On Proper Representation in 'Outlander'
A Scottish American feels thoroughly represented after finally watching the series.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
One of the benefits of having a murderous-sounding locational Highland surname like mine is you know exactly where you come from. But ‘Killough’ only sounds bloodthirsty to English-speaking ears; if you were, say, a swaggering Scot in Outlander who speaks Gaelic, you would know it’s actually quaint and perhaps a little ghoulish. You would hear ‘Cill’ (pronounced “kill” because there is no K in the Gaelic alphabet) and understand it to mean ‘church’ or ‘graveyard’, and the ‘lough’ clearly means ‘loch’; after all, you pronounce both the same way, never as the Americanized 'low'. In other words, you know ‘Killough’ means “church-and-graveyard on a lake.”
On further inquiry, you might determine that my father’s family is a sept of Clan Donald, specifically from Lochaber, and even more precisely from Glen Coe on Loch Leven in Ballaculish (there is another Loch Leven in Perthshire, for some reason).
Then you might ask, “Would the name be referring to Eilean Munde, that wee auld kirk on an isle on the loch that’s the ancient burial ground for the clan?”
“Aye,” I’d reply. “It would.”
Despite the strong cultural association — both of my parents are of Scottish descent, both worship in Presbyterian 'kirks' — I didn’t get around to watching Outlander until this past month. That's a deep-frozen cold shoulder; it’s coming up on its fifth season. I’ll admit that ignoring it was an act of pure macho misogyny: Having watched the pilot when it first aired in 2014, I determined it was a chick’s show based on a series of historical novels that were nothing but some clichéd wish fulfillment about being being swept off your feet and boned senseless by the biggest, best-looking Scottish hunk they could find — and, boy, did they find him in Sam Heughan.
Once again, we Highlanders were being stereotyped and fetishized for our large sporrans and low-hanging kilts. I wanted no part of it.
Even when my boyfriend highly recommended it, I sniffed into my porridge and ignored him; a Danish Canadian should only comment on ‘Vikings’, not Outlander. What sealed my disgust and cemented my misogyny was they changed the gender in the lyrics of the Skye Boat Song in the title sequence from 'lad' to 'lass'. It didn't matter that the lyrics are the later Robert Louis Stevenson version, not the original Highland lullaby: It's about Bonnie Prince Charlie's flight to the Isle of Skye after the Battle of Culloden, an event pivotal to the entire series, so it made even less sense to change it a woman's point of view just for the sake of a female protagonist. #MeToo was going #TooFar!
Having said that, it’s the best rendition of that rousing, emotional song I’ve ever heard, beautifully sung and orchestrated. Certainly better than the version we learned when I was eight at the British School I went to in Rome.
Outlander is indeed a steamy female-oriented, action-romance period drama. But once I was firmly binging it I had to admit I was wronger than I’ve been in a long time. My biggest disgrace is that the first season takes place almost entirely in the Lochaber region, where my father’s people were from; it’s painstakingly authentic — entire scenes mostly in Gaelic with no subtitles — and historically accurate; and of the three clans featured in the story one is my mother’s, MacKenzie, and the other my father’s.
I even had a wee chuckle when the MacKenzies kicked the shit out of a pack of Donalds in a post-duel skirmish; only the perpetually quarrelsome Scots could have post-duel skirmishes. It was like watching my parents’ divorce all over again, but speeded up to under a minute.
In fairness to me, there’s a reason it took me a while to figure out that it’s meant to take place in Lochaber, where I’ve spent some time with the family digging into our roots: The one failing of the show is that it isn’t actually shot in that region. No director would film there for an entire season and not have the mirror-surface lochs and mountains frame every exterior shot; her cinematographer would quit from the trauma and change profession. I’m not sure it would be possible to get a loch-less shot if you tried.
The decision not to shoot on location is clearly for budget reasons: It would be very difficult and costly to accommodate cast and crew in such a remote, sparsely populated place for such a long period, sending main cast and crew home for the weekends, moving everyone around, building and warehousing the sets, replacing a faulty camera within an hour, and so forth. It wasn’t until the action moved to Fort William that I asked my phone, “Isn’t that just up the road from our wee auld kirk on Loch Glen Coe, from whence we get our murderous surname?”
“Aye,” Lord Google the Omniscient replied, “exactly twenty-eight minutes under normal traffic conditions.” Another search revealed that, indeed, the show is shot in and around Edinburgh, which has enough filmmaking infrastructure to support a few shows at once.
