In The Loop and Evolving Cultural Identity

Jon Phillips

December 2, 2009

Migration and Visual Art

'In The Loop and Evolving Cultural Identity'

In The Loop (1), a 2009 British film by Scottish writer and director Armando Iannucci (a kind-of-big-screen adaptation of his BBC show The Thick of It(2)), deals generally with a rapidly snowballing series of events by egotistical and bickering (described by one character in the film as “sweary”) politicians and their underlings, which lead to an unnecessary and wasteful war. The proceedings brings British Minister for International Development Simon Foster and a number of aides (referred to in a brief aside in the film as “Team Simon”) to Washington DC to discuss the possibility of war. The notion of identity, personal, national, cultural, or otherwise, is a concept explored extensively in the film, and Iannucci seems to be promoting the idea that in a world like the one we live in today, the concept of identity, when one is displaced to another location, is one imposed on one by those living there, rather than the other way around.

A similar idea was expressed in Guillermo Gomez-Pena's 2003 article on the Mexican border On the other side of the Mexican mirror. (3) In it, he speaks about the strong emotional reactions from the audience of his first work of performance art in the United States giving him the“painful birth in a new country... of my new identity, 'the Chicano,'” His cultural and personal identity upon migration is not defined by a combining of cultures within himself, but rather dropped upon him, rather jarringly, by the inhabitants of the new nation- a rather different viewpoint of himself than what he had maintained in Mexico and as a fresh immigrant.

Much in the same way, In the Loop treats the visiting Britons in a similar manner. Talking to the cast, Iannucci told them to “Imagine you’re going out to L.A. for the first time.” (4) Inconsequential minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) becomes highly important once he comes to the American political scene, his identity to those around him being transformed into a high-profile, polarizing figure (interestingly enough, he becomes the mascot for both pro-war and anti-war sides, due to a number of contradictory and meaningless words he “freestyled” during media interviews earlier on in the film). Curse spewing Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, reprising his role from The Thick of It) could be said to practically run things in his role as spin doctor and “enforcer” in Britain, but once he comes to America he assumes quite another role, much to his chagrin. As Lt. Gen. Miller (James Gandolofini) puts it in the film, “You know, turkey, you might be a scary little poodle-fucker back there in London, but here you're nothing.”

Personal identity aside, cultural identity also plays an important role as people move from one nation to another (“hopping the pond”, as it's so often put). The inherent absurdity in attempting to keep a strong sense of a firm cultural identity is pointed out in a number of places within the film- the Britons furiously rebuking the Americans for referring to them as 'English', a rave filled with visiting foreign emissaries and White House staffers alike, but summed up most completely in the following exchange between Chris Addison and Anna Chumlsky's characters...

“Let's just agree that what happens in Washington... stays in Washington.”

“See, that doesn't really work, because I live here.”

While researching for the film, Iannucci recruited the talents of political blogger Spencer Ackerman, an American (5). Ackerman's job was to introduce Iannucci to various people he knew in government, to get a feel for the mood of mid-level American bureaucrats. As Ackerman discusses in the article, he was already a “British comedy nerd”, and well aware of who Iannucci was- diluting and erasing the lines of concrete cultural identity (American, British) and facilitating Iannucci's tour of American politics.

Identities as Multimedia Spectacle , a 2001 article by Nestor Garcio Canclini, states that

If anthropology—the social science that has studied the formation of

identities more than any other—encounters difficulties today in dealing

with transnationalization and globalization, it is because of the habit

of considering the members of a society as belonging to one homogenous

culture and, for that reason, having one distinctive and

coherent identity. (6)

Clearly, In The Loop not only demonstrates this concept within the film itself, but also in the behind-the-scenes collaboration between Americans, Britons, and more which occurred to create it as such a media artifact.

1.In The Loop, dir. Armando Iannucci, Peter Capaldi.

2009, IFC Films, BBC Films.

2.The Thick of It, dir. Armando Iannucci, Peter Capaldi.

2006-2009, BBC Two.

3. Gomez-Pena, Guillermo. “On the Other Side of the Mexican Mirror.” Ethno-Techno: Writings on performance, activism, and pedagogy. Ed. Elaine Pena. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. 5-18

4. http://www.avclub.com/articles/armando-iannucci,30736/ ,2009

5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jul/23/armando-iannucci-in-the-loop-washington ,2009

6. Canclini, Nestor Garcia. “Identities as Multimedia Spectacle.” Consumer: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Trans. George Yudice. Cultural Studies of the Americas, Vol. 6. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. 89-96