As a non-American who loves American culture, I have always wondered about how American pop culture presents foreign countries to Americans. What are some of your early memories of seeing foreign countries depicted in America pop culture? Did these depictions make you want to travel or stay home? —Cobus
Tasha Robinson
For whatever reason, virtually all my early examples of other countries in the media were also about the past rather than the present; I read a lot of Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, both of which are almost guaranteed to make very young readers simultaneously fascinated with Britain (so many dialects, so much history in the land and the buildings), and convinced that even today, it’s an old, crazy place with a long history of apathy and cruelty, particularly toward the poor and disenfranchised. (As opposed to America, where we treat our paupers with dignity and honor, of course.) Between those authors and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and The Secret Garden and the Narnia books and Edith Nesbit and The Hundred And One Dalmatians and I don’t know what all else, I’m not sure I realized there was a contemporary, modern UK until I saw Trainspotting. (Now there’s a movie guaranteed to not encourage tourism.) Apart from being stuck in the past, I’m not sure I ever got a romanticized (or exaggeratedly evil) notion of a foreign country in childhood. Oh wait, except for that old Wendy’s ad (“Is next: dayware. Very nice!”) which depicted the USSR as a lightless, choiceless, grim place full of fat ladies in potato-sack dresses and grim party apparatchiks who pretended to like whatever they were told to like. It was fairly funny to recently watch the movie Mao’s Last Dancer and find out that kids in Mao-era schools were taught the same thing about America: that the sun only shines here an hour a day or so because capitalism is such a terrible way to run a country that we all live in grey twilight misery all the time.
Leonard Pierce
Like Tasha, most of the cultural signals I picked up about England were from reading English literature from the 19th century—Thomas Hardy, the Brontës, the Lake Poets, as well as Dickens and Kipling—so I was convinced that English history had more or less stopped around the end of World War II. Later in life, when I was old enough to know better, I had become so immersed in the low-life highbrow literature of James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, and George Bernard Shaw that I imagined the whole of Ireland consisted of endless green hills broken up by the occasional pub, where educated drunks yelled at each other late into the night. I was mildly surprised to learn that they have cell phones and computers and stuff. Slightly more forgivable, I think, just because all I knew about the country came from weird comic books, noise rock, cult films, and American television, was my belief that Japanese culture is completely fucking insane.
Scott Gordon
It’s easy to get into the habit of seeing other countries only in terms of their eccentric qualities, and that seems especially true of Australia. The folks down under are so busy documenting adorable marsupials, getting eaten by sharks and stung to death by other sea-born freaks of nature, writing copy for Outback Steakhouse menus, and keeping Paul Hogan in check that they’d hardly have time for building a normal civilization, right? I recently read Bill Bryson’s travel book In A Sunburned Country, and it nearly cured me of my conception of Australia as a wild cauldron of exotic deaths and puzzling idioms. Sure, Bryson spends a lot of time discussing the continent’s abundance of insanely venomous critters, and refers to its vast interior landscape as “murderous” at least a dozen times, but he also reveals an admirable, welcoming society that the rest of the world largely tends to ignore. Apart from that whole matter of the Aborigines (but who are Americans to criticize?) and Australia’s history as a dumping ground for criminals, Bryson generally implies that the country has a lot to offer the rest of the civilized world. In fact, he concludes that its merits are also the reasons people forget about it: “It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn’t need watching, and so we don’t.” What an enticing contrast: a society that’s congenial and as fully formed as any in the Western world, but also seems permanently remote.
Kyle Ryan
As a kid, I probably watched National Lampoon’s European Vacation a hundred times, and really, what better way to learn about Europe? Via the Griswolds, I learned that the British are unfailingly polite, the French are condescending assholes, the Germans can turn on you in a second, and the Italians are scheming conmen who will kidnap your wife. Well, all of that can happen if you’re the perpetually blundering Chevy Chase, whose gaffes and general cultural stupidity create all of their problems. The film certainly hit on some time-honored stereotypes, but the Griswolds were really the butt of the jokes. That said, when I found out I’d be hitting all of those countries (and others) on tour in 2001, my fantasy wasn’t all that different from Rusty’s: