The War Room

MISTER BEAN'S HOLIDAY: AMERICAN IMPERIALISM REVISTED

I love movies. I went to film school. But I do not always have time to review films. So today, I will let a guest critic present a review of Mr. Bean's Holiday.

My guest critic is Andre Bedouin. He has a PHD in Film and Anthropological studies. In his spare time, Andre is dedicated to making the world a better place through academia and tolerance.

Take it away Andre!

Mr. Bean's Holiday, (Universal Pictures) serves as a graphic example of British Colonization and by association, a propagandistic film that creates one dimensional support for American Imperialism.

Mr. Bean, a displaced British occupier on vacation in France during the war in Iraq, clearly represents the colonizing by the British of culture it sees as subservient to it. When he creates havoc at Cannes, it is a symbol of colonial Britain (and by association Imperialist America) taking over the culture and appropriating it to his/its own end. The pacified, neutered patrons even look on at the befuddled Bean/Bush/Blair in 'shock and awe'. Bean's ambivalence to the destruction he wreaks is as though he is saying to France/Iraq "Bring it on".

That the viewer is asked to enjoy these 'antics', makes one complacent in maintaining the anti-Gramscian cultural hegemony of the state in a capitalist society. This is offensive to the post-modern viewer.

The film is also homophobic and homoerotic at the same time. Mr. Bean, with his long lean legs and lithe dancers body, is clearly intended as a latent homosexual. Time and again he is either awkward around womyn or does not acknowledge them at all. His legs are his phallic symbol. Much like the penis or -cockette- they represent however, he is all erection with no release.

This subtext makes it a prime discourse on sexual repression in post-colonial Western Judeo-Christian society. Taking Foucault into account, Mr. Bean represents the dichotomy of the hypersexualized homoerotic fantasy. He is also the repressed 'other' that will not allow itself expression in a homophobic patriarchal Western culture. Had this film been made in a sexually free matriarchal culture such as Syria, Iran or pre-colonized Iraq, this text would be more open and nurtured.

Hence, Mr. Bean's Holiday resurrects a typical jingoistic expression of the dead, white man's culture. A patriarchal merging of both a capitalist meta-structure and the dichotomy of the 'other' that it represses through its own inherent contradictions.

1/2 star for the oppressive return of Mr. Bean. The half star is because I could drink at the screening. It is rated G but should be an R so as to not influence children or the aged.

Thanks, again Andre!

posted by Nicol DuMoulin @ 10:01 AM