Fictional Scotland in Film Drama and Literature

By Dougie Bicket

In 1996 moviegoers in America and across the world were enthralled by two romantic epics about Scotland that featured real historical characters in (supposedly) factual circumstances. I am of course referring to Braveheart and Rob Roy. The violent yet

uplifting lives of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, and Rob Roy MacGregor make wonderful tales, and the milieu in which their actions are played out -- the Highlands of Scotland -- provides a superb cinematic backdrop. There's plenty of color as well, both in the dress and the language, to keep audiences engaged. Yet, in spite of the strong factual basis for these narratives (Wallace, for example, truly is regarded as a national hero in Scotland) the lingering impression of these movies -- kilts, misty glens, haunting Celtic music, oppressive English soldiers -- remains somehow disjointed, ephemeral, seemingly mythical. It is almost as if the place where these events took place never really existed at all, and resides only vaguely in our collective imagination, like Atlantis or Valhalla. Perhaps, to most moviegoers and TV viewers, Brigadoon doesn't seem so far-fetched after all.

Still, this image of Highland and tartan history is one in which the Scottish nation still places a great deal of stock, at least in its literature and film. Even more confounding to foreign sensibilities, there are other, equally salient ways of viewing Scotland and the Scots which are prevalent in fiction about that small country. Such alternate discourses evoke images as contrary as Glasgow hard men and prim Edinburgh lawyers; Clyde shipbuilders and rural, very proper Presbyterian villagers; plucky Gaels and ruddy-cheeked, whisky-swilling Highlanders in ridiculous plaid dress. Yet, while all of these images seem to be recognizably 'Scottish,' they do little justice to everyday Scotland, even while they retain a very real role in preserving many Scots' sense of their own national identity.

The purpose of this section is to examine this conundrum more closely, and attempt to offer some explanations for this rather dissonant approach to Scottish identity and its representation in the media. Scotland's unique constitutional position offers some fascinating insights to issues of media representation of small nations in general, and nations bereft of direct political representation in particular. The experience of Scotland, a small country whose international literary and media profiles dwarf its physical size, might well be pertinent to other countries trying to define their cultural boundaries in relation to larger and more powerful neighbors.

I take the title of this essay from a phrase used by John Brown in his article "Love and Death in the Scottish Cinema" (1). In that paper, which addresses many of the underlying common traits and themes in Scottish film-making, he refers to Scotland as an entity which exists -- for the purposes of film-makers, writers, politicians, and ordinary people alike -- only in the "realm of the imagination." Quite why he would say such a thing is fundamental to this study of Scottish fictional themes, and how they have developed in literary and dramatic forms, through to present-day television and film.

The first thing to remember is that when talking about Scottish fictional themes, the problem of accurately addressing the issue of representation often seems intractable -- by 'representation' I mean the way Scots and Scotland are portrayed and the discourses used for their portrayal. This is not an essay on the rights, wrongs, and regressive tendencies of tartanry, kailyardism, and Clydesideism, but these discourses have to be recognized and acknowledged, since they still run through much of what we see produced by Scottish film-makers -- just as they did, and still do, in Scottish literature. They are the basis of such well-known stereotypes as the kilted buffoon, the drunken, hard-bitten Scotsman, and the canny, tight-fisted Scotsman on the make. So where do these supposedly pernicious discourses in Scottish drama -- whether in written or filmed form -- come from? Meech and Kilborn's encapsulated definitions, which serve as a useful introduction, make it quite clear that, even today, in the world of current Scottish filmed output,

[t]he central and abiding myths are those of the Kailyard (a nostalgic and overly sentimental parochialism) and of Tartanry (heavily romanticized depictions of heroic deeds of yesteryear against spectacular Highland backdrops). The other stereotype that has come to the fore in the last two decades has been that of the 'dark and dangerous city' (frequently Glasgow) where urban squalor, religious strife and social breakdown provide fast-moving thrillers or social realism pieces (e.g. The Big Man, 1990) (254).

