Heavy is the Head
The Burden of Representation in The Crown
As someone who opposes pretty much every single thing the British Royal Family stands for, I am ashamed to say that I have never been able to let go of what I consider to be my somewhat perverse fascination with them; or maybe more accurately my fascination with the grip they have somehow managed to maintain on global attention. For me, this manifests in the similarly unfortunate sense of enjoyment that I get from watching their most recent, and potentially most powerful, reclamation of cultural space in the popular Netflix series, The Crown.
The show, currently in its sixth and final season, narrates the more recent edge of this imperial dynasty’s legacy: it takes us from the coronation of a young Queen Elizabeth II and her gradual ascent into power; through the fraught media circus that circled the shenigans of her son, the eventual King Charles and his phenom wife Diana, and ends with the early days of Prince William’s child and young adulthood. The show, which has run since 2017, has proven to be incredibly popular with critics and audiences alike, and it has pulled the royal family — and all of their many sins — from the not so distant depths of the historical record into our popular imagination once again.
Through enmeshing a comprehensive and dramatic portrayal of key events in modern British history with the imagined interpersonal intimacies that underlies the royals’ role in these events, we as viewers become privy to a richly detailed conception of this family that is unprecedented in both depth and scale. By weaving the avowedly fictional and the historically determined into an indistinguishable tapestry, the show has forced us to confront the difficulties of maintaining our own grasp on the hard lines between the two, particularly when the packaged combination of the two becomes vastly more alluring than the alternative.
It’s a show that unashamedly, and undeniably skillfully re-imagines — through the power of strikingly composed visual narrative — the meaning of one of the most dominating structures of colonialism and imperialism in modern history and presents it on a platter for the consumption of audiences of all kinds. I use the word meaning intentionally here, for though the show is a historical drama — an avowed fictionalization — the impact of this show has undoubtedly stretched into the space of the real.
The impact this show has on our collective understanding of the royal family is not something I dreamt up simply through my own experience of it. In fact, it was powerfully articulated by the upper reaches of British power holders who began to see the show as a threat when they realized that in its popularity, reach, and aesthetic commitments, the show was beginning to develop an increasingly powerful role in defining the legacy that the royal family would have for the next generation.
In November 2020, the British Culture Minister Oliver Dowden called on the show to include what he called a “health warning” — a disclaimer that would clearly state that the show was an act of fiction, out of the worry that people — particularly the new generation that had no first hand memory of the events that were being depicted — were beginning to absorb the show’s constructed narrative as the correct one. While the ground on which Dowden and others protested The Crown’s power — namely its potential to tarnish the Royal family’s image — is unimportant to me(and I think we can agree to society as whole) — something interesting does arise out of this debate. Why did this show in particular, one of many historical dramas created since the dawn of media, draw this particular concern around it’s ability to blur the lines of fact and fiction. Why did the British Cultural Minister feel the need to step in here, but not for every other show, story, text that has striven to depict our figures of history through a complex blend of reality and fiction? Some might say it was the subject matter — that the Crown’s choice to expose the imagined intimacies of the British royal family — who maintain a protected, albeit controversial, status in British culture — was enough to draw the ire of British power holders. And while I believe this is a contributing factor, why this show, at this particular time? What about this show, and how it was made and received ended up creating such a threat?
This apparent threat was not felt equally by all. The Netflix show runners wholly refuted the necessity of the disclaimer, stating in a 2020 interview with a The Hollywood Reporter: “We have always presented The Crown as a drama — and we have every confidence our members understand it’s a work of fiction that’s broadly based on historical events. As a result we have no plans — and see no need — to add a disclaimer.”
In sum, their stance was to scoff and say: Why should we tell people it’s fiction, when everyone should know it already? Responses to the debate on social media also stirred up similar derision towards the request: Why was there the need to disclaim something that was so obvious and apparent? What is missed in this response is that it is entirely possible for people to be aware that a show is fictional and still let it color their understanding of the historical. Because — despite its claims to fictionality — the show’s choice to rely upon the visual, narrative power of both the historical and the imaginative in an inseparable array ensured that people were unable to easily unravel the difference between the two. Therefore the power to define the royal family was now in the hands of a few media creators, and taking place in a wholly new medium — the TV show. And their choice of subject matter, that stood at the intersection of imperial myth and celebrity fantasy, provided the perfect subject to play upon collective desires to extract more meaning from the power structures of both past and present.
