I’ve been blogging occasionally about The Crown since it began. The series is now coming to an end. I’ve just watched “The Ritz,” the eighth episode in the sixth and last season. The first four episodes of the season were given over to Princess Diana and her death. This episode focuses on the relationship between Elizabeth and her younger sister, Margaret. They were different in temperament, but quite close.
Margaret was a bit of a wild child. An earlier series of episodes dealt with Margaret’s romance with Peter Townsand. He proposed and she accepted. And then things dragged for this that and the other reason, all tied up in succession to the crown and nobility and status and who knows what. In the end, the marriage did not happen. Margaret was devastated. Her subsequent marriage to photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones ended in divorce. She never remarried.
That’s all in the background for this episode, which covers the last weeks of Margaret’s life. Two motifs are woven together in this episode. In the present we have a series of strokes to Margaret and her subsequent recovery. Each stroke takes a bit more from her, each recovery is weaker. And then there is no recovery.
The other motif is a series of flashbacks to VE Day:
Did the Queen enjoy an illicit kiss with an American GI in the basement of the Ritz? That’s what The Crown (Netflix) wants you to believe, and they’ve based a whole episode around it.
She wasn’t the Queen then, of course, but Princess Elizabeth, sneaking out of Buckingham Palace on VE Day with her sister Margaret. That much is fact, but the rest has been dreamed up by writer Peter Morgan and is teased from the outset. “Our VE Day. It was quite a night. Do you remember?” asks Margaret (Lesley Manville) in the present day. “We almost lost you. And then we very much found you. The real you. The you that you gave up in order to be the other you.”
A black GI invites young Elizabeth to the Pink Sink, a nightclub in the basement where the music is hot jazz and all the crazy kids are dancing the jitterbug. Elizabeth joins in and has a ball.
Even as she is dying, Margaret is reminding Elizabeth how much of herself she has had to give up in order to properly enact the role of Queen. And THAT has been a motif throughout the series. At one point, when Elisabeth is on a trip to America visiting horse stables, she remarks that, if it had been up to her, she’d have devoted her life to horses, breeding them, racing them, and of course riding them herself. Instead, she’s had to live a life whose possibilities and obligations were strongly constrained by law and custom.
In contrast, down in the basement, one of the GIs proclaims: “Down here is the place to be.” “Why,” she asks. “Because down here there’s no rank or background. Just music.” “Well, in that case...” She joins him on the dance floor. He, or course, has no idea who she is. To him she’s just an attractive English girl he met on an evening when everyone is celebrating the end of the war.
And THAT reminded me of a scene near the end of Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which I’ve written about here and there. As you may recall, it’s set in the future and is a long-complicated book about a financial crisis obviously modeled on the crisis of 2008. But things work out differently this time; the banks get nationalized. We’re at the end of the story, the future’s wide open (perhaps), and some of the good guys are at the Mezzrow club that’s several floors below water level – in a world where the seas have risen 50 feet (pp. 611-612):
Everyone in the room is now grooving to the tightest West African pop any of them have ever heard. The guitar players’ licks are like metal shavings coming off a lathe. The vocalists are wailing, the horns are a freight train. [...] The other horn players instantly get better, the guitar players even more precise and intricate. The vocalists are grinning and shouting duets in harmony. It’s like they’ve all just plugged into an electrical jack through their shoes...Crowd goes crazy, dancing swells the room.
That’s all there is, just this one scene in the whole novel.
Given the way the world works, however, people have been down in Mezz’s the whole time, and other clubs as well. At least that how things are now, and Robinson has given no indication that things have changed in the future he’s imagining. There’s nothing in there about Islamic clerics and dictators and Nazi killjoys taking over and banning black music and dance. No doubt some of our gang of heroes have been down there as well, but the story hadn’t followed them there because it wasn’t relevant to the main line.
Here we have it, two very different narratives: 1) a historical narrative based on the life of Queen Elizabeth II, and 2) a science fiction story set in the future. Both narratives have a scene near the end where African-derived song and dance is placed in counterpoint to the world of hierarchy and repression that has dominated the main narrative.
When is someone going to write a narrative where egalitarian dance and music structure the whole story?
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