In a scene from the first season of The Crown, on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, the Duke of Windsor, watching footage of the ceremony on television, exclaims: “Who wants transparency when you can have magic? Who wants prose when you can have poetry?â€
The English monarchy has a poetic rhythm that gives musicality while combining pomposity with harmony even adding the surprising virtue of silence.
On Saturday we got into a live medieval series where everything is fallacious and only fiction seems true. Even the carriage of these royal Cinderellas was pulled by six horses, but with air conditioning, heating and electric windows. The fiction of the Middle Ages and the reality of Christopher Nolan in a crown literally twisted on the head of King Charles, who wore it more soberly than Queen Camilla. (Poor woman, who was holding the crown like a circus tightrope walker holding a bar with two cyclists on his head.)
Monarchy is easy to parody especially when it pretends to be true or show modernity. The adventures of Harry and Megan are the insubstantiality of the monarchy or the sincere yawns during the coronation of LluÃs, the nicest and less monarchical son of the family. When the world was smiling at the beauty and proximity of Diana of Wales, she was turning Buckingham Palace into a playground. “I would like to be your tampax” was the consequence of an erroneous marriage, forced by the queen, who placed royalty on the same level as her subjects. Camilla outlived Diana, and despite wearing the crown like Mister Potato, Brits already know that the wicked stepmother is actually the closest thing the royals want.
If the royalty wants to be like us, the inviolabilities have even less meaning, the excessive clothing of the weddings will no longer look like a 080 catwalk to the commoners and the front page of yesterday’s newspapers will be pure bullshit. It will be shouted that the king goes in balls, the people will not understand such pomp and the float will turn into a pumpkin. And because of wanting to be lackeys so much, you start to realize that The Crown is effectively just a fictional series.
