'The Crown' and 'The West Wing…': Monarchy or Republic?

Until 2016, no career politician was to be taken seriously who hadn't read

Machiavelli's

.

From then on, those who seek a place in that courtyard have to pass another exam with a grade:

.

Both works represent the essence of liberal democracies, a system conquered by blood and which for a decade has once again been in danger of being demolished by the same ghosts that wanted to destroy it at the beginning of the 20th century.

Aaron Sorkin's series broke down in seven seasons all the twists and turns of the American presidential system.

While Peter Morgan has done the same thing with Parliamentary Monarchy on Netflix.

The fifth season can be seen from November 9.

Both artifacts influence large audiences much more than a battalion of so-called political scientists or sharp analysts clucking manuals and often incomprehensible words in the media.

The creative screenwriters of these two masterpieces do so through a sophisticated fiction that battles between the real and the ideal, the praxis of crudeness, the not always sustained weight of ethics and the desire to improve things.

When Sorkin devised

he had no inkling that he would one day witness Donald Trump's rise to the presidency.

Not even in his worst nightmares did Peter Morgan —especially when he wrote the brilliant script for

Queen— intuit that his beloved Elizabeth II would have to receive Boris Johnson in audience.

In the last decade, both have been champions of the demolition of their systems in pursuit not of constructive alternatives but of their own personal interests.

But reality has already stoked the hammer blow of our astonishment.

That is why it is more convenient today than ever to pay attention to both creations.

Martin Sheen in the second season of 'The West Wing of the White House'.

The West Wing

is more theoretical than practical, while

On the contrary, she chooses with an ability that has her pun, by being tied to real events.

Jed Bartlet is a completely invented character through whom Sorkin constructs an ideal of what the President of the United States should be: educated, thorough, pragmatic, but rooted in his principles, close, but aware of the loneliness in which he must finally take. his decisions, surrounded by the best, attentive to their advice, determined when facing and signing what he has to sign.

Delivered to his simple tastes but masterful in protocol, fragile but energetic and with a sentimental touch.

A guy you would go to vote for without a shadow of a doubt, a son of utopia with a margin of real application.

Bartlet opens the 21st century in an iconic way as opposed to another fictional nemesis like the Frank Underwood in

.

Just as Sorkin's character heralds the arrival of an Obama since the series premiere in 1999, Frank flatters us and anticipates Trump.

Heroine of global audiences

Elizabeth II, on the other hand, has existed.

We have seen it and lived with it.

But the ability of

is to have broken the emotional barrier that has armored the character for decades to put it inside all of us.

In view of her, what has happened with her death remains: a fervor that would not have curdled in the same way among citizens without the series in between.

In fact, it has been her true litmus test: seeing how from queen of a country she has become a heroine of global audiences through a pure conscientiously crafted television show.

demonstrates what it is: not only a show that has marked an era and a trend, but also the best and most modern image operation that has been launched in the 21st century within a modern State.

Morgan already began with his experiment in this sense with the figure of Elizabeth II when he wrote

, directed by Stephen Frears.

In it he addressed the pact between monarchy and politics that has functioned as the

in the United Kingdom since Charles I had his head cut off in 1649 following the revolt of Oliver Cromwell and the Ironsides.

The image of the queen lived its lowest hours after the death of Diana of Wales and

deals with how she and Tony Blair repaired that crack with a masterful film, in line with that kind of history that Anglo-Saxon cinema has given us the time to deal with the matter with perspective in works such as

, by Fred Zinnemann (1966) or

, by Ken Hughes (1970)

The Crown

goes further… It addresses the figure of the queen not in a single chapter, but with the ambition of connecting her as a legend in her time.

She does this without failing to go into her weaknesses in order to better justify her strengths.

She does not avoid family, marital, political tension regardless of the fact that she is often in a bad place to make us understand that if she has acted that way in certain situations, she did it because of her ability to sacrifice in favor of the crown.

The weight of majesty often implies the annulment of the will and the desire to act in one direction or another.

And that the stability of the monarchy responds to interests that are paid with the price of misunderstanding or directly the absence of affective and emotional ties with respect to husband, children, brothers or grandchildren.

pic.twitter.com/jMJNYCZ1va

— The Crown (@TheCrownNetflix) September 24, 2022

The series shows the spectacle of the solemnity accompanied by a crude but close portrait of the queen to achieve with it the powerful image of a deified woman where heroes and legends are cooked today: on television.

The symbolic force of it has been accompanied by the times.

In the present democratic drift, when the extreme right is present and eats away at the system with speeches of division and hatred that find followers to take away governments, where the leadership has been left on the ground, her figure gains even more strength with an aroma of nostalgia.

On the other hand, the ideal of Bartlet in the United States no longer seems possible or by replacing the series again and again on Amazon Prime or HBO Max, where it can be seen.

Everything that Sorkin theorized in dramaturgy and images today faces internal ghosts with the same danger as the external ones.

Today, Trump's supporters and his theories threaten as much or more than Putin — the true boss of the previous president — within the system.

We no longer even need dystopias to alert us.

We have lived them.

To counteract them we do not require utopias either.

But it is worth reviewing and continuing to see the chapters of these fundamental works to understand the complexity of a system that has conquered the highest levels of well-being in history through the will of dialogue and agreement.

Both show us that the key to progress and democracy is not reduced to black and white, but to a continuous and subtle balance open to agreement in a constant way to walk towards a world, if not better, simply more secure and habitable.

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