Politics & Power Quote by Richard O'Brien

There is a quiet confession tucked inside Richard O'Brien's tidy list of "influences": New Zealand and Australia didn't just watch culture, they received it like a delivery. Britain and America "sending" movies and television turns entertainment into infrastructure, a pipeline that shapes what a place imagines itself to be. The phrasing matters. "Western civilisation" and "English speaking civilisation" sound like neutral descriptors, but they function as permissions slips: a way of explaining why certain stories arrive pre-approved, why accents and archetypes feel default, why local life can start to look like a regional spinoff of someone else's center.

O'Brien is an actor, and you can hear the performer in how he frames culture as something embodied, not debated. It's not policy, it's what you grow up mimicking. Film and TV don't arrive as arguments; they arrive as vibes, characters, jokes, desirability. That soft power is the subtext: an imported emotional education that teaches you what counts as sophisticated, rebellious, funny, romantic, "normal."

Context matters because O'Brien comes from the mid-century Commonwealth world where passports, broadcast schedules, and cultural aspiration all pointed north and west. Before global streaming flattened taste into algorithmic sameness, the menu was still narrow - and heavily Anglo-American. The line reads less like nostalgia than a clear-eyed origin story for a particular kind of hybrid creativity: artists from the periphery absorbing dominant codes, then reassembling them into something weirder, brasher, and more locally charged. This is how cultural dependence can quietly incubate cultural invention.