WHY ALMOST ALL BRITISH STARS ARE HIGH CLASS
While in the USA there is no star who does not boast of having slept in a car, in the UK the story is quite different. We analyze the phenomenon.
In the first episode of Elite, three lower-class students receive a scholarship to one of the most exclusive institutes in the country. That country, it goes without saying, is Spain. But the nature of Elite as a global product (shot, produced and starring Spanish, but broadcast in 190 countries simultaneously) strips it of any cultural reference to be enjoyed anywhere on the planet. When a teacher describes the institute as "the place where the future leaders of the nation will come from," the Spanish viewer raises an eyebrow: what the hell is he talking about? In our collective imagination there is no such student path or it is not nearly as marked as in the United States or Great Britain.
Elite, much more inspired by Cruel Intentions (hypersexualized teenagers who behave like alcoholic divorcees) or Gossip Girl (glamorization of wealth) than in Leaving Class, it resorts to that purely Anglo-Saxon notion that only the upper classes have access to power . But even between the United States and Great Britain there is a social gap: the American dream dictates that no matter where you come from, with talent and hard work you can reach the top; the British dream, by contrast, is not even a concept as such.
Half of Hollywood actors are proud to tell how they slept in a car before making it into the movies. The British actors are silent. In a recent editorial for The Guardian, Dany Leigh denounced that "the exclusion of poor young people from British cinema is a national shame." The data is irrefutable: 7% of Britons receive private education, but 44% of British film professionals come from this select group.
Eddie Redmayne (Prince William's classmate at Eton), Tom Hiddleston, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, Emilia Clarke, Daniel Day-Lewis, Emily Blunt, Robert Pattinson, Kate Beckinsale, or Henry Cavill attended private school. Tom Hardy, the personification of the British street tough guy, too. Kit Harrington is closer in lineage to King Charles II than Queen Elizabeth II herself. The exceptions (Colin Firth, Daniel Craig) are in the minority. James McAvoy, who worked at a bakery to pay for his acting classes, calls this imbalance "terrifying." “If only a small part of society creates all art, our culture will not represent the whole world but that small part. This is not only unfair, but also detrimental to society ”, reflects the actor.
Claire Foy, whose signing to play Elizabeth II in The Crown is subversive given her working-class origins, spoke about this matter for Vanity Fair during her recent visit to the San Sebastian festival. “I grew up seeing stories of people with a lot of money. For whatever reason, British literature is interested in people with money or people who acquire it and improve their social position. When I was little, nobody in my family considered dedicating themselves to art, because for that you need time and space. And if you're working non-stop, you don't have that time or that space, so it ends up being the wealthy people who have the time and space to sit down and become contemplative, ”Foy explained.
Andy Warhol said that what made America great was its consumer culture: You saw a Coca-Cola ad on television and you knew that you, Liz Taylor, and the president drank it. This homogeneity (regardless of the money you have, you have access to the same culture as everyone else) is born precisely from the Declaration of Independence, with which the United States tried to flee the exclusive culture of its founding empire.
Traditionally, British culture has been in the hands of upper-class people who tell stories of other upper-class people. To narrate tales of poverty there were already the French and Russian fatalists. Therefore, the fictional products that the United Kingdom exports inherit this ideology and the first thing that comes to mind when we think of British fiction is the cinema of little cups: the Ivory / Merchant dramas (Remains of the day, Return to Howard's End) or Downton Abbey (with which the public enjoyed Lady Violet phrases such as "what is a weekend?"). Lower-class stories are relegated to vulgar daily television (Eastenders, Coronation Street) and never make it beyond British borders. And even isolated working-class phenomena such as Trainspotting, Full Monty or Billy Elliot are interpreted and directed, for the most part, by artists from private education.
The most popular British directors (Christopher Nolan, Guy Ritchie, Sam Mendes, Tom Hooper, Matthew Vaughn) also come from wealthy families, to the point that even in an action blockbuster like Kingsman its director Matthew Vaughn demonstrated a rampant classism in proposing a pygmalion that declared the protagonist's working-class ways unacceptable and refined him to make him the highest and best expression of British man: one of ancestry.
This inequality in access to culture has been denounced by both actresses such as Julie Walters (“I managed to dedicate myself to acting thanks to a scholarship, today that is impossible; the working class is not represented and, when it happens, its characters are interpreted by upper-class actors ”) or Judi Dench (“ I receive a multitude of letters asking for my help, the training of actors is very expensive ”), who makes donations to public acting schools without which aspiring actors without resources would not even be seen by casting directors.
Opposition culture officer Chris Bryant also regretted this in 2015. “I love that Eddie Redmayne wins awards, but we can't have a culture dominated by the Redmaynes and James Blunts. Where are the Albert Finneys and the Glenda Jacksons? They emerged from a meritocratic system in which the scriptwriters also wrote stories for them. We cannot produce only series like Downton Abbey and think that we have complied only because servants come out, ”he explained. Bryant also questioned the price of National Theater tickets and the role of the BBC in reconciling this class machinery and, precisely, this cultural elitism was one of the guns that his government brought down through the approval of Brexit. Politicians who were in favor of leaving the European Union pointed out that coincidentally all the cultural figures who opposed Brexit were millionaires from the cradle.
Some actors, however, have rebelled against this complaint. Diana Rigg (the heroine of the series The Avengers and Lady Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones) complains that in the 60s, with the revolution of the working class, the situation was exactly the opposite (art was dominated by the street) and nobody was complaining. Benedict Cumberbatch, who, as his name suggests, has attended the best schools in the country, says he is fed up with only being given posh papers and being treated as "a complaining and rich bastard with a private education" because " one of the best things about being an actor is the meritocracy ”of the sector.
But statistics play against this supposed meritocracy. 42% of British Bafta winners and 67% of British Oscar winners come from that elite who, remember, only represent 7% of the total British population. The British subgenre of the "comedy about people without resources who nevertheless manage to be happy" does not pretend to represent the working class in that it works as a fable of improvement so that the public feels good. However, outside the cameras social classes in the United Kingdom are less and less understood, because only one has a voice to tell their story. And elitism in film and television is only a showy representation of a classism rooted in the nation: that privileged 7% hold 71% of judicial positions, 50% of politics, 45% of civil service and 43 % of journalism.
As Carole Cadwalladr argued, “actors, culture, identity, representation, and politics are inextricably linked. The actors that appear on our screens, the dramas that are produced, the way we view ourselves, the politicians that we vote, and our ability to empathize with people from other parts of our culture are a whole. Or is it a coincidence that the highest links in our cinema and our politics continue to be dominated by Eton students? Perhaps that is why, when 52% of British people voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, the other 48% did not even understand what had happened.
