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LuckyAlbatross -> RE: Movie "The Queen" (5/4/2007 8:02:29 AM)
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Really? I thought the movie showed that the Queen was highly emotionally connected- but in a way that is very different from how most people show emotions today. She was raised to and had to keep her emotions in check by coming into power during a world war in which they were losing at the time, raise the country up into a completely new world, have an "outsider" come in and take all the prestige and austerity she had worked so hard to protect get splashed all over the tabloids.
I thought that was the entire point of the buck plotline- to show just how connected QEII was to her world and DID feel grief and respect for it, but personally and station wise felt completely adrift on how the world was telling her that not only was she not grieving appropriately, but that she was hurting her own country because of it. Even though it was always what she had known and been before.
Here's my LJ post on the movie:
I had guessed I would like The Queen, despite being overexposed to Helen Mirren as the icon of monarchy this year. I’m such juxtaposition, idiosyncratic both extremes together type of person that anything dealing with those same themes tends to delight as well.
And I was not disappointed. The telling first scene involved the newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair meeting the Queen for the official invitation. The wife disdains of the old formal ways and makes awkward jokes about her.
But when she sits down in a chair, she immediately crosses her legs at the ankle, shifts them to the side and clasps her hands neatly on her lap.
Etiquette and formality is a sliding scale indeed.
And so many questions are lit up in the movie- when does structure become a fortress? When do traditions start to stifle us rather than lift us up? When we do go from being repressive to being vulgar?
It’s so funny considering how disdainful I tend to be of formality and rituals WITHIN the scene, that I care so deeply and strongly about them in life in general. I think it’s because I’m so unempathic that I need these cues to keep myself in line and prevents others from coming into my lines. I’m so OCD that I love the comfort the rules bring.
I also think that a monarchy IS a socially recognized position while dominant is not. I’ll follow rules of order for a chair of the board no matter what orientation, but I won’t follow rules of order for a random dominant.
It also spoke deeply to me of my issues with lack of empathy. While I don’t think it was really the Queen’s issue, it did point out how the supposedly empathic people are always the ones crying out about how the unempathic ones are uncaring, unfeeling, unsympathetic. Does that seem right to you?
Obviously lacking empathy hardly means one lacks the depth for feeling, for connection, for perspective, for any emotion. I simply connect and express it differently.
And finally, the Queen made a point of putting duty before self- that her own grieving was not a matter for the public and to do her duty was the ultimate priority. As a woman who came into the monarchy early, during war crisis, it’s obvious how this would become so completely instilled in her.
In a world where so many bitch about the “entitled spoiled Me-generation,” where are those voices when asked to put duty above personal self? When is sacrifice for the good?
As always, where is the balance on the scale?
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