Recent Movie Viewings (1)

The Queen. A couple of weeks ago, I watched Prince William and Harry’s 10-year memorial concert for Diana. There is nothing to say about this concert, whose execution was no different than any other live musical performance choreographed for TV, and I mention it only in reference to the oddity that I was watching it at all. The reason, of course, was nostalgia. I didn’t understand then, and still don’t understand why some people could become so emotional about a royal figure whom they didn’t know, unless they just needed an excuse to feel sad. The ending credits of the concert were followed by archive footage of Diana as a girl, playing in a swimming pool, I think, or in the snow, and nothing in her behavior intimated that she was destined for greatness; she could have been anybody’s little kid, and that, I think, was the point.

The Queen, which I finally saw this weekend, is partly about Diana. Not the real person, of course, and in any case she dies in the first five minutes, but rather our collective memory of her as it was assembled on television. The news clips make her look uncannily like a ghost responding to her own memorial. One scene at her funeral cuts to an image of Diana, wearing a hat, turning her eyes toward the camera, after which we shift abruptly back to the funeral. What makes this so unlike, and so superior to the normal biopic is that it doesn’t claim to be “about” the real life of any public figures, but instead examines how our perception of them colors our understanding of history. The film is also about crowds – it opens with a close-up on somebody’s hands clapping, in this case for Tony Blair when he became the prime minister. And over and over again, in segments both staged and real – the boundary is often unclear – we see people crying and laying flowers at the Buckingham Palace, which is so disturbing because it looks so irrational (what good reason was there to get so upset about a princess?) and yet is so understandable.

And third, the movie is about power. The royal family, holed up for most of the film at their estate in Scotland, is the least active group in the entire cast, watching events unfold from the comfort of their rooms. I haven’t decided what to make of the extended shots of the countryside: whether they are supposed to indicate a wilderness that a monarch cannot control, or just an extension of the vast palace garden. We see the queen and her cohort lounging and bickering, almost like they are just another middle-class family on holiday, to the point that we nearly forget that they have any authority – until the moment when the queen decides to walk “among her people” and they begin to curtsy in spite of themselves.