"The Special Relationship": The strange case of American women and English men with Monica Heisey

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1:02Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Hi, everyone. This week's episode of the podcast is about the relationship between American women and English men in the context of rom-coms and romantic fiction. And it's interesting that we're talking so much about, like, the American gaze this week, because I'm actually going to be in America really, really soon. on the 6th of September I am going to be at the Library of National Congress doing a speaking event with Ransom Riggs at the National Book Festival it's going to be at 9 30 in the morning I'm going to have a signing afterwards it's going to be great I can't wait I'll put a link to the tickets in the show notes please please dump up tickets I have never been to Washington before and I'm coming at an extremely strange time in the city's history so I would love to be made feel welcome by any sentimental garbage fans in the vicinity then the very next day on the 7th of September I have an event I think I'm more excited for this event than anything I've ever done in the past and I like include you know selling out theatres in that um so I am going to be at the Strand bookstore in New York City the very next day Sunday September 7th and I'm going to be interviewed by someone extremely special special full stop but like also extremely special to me um you guys might know my friend Natasha Hodgson she is one of the writers and performers Tony nominated performers of Operation Mincemeat and um she's obviously in New York at the moment because she's a Broadway star she's also done episodes of this podcast in the past including our Wicked episode which many of you loved um but uh Tash is also the audiobook narrator for my latest book Skip Shock which I know I've spoken about on this podcast before it is the most incredible audiobook I have ever definitely heard of my own work which is a steep steep you know standard um I can't believe I not only I have a I have a Tony nominated performer doing my audiobook and she's also one of my oldest friends and she is going to be interviewing me at the strand one of the most like important and famous and storied bookstores in the world maybe anyway I'm pretty sure tickets are going to set up pretty quickly and I would love to see some kind of metal garbage fans there so please buy your tickets tell your friends who live in New York I can't wait to see them all right on with the show

3:42Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Hello and welcome to Sentimental Garbage, the podcast where we haven't even noticed it's raining. My name is Carolyn O'Donoghue and I'm the actress who has never even heard of the royal family before I met my husband, Prince Harry. And she doesn't know our fancy manners, but her heart's in the right place. It's Monica Heisey. Hi. I love when we do these kinds of episodes that are kind of about a trope or a thing or a vibe. We're not necessarily pinning it to any one, you know, movie or TV show. is just a thing that we all know exists. And that thing today is American girls and English men.

4:16Monica Heisey: Specifically in romantic comedy film. I guess in, actually, I guess in culture more broadly.

4:20Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Right, because there's like, there's a lot of it about right now. There is a lot of it about. I mean, your credentials as per this episode, Monica, is first that you wanted to come over. And second, that you are one of the writers and should I possibly say stars?

4:37Monica Heisey: Yeah, big star, two line star as they're calling it.

4:41Sentimental Garbage Hosts: It's a tour de force of the TV show Too Much, the Lena Dunham show starring Meg Stolter, which is about an American girl coming over here to London, meeting an English guy, falling in love. And Monica, if anyone wants to place her visibly, is the girl who makes Meg Stolter feel terrible about herself at a dinner party.

5:02Monica Heisey: And I do want on record that I know that Lacanian is pronounced Lacanian and not Lacanian. And we said it the other way for a joke. Okay.

5:11Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Have you been having a lot of correspondence about it?

5:13Monica Heisey: No, I've just been really self-conscious about it, even though I know that everyone knows what acting is and that it's not just a documentary you made about how you're bad at a dinner party. But because I'm not used to being in stuff and it was just like a funny thing that Lena suggested, I am shy.

5:31Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Okay, so I realize that you're acting performance in Too Much, which is once again a tour de force thank you so much for continuing to call it that um okay it's not a documentary but your writing on it does come from a place of some experience

5:47Monica Heisey: would you like to tell the class the the so we wrote the show um several years before it came out it was um in 2023 i guess i just um yeah because i just come back anyway we wrote the show in 2023 and um then Alina and I worked on one of the scripts together for episode eight um throughout that year and then she carried on and made the show what it is I mean I was such a small part of it really you co-wrote the wedding episode right yeah really fun it was so fun I had the best time working on it but truly was such a small part that I almost forgot about what the characters' names were. And then I started dating a sort of chain-smoking British artist called Felix and then saw Lena for lunch and we were catching up.

6:36Monica Heisey: And I told her that and she was like, excuse me. So she does think that she manifested my current relationship. And I'm not convinced that that's not the case. It's really possible. The timeline is sketchy at best. Something's absolutely up as well because I also wrote a rom-com called smothered about a nice British man called Tom and right before that came out started dating a nice British man called Tom

7:02Sentimental Garbage Hosts: so something's definitely going on something's going on but like you do you find that within work a lot like I often find in novels like I'll get to the end of the novel and I'll suddenly have a wave of inspiration about how it should end and then I'll realize the pieces have all been there from the start or in a script but like you're doing that with your whole damn life

7:21Monica Heisey: I think a lot of the time you get to the end of a work and you realize that it's the culmination of like at least months, often years of thinking and mulling the same things over and over. And certainly too much is so heavily, heavily rooted in this question of like, what is it about living in the UK and potentially loving in the UK that has such a draw on the North American imagination? there's this like really confronting montage at the very opening where Meg is sort of like running through fields and in like um in like Jane Austen garb and like yeah imagining the different versions of herself that she could be um in London and uh I had never really thought about it when I came over here but like what did I think I was doing I came over to do a master's degree in Shakespearean literature and lived like around London Bridge.

8:19Monica Heisey: I lived like around the corner from Bridget Jones's apartment.

8:21Sentimental Garbage Hosts: You were doing that Bridget Jones Tower Bridge walk every day, were you?

8:26Monica Heisey: I was certainly walking by it, back to my nasty student halls in the shadow of the shard. But yeah, I think those sort of Anglophile fantasies are really prevalent in North America and as a result in our culture.

8:44Sentimental Garbage Hosts: I'm so excited to talk more about it because I think it's like, because on the one hand, you could be like, yeah, no shit. Like, you know, there's two extremely dominant cultures that both speak English. And there's a lot of like, you know, trade of like ideas, values and items, whatever, going back like hundreds of years. Of course, there's going to be a lot of like pairings on screen of Americans. and English people but like the more you look into it the more you kind of realize I guess with kind of any trope romantically so like if you're speaking specifically about romance fiction or rom-coms or whatever everything tends to be a photocopy of a photocopy because we're always looking at what works best and like you know for it's why we keep on using Shakespeare plots why we keep on using Jane Austen plots why we keep on just using these things over and over again but what we kind of don't realize that when we're copying things is those things were originally created in response to a political climate that was happening at the time or a social climate that was happening at time so like what on the surface seems like very simplistic being like yeah two cultures that speak english and they have a lot of communication so they end up together actually has a really deep history that i think we're gonna go through today I think it's really fascinating as well because you think, oh, sure, like it's an obvious possibility.

10:06Monica Heisey: Why wouldn't they get together? But actually like the intense prevalence of it, particularly in the romantic genre, is really noticeable. And also it's almost always American women and British men. There's something very gendered about it. It's not, it very rarely goes the other way. Mm-hmm.

10:24Sentimental Garbage Hosts: And there are reasons for that that I found on my research. I'm just so happy to do research for things sometimes.

10:34Monica Heisey: Ugh, let me get my homework folder out. It's my dream come true. I just want, do you guys have a, do you have the word duotang here?

10:42Sentimental Garbage Hosts: The fuck is that?

