The Crown: Governance as a lesson for our time.

My connection to Queen Elizabeth stems from my identification as a member of the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the Church of England), where the minister once characterized us as the “frozen chosen”.  She has always appeared to me to exemplify what it means to have a stiff upper lip.  And a stiff lower lip.  She has seemed almost inhuman.  I was first introduced to her on screen when she was portrayed as a child in the movie The King’s Speech.  I think I next ran into her onscreen – or the royal family as a whole – in Love Actually, where the loser sandwich delivery guy imagines himself in America as Prince Harry without the weird family.  Oh, sure, I have seen her on TV and in People magazine.  Elizabeth is the mother of Charles who married Lady Di – and she has never turned over the throne to him – but I am not an anglophile, so am just now learning about the history of the monarchy from the new Netflix series, The Crown, which really seems to flow almost seamlessly out of The King’s Speech (by way of Dunkirk).

Claire Foy plays the queen – and she does this with all the humanity that my brief views of Elizabeth in People and News Clips lack.  What Foy is particularly good at – and what the show seems to centrally focus on – is portraying the experience of what it takes – the internal mettle – to cross a boundary.  It is as if you can see Elizabeth, over and over, making a decision – and each one involves leaving behind a little piece of her humanity to more fully assume the role of Queen – to become The Crown – and this transition, far from being a cold or mechanical one – paradoxically makes her become more and more delightfully and painfully human. Foy as Elizabeth invites us to empathically connect with what it takes to be the adult when all those around her are being children – to determine how to confront her prime minister or her husband – not because she wants to, but because it must be done – and, across the course of time and much against her will, we see her becoming the Queen and more fully and weirdly, herself.

Elizabeth is portrayed as believing herself to be poorly suited to being Queen.  The abdication of Edward the VIII is a truly awful moment for her – it is the moment when her father, George VI, becomes King and she becomes the heir.  She had wanted to lead a quiet life of leisure – to be a royal housewife at some kind of English Manor House in which she could raise children and horses and go hunting out of the limelight and off the party circuit, entertaining, and being entertained by a few close friends.  This is the life that she and Phillip fantasized about leading until she, rather late in life, would be called on to become Queen.  Unfortunately her father’s health precluded that – his death from lung cancer thrust her into a role that she had been trained for but felt quite ill-suited to.    Her sister Margaret (played stunningly by Vanessa Kirby) seems more suited to the role of Royal – outgoing, vivacious and beautiful, she would have wowed not just the Brits, but the world.  Instead it is the dowdy and inwardly drawn Elizabeth who, based on birth order, assumes the throne.

Now, wouldn’t we all, in some measure, want this thrust upon us?  Wouldn’t we all want to be Queen?  Well, it turns out that it’s not just a title but a role.  The Crown is an integral part of the functioning of a constitutional monarchy.  And governmental oversight (or more precisely in the role of the Crown – oversight of the government) it turns out – despite our current president’s position that abdicating oversight is a reasonable way to govern – is an essential function for a country by its titular governor.  We first get a flavor of this when Elizabeth’s father, who knows he is terminally ill but has not yet told Elizabeth or the family, introduces Elizabeth to The Red Box.  This is the leather bound box in which the notifications about the functioning of the government arrive.  What does he state that he does with it?  He turns it over before opening it.  The things they want him to see are on top.  The details – the boring, but also the essential stuff, is hidden in the bottom.  He says to her, in effect, turn it (and metaphorically everything else that is handed to you on a platter or in a box) over and work your way up from the details to the formalities.

Across the course of the first two seasons (the third has not been released at this writing), this is what she does – she turns things over, looks at them from underneath, and works her way towards functioning as The Crown.  She is doing this during a period in time when the British Empire, which quite recently had counted one fifth of the world’s population as its subjects, has fallen on hard times and is struggling to keep its head above water as a world power and even, at times, to feed its own people.  She works to define herself (choosing, for instance, to marry Phillip, someone whom no one from the royal family was in favor of) but also to define her role and her country during this time of huge transition.  And she does this living in palaces and castles that, for all their monstrous size, when they don’t look like the lobby of some kind of convention hotel, look more like tawdry middle class homes filled with old knick-knacks and souvenirs from a bygone era, as well as huge television sets with tiny screens that look chintzy, regularly fritz out, and are, appallingly, rented. 

