From: Gooch McCracken
Category: Amis
Date: 7/12/99
Time: 12:44:15 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
FROM *JANE'S WORLD* BY MARTIN AMIS:
Currently, it seems, Jane Austen is hotter than Quentin Tarantino. But before we try to establish what the Austen phenomenon is, let us first establish what it is not. About eighteen months ago, I went to see *Four Weddings and a Funeral* at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (standing at a bus stop in the rain, for example); and under normal circumstances I would have walked out after ten or fifteen minutes. But these weren't normal circumstances. Beside me sat Salman Rushdie. For various reasons---various security reasons---we had to stay. Thus the Ayatollah Khomeini had condemned me to sit through *Four Weddings and a Funeral*; and no Iranian torturer could have elicited a greater variety of winces and flinches, of pleadings and whimperings. One was obliged to submit, and absorb a few social lessons, in agonizing surroundings. It felt like a reversal of the Charles Addams cartoon: I sat there, thoroughly aghast, while everyone about me (save the author of *The Satanic Verses*) giggled and gurgled, hugging themselves with the deliciousness of it all. The only good bit was when you realized that the titular funeral was going to feature Simon Callow. I clenched my fist and said *yes*. At least *one* of them was going to die.
"Well", I said, when it was over, "that was bottomlessly horrible. Why is it so popular?"
"Because", said Salman, "the world has bad taste. Didn't you know that?"
Still, bad taste doesn't quite cover it. I can see that the upper classes might enjoy watching the upper classes portrayed with such whimsical fondness. But why should it appeal to four hundred berks from Hendon? In any post-war decade other than the present one, *Four Weddings* would have provoked nothing but incredulous disgust. A sixties audience would have wrecked the cinema. Yet now it seems that the old resentments have evaporated, and "the million", as Hamlet called them, feel free to root for the congenital millionaires. They can lapse into a forgetful toadyism, and abase themselves before their historical oppressors. Class is harmless, class is cute; class is even felt to be...*classy*. *Four Weddings* is of course deeply "sentimental" in the colloquial sense: it displays false and unworthy tenderness. But it is also sentimental in the literary sense: an exhausted form has been speciously revived. Houses, parties, house parties, amorous vicissitudes in opulent drawing rooms and landscaped gardens, do's and don'ts, "p"s and "q"s, old money and unlimited leisure. To get in the mood for *Four Weddings*, imagine you are the Reverend Collins on laughing gas. It is Jane Austen, in a vile new outfit.