the legal disclaimer out of the way I can proceed to say whatever I want about the noxious beverage that is responsible for the epidemics of obesity and diabetes in the United States, not to mention the plague of cultural imperialism tainting the globe with each shipment of the bright red aluminum cans filled with fizzing sugary liquid. But I digress. My subject today is how I stumbled upon a kind of Rorschach test for the cultural rift between Britain and America.

I first saw the film Dr. Strangelove in 1967 at the University of Sussex. It was the Age of Aquarius. Anti-war and anti-American sentiments were at fever pitch. There had just been an incident on campus over a guest lecture by the American Ambassador. Protestors threw red paint, which could be seen splashed on the door of the Porter’s Lodge for days afterward. Marxist theory was the intellectual fashion that underlay all discourse, tripping easily from the tongues of upper middle-class students who had never experienced a day of work in their lives. Dr. Strangelove hit all the right notes for this crowd of fashionably scruffy pampered socialists. American generals are portrayed as crazy buffoons, the American President as an inept cipher, and everyday Americans as trigger-happy cowboys ready and willing to bomb the earth into total annihilation in order to defeat their archenemy, Communism. Peter Sellers is in top form in a trio of roles including the title character, a mad genius German scientist whose crippled arm has a habit of snapping into the Nazi salute of its own volition.

The Sussex student audience was loudly appreciative of the film, laughing and whooping at all the delicious key moments. But there was one scene that absolutely brought the house down, eliciting by far the loudest, longest roar of laughter. Peter Sellers, in his role as the visiting RAF Major, is desperately trying to phone the President to give him the code to recall the rogue plane before it drops its bombs on the USSR. The only working phone is a pay phone, but he doesn’t have enough change to complete the call. He turns to an American soldier and orders him to shoot the nearby Coca Cola machine to get the coins out. Incredulous, the American responds “But that’s private property!” This line seemed to sum up all the perceived craziness of Americans, so mindlessly devoted to the sanctity of property that they couldn’t violate it even to save the entire world from annihilation! The laughter burst out with such force you could barely hear the machine gun fire as the American reluctantly obeyed the order, warning the Major that he would have to answer to the Coca Cola Company.

A few years later I saw the film again, this time in Berkeley, California. The last clouds of tear gas had only recently wafted away from People’s Park, centre of the Free Speech movement. The demographics of the audience were very similar to the Sussex audience, UC Berkeley students and counter-culture hippies. You could probably not have found a more radical group anywhere in America. Certainly the anti-war theme and satire of the military were greeted with enthusiastic laughter. I looked forward with anticipation to my favorite scene. The magic words were spoken, “But that’s private property,” and I joined in what I expected to be a gale of laughter. Utter silence in the theater, apart from my lonely, now embarrassingly too loud laugh. I choked it back and looked around in amazement. Why did they not find it funny, even my friends? I couldn’t wait to discuss this with them afterwards. It turned out the scene just didn’t make much of an impression on them at all and they were surprised that it was such a big deal for me. They found my account of the reaction in England weird. I realized they were so steeped in American culture they just couldn’t see it or question it as I, an outsider, could. It was a crucial moment in my understanding of how many unthinking assumptions we all make in our separate cultural worlds. In the decades since I’ve often thought of the Dr. Strangelove test as an essential measure of our cultural divide.

Then a strange thing happened. This weekend I went to the library and checked the film out on DVD. I wanted to watch Dr. Strangelove again to remind myself of the context of the scene before I wrote about it. There they were again, the bumbling British Major and the private property worshiping American. But this time I didn’t laugh. I found it unbearably sad. In the years since this was funny private property in America has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. In a religious nation dominated by Christians Jesus’s words “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Matthew 19:21) have been warped into the Prosperity Gospel, a belief that God rewards the faithful with the riches of this world. And companies, Coca Cola among them, have garnered even more unbridled power with the recent Supreme Court decision granting corporations the same rights as persons. The ascent of money would seem to be complete.

But there are signs of a dawning realization that things have gone too far. Could the Occupy Wall Street protests spreading across the country mark the ascent of a new Age of American Enlightenment? This child of the Age of Aquarius certainly hopes so. I look forward to a time when the film that ends with a mushroom cloud is just something to laugh at again.

Rita Byrne Tull is an ex-pat librarian who lives in Maryland.