HOME SWEET HOME
The best way to describe Lochaber and Glen Coe in particular is an anecdote. I was passing an Indian American colleague’s desk once and noticed his computer wallpaper: a craggy, snow-capped hill perfectly reflected in the still, polished-ebony waters of a loch, a ray of sunshine bursting through the majestic nebulous clouds like an archangel’s trumpet heralding God’s imminent arrival. “Is that Scotland?” I asked, knowing the answer.
“Yeah. It’s Glen Coe,” my friend replied. “I think it looks like heaven on earth. It soothes me when I'm stressed,” which is a lot coming from a devout Sufi.
“That’s where my family’s from! But imagine trying to make a living off that land,” I said, throttling back pride that swelled with wailing bagpipes and the feel of my kilt’s heavy pleated hem brushing against the back of my knees. “Sheep, sheep, and more sheep — no wonder we had to leave.”
Outlander follows the story of a preternaturally long-necked English army nurse, Claire, in the months just after the end of World War II, who visits the Highlands with her English husband, Frank, to research an ancestor of his, an English captain garrisoned in Fort William during the Jacobite risings of the 1740s.
On a visit to a druidic Stonehenge-like formation, she falls through time to 1743, into the hands of Clan MacKenzie, who suspect she’s a spy; they are soon seduced by her noble English grace and astounding healing powers. The subtext is refined, evolved English culture stuck amid the barbarians of the wild north. She also meets Frank’s ancestor, the brutal sadist Jack Randall, who creates a crisis that is only solved if Claire marries a young, six-foot-three, physically perfect, redhead Highland laird named Jamie — poor woman. But if you’re going to do time-travel bigamy, might as well do it with a Highland god.
Lest we barbaric Scots of all types take offense at the inter-cultural clichés — unlikely, as we’re way too leathery and blockheaded to be woke — Claire has all prejudices schooled out of her when Jamie throws his caber up her sports field in ways she’d be unlikely to experience south of Hadrian’s Wall, where the notion of good sex involves crossdressing/cosplay and a jolly good spanking from nanny.
I’m only partly through the second season, but for most of season one the MacGuffin — not a real clan; a plotting device — of the story is Claire's need to get back to the Stonehenge-like place and return to Frank and the time she was born in. After she falls ever more deeply in love with Jamie and her new Highland lifestyle, her MacGuffin switches from trying to get back home to stop the ill-fated, ill-advised Battle of Culloden in 1746, which she knows her new clansmen will lose to the English. Culloden will prompt the English “to destroy Highland culture for good in retribution,” as Claire frets in almost every episode to remind viewers of the consequences if she doesn’t force a change in the course of history by sabotaging the Jacobite rebellion.
This single culture-changing event, combined with being tired of trying to eke out a living on a brutal, unforgiving slice of “heaven on earth,” is why I speak with an American accent, not a Scottish brogue. This is even more reason why Outlander represents me and the culture I am descended from so fully and appropriately, despite being at times a standard corset-ripping premium cable soap opera.
When my father, my siblings and I began our Highland journey “home” to Glen Coe, we began it by driving to Culloden from Edinburgh and paying our respects to the battlefield, conveniently ignoring the fact that Clan Donald was partly responsible for the defeat by refusing to charge because they’d been given the left flank rather than the right, which was their position per tradition.
A HERITAGE OF DISCORD AND BRUTALITY
What can I say? We love our details and traditions. We also love our constant infighting, another accurate representation that I deeply appreciate; it’s a characteristic that I feel I’ve failed to properly convey to my therapist when I’m ascribing my family’s deep dysfunction to inherited cultural traits. (After almost twenty years of trying to explain to my kind, gentle, non-confrontational Brahmin Indian brother-in-law why we Killoughs behave the way we do, I settled on, "We're a combination of jats (farmer caste) and kshatriyas (warriors), with a heavier portion of the latter.")
The Killoughs had actually begun leaving the Highlands well over a century before Culloden, to become gentlemen farmers during the “Plantation” of the wilds of Northern Ireland, the reason we’re also categorized as Ulster Scots. But we remained attached to our details and traditions: our children were brought back to Lochaber to be “properly baptized,” as one family historian put it; it's a short distance between the western Highlands and the northeast coast of Ireland, twelve miles at its narrowest. That tradition faded when we migrated to the New World.
