The Weight of the Crown

Alone amongst my family, I have kept on watching The Crown off and on, in between episodes of things I watch with the rest of them of shows involving more guns and guffaws. The show is indeed slow. Its slowness would seem to derive from the fact that, at base, it has but one theme: the weight of the crown, and what that means for the Queen and her family, but mostly for the Queen herself; the tension of being at once sovereign and human, and at times the added pressure being sovereign and woman.

It does sound boring, and is in fact not long on car chases. One would not think that this theme could be strung out successfully over many episodes, that there were so many facets to it. But there are.

The most recent episode I watched concerned the Edward VIII's desire to return to public life, which coincides in the episode (and presumably in real life) with the discovery that he had been in league with Hitler in a variety of ways. Should Elizabeth forgive him and let him serve the government? At the same time Billy Graham is touring through Britain and giving sermons to stadiums, and Elizabeth, in distinction to most of the rest of the snooty royals, refuses to act as if he is an unwashed commoner. She watches his sermons and hears some of his message. Again, she is at once sovereign and human.

Unlike most people, however, she can just snap her fingers and he'll come visit, which she does, and he does, twice. The second time, it is for advice, as she ponders what to do with her dandy, barely repentant fascist uncle. And Elizabeth says to Graham, basically: "I'm in a tough position, as the head of the church. There's no one between me and God."

So now the stage has shifted, because now she has reframed the issue and it's not about sovereign/human, but about divine/human, and we are back on familiar territory, because we are thinking in not just Christian (God/man) terms but Socratic (ideal/real) or even pre-Socratic (one/many) ones.

But we've really been there the whole time, which is why the show has been more or less relatable from the beginning, because it has foregrounded the fact that Elizabeth, while a clever and earnest girl, was never a rocket scientist. She was a good girl -- Gallant to Margaret's Goofus -- but she also enjoys a romp between the sheets with the dashing if debauched and philandering Phillip and is not above a petty snit now and again. But she tries. Over and over again she wrestles with tough questions as the camera lingers on her -- aided in this act by Claire Foy's good looks.

And in fact, this very ordinariness is the key to her appeal and her power. Although anointed by God and easy on the eye, Elizabeth is not very special. Like Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer,* Elizabeth's voice is scarcely distinguishable from that of her subjects, a fact that is ultimately not lost on her, but she labors diligently to justify the attention paid to her.

It must be said The Crown, at least through the first two seasons, is mighty white. The show deals with questions of gender ever so slightly, and class too, and there are allusions to gayness here or there, and there are scenes of Philip and his crew ogling and then bedding African and Polynesian women, which comes back to bite him, and around the time of the Suez crisis there's a pretty frank admission of the UK's dependence on oil seized by force, but by and large the first couple of seasons float in that blissful time before the colonial repressed has returned. So it is easy for things to float along at a high level of abstraction, because these questions of ruler and subject, man and God, one and many are being worked out amongst a bunch of people and supernatural entities who, in their minds' eyes, look like one another. By and large this is the realm of the Masterpiece Theater genre from which The Crown jumps off, a comfortable and scenic world in which affluent, liberal and educated audiences can look at pretty things and consider an issue or two before getting ready for the work week. It will be interesting to see if the upcoming seasons can open up and process more complexity. I ain't saying it's easy.










*Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Songstress", If, then, if it were to be true that Josephine doesn't sing but just whistles, and indeed, as it seems to me, that her whistling barely exceeds the bounds of the ordinary, that really her powers in whistling don't even extend into the triumphant sort mentioned earlier whereas the whistling of our typical laborer, someone who is quite down to earth and who whistles the whole day long without any particular effort, that this just goes hand in hand with his earthly travails, well, if all of this were to be true then, indeed, Josephine's purported artistry would be refuted-but now, first and foremost, now we'd have to face up to this riddle as to why it is that her performances are so electrifying! And really, when you get right down to it, it's not merely whistling, this is not everything that Josephine exhibits in her performances-you need only place yourself in the back of the auditorium and listen attentively... or, better yet, test this out in the following manner: if Josephine is singing amongst a group of others and if you should give yourself the task of making her voice out from amongst these others then without fail you won't be able to distinguish anything else but a typical, middle-of-the-road sort of whistling that, at the most, is a bit sweeter or somehow softer and this is the only distinguishing characteristic that you might hear.