America's sentimental love affair with the Irish appears to have gone slightly insane. In the new disaster film Titanic, the true-blue Yankee hero, Leonardo DiCaprio, leans out over the bow and fixes the horizon with a steely glint, whereupon a burst of jaunty Oirish fiddle pops up behind him - and he's not even Irish. Hollywood has now reached a point where non-Irish characters have to establish some sort of Irishness, subliminal or otherwise, in order to register decency in the minds of a US audience.
The heroine, a spoilt American rich girl, goes through a highly symbolic rite of passage when she heads below decks to dance an Irish jig and swig back a pint of Guinness in the third-class compartment. She casts off the shackles of snobbery, pretension and priggishness merely by donning a pair of metaphorical green underpants. The English crew, meanwhile, are ugly, boneheaded cowards to a man, dedicated to drowning the third-class passengers, virtually all of whom are - by an amazing coincidence - Irish.
I saw Titanic in America, where - in the middle of a graphically convincing reconstruction of the sinking - the audience cheered and laughed as a handsome Irishman from below decks planted his fist on the snout of a hog-faced English crew member. Thus was one of the most terrible and moving disasters of this century reduced to a straightforward cowboys-and-indians stereotype.
Of course we've all known for ages that baddies, aliens and vampires in Hollywood movies have to come from Surrey. It's one of the unwritten laws of film, like the rule stipulating that during an intergalactic dogfight the good guy with the beard has to get killed first. And if the baddie isn't actually English, then an eyebrow-swivelling Englishman is shipped in to play a villain from a nearby European country: Jeremy Irons and Alan Rickman in the Die Hard series, for instance, or Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List (Schindler himself being played by Liam Neeson, an Irishman, naturally).
Even the current James Bond, Pierce Brosnan, is an Irishman. He sounds like Roger Moore when he's interviewed in Britain, but in the US, if you shut your eyes, you could be listening to Frank Carson. Bond's latest adversary, Jonathan Pryce, is the usual RSC panto villain.
But to engage the full sympathy of an American audience the hero needs to be more than just Irish: he must hail from the IRA itself. Take Michael Collins, a candidate for the worst film ever made. The warm-hearted Collins (portrayed by Liam Neeson) wanders about and snogs Julia Roberts to the familiar sound of that jaunty Irish fiddle, whereas his English adversary (Charles Dance, with his special sinister bent nose) is lit from below like Bela Lugosi and accompanied throughout by lugubrious cellos. Even Eamon de Valera, the "wicked" Irishman who ultimately disposes of Our Mike, isn't really Irish, as indicated by Alan Rickman's strangled blarney.
The other day I saw a trailer for another recent Hollywood film, The Jackal, a thriller in which the world's finest marines and Swat teams are deemed incapable of stopping the global threat posed by an international super-villain. The only man good enough to go after him (cue Richard Gere brandishing unconvincing Skibbereen accent) is an IRA terrorist with a heart of gold. Oh yeah, right. And what does he intend to do when he catches up with his target - stand next to him on the bus and blow himself to pieces because he can't tell the difference between a.m. and p.m. on his alarm clock timing device?
Why stop there? Look out for a remake of Around The World In 80 Days, in which Phileas Fogg fails to complete the trip on time, whereupon a warm-hearted top IRA terrorist (played by Brad Pitt) is brought in to pull off the task. The evil Fogg (Geoffrey Palmer) tries to stop him, before falling off a skyscraper during a motorbike chase and being impaled on a huge spike. Or a new version of Genevieve in which the evil old car breaks down at a transport cafe on the A21 and the London to Brighton car rally is won by a loveable top IRA terrorist (Anjelica Huston) in an unmarked van. Or the remake of The Dambusters, in which the RAF, in league with Hitler, fails to destroy the Ruhr dams, whereupon a compassionate IRA terrorist (Mickey Rourke) carries out the task, despite the frantic efforts of the evil Guy Gibson (Frank Thornton) to stop him.
I had a university friend called Phil who was walking along a Knightsbridge street, having just bought a Christmas present for his father at Harrods, when the car he was strolling past exploded. He had to be identified by his dental records. I'd like to propose that a new category be instituted at the Oscars, for the most commercially successful Irish performance by a stupid American actor who thinks Gerry Adams is a leprechaun. Instead of the gold statuette, they'd get Phil's teeth, painted luminous green and mounted on a plinth, to grin at them at night and serenade them with bursts of jaunty fiddle, reminding them not to lose touch with that all-important cute, homespun feel.