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Reactions to the news of her death underscored how strikingly different her story may look if she's seen less as the head of a family touched by tragedy and more as the figure who still represented what had been the British Empire. The focus on palace intrigue in most of these constructed images of her meant, among other things, that they rarely considered her from the point of view of ordinary people inside England, let alone, for instance, those harmed by the monarchy's long history of colonization. Her only help comes from Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), who in the film is her savior precisely because he learned to pursue popularity outside the monarchy. It posited that Elizabeth was, through her training and the sense of duty that defined her life, simply unprepared for the depth of feeling she encountered, and surrounded by no one who could help her navigate it. Mirren's portrayal, for which she won an Oscar, was both sympathetic and damning. In The Queen, Helen Mirren played her as a woman so preoccupied with protecting her family and the institution of the monarchy, and so removed from her subjects, that she couldn't initially understand the public response Princess Diana's death would draw. That's why the portrayal of her has been handed off from actress to actress, from Claire Foy to Olivia Colman to Imelda Staunton.īut there were other portrayals, too. Much of The Crown has been devoted to unwinding her life to explore her humanity, how the woman she was from the moment of her startlingly young ascent to power informed the monarch she was. How popular culture engaged with her was a huge part of how it engaged with the entire idea of a queen - an English queen or any other one.Įlizabeth herself, in cultural representations both American and not, was a figure who could be stern or kind, tragic or comic, opaque or transparent. How popular culture engaged with her was a huge part of how it engaged with the entire idea of a queen - an English queen or any other one. There are fewer and fewer living memories anymore of the monarchy before her, without her.
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By the time I became pop-culture aware, Queen Elizabeth II was the British monarchy. She wasn't just queen for all my life she had been queen since my parents were teenagers. That's part of why the positioning of Queen Elizabeth II in pop culture is such a big part of how Americans saw her.Įlizabeth II became queen in 1952, almost 20 years before I was born. After all, Americans aren't burdened with the costs and political problems and the other pains of maintaining a monarchy they get to look at princes and princesses in real life much like they would on television - as an aesthetic and a story. The United States really doesn't have anything like it, which is perhaps why some Londoners will grouse about how Americans are more impressed by and more obsessed with the British royal family than British people are. You don't see the queen dancing on TikTok or selling a new activewear line on Instagram. But there's a degree of tradition associated with this reverence, and a degree of formality and distance, that isn't like the devotion to Beyoncé or Chris Evans or whomever. It felt kind of similar in sheer magnitude to the way some Americans are about celebrities they admire, like actors and musicians. But it is the way a particular slice of the population reacted to her. The most important caveat about the royalty-adjacent emotions I saw that day is that of course this is not how all Londoners or all English people - let alone all of Queen Elizabeth's subjects - felt about her. It wasn't because she wasn't looking.Ī little shocked and a little dejected, she admitted it was simply that she was "mesmerized." Were they tall enough, could they bend enough, could they reach far enough to get the shot?īut the gray-haired woman near me who had been handing out snacks and chattering excitedly the entire time missed the photo she wanted the most: She didn't get a shot of the queen passing by in her carriage. They struggled to get their cameras positioned so they weren't blocked by other people's cameras. Of the horses, the carriages, the other people, and the waving Will and Kate pennants. People held them up to take pictures of nothing, of everything. When I stood on the street outside Westminster Abbey in 2011, wedged into a crowd watching the arrivals and departures at the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, smartphones and digital cameras were everywhere.