10:43Monica Heisey: Okay. It's like a, I don't know if it's a Canadian or North American word for like a kind of folder. but if you're an organized little loser as some of us may have been as children do a tang very important part of your life

10:57Sentimental Garbage Hosts: okay this is very much that moment in Clueless where she goes up at the top of the class and does her presentation on Haiti you know it's that we've done some research we've gone into the historicalness of it

11:08Monica Heisey: it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty

11:17Sentimental Garbage Hosts: before we get into the historical stuff I kind of want to pause for a second and be like okay we obviously just spoke about too much which is you know anytime Lena has a huge as a show out it's a huge moment right like it's and and I I like living in that world yeah it's one of the few things about my world right now that actually I would not change that when Lena Dunham does stuff if we all sort of listen but like this you know i think that we're kind of at the apex of another like rule batania moment kind of thing and i know that because a guardian journalist reached out

11:52Monica Heisey: to get me to comment on oh no i have seen you know you got nothing coming on when you're commenting on someone else's article but right there's there's too much there's um the fact

12:03Sentimental Garbage Hosts: that there is not one but two major austin adaptations happening at the moment one of which is being done by a friend of the pod. Shout out to our girl. Shout out to our girl who's doing Pride and Prejudice. And the other one, I'm very proud of this, is also a friend of the pod. Oh my God. Diana Reed, who came on this podcast to talk about Caroline Calloway, is writing The New Testament Sensibility. Incredible. But on top of that, I know you've bailed out an event just like that, like a fucking pilot whose engine is on fire.

12:37Sentimental Garbage Hosts: like a normal person you have stopped watching and just like that that's right but carrie bradshaw's latest uh paramore is an english man i've heard he's an english novelist

12:49Monica Heisey: he's an english biographer oh and she's writing a novel and he's looking at it yeah and i have to

12:54Sentimental Garbage Hosts: say like that show is made for people who committed sins in a previous life yes has to pay for them in this one and for some reason I committed some terrible sins previous life and that means I have to watch every episode sometimes twice twice I don't know I just have to you're very sick

13:15Sentimental Garbage Hosts: but something I found really interesting about like you know Carrie Bradshaw has fucked everybody but for some reason this is like her first major like English paramour right and this guy the one thing this season is doing well is that it's positioning this guy as being like you know she's had boyfriends before but she's always just trying to be cute and crazy and sexy and try to impress them she's had artist boyfriends before but she's always felt like she had to kowtow to their like their art basically you know jack burger it was all about his insecurities the russian was all about his light installations or whatever that this show makes a point of really saying this guy this guy Duncan the biographer and she says it with her own human mouth so this is the first person I've ever been able to sort of go toe to toe with and be an intellectual equal

14:04Monica Heisey: with we're supposed to believe that she's lived 50 something years yeah and in the intervening time but this is the whole problem with and just like that nothing happened to any of these women in between the finale, or I guess, God forbid, the trip to Dubai. And then the day they all woke up on the first episode of End Just Like That to meet in that brightly lit restaurant and not eat French fries or whatever happened. That seems so crazy to me that Carrie wouldn't have, anyway, fine, whatever. They're adults, they can make their own choices.

14:41Sentimental Garbage Hosts: SJP sells it. You really do believe it. And you're like, wow, yeah, you have never been yourself with a man until this biographer. I think this is rude because I actually think she was herself with Big.

14:52Monica Heisey: And herself as a freak. Yeah, they're awful together and that's why they work. Do you remember how hard she laughed when he put a whoopee cushion on her stool? They loved it. That was so funny. They loved it. Those people were meant to be together. I understand that he's canceled in real life. And so they had to kill him and dump his ashes out of a little bejeweled purse into the Seine. But for God's sake, they were equals in a lot of ways.

15:22Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know about this. I'm going to send you the scene, but I want, I do. So if we're, if we're thinking about all of this as like a trope and like the trope having different meanings through different period of time, like what do we think the english man and the american girl means right now what part of our brain is it servicing like what part of like american insecurity is it servicing like what what what what's it doing right now i think there's a little bit of sort of special girl

15:56Monica Heisey: syndrome to having a british boyfriend if you look at all the british pop stars that have or the american pop stars that have british boyfriends i think there's something suki waterhouse i guess is she american she's british her name is suki waterhouse she's gotta be british right yeah that is a very notting hill name um but like olivia rodrigo huge american pop star has a british boyfriend who's her boyfriend some guy louis something okay um but she's always she was like on stage at glass slumbery being like i love pints why not good for her sure good for her

16:31Sentimental Garbage Hosts: famously she has a song called so american um which is like about her british boyfriend finding

16:38Monica Heisey: her funny and calling telling her that she's so american cute i think i actually love olivia rodrigo well i think okay here's my like sort of galaxy brain take on the whole thing america and england as countries there's so much between them that it's like very easy to participate then in in sort of personal myth making when you are going out across the cultures you right like olivia rodrigo doesn't have to just be a pop star she can be like i'm so american she can get involved in the american myth you know taylor swift famously there's like a ton of songs like miss americana and the heartbreak prince um yeah taylor is is one of the

17:20Sentimental Garbage Hosts: ranniest offenders of like an english boyfriend will make me feel better she really likes to get

17:25Monica Heisey: into the idea of being someone's American dream it's very not like it because these people are like large cultural outputs of their country it makes a lot of sense to be able to be with someone where you can kind of define yourself against it and be like I'm the girl of his American dreams he's this like messed up sort of like he's not just a jerk he's British and it's also with all

17:48Sentimental Garbage Hosts: of Taylor's songs about her various British boyfriends most of it is about seeing yourself through the lens of an imagined lens of how they think that they're seeing you

18:01Monica Heisey: the kind of person whose boyfriend is British yeah I do love to show English men when I'm single and dating I do love to show them the song London Boy I love London I love to show it to them I love to tell them that that's exactly how it feels to go out with them they don't like that but it's really interesting they all respond in sort of unique ways tells you a lot about it man people need to lighten the fuck up about London Boy

18:28Sentimental Garbage Hosts: it is fun that queen be fun

18:31Monica Heisey: everyone's mad because she goes to too many places in one day she's got a driver it's Taylor Swift for god's sake

18:39Sentimental Garbage Hosts: come on

18:40Monica Heisey: she's being driven around I've cracked it they did the same thing you've cracked it Monica They did the same thing with Too Much. Everyone was mad that she went to a pub in Nunhead despite moving to Hoxham. But if it's your first day in London, what you've done is texted a friend who's been to London before and said, where is good to go get a pint? And then they've told you somewhere and you've thought that how far could it be? Because you don't understand the scale of the city and then you're in an Uber you can't back out of that's 45 minutes long.

19:11Sentimental Garbage Hosts: This is the time that I was in San Francisco and we were being taken out by clients of Gav's or whatever, or maybe Gav was a client of them. Anyway, they needed to impress us for some reason. The power was all off. And they were like, where have you always wanted to go in San Francisco? And I said, because I had watched the Anthony Bourdain private parts thing, I want to go to the Tiki Room. Okay. And they first got sick in a bag and then drove us there. And it took so long. And then there was a$20 a head. It's like, like no one's immune to being stupid in a different country.

19:46Monica Heisey: It's part of one of the things that, that I think these stories are based in is someone who doesn't know anything.

19:53Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Fish out of water will remain the, like the romantic genre, right? Because it's like, it's like somebody who's on the back foot, immediately vulnerable, therefore immediately lovable. Like vulnerability is one of the most contagious emotions, you know?

