The History Boys and Britain’s path to national suicide

If you don’t believe that the British elites despise their country, their culture, their history, and secretly or openly wish to have done with it all, see The History Boys. Not that I’m recommending it. It is an unpleasant experience, among other things the most explicit attempt by a movie to normalize homosexuality that I’ve seen. And the homosexuality it normalizes is far from the “nice,” “wholesome” homosexuality—presented as a model of moral uprightness and psychological health in comparison with the desperate neuroses of the heterosexual main characters—that has been the standard, pro-gay fare of Hollywood over the last decade or so. It is a homosexuality that is by turns depressing and nasty, even evil. Yet the movie approves of all of it, as do all the characters. Even the ostensible subject of the film—how eight boys in an undistinguished high school in northern England receive special preparation for their entrance exams to Oxford and Cambridge—is imbued with a homosexualist ethos, turning intellectual life and the experience of learning into either a hollow cynical game or a vampy theatrical exercise. As I said, by the time the movie ended, the realization hit me that the British elites that created a movie like this, that praised and recommended a movie like this, seek with cold and deliberate malice the destruction of their country.

To spare you the trouble of sitting through the film yourself, here, as an exclusive for VFR, are literary critic Carol Iannone’s thoughts on it.

I won’t say I wasn’t warned. Extremely discerning people whom I greatly respect told me The History Boys was not really about history, and only about boys in the homosexual connection. But it seemed at least to touch on ideas about school and teaching, and at one time I liked the work of Alan Bennett, or thought I did. Also, David Denby at The New Yorker, who once wrote a book about his love of the Great Books program at Columbia University, strongly praised it. Still, it was a shock just how perverse it was after all. Under the guise of a friendly play about boys from modest backgrounds aspiring to Oxford, the audience was coaxed into smiling and chuckling about such things as a respected teacher who amiably grabs the genitals of his male students as they ride behind him on his motorcycle (and, this, with the frenzy over Mark Foley barely over), and, in the culminating scene of the movie, a student who seduces a teacher to meet him for a rendezvous where the teacher would blankety blank blank, that is, administer oral sex on him, expressed in the vernacular.

And the teaching? The play is supposed to be contrasting two styles of teaching, but both styles are inane. The old teacher (the one who routinely grabs his students by the genitals, a habit he excuses as “passing on the tradition”), can’t be bothered to prepare a real class, but has the boys sing, act out scenes from movies, pretend they’re in a French bordello to practice the language, and identify wisps of poetry here and there. This is supposed to contrast with (and perhaps it is marginally less noxious) than the over-focused-for-success method of the young teacher who advises the students to mouth empty revisionist views of history to get attention on the Oxford entrance exams, and manages to suggest that Oxford, the great venerable institution of Lewis and Tolkien, is really just a burnt out pile of pretty stones and clever fakery. The true method in his madness, though, is the modern English desire to destroy any faith in their country at any time in its history. That’s also the purpose of Foyle’s War, a dark British TV series set during World War II, designed to inform us that even during England’s finest hour, the Island was full of ratty people who deserved to lose. No wonder the Muslims think they are entitled to remake Britain.

And the play went on tour throughout Britain. So that audiences in all the provinces are going to hear the surly student tell his teacher that by next week the teacher will be blankety blank blank, that is, administering oral sex on him, expressed in the vernacular. This isn’t even presented as a particularly pleasant prospect, more like something a timid pedophile might be threatened with by a prison bully. But audiences are expected to smile at it. The only thing you can say is, Plato was right. Art does corrupt.

Not that we don’t have the same kind of thing here. Sex and the City, for example. OK, I’ll admit, the clothes were fabulous and there were some funny and poignant moments, but overall it was horrendously vulgar. And again, it was the mixture: one moment a reasonably amusing satire on contemporary male-female relations, and the next, something appallingly perverse and disgusting, like when Sarah Jessica Parker in that bubbly little girl voice would say these filthy things in the voice-over narrative, something like—“and as for Charlotte, well, she learned just how much she liked blankety blank,” that is, administering oral sex to a man, stated in the vernacular. Almost like a ten-year-old telling us about things to do with genitals. And then when Sarah Jessica Parker started to be routinely featured in the media as New York City’s little sweetheart and the series was referred to as “beloved,” as if they were Shirley Temple and Lassie, respectively, yet another line had been crossed into an explicitly nihilist culture.

The weird reverence accorded Sex and the City was similar to the reverence accorded to Madonna when she decides to play the proper married lady after her years of turning a couple of mini-generations of American ‘tweens into tramps. One moment she’s the mature English matron and mother writing children’s books, the next moment she’s an unhinged celebrity tongue-kissing women at televised awards ceremonies. It’s the mixture of the two modes that is more offensive than one or the other. Something that draws you in with its seeming normalcy and then shoves perversity in your face.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 02, 2006 11:03 AM | Comment | Send