We should embrace the troubled histories and connotations of Hollywood films, not ignore them

Why are we denying our past? Why do we dream that our children will be better off by shielding them from it?

West End return: Ken Watanabe and Kelli O'Hara in 'The King and I' (Matthew Murphy)

We had three Betamax tapes when I was growing up, of films we recorded at Christmas. They were Grease, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The King and I. This was the early 1980s and even going down to the local newsagent and choosing one of the 11 Betamax films to hire for the night from the dusty plastic rotating stacker by the loo paper stock, was still just a dream.

These were the films I watched over and over again until I knew them by heart. I sang “Hello Young Lovers” in front of my bedroom mirror. My impersonation of Yul Brynner singing “A Puzzlement” made me the toast of my parent’s dinner parties. My neighbours’ daughter and I took the roles of Danny Zuko and Sandy Olsson from Grease and sang “You’re the one That I Want”. I was always Danny. Always. However, I have never once got a role I wanted in my life. (I never even got to be Mary in our school nativity play even though I was the only Middle Eastern virgin in my class).

With fresh eyes not everything in these films were politically correct. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a Christian allegory and supported the divine right to rule for monarchs. My socialist, atheist parents paid no heed. They were confident in the fact that ultimately, they were bringing us up, not CS Lewis.

Thankfully, their English back then wasn’t as fluent as it is now. They would perhaps have had an issue with my friends and I, at age seven, singing “Grease Lightening”. If you don’t know the song, the lads are fixing up an old car and singing about it. We sang “the chicks’ll cream for Greased Lightening” and “we’ll be getting lots of tit” and “she’s a real pussy wagon” as primary school children and all the while my mother was just pleased I was occupied while she got on with dinner.

The King and I is the most criticised for being politically incorrect when looked at with our 21st century sensibilities. An English school teacher, Anna Leonowens, sets off on a voyage to the Malay Peninsula to teach the children of the King of Siam (Thailand). Her character was raised in the colonies and the king sends for her because of a belief that Western education is best.

Anna struggles with the new culture she is in. All the Kings wives call her “sir” because “you scientific, not lowly like woman”.

“Do you all think that women are more lowly than men? Well I certainly do not.”

As a kid, I never sat there thinking “yes English lady, yes! Tell it like it is to these backwards Eastern folk” because I have never been so completely stupid as to not see nuances and complexities when they are spelled out to me or taken what I’ve seen in a film as a direct comment of how things actually are or should be.

Even as a child, what I saw in The King and I was a man and a woman who had deep respect for each other, struggling to find common ground amid the limitations of their vastly different cultures and outlooks. And fantastic songs and incredible costumes. Even though the king goes to beat a slave-girl for daring to be in love with another man, (quite a traumatic scene for a child to watch. Where were my parents!?). I wept every time at the end when he died because, like Anna, I saw a flawed, intelligent human breaking under the strain of trying desperately to understand what was beyond his gilded cage. How can we dismiss such a story?

“Because it glorifies white imperialism!” I hear some of you at the back shout. Britain had an empire. Deal with it. So did Persia but you don’t see me trashing Persepolis or making a Darius the Great dart board. No empire was built without bloodshed, without a sense of profound superiority over others. The residue of imperial attitude in art, whether we like it or not, is part of our history. Allow children to know what went on before.

The King and I was written in the 1950s. God forbid we watch it with our children now and talk with them about the history behind it so they actually learn about how cultures and attitudes have an endlessly shifting and changing life force. Why would we ever want to dismiss a work of art (and the March of the Siamese Children scene alone in The King and I is a beautiful work of art) because it doesn’t fit in with the values we hold today? Are our present morals and values so fragile that a trip to the theatre or looking at a statue or reading a book might undo them and send us rushing out to tell black people “you lot are marvellous dancers aren’t you?” and to ban Indians from golf clubs?

I grew up watching Little House on the Prairie. It gave me joy on a Saturday morning. Its author, Laura Ingalls Wilder has had her name removed from a major children’s award in America. The Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal is now the Children’s Literature Medal. Why? Because in her books, she used language that would be seen as racist today. Every single member of the board who made the decision to erase Ingalls from the consciousness of modern children would have had the same attitudes and used the same language she did if they had existed in the same time in history as her. Why are we denying our history? Why do we dream that our children will be better off by shielding them from it? In her lifetime, Ingells acknowledged and apologised for some of the language in her books. Isn’t that a wonderful thing for our children to know? To learn that we can move forward with the times and change own rhetoric?

Pulling a veil over our statues, books or theatre shows will not change what happened in the past. But keeping it reminds us of how far we have come and allows future generations to question and evaluate history. So for goodness sake do yourself a favour and have a good cry watching the King and I’s glorious return to the West End.