The Queen
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
I like stories about Kings and Queens. It doesn't seem like I should but I do. Maybe it's because only constitutionally free citizens can really get any meaning out of the rise of Prince Hal or the fall of Lear. One certainly doesn't imagine Elizabeth the First (or, currently, say, King Abdullah of Jordan) getting much out of them--Shakespeare's kings are written for merchants, actors and pimps. They're democratic kings, willing to abase themselves in greasepaint before the public.
I just got back from seeing Hellen Mirren portray Elizabeth II, and though my mind's not blown I had a pretty good time. It takes place during the week after Diana's death in 1997, and it's novel to see contemporary queenship shown so explicitly--it has the anachronistic effect of science fiction. Yet how could it be mind blowing, really? There is no raging or weeping or any other kind of big-money payoff. The epigraph quotes Henry IV--"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"--but in this case all the Falstaffs are in court--quite untroubled--and all the princes are out of it. In the scene where Tony Blair stands up and defends the Queen against the snide Labour party insiders, he is violently asserting his authority over the Queen's existence and not the other way around. The movie serenely skewers the Royal family, portraying them as lightweight dolts, with Helen Mirren giving an excellent, frosty performance as the Queen dolt, reduced rather than aggrandized by the falseness of her eventual public openness. What these royals are first, besides being funny, is boring. She is perhaps the first English Queen ever to be portrayed as such: someone powerful and removed enough to be absolutely mindless and without real qualities at all. She neither rages nor falls nor really weeps, and can tell us absolutely nothing about our roles in a democracy. The Queen is sort of like a Masterpiece Theatre Ubu Roi, abstractedly destructive of anything unregimented, yet maximally genteel, and requiring tea.
This movie actually wallows in the language and manners of democracy like a pig in shit, yet it assumes that the democracy Elizabeth is learning to love has something to do with loosening up the old sash and chilling out with Elton John at Princess Di's funeral. As merchants and pimps we can rage and weep all we want, but we'll never be invited to do that.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 5:07 PM,