First we tried Pennsylvania, which was more hospitable to Presbyterians than Puritan New England, “where we fought with everyone, per usual,” as Dad puts it. Then we branched off, the greater portion to slash their way through the wilds of Texas and Oklahoma, and be slashed and scalped themselves by Cherokees in the Killough Massacre of 1838 in East Texas. A smattering went north to New York State, which would be our very thin line of the family. Mum’s MacKenzie lot stayed in Scotland and Ulster longer, then migrated to Australia to herd “sheep, sheep, and more sheep” over the Blue Mountains from New South Wales to Victoria, where Cousin Pete still has a sheep station.
FREE FOLK IN KILTS
Outlander isn’t just an overt, forthright comment on race relations — keeping in mind that the English back then saw themselves as a superior race and culture to the Scots, which constitutes racism — it’s a relentless meditation on it; they literally don’t stop commenting on it in the dialogue, thereby keeping the white-on-white bigotry subtext constantly in play.
Covertly, the racial theme is stymied by the epic, layered, nuanced psychological and physical struggle between the sadistic English Captain Jack Randall and the heroic Highland hunk Jamie, who carries the marks of the scourge of British oppression in the form of a mass of crisscrossing scars on his back, the result of two hundred lashes with a cat o’ nine tails dealt to him by Randall himself.
Lest anyone think that White-on-White racism isn’t possible, it’s actually far more common and aggressive than White-on-Nonwhite; humans tend to hate most the people most like them: the tribes that border us are a much greater threat to our survival than those far away.
I was raised with my Ulster Scots mother saying about my patrician, Anglo-Saxon paternal grandmother — whose family settled in New England during the Great Puritan Migration — “She married beneath her” by getting hitched to my Ulster Scots grandfather. Having been raised in a strictly pro-British culture in Melbourne, part of the first generation in well-to-do Australia not to adopt a “cut-glass” English RP accent, Mum still took it as par for the course that Anglo-Saxon blood is superior to Anglo-Celtic, even if it meant that she herself was lesser.
Where the Scots lay in the scheme of early British history is easily understood by the dynamics in Game of Thrones. The Scots were so bellicose and pesky that the Romans built a wall to contain them, which is transformed in GoT to become the colossal ice Wall that separates the North from the Lands of Always Winter.
The Wildlings/Free Folk who live beyond the Wall are the equivalent of Scots; the redhead Wildling Tormund Giantsbane in GoT is a stereotype represented in Outlander by both hunky redhead Jamie and his ever-grumpy, constantly combative wingman Murthagh Fraser. How Westerosians feel about Wildlings is how the English felt about the Scots until Queen Victoria elevated them to her favorite pet people and restored Highland culture, which was indeed destroyed in retribution after Culloden; even clan tartans were banned.
OPINIONS ARE LIKE BELLY BUTTONS: THEY ALL TICKLE
As with all entertainment, so much of this is personal taste and point of view; the intellectual merits, however, I feel are less subjective and debatable. I consider Outlander to be a good show with moments of greatness. If I were a woman into period dramas I would consider it to be outstanding — the writing and performances alone are deeply satisfying. I am particularly enjoying the little lessons in 18th-century medicine compared to the mid-20th century’s.
This is another effective theme: being more medically advanced than the best doctors of the Jacobite era creates the constant threat that Claire might be accused of sorcery and executed. I’m also intrigued with what seems to me to be a female take on male sexuality; while I have encountered it throughout my life as a gay man trying to explain it to puzzled women who make certain assumptions based on their impulses and desires, I have never seen it explored in such detail on screen.
Having broken it down like this, I have to say that Outlander is an even more plentiful smorgasbord of intellectual delights than I thought when I started writing this.
Again, Bear McCreary’s rendition of the Sky Boat Song, sung by Raya Yarborough, cannot be ignored — brings tears to my eyes. Like me, McCreary of West Scottish descent, therefore allowed to do what he pleases without fear of being sent to the clink for appropriation.
Parting observation: I don’t understand why people hate bagpipes so much, especially if they’re integrated judiciously with other instruments; I have a sneaking suspicion that they evoke so much loss and longing — likely the reason they are played at funerals of public officials throughout the Anglosphere — that some people resent them for exploiting their emotions.
UPDATE 05/25/23:
Stumbled on this extended version of The Skye Boat Song in Scottish Gaelic from Season 6, which I have yet to watch:
This was originally posted on Pure Film Creative.
I know this is an old posting but very worthwhile reading James. My dad's family has MacDonalds from Glen Coe in their ancestry. I wish I had known this when we visited there years ago.