Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
15 - Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- The Contributors
- Introduction: Still Crazy After All These Years? The ‘Special Relationship’ in Popular Culture
- Part One ‘[Not] Just a Girl, Standing in Front of a Boy . . . ’: Feminism, Women and Transatlantic Romance
- 1 Atlantic Liners, It Girls and Old Europe in Elinor Glyn’s Romantic Adventures
- 2 ‘World Turned Upside Down’: The Role of Revolutions in Maya Rodale’s Regency-set Romances
- 3 Bridget Jones’s Special Relationship: No Filth, Please, We’re Brexiteers
- 4 Sharon Horgan, Postfeminism and the Transatlantic Psycho-politics of ‘Woemantic’ Comedy
- Part Two Love Beyond Borders: The Global City, Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Space
- 5 ‘British People Are Awful’: Gentrification, Queerness and Race in the US–UK Romances of Looking and You’re the Worst
- 6 Catastrophe: Transatlantic Love in East London
- 7 On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011)
- 8 The Mise-en-scène of Romance and Transatlantic Desire: Genre, Space and Place in Nancy Meyers’s The Parent Trap and Holiday
- Part Three Two Lovers Divided by a Common Language: ‘Britishness’, ‘Americanness’ and Identity
- 9 ‘American, a Slut and Out of Your League’: Working Title’s Equivocal Relationship with Americanness
- 10 ‘It’s the American Dream’: British Audiences and the Contemporary Hollywood Romcom
- 11 Business-like Lords and Gentlemanly Businessmen: The Romance Hero in Lisa Kleypas’s Wallflowers Series
- 12 Imagine: The Beatles, John Lennon and Love Across Borders
- Part Four Political Coupledom: Flirting with the Special Relationship
- 13 ‘Political Soulmates’: The ‘Special Relationship’ of Reagan and Thatcher and the Powerful Chemistry of Celebrity Coupledom
- 14 ‘I Will Be with You, Whatever’: Bush and Blair’s Baghdadi Bromance
- 15 Holding Hands as the Ship Sinks: Trump and May’s Special Relationship
- 16 ‘Prince Harry has gone over to the dark side’: Race, Royalty and US–UK Romance in Brexit Britain
- Index
Summary
Introduction – A Titanic Disaster
In August 2018, while talks between the UK and the European Union (EU) to negotiate the terms of the UK's departure from the EU were dominating news cycles, a short film called Brexit: A Titanic Disaster (2017) went viral across social media platforms. Created by Comedy Central writer Josh Pappenheim, it mocked the prominent ‘Leaver’ and erstwhile British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson's comment that ‘Brexit means Brexit and we are going to make a Titanic success of it’ (Johnson 2016); it also tapped into growing fears that the negotiations were going so badly that Britain was drifting towards the iceberg of a ‘No Deal’ Brexit in March 2019. Featuring scenes from James Cameron's iconic romantic blockbuster Titanic (1997), with the faces of high-profile politicians doctored into the footage, the film was watched more than ten million times in a matter of days (Townsend 2018). It begins with a foghorn bellowing and former Prime Minister David Cameron warning that ‘there is no going back from this’. Then, as water starts to overwhelm the ocean-liner, his successor, Theresa May, urges the people to ‘come together and seize the day’. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, playing a slow lament on a violin, says ‘the British people have made their decision’, and an image of the pound sterling falls off the ship and crashes into the water. Cabin lights then illuminate the split vote, 48 per cent against 52 per cent, on opposite sides of the ship as it breaks down the middle and sinks into the ocean.
While the film is clearly partisan and aimed at the sympathies of ‘Remainers’, it is also quite witty. And though its message is unsubtle, its ending intrigues. Where Titanic's tragedy of the young couple being torn apart offers a terrible finality (albeit assuaged by Celine Dion's soaring, if trite, insistence that their love ‘will go on’), the ending of Brexit: A Titanic Disaster is more ambiguous, uncertain and creepy. While May is left floating on the water, huddled, freezing and waiting to be rescued, the narrative ends by cutting to the scene in the original film where Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) is painting the nude Rose (Kate Winslet).
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- Love Across the AtlanticUS-UK Romance in Popular Culture, pp. 258 - 274Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020