20:07Monica Heisey: And I'm just thinking about all the ways that we then try and manufacture that sense of wide-eyed naivety. Like in Aladdin, I can show you the world. It's like she's seen it before, but she hasn't seen it like this. And this is just making it so clear and literal from the beginning. She actually hasn't seen it. He can show you everything. He can show you all of Nunhead. But I grew up on all of those movies. and so I think it was romantic to me the idea that you would go somewhere and not know anything and someone would be like don't worry I'll show you everything I'll explain everything to you which I guess like in a sort of my like little grew up in the 2010 feminist online commentary piece brain is like that's a disempowering fantasy but I don't know that that's true maybe the fantasy is just like you have everything you know and they have everything they know and actually they couldn't know what you know you couldn't know what they know and then you share what you know I do think as well that having a cultural difference in a relationship is a little bit of a get-out clause and maybe that's one of the reasons that it's so prevalent in the as a romantic comedy trope as well because you're looking for ways for people to I think all the time about like Harry and Sally who are obviously the same culture but squabbling and finding ways when we were writing Smothered it was the same thing we were trying to find ways for them to have conflict that was real and involved real argument, but that wasn't threatening to the relationship.

21:39Monica Heisey: And I think when you're from different cultures, it's very easy to be like, we're not fundamentally incompatible people or the amount of friction that's normal in trying to know someone and be known by them isn't overwhelming us. There's just a cultural difference between us. Do you know what I mean? So you can blame, and those feelings I think exist in any relationship really quickly really quickly very fast and also sometimes you can lie

22:10Sentimental Garbage Hosts: sometimes you can i told someone once like legal years ago i told someone like i would when i was

22:16Monica Heisey: uh single and kind of like dating around a bit more casually i was very bad at being like i i'm so sorry to be like so north american about it i just feel like you know it's like really normal in my country to like know sort of where you stand with someone that's great which is not true it's as bad over there as it is over here but you can sort of push

22:37Sentimental Garbage Hosts: it a bit and yeah people are like especially in london where people are always like kind of conscious of having a diverse circle they're like okay i mean and there are there are genuine

22:50Monica Heisey: differences which the films that we're going to talk about get into but i i do think there's something about like the kind of lightness of the conflict that comes from outside of your couple it's not about your two personalities it's about the places you've come from yeah yeah it is it

23:06Sentimental Garbage Hosts: does make it special and you see that even with like couples who are both English they'll try and dig down into something of like well the thing is is that you know he was from East Yorkshire and I was from yeah West Yorkshire we went to the two different schools in the town yeah exactly you need that kind of yeah that kind of little bubble to exist because a conflict has to exist in relationships in order for it to remain interesting it's not like that esther perel classics of like eroticism sort of forms in the area between familiarity and mystery yes and sort of nationality and differences in nationality and culture can be a great sort of glass house for that stuff to grow

23:44Monica Heisey: yes i will say i worry often that i spend too much of my time being like in canada we would call that this what do you call it like that might not be amazing chat but I don't tire of it and actually now that I think about it I know it's not amazing chat because they almost never do that in the film and television that we're talking about and you know what never works as well not in real life

24:08Sentimental Garbage Hosts: and not in film either is when you try and get up on your high horse about what their country has done to your country speaking as an Irish person that is when the chat falls flat like talking about like fun differences is fun and being like oh I don't get this and you don't get this and I'm obsessed with shame and you're obsessed whatever for example to pull an example from nowhere nowhere and I mean like I literally have a podcast about shame but like then when you try and get like well if I can divert your attention to the famine second of all there was no famine I would be I would be using that all the time the beginning of the beginning of people being really obsessed with american girls and english guys happens like at the fondest thing obsessed i can't believe i went for it i'm really proud of you as well i'm really proud of you and proud of myself for being an intimidating person to say that in front of at the turn of the century absolutely late 19th century um you know what Miranda Hobbes will have us believe is the Gilded Age.

25:21Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Where like we have this, this kind of America has existed for long enough where there is genuine, real crazy money happening in America. Like people have built the railroads. There's like, there's big, big, big business happening in America. You know, there's the sense of like, like it's the whole Edith Wharton thing. it's what is called the 400 which is like kind of the 400 people that are allowed in new york high society it's mrs astor it's all that cynthia nixon will tell you all about it um but like that sort of thing of like americans who have existed with money in in america for like three generations maybe three or four from the kind of like original dutch settlers it's not surprising to me that this

26:06Monica Heisey: kind of intercultural relations for England only became possible when generational wealth began to exist in America.

26:13Sentimental Garbage Hosts: So true. Before that, it's just Pocahontas and John Smith. That actually looks great. Actually, you know what? Never mind. We've really, you know what? We really evolved our notions of you since you started having massive railroad bucks.

26:28Monica Heisey: You have massive railroad money. Our plumbing doesn't work in the house anymore. Why don't you come back over here, girl?

26:33Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Why don't you come back over? and like that but i think it's so interesting the thing of like america was trying to form this sort of facsimile culture that was aping european aristocracy even though it was like had nothing to do with it so they're like forming like very courtly manners when there is no court so they're like how can we get one we'll get our pretty daughters to marry some earl somewhere yeah and And so it's like land rich, cash poor, English aristocracy, plus cash rich, like esteem poor American girls.

27:07Monica Heisey: They used to call them dollar princesses. Love that. Which I am obsessed with. I used to dance under that name. Winston Churchill's mother was one. Yes, Jenny. I'm obsessed with that. The television show The Buccaneers on Apple TV is about such a group.

27:24Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah.

27:26Monica Heisey: um it's really it's a really so yeah the the pre-existing thing of like I'll go over to England and find myself a kind of genteel husband yeah you can see girls talking about it on TikTok now like it's so interesting how these these ideas like just continue to exist or like cycle through in and out of the culture girls on TikTok will are are like posting videos being like me and my friends all came over to London to like meet English boys yes yeah and like there's this great

27:53Sentimental Garbage Hosts: quote I read today which was one does not love but accepts a millionaires

28:06Sentimental Garbage Hosts: so brutal okay but like the contemporary writing at the time is very like you know these girls are never going to be fully accepted yes and also but also this twin thing of like and what English girl stands a chance? It's unfair. It's rigged the deck. Yes. You do get in contemporary rom-coms as well as being like, how dare you go out with this American? Like you get that in Bridget Jones when she finds Lara on the roof, right?

28:30Monica Heisey: That's right. The American stick insect. Not only is she thin, she's American and brunette. With tiny little glasses. The tiniest glasses in the world. But the biggest document briefcase. But yes, so it was a social phenomenon, I would say before it was a cultural phenomenon, but then you start to hear about it. I mean, even Henry James is writing about it in Portrait of a Lady, I think.

28:56Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah. And The Buccaneers is based on an unfinished Edith Wharton novel, I'm pretty sure, right? Which is about the dollar princesses. That's where it comes from. But like, oh my God. Okay, so I have a book. Can't believe I'm referencing a book. I'm so excited. So this is my favorite nonfiction book. It's Heiresses by Laura Thompson. she is an incredible writer her newsletter is incredible but um she talks a lot in her book about the dollar princesses and about how um the prince regent at the time was like a real he would like really like form a house for them to like thrive in like because he just like loved being entertained loved drinking loved having loved anybody who had like enough money to sort of facilitate how much he wanted to eat and drink sounds like a great time great time i I think.