The premise of the show is to take the people, and events that we do know, and to appear as if they are exposing what we don’t know, but what we of course might want to know. Despite its claims to fictionality, The Crown remains extremely committed to using extremely rigorous historical research to fix itself onto as many collectively agreed upon historical points as possible, in the process creating an aesthetic of reality reflected in choices made in casting, acting, costume and set design, and script that openly displays its reliance on a sense of historicity.
However, the integral intervention of the show is in its creation of the imagined interpersonal threads that underlie these historical moments, and create the desirable and fascinating narrative that embeds itself in both the hearts and minds of the people who watch it, and in the historical process we are subjects of. What this creates is a show in which from scene to scene, it becomes almost impossible to tell what then is “real,” of part of our collective understanding of what the past looked and felt like, and what is imagined: what the many writers, creators, and designers have then imagined for us through a process of visual fantasy fulfillment. While one could try and understand the impact that The Crown has on our perception of reality by analyzing whether it is closer to the “real” or the “fictional” on some set spectrum, I believe the more productive choice is to sidestep that particular reduction and to see the line between “real” and “fictional” representations as much less stable categories. Because out of the show’s ability to unite the ostensibly factual and fictional into an indistinguishable tapestry, we can see how the two exist not as binary oppositions, but rather as forces that are exceptionally powerful when intertwined in the representational process.
The plot and production of one particular episode of Season 6, entitled “Two Photographs” provides a way to expose this conversation. The episode opens with an docu-interview style clip of an actor playing Mario Brenna; a tabloid photographer who became renown for his exposing captures of celebrities, particularly Princess Diana.
After we meet Brenna, and hear him describe his somewhat vicious approach to celebrity photography, we then meet Duncan Muir, one of many official photographers that works directly for the family to capture their daily royal labors.
Both photographers are involved in the process of generating a particular version of the royal family for us to consume, and yet they could not be more different (not just in superficial fashion appeal). One photographer seeks to expose what is attempted to be hidden, the other seeks to serve by capturing what is designed to be shown. One exploits our desire to engage in celebrity fantasy for his own profit, one puts his skills to use in upholding the imperial myth the royal family is so deeply committed to maintaining. Throughout the episode, our attention is drawn to the constructed and contested nature of this family’s existence, particularly as the visual media that represented them slipped farther out of their control, and closer to the publics’.
The episode comes right in the middle of a story arc that focuses on Princess Diana’s budding relationship with Dodi Al-Fayed; her eventual lover, and the man who would be her companion in the fatal car crash that rocked the globe. After we meet these two photographers, we then follow along as Brenna — who we are made to believe is working for Dodi’s father — manages to capture a photo of the pair embracing on a yacht in the South of France.
The photo all but confirmed the romantic nature of their relationship to the public, and in doing so subjected Diana to an intense media storm hungry for further details about her personal life. Alongside Brenna’s journey to take the photo, the show weaves in a multitude of moments depicting the private moments that Diana and Dodi might have had on the boat leading up to embrace that would eventually be captured by Brenna. The look and feel of this episode epitomizes the show’s ability to seamlessly blend its commitment to a visual expression of these publicly experienced, previously established historical scenes, with the imagined, behind the scenes intimacies that make for an overall richer narrative for the viewer.
The real Mario’s Brenna struggle to establish his version of what happened that day became the topic of a New York Times article entitled “‘The Crown’: Behind the Photo of an Embrace That Changed Princess Diana’s Life.” In his interview with the Times, Brenna contests his portrayal in the episode, claiming that the implication the show makes that he was paid to get this photo is a lie. He instead claims that it was pure chance he was there. The head researcher for The Crown, interviewed in this article as well, claims that, based on their source material, the version that they present is a viable and probable documentation of what happened that day. As a watcher, of both the show, and of the real life events the show concerns itself with, we are faced with a problem. We might understand the show as a kind of visual fantasy that has a “true story” that lies underneath the clean narrative it presents, but even as we search for that stable and fixed truth, we are faced with the uncomfortable fact that such fixity is much harder to find than we might want it to be. It is not to say that the events under contest did not happen, but that as soon as as a story about the events is told, as soon as they are represented, as it must be if it is going to be communicated, then they will be subject to the context this process occurs in.
