Begorrah!

In regard to the "argument" that America has no culture so tends to look where their forefathers hailed from, this makes no sense. All societies look to their forefathers for knowledge about their culture. One definition of "Culture" is: "the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another."

Every generation imparts their culture to their children. America happens to be full of immigrants who combine the culture of their country of origin and what their parents taught them with where they live now. All people look to their forefathers, not just Americans, and it is not because we have no culture, it is because that is what culture is - the sum total of ways of living... transmitted from one generation to another.

I haven't heard of Americans who "reject the notion of culture as it is applied to themselves", but I do understand how we might reject the perception that you have of our culture. As if Paris Hilton, McDonalds, or a Hersheys Bar could be an accurate depiction of American culture.

How many American tourists have you met? I can't imagine that you met more than one person making a statement about being part Irish because of a dog a neighbor owns. If you have met more than one American tourist saying such "rubbish", then it might just be that you have really bad luck or you're somehow directing the conversation.

I think the next time you meet an American tourist you should just let them know what you really think of them so they don't mistakenly come away from the experience not knowing you were pretentious and judgmental.

top o the mornin to ya!

lol

come on, it was a good film. who cares wether accents were spot on or not. ive heard english actors do crappy u.s accents , u.s actors doing crappy english or irish accents, and irish actors doing crap u.s accents. who cares? if the movies good enough you wont notice.

Yes, of course the script has many hackneyed elements typical of Hollywood.

Interestingly, the scenes in Ireland are quite brief and you didn't explain what was inaccurate. Those scenes were intended to make a heavy-handed point about class differences and that's as far as I took them. As far as the bulk of the film, its depiction of U.S. immigrants at the time is not outrageously off the mark, of course with the usual Hollywood fictionalizations and contrivances added on - as with 90% of "historical" films (this includes off-kilter accents).

As far as American culture - the problem here is exactly opposite to what you describe. Americans are completely immersed in American culture and that's all they know. Thanks to a completely consumerist society, an embarrassingly poor educational system (at least through high school), and geographical distance from most other countries, the majority of Americans are blithely unaware of (and uninterested in) most any culture outside American culture. You must realize most Americans don't even have an accurate picture of Mexico, much less Ireland.

I think what you're discussing is more an issue of cultural identity. Without centuries of history, there is almost no cultural identity here. Yet this is the only nation in the world (for the most part) where immigrant groups were able to stick together in large numbers once they emigrated from their homeland. To the extent that, for example, I have relatives who've lived here for decades and still don't speak English.

Thus it's no surprise that these immigrant groups are almost the only source of cultural identity here. Americans who've lived here for generations are just "grey" in comparison - I'm not sure how to describe it but I've got the immigrant side on one family, the multiple generations of Americans on the other. There's a certain bland lack of identity to the American side.

Perhaps it's just simpler to say that for a cultural identity, you have to look to the past, and there's hardly any past here - 200 years is not enough. We naturally look to our forebears, and thus here, people usually do not say "I'm Irish" - but they will say "my background is Irish" - even if many generations removed. In a sense, that's actually the American cultural identity.


Stuck in purgatory.

I understand what you're saying but you need to calm down. I'm sure Dublin is a modern, vibrant city, but two things. This film is never set on Dublin but on some rural area in Ireland. Not only that but in 1892 what do you expect? At that time there's still a lot of poverty illiteracy, etc, not just in Ireland but in many other places. So what did you expect they would portray the characters as, some doctor? some professor? It's 1892.