29:46Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah. Bertie, as he was known, was an easy nut to crack for American heiresses. He found them direct and unstuffy and no doubt wonderfully unlike his mother. Deference was so familiar as to be something of a bore. These girls had what he called snap. Snap. These girls had snap. And I love that because like, that's like, you know, the 1800s or whatever, but like that sort of portrayal of American girls in English things has never, or even like you know like in the kind of the english romance has never faltered it's always the thing of like she's this burst of like fresh energy she has no regard for convention she doesn't even know what the conventions are yeah you know but what i think is so interesting with all of

30:27Monica Heisey: these stories is like are they true or do the stories sort of make them true do they sort of reify this behavior from people because you you live in your own country and you don't think of yourself as particularly direct or particularly confident or particularly brash or whatever and you come over here and you know you're thought of in that way yeah does that change your behavior does that change your self-perception in a way I think one of the things that's happening in these cross-cultural relationships is that you're sort of playing into these mythologies for each other yeah so like whether or not you are particularly direct or particularly brash or particularly confident North American woman think sometimes going on a date then with a British man they get to decide I'm out now with this like loud uh straightforward person which means I can be louder and more straightforward yes or I don't have to worry about coming across as too loud or too straightforward because obviously this dinosaur is crashing around the pub and it's going to be sort of louder than me um and I think there's a certain safety or freedom or something in allowing a cultural story to sort of take, again, I think we're just looking at like ways to relieve a bit of the pressure of two people meeting each other and having to kind of like make it all happen, just the two of them.

31:51Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah.

31:52Monica Heisey: It takes some of the pressure off where you're like, obviously in a dating context, I would love to be direct and fun and straightforward and confident.

31:59Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah.

31:59Monica Heisey: And the story that we have from all of these, you know, films and television and whatever is that that's what in this pairing I would be yeah that's what American girls do yeah yeah I mean me saying this and I'm not even American yeah North America you

32:17Sentimental Garbage Hosts: get it we know what you're talking about we know it but no I I feel that too I mean look we're we're obviously both from different places but we both come from places where there's a strong idea of what our nationality is supposed to be and that can be a really useful and comforting social guise to live under you know um especially particularly when you're talking about london particularly when you're talking about kind of london media circles or whatever when you get an awful lot of people who've been to oxbridge or have been to you know various kinds of private schools together and sort of your nationality kind of becomes both your embrace and your shield kind of thing it's like come come over and talk to me because i'm kind of the loud kind of funny irish girl or whatever but also like you're never going to be able to interrogate me too deeply because you don't know where I come from you don't know anything about me whereas all these people are able to interrogate each other very deeply because of having a shared backstory and that comes off a lot in too much this idea that Felix is always running into these people who are from this very posh background and everyone is always checking each other's homework all the time and the freedom of therefore meeting somebody who does who can't check your homework and you can't check theirs and there's a kind of, I don't know, elasticity that happens around that, I think.

33:31Monica Heisey: Yeah, I think it's like this fantasy of meeting an alien. You know, like particularly, I feel like I must say that that's my Felix's theory. Not. Well, we were talking about like what, we were talking about this and what the appeal is and I think there's like, particularly in the films, it's so useful. In real life, it can be useful and I think trickier, But in the films, it's like, what would it be like for someone from a really codified world to meet someone who doesn't know, have any sense of what those rules and codes are? How much would that allow them, these men, to, like, redefine themselves?

34:12Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah.

34:12Monica Heisey: How much freedom does it give them? And also, how much does it point out the sort of arbitrariness of them, right? Like if these rules about class and behavior are guiding factors in these men's lives and then they meet someone who's like, oh, none of that means anything to me. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I think that could be quite freeing in an almost, you know, like the American non-American version is the manic pixie dream girl. But she's not bringing her own sort of, I think historically she doesn't bring her own intellect and ideas to it. she's just like I don't really respect that I think it should be different I think we should yell into this canyon but I think the British version of yelling into a canyon is a lot lower

34:55Sentimental Garbage Hosts: key there's always been stories about you know cross-cultural romance and like often that will have like religious or racial kind of inferences of just kind of one of these things of like you'll get a couple where it gets to a point with like well we simply can't go any further unless somebody converts or unless somebody radically changes their life but like americans and english people or even indeed irish people english people there's there's really not that much to get over and as you're saying it makes you confront these tiny little kind of social norms that you think to be so important are they as you say are they important at all you know yeah like it's so uncontroversial and yet so internally confronting there's there's something i mean one of the things

35:36Monica Heisey: i find really challenging about living in the uk and i've lived here a long time and i still find it challenging is how many rules you are failing to observe in a given day and no one will tell you because they somehow think it's more rude to correct you than to let you embarrass yourself like what it's like this is like a really oxbridge example but i had a few friends when i first moved here who went to um maudlin college no idea okay it's spelled magdalene really yeah nobody told me yeah for years it's not like i was saying it a lot but no one ever

36:16Sentimental Garbage Hosts: corrected me very embarrassing very embarrassing very embarrassing i guess i mean specific i mean

36:22Monica Heisey: well i was trying to think of a bigger example like like nobody told me that quite means is like passive aggressive so quite is a modifier that means very it means more if you said that's quite nice that means it's very nice but this god forsaken country is a passive aggressive way to say that's not very nice and everyone knows that but no one will tell you that's so interesting

36:47Sentimental Garbage Hosts: yeah that's the kind of the equivalent in irish is like saying something is grand like in any grand bad mostly yes fucker mostly grand means absolutely fine just about par but see do you Did you hear the word you're using for that? I know, exactly. Grand means, you know, luxurious, sort of festive, rich, golden, whatever. Yeah, you know what's grand?

37:11Monica Heisey: The boulevards in Paris. Yeah. For God's sake.

37:15Sentimental Garbage Hosts: How was Paris, Caroline? Yeah, it was grand. She hated it. It was grand. She hated being in Paris.

37:20Monica Heisey: Yeah, it's those kinds of things. I mean, that's, you know, it's very challenging. Why did we start talking about that, though? It was related to the trope thing. You're, like, crashing through all of these, all of these, like, unspoken rules, which I suppose might be freeing for the other person to see, but actually it's quite embarrassing when you're the one doing it. Hugh Grant and Richard Curtis together as a team have a lot to answer for in terms of my dating history. There's just nothing better. There's nothing better. They are so good together. I feel like when Hugh Grant went over to America and then did sort of like a different character who was also still Hugh Grant, but he's still very charming in like two weeks notice even in music and lyrics which is a real weird one he's still so charming but it's like he's nowhere close to the heights of you know

38:16Sentimental Garbage Hosts: like apricots and honey guy apricots and honey and nodding hill yeah um yeah i think those are those have to be my favorites it is so crazy to me that like when Hugh Grant aged out of doing like rom-coms and honestly he hasn't I mean in a commercial sense he hasn't actually aged out of doing anything he can do whatever he wants yeah that we just kind of stopped with rom-coms

38:42Monica Heisey: yeah we were like well we tried a couple other ones without him and then we thought

38:47Sentimental Garbage Hosts: no it's so interesting to me that like and this is a bit of an aside that like those star power rom-com actors meg ryan hugh grant are those people who just had unbelievable just wattage behind them that just completely fortifies films julie roberts once they duck out yeah we never replace them with anything there is nobody who has that same rom-com power now no well i think part of it is that everyone looks the same yeah that's tough but also um apparently big male

39:19Monica Heisey: celebrities don't want to do romances anymore although very exciting to see pedro pascal and chris evans in the materialists oh yeah um not so big on the calm of the rom-com but certainly a romantic movie with two major stars in it which is really nice to see um so maybe there will be a shift um but yeah hugh grant really nobody nobody did it like him and nobody is doing it

