Phillip E. Wegner
University of Florida
             The Pretty Woman Goes Global;
 Or, Learning to Love "Americanization" in Notting Hill

     The film I will talk about, summer 1999's hit
Notting Hill, is a paradigmatic example of the genre
Stanley Cavell names the "comedy of re-marriage."  
Finding its roots in Shakespeare's comedies, and
flourishing in the Hollywood studio system of the mid-
to late-1930s, the classic comedies of re-marriage, in
Cavell's words, "may be understood as parables of a
phase of the development of consciousness at which the
struggle is for the reciprocity or equality of
consciousness between a woman and a man" (17-18).  In
Notting Hill, the "woman and man" involved
in this struggle for recognition are the American film
actress and Hollywood mega-star Anna Scott (played by
Julia Roberts) and William Thacker (Hugh Grant), an
educated English upper-middle-class owner of a
struggling travel bookstore on Portabello Road in West
London.  First encountering each other when Anna
wanders into William's bookstore, their blossoming
romance must overcome a series of obstacles, in a large
part generated by what would seem the absolute
incommensurability of their respective worlds.  During
the course of the narrative, each of our two
protagonists enters into the other's world, and, as
Cavell notes of other works in the genre, begins to
learn to see things through their perspective.  The
conflict of these points of view produces a series of
crises in their relationship, the cycle of couplings
and "divorces" that according to Cavell are so central
to the form, before their union is finally sealed in
the film's closing moments.
     Cavell's description of the plot resolution
offered by this genre as a deeply "utopian" one also
points toward another significant dimension of this
film: for utopias, as well the larger narrative modes
of the romance to which they belong, are centrally
concerned with the production and mappings of space. 
That this film is also very much a reflection on space
is borne out in its very title, taken as it is from the
London neighborhood where a good deal of the narrative
action unfolds.  Notting Hill is a particularly
fascinating urban site, one that had previously burst
into the British cultural imaginary in the course of
two earlier summers.  The first occasion occurred in
August, 1958 with what became known as the Notting Hill
Riots, staged between working-class white and more
recently arrived West Indian black populations.  The
second took place in 1976 during the Notting Hill
Carnival.  This latter event was later celebrated as a
major victory over the repressive apparatus of the
British state, and would also playing a crucial role in
the emerging oppositional consciousness of the punk
movement.  However, by the end of the 1980s, the
numbers involved in police/resident conflicts began to
decrease dramatically, as "the old Black community area
of Notting Hill has been significantly eroded, as
people are displaced by the forces of gentrification"
(Keith, 128-129). Notting Hill, along with a number of
other areas throughout the city have been transformed
into key zones of young white professional
re-development, beneficiaries of the far-reaching
privatization programs begun under the Thatcher regime. 
It is the culmination of these processes of spatial
transformation that are then registered in this film,
as these earlier histories of class and racial conflict
and contestation have apparently vanished without a
trace.
        However, to say that this film is a
triumphalist vision of a new cultural elite, does not
mean that all contestations over the production of
space have vanished from within it.  The events of 1958
and 1976, although unfolding on what Neil Smith calls
the spatial scale of the city, can only truly be
understood without also placing them within the context
of transformations taking place on the global level. 
Thus, I want to suggest that the urban spatial
transformations we witness in this film are no
less the results of the wide-scale systemic spatial
changes we now call "globalization," and if Notting
Hill erases the interclass class struggles that take
place between local populations it brilliantly
registers the intraclass of a new global elite.  In
short, the film narrates a new stage in the history of
globalization, one that involves a recomposition of the
relationship between older local and national cultures
and a transnational corporate culture industry.  The
film thus also marks a dramatic mutation in the British
middle-class response to what we now think of as
globalization-or what used to be more precisely
referred to as "Americanization." I want to argue that
the power and interest of this film thus lies in the
story it tells of the mediation between these two elite
responses to globalization, staging a set of older
cultural fears in order to dissolve them away in the
utopian resolution Cavell argues is central to the
comedy of remarriage, a re-marriage here of American
commodity and media culture and English cultural
identity.  In short, the film offers a specifically
classed education in why Europe should learn to stop
fearing Americanization, and learn to embrace its
benefits.  Moreover, the film also offers us a lesson
in the representation of globalization, using the
figure of marriage (or more precisely, remarriage) to
render concrete the relationship between spatial scales
that are such a central dimension of the current
processes of global spatial and social transformation.
     Moreover, a central lesson of this film is that
for such a marriage to succeed it cannot involve a
simple dissolution of one character and spatial level
into the other.  Interestingly, such a conclusion also
lays to rest one of the other fundamental anxieties
about globalization, one given voice even in such
blatant ideological tracts as Thomas Friedman's recent
best-seller The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding
Globalization.   After offering page after page of
triumphalist paeans to an American corporate-led
globalization, Friedman expresses a passing
worry over the possibility of an incipient cultural
homogenization.  Notting Hill teaches us that such a
worry is a groundless one -- the current forces of
globalization requires both universal commodification
and local cultural identity.  Of course, the identity
of who produces the mass media and other global
commodities and who maintains the local identities is
something that both Friedman's work, and the film,
leaves necessarily unarticulated.