Painful introspection makes me plead for forgiveness – yes, someday, someday soon I will get back to the depth that silent contemplative reading brings us. Someday soon, that is, just as soon as this latest series on Netflix is over. Like an alcoholic the day after, I promise that I will get on my feet one day and walk tall with head bowed over trusted and true tomes of literature and philosophy. Books are better because their production costs are much, much lower. With that, authors don’t have to desperately search for ways to amass customers to recoup the millions of dollars owed to impatient and demanding lenders. That is, they don’t have to pander to the masses with sex and gossip, which appear in most of these series as if by law.
Alas, we do love that sex and gossip all too well. But good TV series also bring the companionship of watching with friends and family, something lacking in dank library dens. They can also bring out some astounding jewels of truth. Such I have found with many before, and recently, with The Crown after only six or seven episodes.
The Crown: as one might expect, it is about royalty and, more explicitly, the English royalty of the latter half of the 20th century. This was the point in time at which royalty had become all but irrelevant. This was their own fault. After internecine squabbles among the noble families of Europe managed to kill ten million people in WWI for absolutely no good reason, “noble” became synonymous with amoral philanderer and murderer. Many of the crowns of Europe – the German, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, and more – were discarded entirely. Those that hung on were mostly in low-power, relatively blameless small countries such as Denmark and Sweden. England became the one exception. Besides the scandals and affairs and a few skin shots - we now know that the man who plays Elizabeth II’s husband Phillip has a firm butt - this is what the movie is about. That is, it tries to answer how it was that royalty was able to remain in Britain. And, more subtly, it makes us ask ourselves why the nobles would want to remain.
The latter question is begged as the series overall takes pity on the royal family, showing just how impinged they were once their political power had been taken away. Whereas in the past, brother had killed brother and sometimes father to become king, now they desperately tried NOT to become king. For instance, the prince who would briefly become Edward VIII dumped his kingship the same year he attained it, 1936, to marry a twice-divorced US citizen, Wallace Simpson. He claimed again and again that he did it for love, but we come to think differently in the series. Rather, we come to believe that he only wanted to continue to have the good life, which in his case was not very “good.” Kingship by then had become all responsibility and tradition without the attendant power. Who would want to be king?
Certainly not Edward VIII, certainly not George VI, his brother, and certainly not Elizabeth II, who would become The Queen in 1952 at the age of 26. She is still queen today. In the past I often wondered how the queen could be so cruel as to deny her own son Charles the crown so far into her dotage. I do not wonder that any more. Now I know that she remains queen to save Charles from the horrible position of head noble for as long as possible. After several nights of watching the series, we come to see her as perhaps the most saintly of the privileged class in the past century.
My fundamental question – why would the nobility want to continue to be nobility? - came into clarity last night as we watched the scandal created by Princess Margaret and her divorced lover, Peter Townsend, develop. In reality, we now know that Margaret and Peter were all-out sexual lovers before his divorce, but the papers of the time, in 1953 I believe, only knew of a romantic affair after his divorce. It was a scandal, then, only because a high royal had dared to become romantically involved with a divorced commoner. In Elizabeth’s preliminary view, the affair was not so big a deal – after all, with the birth of her own children, the crown would certainly not go to Margaret, as it had to Edward. But soon Elizabeth would be convinced that even this small scandal was important. It was important because Royalty at large was then at the very precipice of its existence. The people, we learn, continued to tolerate them only because the Royal Family created a sense of decorum and tradition, something like high-bred mascots, living human logos of what it was to be British. If they did not play the part to the hilt, we learn, they would get the same boot as the Kaiser.
And there is the big glaring question again that I am not sure even the makers of the series realized they had created: why? Why did and still do the nobles care to continue on as the royal family? They have no real power, and because they are barely tolerated, every public action – and with the royals, almost all becomes public sooner or later – is scrutinized for any deviation from the ideal. They are in effect prisoners as long as they continue on as royalty, and the hatred of the top job proves it. And yet they desperately sought, and continue to seek, to remain as royalty.
One more time: why? If they were to go, certainly they would be allowed to take some family heirlooms with them, valuable enough to keep at least a few generations rich. They could still attend Oxford or Cambridge if they studied enough and could retain the air of snobbish superiority. They would be more common than before, it’s true, but it seems a small price to pay for freedom.
Maybe it’s tradition, then? Could they be so ingrained with their heritage and tradition that all the suffering under public eye still makes it all worthwhile? That was certainly not the case with Edward, although perhaps it was with the others. But still, the scrutiny, the minutia of tradition, the literal trappings of hundreds of years, all now just for show, much like our president pardoning the turkey on Thanksgiving Day. Is duty that strong for so many, now leading into the 4th generation after WWI?
The answer is, I think, no, and this is important for all of us. Although I think with the minor nobility it still might be a matter of snobbish social ranking, with the core noble family it goes well beyond rank and tradition. I think, rather, that their status defines their very person-hood. For this they are willing to be miserable, just as most everyone would rather suffer than to die. I believe this is true of the royal family because most of us choose to live with something in our lives even though it makes us miserable. We do so because we think this “thing” helps define us. Just as illness is usually preferable to death, so being something is better than being nothing at all, regardless.
Drug addiction is the easiest way to see this, particularly with something like smoking, to which I was addicted. Unlike heroin, not smoking does not cause horrible hallucinations and feelings of madness. Rather, one becomes irritable for another smoke. That’s it. Because I had parred my smoking down to 4 cigs a day in the last decade, for me the actual addiction to the drug was minimal. For me, instead, I could not imagine having a beer or sitting up on the cabin porch without having a butt. It was more a matter of style, of who I was, rather than anything else. We know for an absolute fact that smoking kills sooner or later, and yet it took all the willpower I had to (hopefully) avoid a horrible cancer because of personal style.
Self-destructive, self-defining choices go far beyond simple drug addiction. I know many low-wage workers who hate their near-poverty and their jobs, but will not do anything to change the situation because that would be “uppity” or pretentious, a kind of anti-snob snobbery. I have a feeling that this really comes from a deep sense of inferiority, but that, too, is a destructive self-definition. Books have been written about this – see Norman Vincent Peal – but few read or heed them. To change the self is apparently more frightening than to live in despised circumstances.
This is so especially with the really big stuff. We know that we are going to die, and that we probably only have one life, certainly in our current (mortal) body. We know that all is passing, and all that secular society believes to be important is nothing in the face of eternity and infinity. We know this beyond a shadow of a doubt, especially in this day of space travel and astronomy, yet we live clutching the bosom of the earth like children about to go to school for the first time. We remain frustrated and bitter about at least some of our circumstances, yet refuse to see beyond them. And although we might know enough to not keep up with the Jones’s, we still worry and strive and lose and stare back at the lost chances of our human lives, as if most of it really mattered.
Does it really matter to us if there is a queen of England? If her granddaughter moved to America to become a public school teacher, would we care? No, but she would. Stressed and stretched out before the public eye, she lives for the image of her country and her own self- image. That is her choice, but it is a lesson to me. The prize is not the crown or the throne or imagined social glory. Rather, it is the infinity before us, the endless mystery, which smacks us in the face every time we fail or someone dies and we mourn. We mourn because we are disappointed with our own limited circumstances, which, like the crown, only hem us in because we desperately allow them to do so. We believe that something, no matter how bad, is almost always better than nothing, but we are wrong. We are wrong because the “something” we think we have is really nothing compared to the “nothing” that we think we can’t have but do have for all eternity.
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