In “Silencing the Past” an incredible work on the nature of historical production, historian Michel-Rolph Truillot argues that history is neither solely series of constructed imaginations, nor a set of material realities that generate universal, stable meanings. He calls our attention to how in order to view history as a process, and we must turn our attention to the conditions, and the power dynamics, under which a specific narrative is created in order to truly understand it. When we see history this way, we see that it is not the events themselves we remember, but the meaning instilled in them through the way they have been represented, communicated, and woven into narrative.
In order to understand the relationship between representation and history, we can first look more closely at representation itself. In “Representation & Media,” renowned cultural theorist Stuart Hall challenges the idea representation is a kind of re-creation of meaning that stems from the original meaning that a fixed event, person, thing, may have had; a process that would create a so called “gap in representation,” as the stable, universal meaning of a thing becomes inherently distorted through the process of representation. Instead, he argues meaning is generated through the act of representation itself; that there can be no such thing as a fixed meaning that occurs prior to its representation and eventual communication through discourse. The impossibility of establishing a fixed meaning that underlies a representation is reflected in both the plot of our episode in question, as well as in the production of the show itself.
The plot arc of the episode illustrates how the meaning of the royal family for the public of the past was created through their visual representation via photography. And this episode as one part of a larger series is then able to show how the meaning of the royal family — and the people who documented them — for the mass audience of the present is generated through their visual representation in this show. That what “really happened” in the events this episode documents will always be inaccessible to us in some form, but our choice to represent those events in particular ways generates the kind of meanings for us to absorb value from it. There is not the represented meaning and then the true meaning. Neither is there a false story of the past and the true one. There is merely our present construction of the past. The past happens, but it is our process of recalling it and representing it, in creating meaning from it that reflects our own particular stance in the world, that becomes the history that extends to the present. Representation is what creates meaning from our material world, and the historical process is a collection of these meanings into a particular, conceptualized narrative by those who have various stakes in preserving or erasing those meanings. Therefore, media representation — particularly that which openly commits itself to that which has already been defined as history — then needs to be considered as a serious component of how we build history, irrespective of what genre it claims to belong to. If we admit that we never truly establish exactly what did happen in complete and utter totality, the various representational choices of communicating what could have happened, or of what people wanted to happen, must be considered to be just as historical.
Once we are able to see the unstable nature of history production, Truillot then argues that understanding who writes it, under what terms and stakes, is essential to the understanding how this process plays out in each particular unstable act of narrative creation. Where then does power lie in the creation of this show? As Truillot explains, history is full of produced silences; gaps in the process of history making that are both inescapable and inherent, and that reflect the power dynamics involved in that process. In a way, The Crown’s subject matter, a family that exists at the intersection of celebrity fantasy and imperial myth, is reflective of that. The royal family, deeply embedded as they were in archaic halls of power, was for a time deeply in control of their own history, of writing their story, and in turn creating useful silences that could mask their many weaknesses. But the rise of modern media, and its ability to put diverse and effective forms of visual representation into the hands of the many, shifted this power dynamic. We see this struggle play itself out in “Two Photographs.” The old guard very much working to preserve the highly cultivated image of the royal family aligned with their own interests, while the new seeks to expose a wholly new picture in the interests of the people, or at least the lucrative profit they are able to promise. We as a public craved to know more about these people who were both a remnant of an archaic past and part and parcel of a glamorous present, and yet who had kept so much of themselves out of our grasp. We wanted to fill those silences, to challenge their grip on representational power, and we were able to through the photographic powers of exposure, transparency, and documentation.
