We think we have it bad these days. Politics creates anxiety and divisiveness and
we here in the United States seem, at times, to be the dominant power in the
world and it doesn’t seem at all clear who is at the tiller or, when someone
is, what their intentions are. It could
be worse. We could be ruled by a Queen
who is in poor health and getting worse, a Queen who faints while addressing
parliament, a Queen who is afraid to articulate what she believes and perhaps
weirdest of all – a Queen who is more interested in playing with her 17 rabbits
than governing. Now the rabbits. She has one for each of her now deceased, stillborn
or miscarried children. It is
unimaginable to me that someone could have been pregnant 17 times and not have
one single living child. How could she
not be obsessed with rabbits? Her grief
must have been huge. But it does interfere with her governing. It focuses her on
what she has lost and, I think, on how she has failed, and keeps her occupied
with trying to fix through fantasy what can’t be undone. And the country that depends on her is at war
and needs her to be making important decisions about how to manage that war and
this Queen who is focused not on her capacities and abilities, but on her
inabilities and insecurities, is the one that her people must depend on. And the Queen, in turn, because she is so
inconstant, relies on someone with whom we can quickly see she has a very strange
relationship indeed – someone who manipulates and shames her and who plays on
her manifold insecurities mercilessly.
Ouch. I guess it could be worse… (or is this a commentary on our current
situation?)
But we know none of this at the beginning of the film. All we know is that we are travelling with a
pretty woman in a coach. When she
catches the eye of an attractive young man, he starts masturbating – she
gets thrown out of the coach - she ends up in mud and, well, I’ll just say it,
shit, and then walks to the palace (the palace first inhabited by Henry the
VIII and a very dingy and dark palace it is – more like a castle - where she is hoping to be employed by her
cousin – the woman with the manipulative relationship with the queen). Instead
of being hired as some kind of lady in waiting, she is sent down to the bowels
of the palace to work as a scullery maid because she shows up smelling like
shit (quite literally)! So we are
introduced to this madhouse that is the governing place for one of the world
powers and we see the top most layers – and the corrupt relationships there –
and the bottom most – where our apparently innocent coach travelling woman is
tricked into dunking her hand into straight lye by the other scullery maids and
has to sleep on a tiny mat surrounded by scores of men and women snoring away
on their own mats when they go to bed at night.
Well, it turns out that the pretty girl is named Abigail
Hill (played by Emma Stone). She was
born into a royal family and was educated well when she was a child. She speaks multiple languages and has
knowledge of herbal remedies. Her
father, who drank and gambled away the family fortune, lost her in a game of
cards to a German man who, she reports, not only had a skinny penis but was
stupid enough to believe that women bleed twenty eight days a month. She may be pretty and look innocent, but she
is knowledgeable of both book learning and the ways of the world. We don’t see it at first, but she is as
manipulative as her cousin Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) who has the ear – and
the ability to dominate - Queen Anne (Olivia Colman).
The reluctant wife, who saw this film with me, was struck
(as was I, though I think not as viscerally as it didn’t hit quite so close to
home for me on the gender front) by how vulnerable women were in this era of
history – the time just before the King Georges start appearing – not too long
before our own little revolutionary war (actually, it could have been pretty much any time in our history).
There is some irony in her response in that these three women turn out
to be incredibly powerful – they are being portrayed as the most powerful
people in their era and this is in many ways a film that celebrates the power
of these women. But I think it is also
right on target. The ways that they are
the pawns of men, the ways that they don’t feel themselves to be solidly
standing on their own two feet, the ways that they feel precarious in their
positions of power end up leading them to rely on each other and to undercut
each other in ways that drive the central drama of the film.
Anne, the one with the most powerful hold on legitimate
political power, knows that she is the power of the land and asserts that with
terrifying certainty – sometimes at the moments when she is most precariously
concerned about just what the right thing to do is. But her insecurities – that are played on
like a Stradivarius by Sarah – range from her looks to her health to her
capacity to think clearly – and these insecurities undermine the sense of power
that she should feel over her own mind.
Without this essentially feeling of security in herself, she is
vulnerable to manipulation – and afraid to assert the very real political power
that she has.
Abigail, the one with absolutely no real power at the
beginning of the film, the woman who is used and abused by everyone from her
father to the fellow traveler on the coach, relies on her wits, her knowledge
of herbal remedies (to soothe the open lesions on the legs of the Queen) and
her ability to appear innocent and wholly taken by another – to love another
without reserve and with absolute loyalty – to not just ingratiate herself with
the Queen, but to become essential to the Queen’s well-being and
stability. This allows her to rise well
above her status as a scullery maid – indeed to become a lady again – and it
allows the queen to find her keel – to gain a certainty – especially in her
relationship with Sarah – that she has never had before – though at the cost of
losing Sarah’s love – a not insubstantial cost.