39:46Sentimental Garbage Hosts: like him but like do you feel so if we think of the major Hugh Grant plus American sort of things we've got Hugh Grant and Annie McDowell yep in Four Webings the original the OG um then we've got Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts in Notting Hill yep then we've got Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock in Two Weeks Notice absolutely right then we've got Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore in Music and lyrics yeah now what would you can you try a progression for us there in the the evolution

40:16Monica Heisey: of Hugh Grant and also the evolution of this trope actually I'm going to I think the real issue of where Hugh Grant loses his power is when he goes over to America so none of the women in these American women have indefinitely determined okay these are all women who are here briefly Andy McDowell is coming in and out for wedding season but she doesn't really they don't really see each other a lot she hasn't lived she marries that scottish guy eventually yes um famously of course julie roberts is playing a big celebrity who's only in town briefly in too much it's like her first day in london she's not planning on staying these are people who if we're sticking with the alien thing have like recently landed um and are maybe not here to stay and the customs are unfamiliar to them you're never seeing an american who's like naturalized interesting right so there's like something about that fresh fresh to the world fresh to the culture certainly um and then when hugh grant moves over to america they don't let the women characters explain stuff to him like that

41:24Sentimental Garbage Hosts: that's so interesting it goes back to sort of like male ego in rom-coms right the kind of it's very hard for them to let male stars look foolish in rom-com and hugh grant is really high status

41:35Monica Heisey: in the American ones, whereas in the British ones, he's quite low status. He's like a nerdy weirdo. He runs a failing bookstore. He's like a posh guy at a wedding, but I don't remember what his job is. And he's sort of like on the back foot with this cool, sexy woman. Yeah, yeah. And once they go over to America.

41:54Sentimental Garbage Hosts: At two weeks notice, he's like the head of a major company. Yeah. And music and lyrics, he's like a bratty reformed pop star.

42:00Monica Heisey: Yeah, he's like a slightly fallen pop star, but she's his cleaner. She's watering his plants.

42:05Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Oh, yeah, that is it.

42:06Monica Heisey: She's watering his plants, and then she starts singing perfect lyrics to his new song.

42:10Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Oh, yes.

42:11Monica Heisey: Lovely, lovely song. That movie, like, those two people are huge charisma bombs, and it doesn't bomb in a positive way, I guess. But it doesn't quite come together, I think, because the thing that makes Hugh Grant, I mean, he's very good at playing high status. We've seen him as Daniel Cleaver. He plays, like, really, particularly recently, has played a lot of really talented villains. but the really romantic thing is this idea of him as this like imagine meeting someone like Hugh Grant and he's on the back foot in Notting Hill he says he's been left for a more attractive man who could that be well they say he looks like Harrison Ford crucially an American oh yeah a sexy hairy chested American lately this is my specialist subject no but you're you're so right

42:58Sentimental Garbage Hosts: though that thing of like i think in the context of american woman with no indefinite leave to remain going over she has not taken the multiple choice test which you have um the um coming up and it's generally the context of the american woman is she is complicated she has been like chewed up a little by life she's been spat out again and she is whether explicitly or implicitly worried whether or not there's anything in her worth loving because the way she's been treated at home or whatever and and i think and what that kind of um generally i think what's happening there is like she's got this complexity and the complexity is also partnered with a kind of learnedness and that learnedness could only be appreciated in a place where books were invented

43:52Monica Heisey: I do think you're onto something as well about the idea of like a holiday romance often feels frivolous because your cultures are so different. You speak different languages. They live in Sicily. You know what I mean? It's like the Olsen twins never stay with any of the people when they take Rome or take Paris.

44:12Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Passport to Paris.

44:16Monica Heisey: Because it's like obviously. The Olsen twins getting ran through all over Europe. It's obviously different. How could it work? But in this case, you're right. We speak the same language, even though we're so different. And we both come from these enormous global superpowers. So, you know, why shouldn't it's just crazy enough to work?

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46:18Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Actually, this brings me on to my second history point of the thing, which is that we talked about how it is very often English men, American women, very less often, which is American girls, English guys. Yeah. You get it, but it's just less frequent. And I think a lot of this has to do with our old friend, World War II.

46:44Sentimental Garbage Hosts: So in prep for the podcast, we watched a lovely movie called A Matter of Life and Death, which is about an American girl who is, for some reason, we don't really know why, is stationed in England and is manning a kind of a radio tower that is connected to uh english pilots and then the very first scene is one of the most charming openings of any movie i've ever seen it's one of the best openings to a film i have ever seen in my life do you want to describe it no you do it okay i mean you've seen it more i don't want to mess it up but basically this guy uh david niven is like he's this sort of daring do classic sort of World War II pilot.

47:25Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Everything we imagine when we imagine a World War II pilot. He, he's, the plane is on fire. He realized he's going to die. His kind of electrician is already dead beneath him. He's given his parachute to his gunner. Yeah.

47:38Monica Heisey: Because he's such a goddamn hero. Sorry, carry on.

47:43Sentimental Garbage Hosts: And he finds a radio signal of this American girl who is manning this tower. And like, he's talking to her and he's, he's about to die he knows he's gonna have to bail out with no parachute over open water he will either die on impact or drown and he's trying to basically distract himself in his last moments by trying to connect with this girl it's so so i gotta say the movie for me as a whole was a little bit odd i loved some of it didn't love all of it it's a pal and press burger so it's basically great but like didn't love it all of it but this scene is so stunning where it's just like him being like quoting poetry and just sort of saying it off by rote because he's panicking and he's trying not to panic and he's like saying well you know what's your name and she's like June and he's like well are you pretty June and she's like I'm alright

48:34Monica Heisey: do you have a boyfriend don't tell me it's fantastic it's so romantic and I feel like the movie was you can see what there's they've done the amazing thing where the first like few minutes of the film sets up exactly what the film is about which is about the difference and affinity between English and British cultures. The film was designed to be a piece of propaganda to promote Anglo-American relations towards the end of the war and into the post-war period. And you can see it there immediately. I mean, obviously because it's made by English people, like England is the absolute hero. David Niven is an absolute shining, charming, quoting poet.

49:17Monica Heisey: he's like being brave he's quoting poetry he's being stoic he sends a message to his mom that's like tell her i didn't say it enough but i loved her it's like it's sort of everything i did cry oh i cried the whole like almost as soon as it began yeah no it's a real weeper is opening scene

49:36Sentimental Garbage Hosts: yeah and also what's what's beautiful about it as well is that for the first kind of couple of minutes they're talking she just keeps on saying i can't understand you partly because of he's sort of like like kind of hyper and quoting poetry and part of it because of the static but also just like them trying to find a connection through all this mayhem is just so beautiful yeah and then he crash lands um he miraculously doesn't die there's like and this is where it gets wacky it's like yeah

50:03Monica Heisey: immediately there's a crazy loophole from heaven there's a yeah there's like a good third of this

50:08Sentimental Garbage Hosts: movie is set in heaven yeah yeah there's a lot of movies from this era that are about like falling in love with ghosts or like people who've died looking back on their lives because yeah there was just a huge amount of people who were truly fucking dying absolutely hundreds of thousands

50:21Monica Heisey: of people dying unnecessarily all the time yeah but there was also this sense that like

