An amusing crash course in advanced parasitology

Rating: 8/10 (6 December 2008)

What stands out in my mind after watching The Queen is its (unintended?) comicality. Behind a glitzy facade, we are confronted with the empty, squalid lives of people with 'more money than sense', as the saying goes, yet desperately attached, limpet-like, to their privileges and wealth. Mercifully deprived of all real power, the head of an institution well past its use-by date continues to behave as if the destinies of the nation depended on her decision-making skills. But the only issues she is allowed to determine are trivial and merely symbolic, as, for example, whether a flag should be flown at half-mast or not, in memory of a youngish, mediocre, promiscuous ex-daughter-in-law who had squandered most of her copious time consorting with wealthy and not-so-wealthy men instead of spending quality time with her teenage sons. The youngish PM, supposedly the leader of a socialist political party, keeps up the fiction, behaving sycophantically towards the 'head of state' and propping up a system which only benefits those who are already obscenely wealthy. All of this is shown against a background of inexplicable public grief, yet another example of the old dictum 'monarchs will behave like monarchs only as long as their subjects continue to behave like subjects'. Only five years down the track, there occurred an event which clearly demonstrated how values are completely reversed in our society: the unprovoked invasion of Iraq. On that occasion, a truly humane monarch could have refused to sign the order-in-council which authorized the invasion; but didn't. And millions of citizens could have filled the streets of London to protest; but didn't. To be sure, there were demonstrations against the intervention, but they were much, much smaller than those mourning the dead 'princess'. And so the show goes on, staged by the lackeys of the obscenely wealthy and applauded by the gullible millions. Just one more question: if Elizabeth Windsor is genuinely averse to stag hunting, why does she permit it on her own multi-thousand-acre estate? All in all, I regard this as an excellent movie, although it is not entirely clear to me whether its perceptive portrayal of royal squalor was intended.