Pat Kane: Is Outlander keeping Scotland wrapped in Tartan mist and myth?

Filming for a prequel, Blood of My Blood, starts tomorrow on sites across Glasgow – not to mention in the long-standing custom-built studios in Cumbernauld. Many film and TV skill sets are thus being kept in the country, building up capacity for future productions. Thumbs up.

Even if you’ve only lightly dipped into the 20th-century-meets-18th-century time-travel extravaganza, you will be struck by how much Scottish culture – actors, accent, locations, historical topics – is sitting at the heart of a blockbuster American TV show, benefitting from its stardust.

It’s Scottish soft power a-go-go.

There’s even a positive politics of minority languages here, in the show’s regular use of Gaelic phrases (eg, Jamie’s endearments for Claire, like “sassenach”, “mo nighean donn”, and “mo chridhe”).

At this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival, the novelist behind Outlander, Diana Gabaldon, broke down when speaking about the potential demise of Gaelic. She’d hoped her work had “tried to do something about that”.

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The final establishment hurrah would be the series’ benefit to the Scottish tourism industry. A 2022 Visit Scotland report on “The Outlander Effect” has a chart that measures substantial rises in visitor footfall, after a location appears on the show. Glencoe Visitor Centre was up 236%, Falkirk’s Blackness Castle up 379%, and Newhailes House in East Lothian up 1254%.

Here endeth the boosterism. And here begins those annoying public intellectual questions. Not that we have much control over the process … but is this how we want Scotland’s image to land in the world of the 2020s?

Some would say, with Outlander, that the “Scotch Myst” descends again – and out of the clouds emerges a fusion of Braveheart’s grotty sex and violence, Highlander’s idiot supernaturalism and Brigadoon’s sentimental escapism.

This nation’s story to the world is still frozen at the beginning of modernity, and even that is rooted in mystic pre-history (the standing stones that effect time-travelling in the series).

Yet as I’m watching its online archive, I have to admit that Outlander is decidedly weirder than this kind of “tartan monster” critique allows (from the school of Tom Nairn and Murray Grigor).

For one thing, the time-travel device (which first brings Claire as a nurse from the 1940s to the strife-torn Scotland of the mid-18th century, and into Jamie’s arms) allows realities to jarringly mix.

There are some scenes in the current series, between Brianna (Jamie’s daughter) and Roger (her husband), which ensure you could never mistake this for heritage drama. This couple have the capacity, like Claire, to live life in two separate centuries, by means of the standing stones.

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This means you can watch them stroll across the beach to a church service in 1800s Virginia, saying lines like “you’re not Steve McQueen in the Great Escape” and “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee … and God will surely go with thee”.

There’s bathos in this device, too. Brianna and Roger go back again through the standing stones to 80s Scotland. There, they find themselves being ripped off by a building restorer for their dream home, and struggling with TV-deprived children. The context is hardly the crushing of Culloden, or the upheaval of the American War of Independence.

Time-travelling, as a conceit, has a familiar critical objection – particularly as it manifests in Doctor Who (Gabaldon regularly relates being inspired to write the books after catching an old black-and-white Doctor Who episode on Canadian TV, on which appeared a kilted – and comely – young man from the Jacobite era).

The critique goes that Doctor Who is the last gasp of Britain’s imperial gaze. Here’s the charismatic Western professional (until recently, always a white male) intervening with and responding to the natives – but at a cosmic scale, not just the red bits on the world map. And always, with superior technology at hand.

IS this much different from Claire’s near-obsession with recreating 20th-century medical cures – like penicillin and anaesthetic gas – in her 18th-century life, often experimenting on herself?

Like the Doctor, regularly misunderstood by communities as mad or dangerous in his practices, nurse Claire occupies an ambivalent role. As a “healer”, she’s suspected of witchcraft (which has terrible consequences for her) – but is also recognised as a saviour.

The “time travellers” from the 20th century in Outlander are an obvious stand-in for the modern tourist to Scotland. And that’s whether they’re tourists imagining Scotland as a portal to another, more “authentic” world or tourists seeking to establish their genealogy as part of the diaspora. Fly over here, on your mystic Airbus portal, and find yourself.

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Gabaldon seems to half-recognise this blending of “routes” and “roots” when she suggests (in a companion to her books) that “the ability to pass through time [in the stories] is evidently genetic”. As the strapline to the early shows puts it: “What if your future was your past?”.

That strapline expresses what Nairn once called the “Janus-face of nationalism” – drawing resources from national history, to anchor and steer national progress, often against the odds.

And at this point, we should remember that Wikileaks revelation, where David Cameron urged Sony not to release Outlander in 2014, for fear that it might tilt the indyref result towards Yes.

Perplexing, really. What seems to distinguish the lead hunk Jamie (Sam Heughan) is his regular desire to put his family and immediate community first, against the claims of contending ideologues and militias. Better Together couldn’t have had a finer tribune (this is ironic, given Heughan’s public support for independence).

So just short of two cheers for Outlander. But some final points for development.

First: if this higher hokum can benefit from a sumptuous, no-expense-spared rendition of 18th-century Scotland, then why not a blockbuster fictional streamer on the life and times of Robert Burns? Isn’t there a consortium of the good and great that could propose such a project to the major platforms?

And second: watching Outlander and its disjointed leaps between tradition and modernity should make us a bit more patient with Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s steampunk reading of Alasdair Gray’s novel.

Should we really be upbraiding the filmmaker for “de-Glasgow-flying” the movie? After chugging through the militantly sepia gloom and mud-covered thigh boots of Outlander for hours, I’m thinking fondly of Lanthimos’s playful and coherent alternative reality.

“What if your future lay with your imagination?” might be a good variation on the strapline.