Melodrama, Celebrity, The Queen

Abstract

In the midst of Princess Margaret's 1950s romance with Royal Air Force group captain Peter Townsend, Malcolm Muggeridge warned that the new celebrity coverage of the royal family would end in tears. But in 2006, Stephen Frears’ The Queen proved that tears could enhance the popularity of the British monarchy, creating what one film critic hailed as the most sophisticated public relations boost for the queen in 20 years. In this depiction of the fateful week after the death of Diana in 1997, docudrama—the fictionalized representation of real people and events—is trumped by melodrama, with its pathos, its appeal for moral recognition and its highly expressive mise en scène. The former (represented by actual news footage) is the genre of the film's ‘queen of hearts’, Diana. The latter (represented by the dramatic fiction of screenwriter Peter Morgan) is that of its ‘queen of a nation’, Elizabeth II. In its opposition of two ambitious queens—one romantic, one worldly—the film echoes Friedrich Schiller's 1800 proto-melodrama Mary Stuart. More than two centuries later, the older genre triumphs, rendering The Queen's fictional world more vivid and affecting than the actual images of the real-life Diana. Much of this triumph can be attributed to Helen Mirren, who brings the prestige of her star persona to a monarch in danger of being overshadowed by the celebrity of her rival. In an unusually forthright discussion of royalty and celebrity, The Queen draws the two regimes of power together in a single figure, who finishes the film with a declamation on ‘glamour and tears’.