👑 #234 - It's good to be the king
Monarchs, despots, and the perils of absolute power.
How should a writer depict an unaccountably powerful ruler? And why? Historian Dan Snow critiques film versions of the British Monarchy, including notes on what forces shaped these portrayals of real people. For example, Shakespeare’s Richard III depicted Richard as a villainous king in part because Shakespeare’s patrons were the Tudors, the royal family that removed Richard from the throne.
Brian Gibbons focuses on The Madness of King George, and how the play and film act in conversation with the traditions of Shakespeare’s dramatization of royalty and using the past to comment on the present. An Historian Goes to the Movies offers up a lesson on the real history behind the film.
Digging into their process, Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner discuss researching George III and the task of translating the successful play to the film screen:
Monarchs: They’re just like us? K. Austin Collins considers how Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette was written off at its release as wallowing in stylistic excess, but giving it a deeper look reveals the nuanced way it tackles privilege, fashion, and the double-edged sword of the young queen living as a proto-influencer.
Coppola is more than aware that the pleasures in which her film basks are precisely the strikes the revolutionaries held against the fated queen. That is the point. You aren’t watching a movie about the life of Marie Antoinette; you’re watching a movie that embodies all the reasons she died.
Amanda Dobbins believes the film’s intended genre was misunderstood, with its anachronisms and insularity as part of a way of showing the threads that bind together this young queen and a modern audience:
For all its historical trappings, Marie Antoinette is just a painfully hip period film about how annoying and fun and terrifying it is to be a teenage girl. It is a high-school movie transplanted to Versailles.
The divine right of kings isn’t the only way to create an unaccountable ruler. An early example of using film to interrogate and challenge a despot comes from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Zachary Davis gives an overview of the film, the controversy over its making, and the impact of Chaplin’s first talkie. Chaplin himself explained some of the reasons for making The Great Dictator in this press clipping preserved by the Charlie Chaplin Archive. K. Austin Collins1 lauds the film’s deft balance of humor and horror, pointing to it as the gold standard for mocking Nazis.
Finally, Meeka le Fay places Chaplin in the context of the history of clowning used as a form of social disobedience and protest:
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In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link, Simone Giertz had a vision of a better world: one with a chair you could put not quite dirty clothes on and still sit in.
What else is inneresting?
Jason Koebler on the surprising sudden virality of the CIA Field Handbook for Sabotaging Fascism.
Kevin Maguire shares some of his favorite B-Sides and breaks down what makes this type of song special.
Caoilainn on the value in letting go of social media connections to people you don’t connect with any more.
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