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OPINION | The dark side of royalty emerges in 'the Crown'

2020-11-18T20:56:42.345Z


The fourth season of "The Crown" demonstrates how effective the palace's public relations machinery has been since the 1980s, says Holly Thomas.


Thatcher and Princess Diana arrive at "The Crown" 0:43

Editor's Note:

Holly Thomas is a London-based writer and editor.

Her Twitter account is @ HolstaT. The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author.

You can read more articles like this at cnne.com/opinion.

(CNN) -

Please note: the opinion column below contains spoilers for season 4 of "The Crown."

If one were to design the worst possible vacation close to home, I doubt that a single detail would deviate from the description of the royal vacation to Balmoral in the second episode of the newly released fourth season of "The Crown."

The season is set in the late 1970s and 1980s, with Gillian Anderson making her debut as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Also Emma Corrin as Diana Spencer, the potential fiancee of Prince Charles and future princess.

Over the course of several days in khaki, Thatcher, immediately followed by Spencer, is put to the test by the royal family.

Royalty has a series of evaluations known both in the series and in real life as "Balmoral's test."

This is held at the royal holiday home in Scotland to determine if the clan will accept a newcomer.

The test - which focuses heavily on the ability to tolerate mud and indecipherable parlor games - and the family are so gruesome that they make the viewer immediately fall in love with Thatcher.

Her limited ambitions to do a little work and sleep in the same bed as her husband are frustrated at every turn by the rising snobbery of her hosts - especially Princess Margaret, played by Helena Bonham-Carter - and her own ignorance of the rules".

Diana, heartbreakingly young, but unlike very elegant Thatcher, does much better.

"I'm a country girl at heart," she pretends, after being dragged out of bed at dawn to go on a deer hunting trip with the intimidating father of her weekend date, Prince Philip (played by Tobias Menzies).

The journey, which culminates with a deer head perched on the wall as a stark metaphor for Diana's fate with Charles, encapsulates the strongest message of the season: royalty is horrible.

More than any other, this season shows just how effective the palace's public relations machinery has been ever since in changing the public view of a group of people who, whether or not they are exactly like their on-screen counterparts, certainly amassed enough dire facts about those who base an excellent television show.

The season begins with an account of the death of Lord Mountbatten, who was killed on a fishing boat off the Republic of Ireland by the ERI.

Charles, the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth and heir to the throne, has been persecuted by his family for years - even by Lord Mountbatten (in the show) through a letter he sends him before he dies - to find a suitable wife. .

In real life, Mountbatten had long advised Carlos not to go after his longtime love, Camilla Parker Bowles.

He also reinforced the importance of her finding a suitable partner, a vital goal, it seems, for almost every member of the family except Carlos.

The entire cast, including newcomers Anderson and Corrin, put on a stellar performance.

The horror of royalty is depicted in 'The Crown' in large part through the group's treatment of Diana, exquisitely portrayed by Corrin as a paralyzed young woman, who flinches at the cruel comment of the spiky Princess Margaret as she tiptoes past her first night at Buckingham Palace.

While Diana's story follows the hackneyed script of the unknown young woman who is estranged from her marital family, but who is wildly loved by the population, Carlos's is dealt with more abruptly.

Carlos is the only member of the family to convincingly mourn the death of his father's uncle, Lord Mountbatten.

The young man, portrayed in 'The Crown' wonderfully by Josh O'Connor, is penalized for the closeness of their relationship by a jealous Prince Philip, before being wedged by his two parents into a loveless marriage with young Diana.

Almost overnight, he transforms from a pensive bachelor his sister calls "Eeyore" into a dispassionate, inconsiderate and cruel husband failure.

She makes no effort to hide her ongoing romance with Parker-Bowles, even on their honeymoon.

And while his own general situation is understandable, the speed with which he became an insensitive husband - which precedes Diana's rise to superstardom - is not entirely explained by her parents' detachment, or the inhumanity of their forced marriage. .

In traditional

British

posh fashion

, Queen Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) and company manage to remain perpetually uncomfortable physically, morally, and emotionally.

When they are not trapping their children in tragic marriages, they are climbing hills in the rain, ignoring the aesthetic disintegration of their palaces, or sacrificing loyal employees to save face.

Her ingrained stiffness is matched only by the stiffness of her hair (Princess Margaret's is the only one moving) and Thatcher's, whose huge spherical hairdo might as well have her own biography to read: 'tough as the queen, but with a bigger brain ».

Gillian Anderson as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Like the queen, whose real-life preference for Prince Andrew is reinforced in a sequence in which she weighs the limited merits of her four children, Thatcher is shown favoring her worst and most entitled son, Mark.

There is an evident narrative sexism in an episode's rewriting of history to present the Falklands war as an expression of Thatcher's runaway maternal instinct - dissonant echoing Prince Philip's opening comment on 'women menopausal 'in charge - when Mark disappears.

In real life, the events did not overlap.

Mark disappeared (and was found) in Algeria 10 weeks before the start of the Falklands War.

Similarly, the sexist implication that Thatcher's resistance to pressure from the rest of the Commonwealth (and Queen Elizabeth) to impose sanctions on South Africa was due to her desire to protect Mark's business interests, which in some ways it somehow eludes its complex relationship with the region.

Olivia Colman as Queen Elizabeth in the fourth season of 'The Crown'.

Thatcher's focus on getting Britain back on track no matter the cost to many of its impoverished inhabitants - as deliberate on screen as many would say it was in life - is decidedly less maternal.

It forms an interesting contrast to the Queen Elizabeth played by Colman, who can apparently muster a little more sympathy for her subjects than her own miserable children.

In episode five of 'The Crown', the queen manages to have a conversation with a man who breaks into the palace, although it is important to note that that was not the case in real life, according to the intruder.

But when the Diana played by Corrin asks for an audience, the queen repeatedly ignores her, compartmentalizing her suffering, and that of her son Charles, with robotic ease (a tone seemingly not so far removed from the queen and Diana's true relationship).

That ability to compartmentalize seems to run in families, both on and off screen. 

Emma Corrin as Diana Spencer in 'The Crown'

The least famous cruelty of the season may be the most poignant.

In episode seven, "The Hereditary Principle," Princess Margaret discovers that five of her cousins ​​and Queen Elizabeth were hidden in a mental hospital in 1941 and publicly pronounced dead.

When Margaret confronts the Queen Mother about it, she explains the decision as yet another consequence of King-Emperor Edward's abdication in 1936, which made the purity of the family lineage a matter of international concern.

While that conversation is fictional, the reported version of real-life events is that the queen mother learned that the cousins ​​were alive in the early 1980s, but did not visit or correct the public record.

She was, incidentally, the patroness of the Royal Society of Children and Adults with Mental Disabilities.

Nothing in the series better exemplifies how amazing it is for this group of people, so disconnected from both the public and others.

A group that was able in the few decades since these events to build a public relations machine so robust that it has resisted in recent years not only the departure of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, but also the association of Prince Andrew with the convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein , and the horrible accusations leveled against him (which Buckingham Palace has emphatically denied).

Anyone who grew up in the 2000s in Britain will have been aware of the profile of the royal family on their rise, fueled by the more accessible Princes William and Henry, and supercharged by the 2011 royal wedding of Prince Henry and Kate Middleton. .

Season 4 of "The Crown" is a solid reminder that even recently royalty was in a near-constant state of crisis, and raises the question of how much more controversy the image of family can bear.

As the series' timeline draws closer to the present, the continued popularity of royalty in real life becomes more difficult to reconcile with reality.

Meanwhile, their on-screen counterparts become more fascinating to watch.

The Crown

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2020-11-18

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