“I came to Oxford looking for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I chose to experience a lifetime.” Whew boy. These immortal words ring from the pages of Julia Whelan’s 2018 debut novel My Oxford Year, which Netflix has now unwisely adapted in the latest of its toe-curling original films. You’ll probably have seen the posters on public transport — that grim picture of a snogging brunette couple overlaid with a charming serif font. After braving the trailer, one old university friend told me: “I want to jump out of a window after watching that.”
My Oxford Year is the story of a fit American with nice teeth and a — gulp — “library fetish”. She inevitably falls for a sexy young don, telling him: “I just love being among those dusty old first editions.” She is, in short, a book girlie. For those spared this Gen-Z trend, that means she sees hardbacks as substitutes for intellectual curiosity; they are material objects to be conspicuously tucked under a cable-knit arm, flashed at sensitive young men, or leafed through with a steaming hot mug of chamomile tea. Bliss!
You’ll have sensed some vitriol here. I won’t conceal it. The other day I was browsing a secondhand bookshop in Manhattan, of course in an entirely unpretentious way. As I scanned the shelves for something thin and cheap to read on the subway, I sensed a change in the air: a floppy-haired poseur slinked in and demanded of the shopkeeper a “first edition of anything by Simone de Beauvoir”. He was surely trying to shag some gender-studies major, but he’d have to wait a little longer; the store was fresh out of The Second Sex. Rats! No, really. This is New York.
I digress. Rest assured that My Oxford Year, which I took the trouble of zooming through, is a hot lot of nonsense. Specifically, it embodies a breathless Anglophilia that reminds me of the plump, bum-bagged tourists who used to shuffle down Broad Street when I was at Oxford, lumbering into Harry Potter-themed shops and brandishing Amexes at perplexed Oxfam volunteers. Netflix succeeds only in flattening the city and its academic life to a collection of patronising cliches: “That is a serious bit of crumpet,” yelps one student who we are expected to believe is in his early 20s and not, in fact, Norris from Coronation Street in disguise. The sexy don inexplicably drives a silver Aston Martin (UCU strikes where?) and does charmingly British things like hiding from love interests in chip shops and offering students Victoria sponge. When our tiresome protagonists finally start kissing, they do it a lot, particularly when it rains. In one such moment, they lurch into an archway in the Bodleian courtyard, somehow avoiding being brained by the camera of a Chinese tourist.
All this is washed down with a frothing goblet of dialogic slop. “Poetry can be taught, but really it should be lived,” we hear. “Maybe it’s not the amount of time you spend on earth, maybe it’s what you do with it.” Predictably, given the film was produced by the same sobsmiths who made 2014’s young-adult nightmare The Fault in Our Stars, the love interest is bumped off. No contrition here for the spoiler: watching it was punishment enough. But even a dose of tragedy can’t win round all viewers. I find myself urging the producers to make things interesting, go full Titus: bake him into the Victoria sponge.
Are all fictional Oxfords doomed to flop? An open-top bus tour of recent depictions suggests that, yes, the city has jumped the cinematic shark. The typical Oxford films — Saltburn, The Riot Club, even the sepia-tinged Stephen Hawking flick The Theory of Everything — all portray the city as a mirage of sunny quadrangles, orange lamps in foggy lanes and eccentric, alcoholic tutors. Of course, Oxford can be all these things (the latter most of all), but it is also defined by coffin-sized showers with gritty floors, MDF furniture in brutalist staircases and relentless, Soviet-style JCR meetings steered by the spottiest and most insufferable people you’re ever likely to meet. The outsider longing of many of these films trades in what the cultural critic Paul Fussell called “tourist aesthetics”: viewers crave quaint magic, and so aren’t shown the things that make Oxford decidedly unexceptional. It is, after all, just another university. Accordingly, there are tyrannical student representatives, bird-brained political discussions and clubbers staring, dead-eyed, at the searing light of the McDonald’s menu. Charming, I suppose — but not in a way that Netflix could understand.
“Netflix succeeds only in flattening the city and its academic life to a collection of patronising cliches.”
Imaginary Oxford is caught in a sort of time warp, where clipped Wodehouse accents warble about titles and country houses, and the university’s defining class dynamics are boiled down to tailcoated bully boys molesting studious girls from t’ North. But go to any college bar and you’ll find that the students who are most chuffed about being at Oxford are invariably the “outsiders” — non-public schoolers; the fey Londoners shipped in from St Paul’s roll their eyes at this “boring” and “small” consolation prize. You’d never catch them in a college puffer; a ratty jumper from Portobello Market will do. Being detectably dazzled by the city marks you out as a yokel.
One recent portrayal that does understand this is the Wadhamite Christopher J. Yates’s The Rabbit Club, a new mystery novel which takes in the true absurdity of Oxford life. In this book, class is structural, ambient and inescapable — but despite centering another young American protagonist, Yates doesn’t reduce it to cricket jumpers and boyish baronets. Instead, we meet a cast of theatrical try-hards who mainly swallow, rather than spit, their privilege. One such character is the deceptively named T-Bone — or rather, Thomas de Beaune, “future fifth Baron of Hoick” and heir to De Beaune’s bank. After summering in Jamaica, T-Bone returns with dreads and public-school patois (“a little sumting from the byar”). Netflix, take note: the most incorrigible poshos are the ones who deny it. A secret society based, I presume, on Piers Gav is the site of “pink and pallid” pigs’ heads — Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton might well make a cameo. The only construction I did not recognise was the posho nature of the society’s organising committee: the modern-day Piers Gav was infiltrated long ago by a league of mulleted pansexuals who at least do the honour of pretending to be deprived. But, as the novel is set in the Nineties, I’ll let it slide.
Yates approaches the mythos of Oxford in the only way that seems appropriate: by skewering its sacred texts. Brideshead Revisited is said to be a guidebook for wide-eyed first years — the VHS, not the novel, we’re assured — and characters try to be as foppishly eccentric as they might, but beneath the Savile Row shirt the polyester always pokes through. The sense of sweating under grandeur is well wrought: in our Californian character’s eyes, hungover bile vomit, discounted Tesco finds and Scottish people are just as much part of the Oxford experience as gruff porters and casual Latin. Yet they rarely make it into the pantheon of Netflix.
Americans yearn for Old World gravitas. Oxford’s imitators stud the American East Coast, where 18th-century founders laid down flagstone floors and piled pastiche Gothic revival turrets high to create ersatz versions in the Ivy League. Crests, dining halls, tutors: the world was complete in every possible way — every way, that is, except in the presence of the class dynamics which underpin British, and therefore Oxford, life. The next time I suffer through an American in Oxford on screen, I want to see them wade through these tensions. Otherwise, what’s the point?
To any Netflix executive no doubt clinging on to my words, I offer a nugget of wisdom: stop telling British people how quaint we are. Like the “Oxford” hoodies hawked to coachloads of Yanks, it’s cheap, fake tat — and it will never wash well.
