Jamie Oliver: Defending the jerk

This doesn’t come naturally so I hope you’ll bear with me whilst I readjust my goggles, hitch up my underwear, and enter what feels like rare and mythical territory. This is the stuff of unicorns frolicking under blue moons. This is the exceptionally counterintuitive work of defending Jamie Oliver…

I find myself in this unenviable position because Oliver (let’s have none of that overly familiar “Jamie” nonsense, thank you) has been attacked because he recently made a “punchy jerk rice” which Labour MP Dawn Butler condemned, as one tends to do these days, in a tweet. In it, she asked Oliver:

I’m just wondering do you know what #Jamaican #jerk actually is? It’s not just a word you put before stuff to sell products. @levirootsmusic should do a masterclass. Your jerk Rice is not ok. This appropriation from Jamaica needs to stop.

Levi Roots has responded by describing the jerk (the dish, not Oliver) as a “mistake”. Newspaper column inches have now been devoted to finding the true definition of “Jamaican jerk” and the whole thing has begun to resemble a storm in a teacup of rice. If that was as far as it went, it wouldn’t deserve further attention. Yet the story isn’t just about Oliver, jerkiness, or the overreactions of an MP. This story is about “appropriation” and the way in which the ordinary stuff of our culture is weaponised on both the right and the left. Why, after all, should Oliver’s jerk rice be “not ok”? Isn’t the best culture largely about appropriation?

That’s not to say that all appropriations are equal. Sometimes “cultural appropriation” isn’t even the appropriate term for what’s happening. Take, for example, the reaction to the news that Scarlett Johansson would be playing the role of Major in the 2017 remake of Ghost in the Shell. Then, the studio, DreamWorks, was accused of cultural appropriation for casting Johansson in a role that some critics maintained should have been played by somebody who was ethnically Japanese. The outcry was hardly surprising. This, after all, is what happens when authorial intent meets cultural sensitivity and both run up against the pragmatics of film economics. Yet untangling it isn’t as easy as the absolutists would wish.

Ghost in the Shell, like so much manga, was inspired by Western culture, in particular, Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine. More broadly, Tezuka Osamu (the godfather of manga and creator of Astro Boy) was heavily influenced by the cartoons of Disney and, arguably, much of Japanese manga depicts characters with overtly Westernized features. It’s perhaps not the most compelling rationalisation as to why manga could be westernised but it’s an argument made more persuasive by the fact that Johansson’s character is a human who has been re-engineered and encased inside a full-body prosthesis. It means that how she looks isn’t necessarily how she looked in her human form. This gives the filmmakers a certain degree of freedom when it came to making the casting choice. Indeed, it begins to highlight how appropriation isn’t always appropriation. It’s as much about interpretation, reinterpretation, and contextualisation. Johansson’s casting wasn’t the reason why the film wasn’t particularly good but casting a western lead in largely Japanese context did lend the film one of its few interesting dynamics.

The cross-pollination between Japanese and American cinema is well established. John Ford westerns fed straight into the samurai movies of Kurosawa but many of those movies – Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress – themselves proved the inspiration for the Star Wars movies. If any of that was “cultural appropriation” then it was very different to, say, the business of “whitewashing” which has long been a problem for Hollywood. This is a crucial difference and why the normal flows of influence shouldn’t be confused with the kind of crass casting that led Brando to make The Teahouse of the August Moon. Yet it does raise the crucial question as to where cultural appropriation ends and where inspired casting begins. When Idris Elba is proposed as the next James Bond there are howls of outrage because it would mean casting against Fleming’s depiction of Bond. Elba is British but that’s suddenly not enough for the purists. It then becomes a matter of racial identity clouded in all manner of political discourse. What exactly is there to fear? It would certainly be a different Bond but not necessarily a worse Bond (for which Pierce Brosnan surely holds the prize with the woeful Die Another Day). A black Bond would also force us to address what it means to be British and, perhaps, do what the best of culture is so good at doing: provoking debate in a way that Bond films haven’t done for decades.

All of which feels a long way from Jamie’s jerk but, to stretch a metaphor, this is all part of the same stew. So many overblown charges of cultural appropriation are really nationalist tendencies writ small. How dare they make Bond black! How dare Jamie Oliver make a Jamaican jerk! How dare they remake a Japanese manga with an American lead! How dare they. Stop it!

Or, alternatively, why not cut out the nonsense and stop curtailing the threads of influence unless you genuinely want to stop drinking coffee because it’s Arabic or using the alphabet because it was originally Etruscan, Greek, or Roman. Too often is “protecting culture” a byword for a prohibition on the free flow of ideas. The story of Oliver’s jerk is no different to the story of curry, which was once cooked throughout the East but gained its current popularity when it came to the UK and become something similar but entirely different. The entirety of our history has been about how cultures touch and how they are changed by that synthesis. Jamie Oliver is simply expressing a little of what it means to be a human alive in a world of ideas. I really can’t believe I’m saying this but it really is time to cut the jerk a little slack…