50:27Sentimental Garbage Hosts: for this to work I mean that that like America had joined the war there was a lot of American GIs who were stationed in England it was a culture shock for everybody I try to find it before you came over but i have this tiny little booklet which is a replica of the booklets that were given to american gis who were landing in the uk and basically a sort of a short guide to like how not to get in trouble while you're in the uk no and and say and things kind of about local women and being like listen like this has been a war-torn country for some years now do not expect the same level of like grooming i like i was researching a lot of you i was doing like working on that BBC adaptation for a period piece that never ended up going but I ended up like I'm so glad we're doing the podcast today because all the information I just hell yeah you know what I mean when you're working on a thing that never goes and all this information just sits there

51:19Monica Heisey: yeah um but honestly if we weren't recording a podcast and I came over to your house and you were like can I tell you a bunch of facts about the cultural vibe in the UK during World War II I'd be like yeah man god I thought you'd never ask lay it on me sis so like yeah they were like

51:38Sentimental Garbage Hosts: giving out these things to people and but like oh there's this huge these american guys who were over here were so well paid and they were getting more food than anybody else in the country so obviously this kind of like sexual marketplace began really quickly i meant what the girl of the girls of slender means by mural spark is about have you read that book no that sounds amazing fucking love it it's basically like yeah about girls who are friends with guys at the american embassy but this created a huge amount of anxiety around british men who were all overseas in like germany or in the pacific or whatever that american men were going to steal their wives and girlfriends right and knock them up and stuff and so around that period you get a ton of propaganda movies that are about english girls having romantic friendships or like very charged friendships with American GIs but they had their torn between like never crossing a line because Charlie's waiting for me Charlie's waiting for me or they think Charlie's dead and then Charlie comes back and she has to make a choice and often it will like they will almost never kiss and it will just be this thing of like you know you know Tony tell the boys in Brooklyn I say hi but I'm staying here with Charles and it's like this and I think this is why if we talk about like romance often being photocopies of photocopies, the reason that we don't have a lot of the other way around of like English women and American men in the culture as much as the other one is because there aren't that many photocopies because we were visibly preventing that from happening.

53:11Sentimental Garbage Hosts: So English men wouldn't get sad.

53:13Monica Heisey: Also, if you're talking about who's making the movies and whose fantasies we're reflecting, it's British men's fantasy of freedom, right? It's like, you know, Richard Curtis made all of those movies. It's not like, you know, there's no like female equivalent, I guess, working at that time. Yeah. Making the same sort of culturalness.

53:37Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah, there is no British Nori F on really. You know, there's no. There has to. There has to be. I'm sure someone will write in, but I can't name her.

53:46Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Her name is Tali Alderson.

53:52Monica Heisey: Okay, back to Matter of Life and Death. But the thing that I think needs to be said as well is that it's really explicit about the question of American and British romance. Literally most of the film is taken up through a slightly convoluted thing about the afterlife in a long trial.

54:12Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Such a long trial.

54:14Monica Heisey: A globally attended sort of trial in the afterlife to answer the question, can love exist between an American woman and a British man?

54:22Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yes. And the thesis of this is that he has cheated death once and then he's fallen in love with June, the American girl in England. And then he becomes best friends with her and her like platonic male friend, the surgeon. And which I thought would be more of a triangle than it ended up being. And while he's sort of like falling in love with June, he keeps getting these visits from this strange like French grim reaper who is saying to him like, we're, you know.

54:48Monica Heisey: He's an aristocrat who got beheaded during the revolution, please.

54:51Sentimental Garbage Hosts: some respect on my man's name um and yeah basically that he has a case he needs to appeal whether or not he gets to remain on earth and remain remain alive and his case is like you can't kill me i'm in love with this girl and the counter case is an english man could never truly

55:09Monica Heisey: love an american girl and vice versa yes and it's very amusing and i would say it took my the argument they made sort of took my breath away. I have it here actually. The lawyer in his sort of closing remarks says, should the vibrant humor of a young American girl be stifled in the pages of punch? Should the swift tempo of her life be slowed to the crawl of a match at cricket? Should her accustomed native comfort perforce conform to England's warm drinks, cold rooms, drafty windows, smoky chimneys and faulty plumbing? This movie's from the 40s and that. It's so good. All still applies now.

55:54Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Warm drinks, cold rooms, faulty plumbing. What was the other one? Drafty chimneys.

56:00Monica Heisey: I was like.

56:01Sentimental Garbage Hosts: We're literally sitting in a room right now where all that is true.

56:03Monica Heisey: Those are some good questions. Those are some thoughtful questions. They're worth asking.

56:11Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Maybe it is a great movie. It's a fantastic movie. The beginning and the end are certainly perfect.

56:19Monica Heisey: My other favorite thing about it, which is totally unrelated, but might be a fun fact, is that they didn't have enough color film because they were making it during the war. They had to choose. Half of the movie had to be in black and white and half of the movie had to be in color. Oh, is that why that is? Yeah. And so they had to decide, are the scenes in the afterlife going to be in color?

56:39Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Because heaven, you know, technicolor.

56:41Monica Heisey: Or should the scenes on Earth be in color? And they decided that Earth is in technicolor. Because it's life.

56:48Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Oh, that's nice.

56:49Monica Heisey: I know.

56:50Sentimental Garbage Hosts: And it's really nice because when you see him with June and, like, the flowers are really pink and the leaves are really green, it's, like, it's lovely. I know. That's really nice. I love Paul and Pressburger.

57:00Monica Heisey: I do, too. I also think all romances, the color, the saturation needs to be turned up a bit because it's, like, the movies need to feel like what falling in love feels like. So everyone is about 15 % more charming than in real life. The colors are a little bit brighter. The music pops a little bit harder. everyone kind of says and does the right thing at the right moment because falling in love feels

57:20Sentimental Garbage Hosts: like things are clicking like that isn't it so funny how like we grow up on romantic movies that look a certain way and we try and have the romances in our real life reflect that and sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't but then you have this moment and they happen like you know where if if you're very much in love where like that moment where you look at your partner and you'd be like you're like you're a movie star like you are from the movies like light has never been so golden as it is in this room right now and you realize like oh i thought i was trying to replicate the movies but the movies were trying to replicate this oh that's nice that's very nice um that is nice that is nice i think all right i've got we've got a big list here of um different things we've compiled that uh emphasizes our point haven't even talked about Meghan Markle and Harry, which I think needs to be spoken about because it is the Icarus tale of this entire trope.

58:19Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Well, what if you get together with a British man and then his family's crazy? Yeah. Like what? Like, but also it's that thing of, because there are so many Hallmark movies and, and Mills and Boone's novels or whatever about like the, the kind of the fizzy American girl with a lot of ambition and ideas. And she's a little bit screwball, but she's beautiful. meeting the uptight English guy, freeing him with her kind of fizzy joie de vivre and then coming up against the stone wall of family. And then what's so fascinating to me about Meghan Markle is that like, you know how we always say about like how we have the happily ever after, but then what happens next?

58:54Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Her whole life is what happens next, which is like people being mad at you that their jam hasn't arrived. Oh, the jam. I, did she really say she didn't know

59:05Monica Heisey: about the royal family before she met him? She did say that.

59:09Sentimental Garbage Hosts: She said she knew who they were but didn't know anything about them. Okay. Yeah, which I mean, she was living in Canada. That's true.

59:18Monica Heisey: Which arguably is more interested in the royal family. We really know about them. Yeah, yeah. We really know about them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My mom had Princess Diana's haircut for like five years of my childhood. I think Meghan Markle is a bit outside of the rules because her fantasy is being princess, which you could do in any old country as the princess diaries have shown us. Yeah. I think there's, she's like buying into, I think she got a little bit sort of monkey's paw version of being with a British man because I bet Harry on his own in isolation was sort of like a lot of the things that you want from a British man, sort of like cheeky and funny and I'm not going to say smart necessarily.

