Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
10 - ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
Summary
Within the fast-expanding field of romantic comedy (or ‘romcom’) studies, the analysis of the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US has mostly centred on Working Title productions of the nineties and early noughties, with a particular focus on films associated with the writer–director Richard Curtis, such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999) and Love Actually (2003). Annabel Honess Roe, for example, notes that by constructing Britishness in opposition to Americanness, Curtis's films offer a homogenised version of British national identity that ‘neglect[s] the cultural and ethnic diversity of contemporary Britain’ (Honess Roe 2009: 90). Andrew Higson attributes this restricted representation to the process of transnational film distribution, during which ‘ “national cultures” are often reduced down to brand images’ (Higson 2011: 93). This converges with the work of Richard Maltby, whose analysis of the reception of Hollywood films abroad emphasises the inevitable distortion of media messages when consumed by non-domestic audiences. He thus suggests that the version of America consumed by British audiences of Hollywood films is necessarily less complex than that of domestic audiences (Maltby and Stokes 2004: 2–3). Like Maltby’s, my focus here is the distribution and consumption of film across the Atlantic and, more specifically, the reception of Hollywood cinema in Britain. Where this chapter differs from other contributions in this collection is in its methodology, as I approach the transatlantic romance between Britain and the US via audience studies. Drawing on original empirical audience data (see Guilluy 2017), I want to question the ‘specialness’ of this relationship by focusing on British audiences’ responses to a genre closely associated with Hollywood: the romantic comedy.
The material upon which this chapter is drawn comes from a set of original interviews conducted with romcom viewers in Britain, France and Germany between 2013 and 2015. The respondents were recruited both online and through word of mouth, with a view to investigating the impact of national identity on cinematic consumption and taste. This chapter draws primarily on interviews with UK audiences, conducted in London, Manchester and Kent. The majority of the ninety participants were students and young professionals in their twenties to early thirties. Most were also white and educated to degree level, and two-thirds of participants identified as women.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Love Across the AtlanticUS-UK Romance in Popular Culture, pp. 176 - 193Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020