Most readers will likely be entirely unfamiliar with this movie, that’s my guess. Peter Sellers. Rosalie, my librarian friend, knew it well, and recommended it, but she’s a least two standard deviations to the left (towards literate — as in left brain), not anywhere near middle of the road.
Perhaps I’m simply projecting my own ignorance, as an MMU student with less than full fluency in British culture. Maybe that’s why I found this movie so educational, as it wasn’t afraid to poke fun at (expose, dissect) both tiers of psyche in that social Darwinist environment.
Management had split off against the Workers, white versus blue (as in collar) and education levels, as well as birthright land rights, made a huge difference in that respect. “Upper class” means a way of talking (the My Fair Lady insight) and projecting one’s insider (owner) status. Of course the whites and blues are all men and all Euro-white, with females (another caste) as trad-wives, moms and, if you’re lucky, rich aunts.
Of course there’s immense irony in the fact that the Peter Sellers character, representative of the working class, is unable to do dishes or darn his own socks. Minus the women’s caretaker role, the so-called workers are effectively ineffective.
The leading character, a well-acted buffoon, is from the educated insider class. He’s something of a dandy. I found his over-reactions hilarious vs-a-vs those ball-playing women but then the joke was on me cuz I didn’t get this was a nudist colony until the closing scene. Duh.
So our educated dandy is too supercilious to get his hands dirty and the job interviews all bomb. They convince him to go undercover, as working class (the rich aunt is skeptical), at a missile factory and this is where the international relations figure in.
The aristocratic Brits wanna sell weapons to their colonies in the Levant (a semi-country roiled by competing narratives) and make money the old fashioned way: by dreaming up illusionary scenes (like stage magicians) for the journos to report, while meanwhile they make out like bandits — cuz that’s what they are: next generation Venetian schemers as Bucky describes em (“Venetian” rhymes with “Phoenician” in Fuller’s quasi-Joycean vocabulary (long story)).
The worker Brits are trying to resist over-exploitation by organizing around their spanking new ideology, a mash of Marxism and maybe Systematic Ideology (another native source of narratives). Peter Sellers plays a worker-bee indoctrinator, keeping his little army in position to exert leverage by inspiring his brand of groupthink.
But the goofy upper class doofus bungs it up, by not catching on (his level of self awareness is close to zero). He inadvertently subverts the labor unions, weakening their collective bargaining position, to where only strikes (stopping working) seem to be a way back to equilibrium. These strikes effectively spoil the business dynamics and the aristocrats see their schemes go up in smoke (which is just as well, as the Levant is better off without the Brit missiles).
The whole plot becomes a wry comment on the hopelessness of the entire economy, which nevertheless makes movies like this one, and brings us Monty Python.
As I was saying to Rosalie later: “I know this culture”. I was actually being groomed as an aristocrat in 3rd grade, wearing a tie, learning how a table was set with the manners to go with.
I was a lone American (one of maybe two) in that school, not a boarding school. I’d go home to my American parents, but as someone increasingly Britified (I had the accent). Eventually they recognized the pathologies I was developing and they pulled me out, and sent me to a more American school.
I’d avoid any job-roles requiring a tie after that, as a rule of thumb, which in Britain might be a sign I was blue collar, a label I’ll accept (aesthetically, I prefer blue to white — tuxedos look infinitely stupid).
However out here in Cascadia we’re more an egalitarian meritocracy, an engineering culture, meaning status is not conveyed through dress (millionaires dress down, not up) but by one’s level of fluency in STEM languages.
In a nutshell: credibility as an actor, in a management capacity, requires knowing at least some computer science, like the workers do. That’s the gist of the so-called AI revolution: you need to talk like a geek to sound agentic.
But we’re talking about a science fiction future with respect to the 1950s. HG Wells might wanna take over the story at this point.