1:00:03but like

1:00:04Monica Heisey: they're quick and they're silly and they're charming and then to have to be a princess is a totally separate problem I mean it's not totally separate obviously but I think he slightly exists outside of everything actually in a lot of our examples the British man is sort of lower status than the woman which is I think also a fantasy and not real. Yeah. Even in too much, Felix is like, essentially homeless. Yeah, but homeless and though. Fallen posh. Yes, fallen posh. Fallen posh.

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1:01:22Monica Heisey: That's F-O-R-H-E-R-S dot com slash eligible. For hers.com slash eligible. Weight loss by hers is not available in all 50 states. We go V is the registered trademark of Novo Nordisk AS to get started and learn more, including important safety information. We go V clinical study information and restrictions. Visit for hers.com.

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1:02:21Sentimental Garbage Hosts: I think it's interesting that there are, okay, there's this big trope, right? But there are different strands within the trope and they each kind of mean different things. So there's the thing of like, um, girl who's been like in some way or another rejected by America. You know what I mean? Like she's, she's received, she's been humbled by her home country. There is a depth within there that needs to be unearthed by an English man. Or she's rejected America, right? Like Julia Roberts, I think, is sick of what she views as like American celebrity culture.

1:02:51Monica Heisey: Obviously British media culture, which is also nightmarish, comes for her eventually. But I think she's there like a lot of British American celebrities are. A lot of American celebrities move over here because they feel like they have access to a sense of privacy and daily life that is not available to them in America. yeah um there's a sense of freedom i think yeah i wonder why that is i mean like i know lena has

1:03:23Sentimental Garbage Hosts: written about that a lot about her sense of freedom that she gets from living here but like this is the most like gossipy town it's well i sometimes wonder if it's an american

1:03:34Monica Heisey: misunderstanding of british culture because gossip is not the same thing as press that's true so So, like, certainly your British neighbors would be like, guess which celebrity lives next to me? Ellen DeGeneres. But Ellen can still feel like she's not being bothered in the street, even though everyone's going home and telling their entire family and all their friends that they saw Ellen at the supermarket.

1:03:57Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yes, that is true.

1:03:59Monica Heisey: That's what in Portrait of a Lady, someone says really early on to someone who's been living in England a long time but who's a technically American. You understand a great deal of the English. you know exactly what they say, but you don't understand still what they don't say. And there's like a great deal more in what they're not saying. Yeah. Which is something that as a North American is very hard. It's very hard to understand.

1:04:25Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Do you think the triptych of Taylor Swift boyfriends can teach us anything? Who's the three? It's Joe Alwyn. Well, there's loads more. I mean, technically we could count Calvin Harris, but he's Scottish. He's Scottish, yep. So there's Joe Alwyn. There's Maddie Healy. And there's, I mean, I guess there's Tom Hiddleston and Harry Styles.

1:04:43Monica Heisey: I mean, the last, the first, the most recent two British ones, the big ones, are sort of opposite sides, I think. If you put them together, I suppose that's the full fantasy.

1:04:58Sentimental Garbage Hosts: On the Taylor Swift of it all, I think it's so interesting that she's written like dozens of songs that are basically like, I'm American and you think that's horny or you're English and I think that's horny or whatever. And then it kind of, she draws the whole chapter to a close and finally goes back to American Men, which I think was the right thing all along with that song So Long London.

1:05:16Monica Heisey: Yep.

1:05:17Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Which is basically the rarely documented B-side of having to deal and live with English people.

1:05:26Monica Heisey: I do I did really like that too much plays so aggressively with the cultural output that we've been talking about all of these big it's funny too because working title made a lot of those movies and then also made too much which is sort of like in conversation with all of those films but it's nice that it moves past the film version right because it's a television show that's so much longer. You have the meet cute. You have them getting together. You have a little obstacle. They get back together. That's sort of where the film would end. And then we get to see the continued life. I mean, I think all the time about that amazing scene at the end that Lena wrote where after they've just gotten married and she's literally fantasized that he's Alan Rickman throwing the coins up in the air.

1:06:19Monica Heisey: She's Kate Winslet. They're in Marlebone Town Hall. The whole thing is beautiful. and then he turns to her and says, how long do you want to stay married? And then she's like, what? You're kidding. And he's like, yeah, I'm kidding. Maybe. And that is so what it's like.

1:06:40Monica Heisey: How long do you want to stay married? How long do you want to stay? They've just committed to you in front of all of your loved ones and then they turn to you and say, were you serious about that?

1:06:52Monica Heisey: Or, I don't know, I'm trying to think about like what the engine is for the romance in the films and stuff. And I think it's the idea of one crossing that divide. Like the sense of like against all odds, the almost Montague Capulet of it. Like we come from these different places, how could it ever work?

1:07:11Sentimental Garbage Hosts: I also think a lot of it, a lot of like the payoff for these movies is like I have overcome the nature that's been bred into me by the country I'm from. And like, I guess I'm thinking about Wimbledon, which is the movie I love. And we've covered on this podcast before. Do you know it? I know, but I haven't seen it. So Wimbledon stars Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst. And Kirsten Dunst is like this absolute like killer tennis player. Like all she cares about is winning. She's so American. She's managed by her dad. She is like really outspoken, proud, best foot forward all the time. The golden girl.

1:07:47Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Exactly who you imagine Kirsten Dunst to be at 22. and Paul Bettany is like he's hitting 30 he's like used to be ranked but he's falling out of it and he's chosen as the wild card in Wimbledon that year and he has like a good streak and he becomes sort of like the hopeful of that year's Wimbledon or whatever and he's like this great sort of rags to riches tennis story and inevitably he the kind of what it kind of crunches down to is that she softens for him and starts losing and he toughens up for her and starts winning. And so they both kind of like compromise their natures. I don't need her to start losing.

1:08:25Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah, but like it's actually played really well and she hates him for it. And like, that's how it's, yeah, that's kind of how it goes where she breaks up with him because she's like, you have like compromised my nature that I love. So fuck you. And yeah, and he gets tougher for her. And it's like, his kind of like entire British persona is like, oh, never mind me. No, well, I'm nice to my ball boy and I'm nice to my rivals. And I, I shake hands like a gentleman. And she's like, fuck that. Like win. Like fuck you. And then eventually they get back together and she becomes, and she ends up winning Wimbledon twice and like, it's all good.

1:08:59Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Don't worry. But like, it's interesting to me that I think the most satisfying way in which those kind of rom-coms can resolve can be like, it's taken, because I think for any good rom-com to feel satisfying, it has to be like we've both met in the middle somewhere right yeah and so for a thing to be like I have denied this scary country where I'm from and that scares me and I have compromised what

1:09:24Monica Heisey: that has taught me to be with you who I love I think it's good I was just thinking as you were talking about how satisfying it is when in romantic comedy um the creator of whatever it is literalizes some one of the the sort of images or metaphors of romance so like I'm thinking of like in the husbands by Holly Gramazio there's an infinite number of possible men that keep coming out of her attic which I think is like a really clever way to talk about what to do with that feeling of there's potentially unlimited choice but not all of them is are good and I think maybe the enduring appeal of these like stories where two foreigners come together is that that's just what it's like for anyone yeah to meet anyone and your context and their context even if you're from the same country even if you grew up in the same town whatever you're still individual people from the sort of individual places that made you um whether that's your family context or your friendship context or just your personality and this makes it so clear and straightforward like here are two different things coming together trying to merge yeah from totally different backgrounds into one thing which is just literally any relationship literally any relationship yeah

