It was, for me, the highlight of the new Downton Abbey movie. This isn’t saying a lot considering what an innocuous snoozefest it is (“pretty weak Darjeeling,” the Washington Post review calls it), but it was something. 

Guy Dexter, the dashing movie star played by Dominic West, returns to Downton two years after making a movie there. During his first visit, Dexter charmed the Crawleys and their upper-crusty friends, but—here’s the point—also treated the servants with respect, with kindness and, in moments, with genuine affection. Now, back for a second visit, he approaches the starstruck cook Daisy (Sophie McShera) and, to her tongue-tied amazement, tells her that he remembers her. 

That’s it, so don’t blink. The Grand Finale gang could have done a lot more with this moment, but don’t. Given the treatment they lavish, endlessly, on the Crawleys and their swooning reluctance to face facts and move on, this is hardly surprising.  

No one should take any of this seriously. The movie is unintentionally amusing, conjuring up, as it does, “a version of post-Edwardian England that had no reality outside of a Beatrix Potter children’s book,” as Ty Burr put it in the Post—or The Wind in the Willows. But there is still something of note happening in both of these movies, whether Fellowes et al. were even aware of it, and it involves Dexter, the movie star. 

He’s a limey himself, who worked in a clothing store before being photographed for menswear ads. Somehow he ended up in the emerging motion picture business, and, though he doesn’t even consider himself a “real” actor, has become a silent-era screen idol. (He was born, he says, Quentin Sidebottom but changed his name for obvious reasons.) He has made his way through all ranks of society with an open and easygoing self-assurance. 

When Dexter goes to the servants’ quarters to see the former footman Thomas Barrow (Robert James-Collier), he is asked what people will think of the butler “receiving a visit from an upstairs guest.” 

Dexter couldn’t care less, he replies. “I’ve lived in America for 10 years now,” he says, “and I don’t believe in that stuff anymore.” By “that stuff,” he means, of course, the moldy stratification of society that prevailed at Downton and in England generally. Distinctions of that kind make little sense, Dexter has realized, and he, for one, was done with them. 

This makes him a member of what Burke called a “natural aristocracy”: one that might have been in large part based on the fact of one’s birth, but not solely, and sometimes not at all when such virtues as “consideration and good will,” in Thorstein Veblen’s words, are on display. Benjamin Disraeli, another upstart who managed to move throughout British society, called “manners, and consideration for others…the two main characteristics of a gentleman.”

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That Dexter has become an American, and as a result has come to cast off the snootiness of the British aristocracy, is ironic enough, of course. There’s no evidence the Downton servants envy their employers, but envy will be a staple of the American life with which the expat movie star has cast his lot. In America, where lip-service has long been paid to “equality,” the near-constant proximity of classes “make possible envy of the upper by the lower,” Robert Nisbet has written. “This is why envy proliferates [in societies] where equality has come to dominate other values.” As Malcolm Muggeridge put it, “the more egalitarian a society…the more snobbish.”

Guy Dexter is a gentleman, but by no means a “gentleman of leisure,” that type that Veblen taxonomized so carefully. Dexter, all the better, is more of a “natural aristocrat” than his high-born hosts. He is not a snob—not yet—but if Fellowes and his fellows produce yet another Downton Abbey movie, maybe he will become one. Let’s hope not. 

“Didn’t I always treat you like we wuz equals?” the indignant and uncouth ballplayer in Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al asks one of his old friends from back home—one who has not distinguished himself in any way, much less made it to the major leagues. Dexter, God bless him, treats everybody like they wuz equals.