Sarah appears to have the most solid command of herself – and
she uses that to exercise her control over the Queen – but it is a sadistic
control – one in which she is publicly subservient – but privately very much in
charge of her. Sarah is married to the
person heading the army that is fighting the French – and is ensuring that the
Queen provides the material (by doubling the taxes) and political (by keeping
the war going rather than settling a peace) support that her husband needs to
win the war and bring honor to himself – and by extension to her. Sarah is also – and Abigail discovers this in
a very perilous way – not just the Queen’s manipulative ruler, but her
lover. And the sexual love between Anne
and Sarah is yet another venue where their manipulative engagement with each
other gets played out.
Abigail’s insertion of herself into Sarah’s relationship
with Anne, including by turning her ministrations of Anne’s pained legs into
sexual ministrations that turn into a love affair that has a very different
feel to it – the feel of Abigail’s veneration of Anne as opposed to Sarah’s mastery
over her, supports Anne becoming more certain of herself – more centered in who
she is – much less perilously perched atop her own misgivings and
uncertainties. Anne becomes a more
decisive (though a much less well informed) ruler. She feels better about herself and her ruling
capacities, though it appears that she is steering the ship of state on the
advice of a somewhat childish and certainly ill-informed supportive partner –
Abigail.
It is at this point that we see Abigail coming into her own
– making the most of the power that she is consolidating. She takes revenge on some of those who have
abused her, forms strange alliances with others, but sets about destroying her
one true competitor – Sarah. Abigail
defeats her so soundly and so profoundly that it is, frankly, stunning – both
to the audience, but also, I think, to Abigail.
She takes the tail of the tiger – and not only survives but somehow
throws it off the boat. And so Sarah,
the most powerful one at the beginning of the movie, is banished.
The resolution of this state of affairs - the installation of a new power behind the throne, is less
than satisfying. Abigail proves to be a
much less useful container to Anne’s insecurities when it becomes more apparent
that her love is largely a ploy – and Anne must work to maintain the illusion
long after Abigail has abandoned trying to maintain it with any rigor. Anne is now not just beset by physical ills,
but it is clear – in a marvelous bit of make-up and acting – that she has
suffered a stroke. The dissolution and
bloat that were characteristic of the court before the appearance of Abigail
thoroughly infect Abigail – or perhaps she contributes to any even greater
dissolution – and when Anne finally realizes the extent of Abigail’s liberties,
Anne reasserts herself as Queen, putting Abigail clearly in the role of servant
– and the film dissolves into a montage of rabbits – thousands of rabbits.
The director, then, is inviting us to wonder what those
rabbits symbolize. We know that they are
symbolic of Anne’s aborted, stillborn and dead children. They are more broadly symbolic, I think we
can safely say, of the ways in which Anne’s intentions to govern – herself and
her kingdom, and her last two lovers – are aborted and stillborn. Despite her immense wealth and power, Anne is
(I am aware of thinking at the moment – like the men around her) unable to
bring forth legitimate new life. She
does not produce an heir – she is the last of her line and a new royal line
must start – but she also is powerless to bring her life and her reign to a
close in anything even loosely approximating grace. She ends up being an isolated, petulant
child, ordering around other children, while is she also desperately trying to
govern – using a magnifying glass to read documents of state while Abigail lies nearby distracting her.
Sarah had served as a kind of severe and controlling
maternal figure who kept Anne in line and allowed her to timidly feel that she
was in charge. But this was a
charade. Both Sarah and Anne knew that
Anne was not up for the job of governing herself much less the country, which
gave Sarah the illusion of holding the true power so that she experienced herself as
governing Anne and therefore the country. But Anne, I believe,
resented that. She knew that Sarah’s
control – Sarah was her oldest friend, confidant and protector – was indeed control –
and while it passed for love, it played on her insecurities – deepening and
reifying them. Sarah’s position with
Anne was that her love was real because it was honest – she let Anne know both
the truth of her loveliness, but also asserted when that was not the case so
that Anne could know the cold hard truth about herself and the world. Sarah believed that her love - the love of limits and truth telling - was the love that Anne truly needed.