1:10:45Sentimental Garbage Hosts: and it's like as we said at the beginning of this podcast love can only really work if you can if you can sort of mythologize your way through the hard times like something my friend sarah griffin says and that everyone i know who hears it ends up quoting in their own work is a relationship is a subculture of two and like in any sub any healthy subculture you need stories about how the subculture got that way you know you need stories about like you know what what what gigs you played and what venues you played in and the hard things that happened in the vans that broke down along the way or whatever and it's the same in relationships and you need these stories about how you overcame these monumental hurdles even if they weren't monumental they just kind of

1:11:28Monica Heisey: weren't you yeah I've dated English men across different ages now and I feel like I do think there are some things that are true about them generally yeah like I think the the best one to

1:11:43Sentimental Garbage Hosts: four dates of your life will be with an English man and then after that it gets a bit more fuzzy gets a bit so long London it gets a bit I sacrifice I sacrifice myself to the gods of

1:11:56Monica Heisey: your bluest days I just think all of them can be amazing on four dates and then after that you actually have to contend with their personality but British people are so good at just like keeping the conversation going and being charming and fun that you almost don't really get to know them you're just having a very nice time at the pub and then once you start trying to like be like knock knock may I come in they have different strategies to defeat you doing that some of which are more fun than others. To defeat you.

1:12:25Sentimental Garbage Hosts: This has nothing to do with anything, but as we're towards the end of the podcast, not only the real heads are left. Yep. Every Irish man who lives in London thinks he's 15 % funnier than he is. Oh, no. Because everyone is just like, that voice, that face, your folksy ways, you must be the funniest guy. Like, they all have stories that are just not that good. They count way too much.

1:12:46Monica Heisey: There are definitely things in all of my relationships with the British men that I've been out with where I bet you English girls have gotten fed up sooner. And I've been like, he said crumbs. And it does just distract you. It's like. It does. You know.

1:13:09Sentimental Garbage Hosts: All relationships should be international.

1:13:12Monica Heisey: It feels a little bit like dating with like armbands. Yeah. Because you are still swimming. You have to swim yourself. But there's like a little thing keeping it buoyant. Helping you keep it a little light, float around, splash, splash.

1:13:26Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah. I'm trying to think if I could ever seriously go out with an American guy. I think the way they say cum is too embarrassing. Oh, no. What's the difference? I don't.

1:13:40Monica Heisey: I shouldn't have. You're going to cum? I shouldn't have. Gross. I mean, if you're going out with Urkel, I guess. what I will say is that a lot of the, a lot of the movies about transatlantic relationships don't take the difficulty of a transatlantic relationship as their subject and they make it sort of between the two of them. But, um, I think looking at the body of work collectively, you can see like themes emerging. Yeah. You know,

1:14:13Sentimental Garbage Hosts: which is arguably what the last hour has been about.

1:14:18Monica Heisey: it's about themes emerging themes are emerging we're noticing patterns what's that tweet that's like the most fun a woman can have it's like noticing patterns observing behaviors creating

1:14:27Sentimental Garbage Hosts: parallels that is the truest tweet it's what we love to do i love to know parallels it is great i think the thing that i keep thinking about is that it's it often when you dig into tropes

1:14:43Monica Heisey: They exist because they're clever ways to get to the meat of what a certain kind of story is about. So it's a fast route towards romance because you have like, as you were saying with Esther Perel, the tension in a romantic relationship is between keeping some mystery and difference and conflict while also being close. and if the fantasy is like a slightly unknowable person you know like being in the arms of someone who's culturally so different from you that you'll never totally understand how right you know what their culture called a bread roll um you know at the end of the day if like gav says something to

1:15:27Sentimental Garbage Hosts: me like oh you're so irish i know he's low-key horny do you know what i mean because that is way of expressing to me there are parts of you I still don't totally get and that's cool to me

1:15:35Monica Heisey: yes Olivia Rodrigo's song is he laughs at all my jokes and he says I'm so American and what he's saying in that is like I'm charmed by you but I don't understand why yeah which is I think what

1:15:45Sentimental Garbage Hosts: people are hoping for it's literally everything yeah like it's so interesting I mean this is a bigger conversation but like it's as like we sort of count and calculate basically everything in our lives that the only thing that is left that is like sort of you know those those london neighborhoods that have one little nature preserve where it's like open on the last sunday of every month or whatever the one thing that we have that is the nature preserve that can't be like counted or spreadsheeted or tracked or whatever is attraction and sexuality it's like we don't know why it just is go in there there's some bees yeah and uh yeah and if we can keep that level that bubble that little greenhouse of mystery alive then it bodes well I think yeah and what

1:16:32Monica Heisey: easier way to do that than by growing up in totally different contexts do you think we've

1:16:37Sentimental Garbage Hosts: really depressed all the girls who were just like English and married English guys no because as as

1:16:42Monica Heisey: they were saying earlier like their context is so hyper specific one of the things that's crazy about English culture and actually they don't need to be going to America for this is why the Americans are coming over there and the British people are largely not going over to America no they don't want to do that because English people are amazing at categorizing and classifying and uh noting the micro differences that make up larger differences between like strata of people yeah they're incredibly good at it so they can make difference between almost anything they really can right which is why I think English culture is such a crazy mix of like sexually repressed and like the weirdly horny like you're not prepared for how horny it is over here when you move over.

1:17:24Monica Heisey: Not even horny in like a sexual way. Horny in like Great British Bake Off will show a squirrel and the squirrel has balls and everyone is noticing that the balls are there. Do you know what I mean? Like there's like a... It's puerile. The country is like teetering on the edge of titillation at all times. It takes like a whisper to like push them over the edge into full titillation.

1:17:44Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah, I mean it took them years to get rid of page three, right? Like the...

1:17:47Monica Heisey: Yes, it was still going on when I moved here.

1:17:49Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Yeah, right? Like for that to be a national conversation of whether we're allowed to have boobs in the news.

1:17:55Monica Heisey: Yeah. Like a sickness.

1:17:57Sentimental Garbage Hosts: So funny.

1:17:59Monica Heisey: But yeah, I do think it's something that people come over to have access to that, that, that tension between, uh, closeness and, uh, remoteness, which is like inherent to British culture. I think the country has a reputation as being good at flirting because flirting is all about like pushing someone away and then drawing them close over like different measures you know um and i think english people are incredibly good at like the the micro awareness of what others someone and what signals that they're on your side and so it's really satisfying when they push you out in a sort of friendly way and then it's extremely satisfying when they really back in really beckon yeah very nice Hugh Grant you know let us know

1:18:51Sentimental Garbage Hosts: it's just like whole 90 minute podcast has been a subtweet just to be like if you

1:18:56Monica Heisey: hacked off Hugh

1:19:02Sentimental Garbage Hosts: Monica I see Carolina Donahue you are the author of really good actually and a forthcoming novel that I believe is going to be out next year. Does it have a name yet?

1:19:12Monica Heisey: It's coming out in 2027. So nobody needs to worry about that. Nobody needs to worry about that at all. Don't pre-order. It's coming.

1:19:18Sentimental Garbage Hosts: They haven't built a link yet. It's coming, but she's not ready. But in the meantime, you are a co-writer on Too Much and one of the leading actresses. Thank you for coming on today. If you want to listen to more, Monica, you did a great Love Actually podcast with us a couple of Christmases ago. And they really interestingly subvert this whole thing.

1:19:37Monica Heisey: They love Actually.

1:19:38Sentimental Garbage Hosts: They do when we get into that there. So bye, everyone.

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