Issue #31: Bitch I'm famous
Hi,
Welcome back to Continue Watching! It’s been a while, but we think we’re all close enough now that we don’t have to make sad little excuses to tell you why we’ve been missing from your inbox. Much like literally every single person, we’ve been Going Through It as well - sometimes at work and sometimes at life - and unfortunately we’ve had to sometimes forgo indulging in the one thing that gives us unadulterated pleasure, this newsletter.
But, worry not, we’re nothing if not obsessive, so we’re never really going away from your life. In fact, a recent development has us so pumped that we’re now convinced that we’re celebrities. One of our earliest subscribers, a friend of Continue Watching, and Bombay Bombshell Ela Das wrote about Continue Watching for Beautiful Homes, India's largest digital design content platform!
For an article titled 10 interior design ideas from your favourite K-drama series, Ela spoke to us about some of our favourite K-drama leads and their enviable homes. It was so much fun to recollect shows we’ve watched over the years and Ela’s thoughtful questions made us think deeply about their aesthetic. We’re so thankful to Ela for giving us our first ever press, and for inflating our egos manifold!!
With this incredible news, we bring you another issue, but with one singular essay, because SOMEONE is not as disciplined as someone else. Kashika’s unending issues aside, Shahana was not impressed with how the latest season of The Crown treats Princess Diana, and basically tears them a new one in her incredible essay.
Kashika will be back in our year-end issue because she loves a good list, and because Shahana did not raise a quitter!
Have a great weekend!
Continue Watching (and reading!),
Kashika and Shahana
So The Crown really doesn’t like Diana then?
By Shahana
The Crown isn’t just any television show. It’s meant to be a retelling of the history of the United Kingdom during Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, as well as a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the royal family and their relationships with each other. For the last six years, writer and creator Peter Morgan has been cleverly blending fact with fiction, deftly enough that every season brings with it complaints from a bunch of people on how the show should come with a disclaimer reminding viewers that it’s not a documentary. Dame Judi Dench (god, why) in fact said The Crown is “cruelly unjust to the individuals and damaging to the institution they represent.”
Having just finished Season 5, I can say with full confidence, no one needed to worry. Season 4 was perhaps its best season, and it was as good simply because it did what the royal family was afraid of—criticising the Queen. The show used her old-fashioned Victorian morality to show how out of touch with the world and her people she was, and how her values in turn reflected the system’s ignorance. Without ever expressly saying it, the royals’ aimless attempts towards grasping at modernity asked the question—is there any way for a nation to be a modern democracy while continuing to be subjects and not people? Is the Royal Family relevant? Does the monarchy need to be around?
Season 5 asks no such questions. Season 5 critiques no one, except perhaps those that believed The Crown would offer up a commentary on the monarchy. The royals can rest, because The Crown and its writer Peter Morgan, are clearly on their side.
The season starts with Charles (Dominic West) slyly happy about a supposed poll that shows England would prefer that Elizabeth II (Imelda Staunton) abdicated in favour of her son, going so far as to show him schedule a secret meeting with then Prime Minister John Major (Jonny Lee Miller), to discuss Elizabeth’s abdication. The glee on his face, as he tries to orchestrate a coup for a position with no teeth, is meant for us to think of him poorly—and then suddenly, The Crown changes tack.
As we move through the episodes, we learn that his affair with Camilla is still going strong, that every appearance he makes with Diana so the world will think they’re a happy family is just that—an appearance. While season four Charles’ penchant for intellectual pursuits were shown as snobbish, put on, and with an air of someone’s who’s trying really hard to be seen as smarter and cerebral than he is, season five’s Charles is presented as a foil to Diana’s frivolousness—on a 1991 vacation in Italy being marketed to the press as their second honeymoon, Charles creates an itinerary filled with tours of spots full of historical value and art, and Diana interrupts with “Some beaches, perhaps? And shopping?” One could argue that Diana isn’t meant to be frivolous, but as the series keeps progressing, Diana seems to get more petulant while Charles more mature.