Abigail’s love – though largely feigned – was more deeply
desired by Anne. And, whether real or
feigned, it had a real, if temporary, effect on Anne. She became a more effective ruler of herself
and, oddly and by coincidence, of the country.
Using Abigail’s metaphor of a party to understand warfare proved
prescient while being far from a standard military tactic. The success of Abigail’s supporting Anne’s
confidence was that it allowed Anne to throw off the yoke of Sarah’s rule and
assume her own. Even without the stroke (which I think can be understood as a symbol of the impact of losing Sarah on
Anne) she was paralyzed in the wake of losing real if self-serving counsel. Abigail’s promise of greater certainty – of
more balanced self and country rule – turned out to be illusory. A false promise.
If I were, for a moment, to do violence to what I think is a
piece of art and use it to my own ends – I might do that in two ways. In the first, I would think of Sarah and
Abigail as two therapists/advisors of Anne.
They both, unfortunately, have their own interests in mind and so both
“treatments” are doomed from the get-go.
None the less, Sarah’s “treatment” of Anne is a treatment that is based
on giving her the insight that she needs to govern. We could think of this as a authoritative
model of psychotherapy where the patient is not capable of managing her life, so we do it for her. When it is
our interest rather than the patient’s that is at the fore, the treatment is
not a treatment, but an imposition. It is the relationship of Sarah to Anne
that the vehicle for the real “treatment” – and that treatment is to undermine
the well-being of the Queen, for it is only when the Queen is uncertain that
Sarah can feel powerful – and that is Sarah’s true goal. So the treatment is really a gas lighting.
If we think of Abigail’s “treatment” as a more modern,
relational treatment, it too fails, not because it does not offer insight and support but
because it, too, is corrupt and aimed at helping Abigail achieve power – not
helping the Queen do so. Abigail does
not offer genuine love of Anne – and she does not believe in Anne’s power to
function autonomously – she just believes that her own life will be better if Anne
believes herself to be more competent than she actually is.
In a world that is short on resources – and even the richest
courts in the world can be remarkably short on the resources that really matter
– the putting of others and the putting of the country before the needs of
oneself – the ability to support the autonomous functioning of the other – can
become the most needed resource that is in the shortest supply (and this can be true of psychotherapy when a patient cries out for direction, but really needs to learn how to assert self-control). When women are not empowered – when any of us
are disempowered - it is difficult to truly think of what is in the best interests of all
– we tend to look out for ourselves. I think
this may be the implication of what the reluctant wife was seeing as the
consequence of the uncertain fate for women.
So I promised to do violence to this art in two ways – and
the second is to think of it as an intentionally anachronistic piece –
something that I think is advertised to the viewer not with the sexual
shenanigans (We watched a piece called A Very
English Scandal the other night about male homosexual hijinx among the
ruling elite of Britain in the 1970s – the more things change the more they
might be the same); the anachronistic quality of the film is advertised with a dance number where the highly scripted and
tightly choreographed dancing all but becomes a modern street dance – we can
think of this movie as a commentary on those currently in
power in various places in the world, but the replacing our current rulers with others just like them has the potential to be every
bit as toxic. Just choosing women whom we
would herald as saviors doesn't solve the problem. Should those women prove to be as short on psychological resources –
as limited in their sense of comfort and certainty about their personal power – we would be in the same mess. We would have rulers who are incapable of being confident enough to assert their power usefully, including being confident enough to wonder about how the world might be rather without really knowing rather than to assert
how it will and must needs be in order to manage their own insecurity.
What this underscores, then, is the importance of assessing, in a
republic, the character of those that we elect to office. Ultimately we need people who have enough self-confidence
to be able to govern effectively. But
distinguishing between earned, solid self confidence that is based on realizing
that the world is a complicated place and one where, as Abraham Lincoln pointed
out, we should be praying that God is on our side – rather than being certain (or telling him) that he is, from the self confidence that comes from an absolute
certainty that one’s own position, based on one’s own idiosyncratic views of
the world, is always right, can be a difficult call. Anne was always able,
because she was an absolute ruler, to assert her rule. And she knew that once she said, “I have
spoken”, that was the law of the land.
In a democracy, such a position is not possible. We are always at the mercy of shifting views
and changing opinions. That has become a
much more complex reality with the changing and increasing numbers of
information sources, and our recognition of character as an electorate is going
to be sorely tried as we are confronted with the wider range of the humanity of
those who would lead us. We will have to elect imperfect, but therefore more flexible and helpful leaders.
To access a post looking at similar issues in the last season of the House of Cards link here.
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