The years after the second World War in Britain were spent forging a new social consensus, modifying the pre-war class relations. The battle brotherhood of the classes over time became a new national myth, although as statistics show, the trend of the working class becoming middle class predated the war and was not accelerated by it.1 Social change was accompanied by political crisis and the early sixties saw the loss of control over Nigeria, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Uganda, Zanzibar and Kenya. It is in this context that the film Zulu (1964) should be placed. The massive success of the film and its continuing popularity reveal the mechanisms governing nostalgia: the search for security in the past but also for a comment on current social and political change in a historical setting.2 Out of the two officers commanding at Rorke's Drift, Lt. John Chard symbolises the energy and ability of the working class and their deservedness in climbing the social ladder, while Lt. Gonville Bromwich illustrates the insecurities and passiveness of the aristocracy. This cannot be read as a comment on the reality of 1879, but rather 1964.
The film tells the story of a heroic defence, yet not of a great victory: the victory is a moral rather than tactical one, as was indeed the case. This is not unlike the wartime propaganda film In which we serve (1942) where a defeat is shown to further motivate. With the Empire on the wane, British society became aware of what was being lost and of the inevitability of decolonisation. Zulu provided the antidote: it paid homage to the passing glory and to the heroes that fell defending it without rallying support for defending the empire or being derogatory towards the peoples liberating themselves from under colonial rule: the faceless Germans in their Messerschmitt planes, gunning down survivors in the water are replaced by courageous Zulu warriors, an enemy worth acknowledging as the mighty force surrounding from the song 'Men of Harlech' sung in the film by the redcoats. Zulu became popular as it provided the viewers with a feeling of healthy and relatively apolitical nostalgia and can be seen as an example of the market providing a cultural product that allowed society to address a problem via experiencing a feeling and reaching a catharsis that allowed for a coming to terms with history while the government was still desperately trying to cope with the fallout of history in Africa.
The novel Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, originally published in the bleak reality of 1945 has been adapted for the screen twice, as a TV series in 1981 and a film in 2008. The two ecranisations, with a quater of a century between them may differ in quality, yet both can be interpreted as the manifestation of a grudging nostalgia. English aristocracy of the early XXth century is portrayed as decadent and superficially dignified, yet the luxurious interiors of 1920's Oxford and Brideshead manor reveal the true meaning of the film. The protagonist, a young middle class painter is shown to struggle with and ultimately fail to adapt to aristocratic society: the upper class milieu, with all its aesthetic quality is not only morally bankrupt but inaccessible and ultimately not a worthy destination for a talented individual. While the natural aspiration of the upper middle class is to ascend into aristocracy, the two adaptations advise against it, the middle class is to look back upon the aristocracy from their high-professional positions like Cpt. Charles Ryder stationed in Brideshead during the second world war when the manor house is requisitioned for the army- a clear marker of changing times.
The analysis of the hidden message of the film and its commentary on class aspirations is even more pertinent when set in context of a Thatcher government: moralising noblesse oblige did not conform to the new Tory ethic, which praised individual achievement. What Thatcher presented as Victorian Values was in fact Methodism, not based on philanthropy, but self-reliance3. The reception and subsequent usage of the film are very telling of both the mechanisms of nostalgia and official memory. The large success of the TV series in America can be attributed to the stirring of the nostalgia for a phantom Englishness, a longing for a past that never existed, yet its attractiveness and a need to define one's identity allows viewers to accept it as their own.4 American society, which had never experienced true aristocracy, saw the series as a tribute to a long gone manor house culture, whereas the English audience received a warning against conforming to the stilted and fake performance of the old ways. Both can be viewed as types of nostalgia, though one affirmative and the other critical.
In the year 1992 the Department of National heritage was formed in the UK and the appreciation for manor house culture was carefully cultivated, with BBC series like Pride and Prejudice (1995) and Sense and Sensibility (2008).5 The state delicately, yet successfully managed to stoke up the feeling of nostalgia among Brits and foreigners alike in order to boost tourism and promote British Culture, making it profitable enough for Joe Wright to create the two celebrations of British upper-class culture: Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007) both of which earned back their budget with approximately 100 million dollars to spare. We see the spontaneous cooperation of an official yet covert intention to create narrative that takes advantage of an organic, useful nostalgia with an industry that seeks to capitalise on nostalgia. Depending on one's vantage point: either a situation where nostalgia falls pray to the state and the film industry or the latter are motivated by and therefore ultimately serve nostalgia.