The show then takes this a step further by using the structure of the TV show as a vessel for not only exposure, but speculation. Its simultaneous depth and scope lends itself to feeling like a total investigation into the lives of these people, while its commitment to a narrative imperative provides clean conclusions and imposes a false sense of tightness and clarity onto the past that is imagined, but yet deeply desirable. A show like The Crown not only reinserts these events into our collective conscious, but imbibes them with new meaning through the powerful visual form of historical narration, in which the significance of the moments it depicts is newly generated, as we absorb the representational choices and the meaning they create for us.
Truillot notes that the importance of events is not necessarily determined in the moment the event occurs, or in a fixed capacity, but is in constant relation to the context in which these events are being re-called and re-memoried. The Crown operates in this way, to re-inscribe meaning to these people and events, to pull them out of their pastness and project upon them things we need from them: humanity, intimacy, rationality etc. It takes advantage of our desire to continually draw meaning from the past, of our desire to use historical fictionalization to play on the edges; to use what has been agreed upon as real as a vessel for our imaginings of what was, what could or should have been. It hints at how we understand these two modes, the real and the fictional as inextricable historical forces. We crave the ability to draw more meaning from the past. But sometimes we want what can only be imagined. And we can’t help but transpose that, to ground it onto what already has been collectively agreed, because that gives it legitimacy. If we only wanted a mere recreation of what has already happened, then we could watch the clips of Diana speaking to the press, of Charles performing fatherhood with his children, look at the Photos of Dodi and Diana on the boat. We want more than that, of course. The Crown’s power lies in its ability to seamlessly integrate what has already been recorded as history into what an imagined version of what more that history could be. In that way, what is The Crown but another participant in this ever extending, ever developing process of historical meaning making?
The Crown creates reason, motive, and impetus for actual events. It takes advantage of our desire to interpolate the detailed and the intimate unto the broad strokes that we have been given. It works its way backwards and forwards, building off what we know about who these people were, and who they became, to imagine what they could have been in these moments. The Crown acts to reclaim bits of these historicized moments, transform them through re-contextualization, and ultimately produce a piece of visual artifact that is almost unintelligible as either fact or fiction. It transforms the operation of a massive machine of imperial power into a series of quiet, personal, and intimate moments so startlingly close to the image they once provided for us for our consumption, we can hardly not believe it actually happened. It tries to imply that their actions, reflective of the gross and ostentatious power structure they originated in, could have some kind of meaning. In doing so, it remains in service to them as the imperial political power they are, because, as cultural critic Walter Benjamin might say, it ultimately aestheticizes the political structures they are reflective of. Does it matter whether or not the stories The Crown weaves actually happened, as long as we think that it did?
What I think this show teaches us is that what matters most is that we understand how and why these stories are made, rather than whether or not these stories are “true.”
The Crown does not draw this power from being as real as possible, but rather from its ability to draw from the power of both the deeply real as it intersects with the deeply imaginative in a process of fantasy fulfillment in order to more firmly assert itself in the process of meaning/media making. The show masterfully, purposefully works on the edge of these distinctions, bringing the question of the unstable nature of history making to the forefront of popular culture discourse, whether we are aware of it or not. In this way, we see The Crown as agent of historical meaning, as representative of what historical creation can and does look like, as a destabilizer of our commitments to a binary of the real and fictional that ultimately prevent us from developing into historically literate citizens. Its impact and importance lies in its ability to highlight the tenuous process of history creation, and the role of creative media in that process.
Netflix’s choice to refuse the presence of a fictional disclaimer — which ultimately would have stated the obvious — was never the issue. It was the fact that they refused to acknowledge the power their ostensibly fictional show had in creating real meaning, and real historical impact; in other words they attempted to absolve themselves of the representational burden that comes with the work they make. It’s not that we should expect shows like The Crown or media producers like Netflix to constrain their work to that which is purely agreed upon as factual, but we should require them to be honest about the ways in which they utilize their speculative capacity to generate versions of history that will impact our understanding of history itself. Shows like The Crown reveal the relativity of our position, the creation of pastness through a reflection on it, a search for meaning that created new meanings. Meaning that could not be tightly contained to the four walls of the show.
Special thanks to my friend Alex Clark for his indefatigable editing skills.
SOURCE LIST:
“Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History” by Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Representation & Media by Stuart Hall