Episode five sets aside a lot of time to recreate the “Tampongate” phone call between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles (Olivia Williams)—a leaked conversation where Charles talked about how he wanted to turn into a box of Tampax so he could “live inside” Camilla’s trousers. The conversation is oddly tender, and makes us forget the backdrop—Camilla is literally talking about how much she wants to have sex with Charles while her children and husband are sitting outside her bedroom. The fallout of Charles’ carelessness is never examined—Morgan chooses to move past it entirely instead of asking any provocative questions; how the repercussions of his behaviour are borne by the women and how it affected Diana and Camilla’s reputations instead of his, how Charles, like the rest of the royal family, is insulated from any humiliation and public censure. The Crown talks about marriage and family, but never about sex and desire—here was an opportunity, and Morgan sidesteps it in favour of a Charles who is philanthropic and modern, who is happy to breakdance (badly) with students from disadvantaged backgrounds—it wants us to forget the Charles who is cruel to his wife, who needs his shoelaces ironed every morning, who thinks it’s an insult to travel in business class, and who can’t stand a leaking pen.
Morgan’s obvious fascination with the royals could be forgiven and overlooked, if Morgan chose to show Diana the same grace—his Diana, on the other hand, is superficial and flighty. On the Italy trip, Charles bemoans Diana’s desire to indulge in “retail as recreation,” almost like a rebuke to viewers who wanted to see Diana after her separation, the Diana who used her clothes as an intentional statement about who she was. Anyone who thinks of Diana’s clothes as simply something she put on herself is being deliberately obtuse and rather simplistic. Diana used her clothes to signal her independence from the Family’s strict system, whether it was her infamous Revenge Dress, her sweatshirt-and-bike-shorts combo, or the tailored trouser suits—but Morgan chooses to forego her conscious choices to assert her individuality and her personality in favour of multiple shots of her cowering into herself, her sapphire engagement ring in focus. Outside of that iconic ring, outside of her marriage, who was Diana? The Crown doesn’t seem to care.
Even in scenes which should indicate her desire for connection with the people she was around and the compassion and kindness she became the “people’s princess” for, Morgan chooses to make her look fickle and careless. When Diana accompanies her acupuncturist to her husband’s surgery, all she does is check out the doctor, Hasnat Khan: “Quite dishy, wasn’t he?” Her subsequent hospital visits to spend time with the sick are now opportunities for her to spend time with Khan, instead of work she felt pulled towards.
The Crown continues to take liberties with what the truth might be, continuously inviting viewers into the royals’ homes. Its storytelling is a clever way to show us multiple versions of the same event, leaving us guessing until the end as to where its loyalties lie. In the episode about how the Russian Romanovs died, Morgan writes the majority of the episode allied to the idea that King George and Queen Mary declined safe passage to the Russian monarchs due to petty jealousy—and then allows Elizabeth to humanise the royals and by extension, herself. Morgan lets Elizabeth explain that as a royal, “silence becomes part of one’s own DNA”; so if a royal grieves, they do it in private, and their interiority is a matter of their own. An interesting statement to make, considering Elizabeth was largely criticised for her lack of statement after Diana’s death—expected in the next season. When Elizabeth stays stoic, we are meant to remember this scene, because her silence is to be seen as strength and sacrifice, but Diana letting the world know that the monarchy was flawed and fallible, that is meant to be shallow, petty, and childish.
Morgan makes a similar choice when dealing with the famous Panorama interview. He makes Martin Bashir (Prasanna Puwanarajah) deceitful and unscrupulous from the start, wasting no time in giving him any motivation besides wanting an exclusive interview. He lies to Diana and her brother and plays up her fears about being watched and followed—but in doing so, Morgan also portrays Diana as being naive and vengeful. Instead of the interview being a medium for Diana to take back power, own her story, and speak her mind, Morgan uses it to show Diana wanting to simply get back at the monarchy and Charles. When Diana visits Elizabeth to tell her about the interview, the queen retorts with, “All any of us want, Diana, is for you to be happy”; odd, because both in fiction and in life, the royal family has never appeared to care about anyone but themselves.
The unending diminishing of Diana and who she was results in overturning her real life story entirely. It was in her desire and willingness to stop adhering to the monarchy’s facade of happiness, to step away from the fantasy of flawlessness, to be flesh and blood, to care and let the world know she cared—it was this very reason she’s still loved, 25 years after her death. Was it all calculated? Perhaps. Is it also possible that the Diana who walked through a landmine-ridden field, shook hands with people who had HIV and AIDS, and touched patients with leprosy understood the potential of her celebrity and used it to do good? Morgan and The Crown would rather believe the former.
Shows mentioned:
The Crown- Netflix ⭐⭐⭐
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