October 7, 2006
The Queen Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:00 AM EST I’ve just seen The Queen, which Ellen Feldman posted about on last Monday, and which I thought every bit as brilliant as she did. The movie explores a moment when the British public, whipped up into a frenzy by the press, and engaging in what seemed like an orgiastic mixture of grief over the death of Diana, princess of Wales, and voyeurism, demanded a more and more public display of emotion from the members of the Royal Family. Briefly balked of this, the public became angry enough to apparently threaten the continuity of the monarchy. Tony Blair, who at other moments seemed to incarnate the spirit of contempt for the past, a past of which the monarchy is generally considered the supreme and hence most despicable symbol, is widely thought to have saved the monarchy from itself, by advising a display of public emotion, crossed with implied contrition, which suited the exigencies of the moment. Any monarchy is by traditional American standards logically indefensible. As Tom Paine remarked, hereditary government makes as much sense as hereditary authorship. The British monarchy is similarly indefensible to some of the characters in the film, most conspicuously Cherie Blair, and Tony Blair’s director of communications, Alistair Campbell, in a sense a New Labor version of Karl Rove. The film has remarkably little sympathy for their perspective, but it also seems less than enraptured by either Prince Philip or Prince Charles. The former is represented as perdurably contemptuous of political modernity and political necessity, the latter, I think, as much more aware of those things, but the film hints that this awareness is a matter of self-interest: The failure to keep abreast of these matters threatens his inheritance. While they all have their foibles, none of these people are seen as in any way indifferent to the death of the princess of Wales, which was the ugly charge leveled at the time. They are rather seen as committed to protecting the most vulnerable among them, two children, and to behaving with the dignity and restraint that they think characterizes both their caste and their country, and for which they believe both have long been admired. What seems clear is that they are, at least for this moment, very dangerously mistaken in this belief. The Queen sees the role of monarch as a prison, but one within which the queen was quite willing to live, for the shape of the prison was determined by a bargain made between crown and people. At the death of the princess of Wales, the people briefly considered redefining that bargain. The film, however, implies that what the people at that moment wanted was something louder but smaller than a queen of England, for a queen of England has on occasion been something more than a cheaply emoting celebrity, and would have become something less than what she had been, had she too thoroughly complied with the new fashion. Why does the film think this? The Queen’s title character is consistently identified with the Second World War, during which she came of age, and also, as the film at one moment wonderfully reminds us, served as a driver and mechanic. I think the audience is meant to remember that in the 1940s British grief over the dead was wisely restrained, in part because there was an awful lot of it around, and also because it was thought that there were more pressing things to do than drink in displays of unrestrained emotion. This may provoke the reflection that while rational human beings do not give billions of dollars to one of their number, purely on account of an accident of birth, and then make everyone else curtsey to that person, it may also be the case that rational human beings do not always, when beleaguered, absolutely alone, at war with Adolf Hitler, under savage bombardment and blockade, and offered a chance to bow out of it while keeping a very large empire, refuse that offer with incredulous contempt. Ellen Feldman called The Queen filmed historical fiction, and that seems right, but I think it is also a film about the fictions that make up history, some of which, possibly to our sorrow, we may soon become unable to credit. Nations may well be merely imagined communities, and rational beings do not mistake imaginary things for real ones. Post-nationalists are very proud of seeing through the fiction of the nation, and are generally also proud of seeing through queens. The Queen, however, reminds us that committed membership in some imagined communities has had some useful consequences. Within living memory a monarch usefully incarnated a nation and helped rally it to an urgent end. It is a remarkable fact that The Queen may make Americans think not of Paine but of Burke, Paine’s great antagonist, who memorably observed that seen with sufficient clarity, a queen is but a woman, and that seen with similar clarity a woman is but an animal. It is not obviously to our advantage to see everything, at every moment, with quite that degree of clarity.
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