Flicking through George W. Bush’s memoirs, one thing that jumped out was the way in which the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom chose to occupy their time together when they first met on W’s ranch in Texas. They spent the evening watching Meet the Parents.
Now you might think that’s fairly unusual. Couldn’t they have done something more useful with those few precious hours, such as discussing climate change? Some readers will conclude that this was typical of Bush and Blair, two fundamentally frivolous men.
In fact, this is absolutely normal. That’s what heads of state do when they get together — they watch movies. And when they’re not doing that, they talk about movies. How do I know this? Because Mrs Kofi Annan told me.
Rewind to December 1997. I was living in New York at the time and my friend Vijay Parmar invited me to tag along with him to Kofi Annan’s daughter’s birthday party. I had never met her, but the party was in the UN Secretary General’s official residence and this would be an opportunity to check it out. I thought, ‘What the hell. I might get a column out of it.’
Vijay and I turned up on the doorstep dressed in our party clothes and each clutching a bottle of plonk. We were slightly taken aback when the door was opened by what looked like a coach driver straight out of Walt Disney’s Cinderella. He took the bottles from us and, holding them at arm’s length, led us to a large, empty sitting room. What was going on?
Vijay and I had barely had enough time to exchange quizzical glances when Kofi himself strode into the room, followed by Nane, his beautiful Swedish wife.
‘May I get you both a glass of champagne?’ he asked in his unmistakable Ghanaian accent.
It turned out that the ‘birthday party’ was, in fact, a sit-down dinner for six, a number that included the Secretary General and his wife. When the misunderstanding was cleared up, I offered to leave immediately, but Kofi would have none of it. ‘You are here now,’ he said. ‘I insist you stay for dinner.’
I was seated next to Nane and the first question she asked was whether I’d seen Good Will Hunting, which had just been released. I expressed my surprise at this opening gambit — I wouldn’t have clocked the Annans as lovers of Hollywood schlock — and she explained that she and Kofi had identified movies as a ‘safe’ topic around the dinner table. ‘When you’ve got the Indian and Pakistani ambassadors coming to dinner, you can’t discuss politics or religion,’ she said.
I disputed this. I told her that movies might be an uncontroversial subject for her generation, but for people my age no topic was more likely to generate conflict. I described a typical editorial meeting at the Modern Review, the pop culture magazine I used to edit, at which graduates of the world’s finest universities would come to blows over whether Terminator 2 was better than The Terminator. Politics and religion we could tackle with glacial detachment, but discussing the life and work of Steven Spielberg was guaranteed to end in tears.
She seemed slightly puzzled by this so, by way of illustration, I launched into a passionate denunciation of Good Will Hunting. Written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, it was essentially an attempt to assuage the guilt they felt about leaving behind their blue-collar Boston roots. The central character of Will Hunting, with his ‘genius level’ IQ, is a proxy for the two Hollywood hunks, and the film’s story arc, in which Will reluctantly embraces his destiny and decides to use his extraordinary gifts to make money and get girls, is an allegory for their own meteoric rise. The whole film reeked of smug self-satisfaction, just what you’d expect from a couple of Hollywood stars.
By now my voice had risen by several octaves and the rest of the table had fallen into silence. I could see the Secretary General thinking, ‘Who is this maniac?’ I quickly explained that it might be better to steer the conversation away from movies.
Presumably, Meet the Parents didn’t have the same effect on Bush and Blair, but if Obama and Cameron ever get together at Camp David I recommend they spend the evening doing something less controversial than watch a Hollywood comedy, such as discussing the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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