Movie Reviewed
By David A. Thomas
The Queen (2006)
Neal Gabler, the popular culture and media critic who often appears on TV talk shows, authored Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality in 1998.
His description of the importance of movies transformed my theory of rhetoric and films. According to Gabler’s analysis, movies in America are directly responsible for a tectonic shift in the ways we think, and communicate, about reality. Formerly, philosophers would have been correct in describing writing as our primary epistemological form. That is, for serious ideas, i.e., the things we think about, and what we think about them, we needed books. But when people started going to movies in preference to reading books, suddenly our epistemology shifted from print to the narrative, dramatic, and visual forms.
Narrative has always been around, of course. Our religion is based on the narratives in the Bible—but even so, those stories always existed for us in printed form. They still do. Christians, like Jews and Muslims, are “people of the Book.” Personally, I also see movies as social texts. To me, movies like the “Jesus film,” or Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” or last Christmas’ “The Story of the Nativity,” are neither more nor less than yet other translations of Scripture, like the Good News Bible or the NIV. I think millions of viewers would agree. More persons have viewed those religious movies than have ever read the same stories in the Good Book itself. (Just as more people got their only version of Kennedy’s assassination from Oliver Stone’s JFK than from the Warren Commission Report, which was widely published but little read.)
Movies, Gabler asserts, are the most significant model for understanding modern epistemology for a number of reasons. It cannot be denied that humans think in dramatic formats, including plots and characterizations. Ninety percent of human conversation conforms much more to what we might term “gossip” than about what we might term “ideas.” Yet TV, the child of the movies, can also claim pride of place among the sources of not only what we think, but how we think about things.
To be sure, there are significant differences between movies and TV, both technical and environmental. Movies are better than TV, and they are viewed on huge screens in dark theaters with audiences of strangers. TV is viewed on small screens in ambient light (or daylight) at home, alone or with only other family members or friends, in half-hour episodes. Above all, TV is heavily larded with commercial interruptions.
TV presents both stories and information, called “news,” which in turn is visual and narrative rather than verbal. There have been some indelible TV images in my life that I daresay are also true for all Americans – namely, the live news reports of Vietnam war images, of 9/11, of Katrina, and maybe a few other broadcasts.
The Queen as a Hybrid TV Movie. What I want to say about this movie has to do with epistemology. It tells us almost all we know about Queen Elizabeth II during the funeral of Diana. Not only that, the movie shows us how we are expected to think about her. What I want to show, first, is that this movie uses TV techniques to do it.
(I could go on and on about the qualities of the movie itself. The reviewers loved it: Rottentomatoes, a major online movie review aggregator, records an unbelievable 98% favorable ratio among all reviews listed. Helen Mirren, as Elizabeth, won every award on the planet for her acting, including the Oscar. You should see the movie. Moreover, it’s “clean,” so you can safely choose it for a church discussion group.)
Yet consider just how much of this movie is TV-based.
First, there had already been twenty previous movies based on the story of Diana’s death—on TV.
Stephen Frears, the director, has been a TV director since 1968; his acclaimed career as a feature film director only took off in the last decade or so. And so far, all of his theatrical movies adapt well to the small screen. Likewise, Peter Morgan, the screenwriter, is primarily a TV script writer— excepting his other notable movie of this year, The Last King of Scotland.
Helen Mirren, the actress, is a relatively minor movie star. In winning the Oscar, she bumped off Meryl Streep, arguably the greatest screen actress of our time. But Mirren is a huge TV star, in Britain. There, through the years, she was frequently cast in TV productions like Masterpiece Theatre and various Shakespearean epics for TV. She has made over 90 TV appearances, including her most famous role as the lead investigator on the prime time mystery series, Prime Suspect, which just completed its seventh season. This year, of course, she also won the Emmy for her HBO movie role as Elizabeth I.
And consider the movie itself: it is liberally intercut with actual TV footage from Diana’s life, and especially, from the funeral and the events surrounding it. Much of the movie is also shot so as to look like TV. The whole approach of the movie, and the key to its success, is the strategic choice to reveal the personality and character of Elizabeth in a kind of Upstairs, Downstairs dramatization of her private life behind the scenes—her clunky sensible shoes and tweedy skirts, her pillow talk with the stuffy Prince Phillip, and so on. The climactic scene in the movie, in which Queen Elizabeth, at long last, finally consents to speak directly to the masses of people around the world about Diana’s death, is a straight recreation of her speech as she gave it on TV.
I would love to comment at length on how the movie revealed the youthful Boomer, Prime Minister Tony Blair, as he interceded between the media and the poker-faced, utterly dignified, Silent Generation Queen. To overcome her resistance to entering the modern world, he firmly advised her to reveal more of her humanity and personal feelings than, as Queen, she thought it her duty and her responsibility to show. I would love to say a lot more about The Queen’s cinematic achievements in its own right. But you can find a hundred competent reviewers elsewhere who will tell you all those things.
Christian Ethics and the Meaning of The Queen. Let me summarize the thrust of my comments: The Queen is a clear-cut illustration of just how pervasive both movies and TV have become in our consciousness of reality. The importance of this epistemology cannot be overemphasized. Because of our lengthy history with movies and TV, our pews are filled with people who live their lives according to scripts they write in their heads, just like the movies. When they see the scenes of a real event like 9/11, they say, “It was [what?] just like a movie.” And just as importantly, the preacher in the pulpit is possessed by the exact same worldview, and comes to the same judgments about what is real, and what counts for reality.
Keep in mind, many churches now use TV. They broadcast their regular Sunday morning services. They use videos in Sunday Schools and training classes. They (I hope) are sponsoring movie discussion groups. My question is, how are churches using these media tools? And, how much better could they be, if they only took the time to step back and learn newer, more effective ways of doing it?
1 David A. Thomas retired from the University of Richmond in 2004 and now resides in Sarasota, Florida. He invites your comments at davidthomas1572@comcast.net.