The series is quite conscious of the tension between the Royal Family as perceived/ presented and the grimmer grittier reality of running a family business.  Margaret notes in one of the annual family portraits that the job of the royals is to support the fairy tale experience for the public.  All that glitters is not gold, though (Trump and family beware) and this series demonstrates that in engaging detail.  I think that its appeal to me is both on the level of curiosity about what has happened behind closed gates – we have since Shakespeare’s days been fascinated by the lives of the Royals – but also the story of the development of a person who has power thrust upon her – and I think that is both an historically interesting development – she is, for instance, a woman in power during a time that women are gaining power – but also a personally relevant one – she grows into herself on screen in ways that mirror how I have grown in my own life (at my best moments), and as I have watched my children, my students and my patients grow.  Becoming who it is that we are in the process of becoming is, I believe, a fascinating process.

In my Freud class for honors’ students that I am teaching this spring, we have just finished reading two of Freud’s papers that describe something about the governing of one’s own mind – Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Uncanny.  Both of these papers wrestle with something that Freud calls the repetition compulsion – the ways in which we seem to repeat what has happened before in our lives in novel situations and with new actors.  This is not, he notes, just a replaying of pleasurable interactions – that would be understandable – but we replay things that are truly awful – he was treating what we now call PTSD and was wondering about why soldiers would keep revisiting terribly traumatic events they had survived, but he also noted that we seem to set up – and dream about – and re-enact - the most embarrassing and shameful moments in our lives – moments that are simply awful to live through.  Freud is perplexed by this and ends up proposing a drive to explain this – a drive deeper than the drive for pleasure – the death drive.  Now, I think this is a crazy idea and it has never held up.  To his credit, Freud did not seem entirely convinced of it either, but the question remains – why do we keep doing things the same way despite the fact that we know what the outcome of that will be – and how can we help people figure out how to do things differently?

I think that one of the compelling things about this series is that Elizabeth, in those moments when she steels herself, is engaging – over and over – in novel ways of being with others.  She takes as a given the role that has been thrust upon her – her role is to govern and she does that – but she does not do it by rote – but seemingly invents herself and the ways that she will express The Crown in new and completely different ways in episode after episode.  She is coming up against the repetition compulsion – and figuring out how to master it – how to ignore the signals that channel us into familiar ways of functioning – sometimes aided and abetted by pride or anger or a sense of entitlement or injustice.  Elizabeth – not always, but more often than not - is able to elude the grasp of the obvious.  She is able to achieve novel solutions to situations that seem intractable.  Because she, almost at times in spite of herself, cares deeply about the life that has been thrust upon her, she engages deeply and creatively in living that life – circumscribed though it is by tradition and rules which she must and chooses to follow – but she figures out how to do that in novel and exciting ways.  And this, I think, is what people who are awake and engaged do – they live lives that are complicated and fascinating.

As an example, in season 2, episode 8, after having been shown up terribly by the Kennedys – particularly by Jackie when she was a guest – Elizabeth decides to act as an ambassador in a time of great turmoil in Africa.  The communists are successfully wooing former colonies away from Western Influence.  She flies to The Congo and meets with the President there and successfully woos him back, something her advisors and her husband have warned her is a high risk venture with little chance of success.  This account feels prosaic in my telling – you really should watch the episode – and more importantly the series to observe the development of this intriguing – if frozen on the outside – person. 

By the way, I don’t mean to be suggesting that Elizabeth walks on water nor that becoming The Crown is always a good thing.  There are numerous deals with the devil that have terrible consequences in the immediate and long run.  Would that it were possible as a leader or a ruler to be prescient; she is not portrayed in this manner nor can anyone in the real world function in this manner.  But she does struggle with becoming the Crown and the impingement that makes on her being Elizabeth – something that we all struggle with in our own way.

This post has gone on too long, so I will post a separate description of her alter ego, Edward the VIII, and particularly of the Season 2, episode 6 description of his being not what he appears, but instead a worthy subject for Shakespeare…. And someone who does not appreciate what it means to be or become The Crown.

To read a post on The Crown focused on Edward the VIII as Elizabeth's alter ego, click here.

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