The Glasgow-centered "dark and dangerous city" stereotype mentioned above corresponds to the term 'Clydesideism' I prefer to use (although I recognize the efforts of author Irvine Welsh and director Danny Boyle to transplant this discourse's elements to Edinburgh in the novel and filmed versions of Trainspotting). The Big Man, based on a book of the same name by William McIlvanney, is a more recent cinematic manifestation of a discourse that has run through Scottish drama for much of this century. Originally coined to refer to "the nostalgic idealisation of the working class in heavy industries now on the verge of extinction and the associated all-male culture in which class bitterness was combined with football" (Calder 230), the term has taken on even darker connotations in recent years, following the actual collapse of most of these heavy industries and the resulting unemployment and social dislocation. It is now regularly bolstered by such television stalwarts as the Clydeside-based cop drama Taggart and the comedy Rab C. Nesbitt. In some respects, Clydesideism has become so pervasive that it often seems that audiences would find it difficult to relate to drama situated in West-central Scotland in any other way. Of these three central discourses, tartanry is the oldest, the most pervasive, and probably the most easily identifiable to non-Scots -- last year's Rob Roy and Braveheart are of course only the latest manifestations of this still-powerful discourse. All three discourses are fairly modern manifestations of 'Scotland,' however, having grown out of the Victorian age or its early-20th century aftermath. Tartanry can find its literary roots quite clearly in the early-19th century novels of Sir Walter Scott. Works such as Waverley and The Heart of Midlothian heralded a new era of fascination with all things Highland among Americans and English alike, following a century of strenuous efforts by the British government to obliterate that very same culture. Indeed tartanry, a Victorian fad whose adherants included Queen Victoria herself, could be construed as a 19th-century affliction to Scottish culture whose effects have never completely worn off.

The kailyard ethic, although traced by some to Scott's The Heart of Midlothian (e.g., see Craig, Out of History: Creative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture 44-45), finds its strongest roots in a small group of Scottish authors of the later 19th century -- including J.M. Barrie, now best known for his Peter Pan -- whose foremost common cause was a powerful commitment to the fundamentalist Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Indeed, many of the genreÕs prime authors, although not Barrie himself, were ministers in that church. Kailyardism celebrated (and still celebrates) a cloying, sanitized, and sentimentalized version of Scottish working-class life, guaranteed to win popularity with audiences eager to avoid or ignore the harsh realities of that life in the late 19th century. Kailyard fiction "portrayed 'life as seen from the Free Kirk manse'; from this viewpoint Scottish characters were always quaint, the way Scots spoke was comical, the situations Scots found themselves in were coy" (Bold 42). The kailyard ethic still exists in some mass media forms today, most famously within the pages of the Sunday Post, Scotland's largest-selling Sunday newspaper.

Seemingly recurrent 'Scottish' themes, such as hopelessness, romanticism, and strong community values often seem to take their cue from one or more of these aforementioned 'big three' discourses, while at the same time running through and across them. John Caughie, a Scottish film historian, recognizes the perniciousness of such themes feeding into the underlying discourses of fictional Scotland, which in turn fix Scottish culture in a mythical past where, according to Craig, the country's true cultural assets are denied any contemporary form of expression (27).

This is important because, if we are to talk about distinctiveness, we have to be clear about who or what Scots and Scottishness are distinctive from. In this case, it seems that our benchmark in this test must be England. The giant partner in the union to which at present Scotland is bound, England's cultural hegemony remains as strong as ever, against which a separate Scottish identity must struggle for recognition. The importance of England as a rallying point for Scottish identity, however defined, cannot be underestimated. According to Meech and Kilborn, "Scottish collective identity defines itself, to a significant degree, by differences in attitudes, values and behavior between the Scots and the English" (246). Put more viscerally, "to be Scottish is, to some degree, to dislike or resent the English" (Dickson 61).

In the introduction to his book Modern Scottish Literature, Alan Bold points out that "although Scotland is not officially an independent state, Scottishness is a recognized state of mind: sometimes an independent state of mind, occasionally a theocratic state of mind, frequently a confused state of mind" (1). Despite this, and despite all the ambiguities created by the aforementioned discourses and their stereotypes, Bold is in no doubt about the importance of fiction drama, both in constructing and preserving Scotland's present-day sense of itself. This opinion is echoed by Caughie who, in approaching the topic from within the context of television, stated: "It is the fictional and dramatic representation of Scotland and Scottishness which seems to offer the points of identification for a Scottish identity" (Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television 56).

THIS special topic, Scottish Film and Literature, is abstracted from a paper presented at the International Communications Association conference, Philosophy of Communications Division, Jersusalem, Israel, July 1998, and due to be published in Journal of Communication Inquiry.

CT. Special topics