The Crown and Simulacra

How the Netflix show The Crown taps into Britain's shared cultural memory

There was a moment in season four of The Crown in which we saw inside the home of Mark Fagan, the man who broke into Buckingham Palace and even the Queen’s bedroom in 1982. Fagan’s rather squalid council flat featured a type of gas fire with a wire grid placed over it, covering the blue flames behind it. I was immediately taken back to childhood visits to a great-aunty and my great-grandmother, who had the same fireplace to heat their homes. I had completely forgotten that in the ‘70s and ‘80s, such fireplaces were commonplace because, in the end, it wasn’t really important — a small facet of British life now gone and disregarded. This is the essence of the sumptuous and sprawling Netflix drama The Crown — a very well-acted trip down the folk memory lane of modern Britain, with the life of Queen Elizabeth II as the star around which everything else orbits.

Many people reacted with surprise upon learning that I was wading my way through sixty hours of royal intrigue and drama. Alas, this is merely a facet of domestic life, especially when my good lady had just sat through all of Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad. I was not looking forward to The Crown, but once underway I managed to settle into it. Eventually, it was “just there”, rather like Queen Elizabeth herself throughout my life.

Writer Peter Morgan based The Crown loosely on his 2013 stage play The Audience, which centred on the Queen’s weekly visit with her Prime Ministers. The problem with dramatizing the Queen and juxtaposing her with politicians is that she did not have any formal political power. Indeed, in The Crown Queen Elizabeth II views her political aloofness as “tradition”. The subject of Queen Elizabeth’s seeming indifference to the changes taking place in Britain was excellently explored in a stream by Apostolic Majesty.

However, in terms of creating drama and tension for a television show, the fact the Queen is not outright commanding or expressing sovereign power means the soap opera aspects of royal life come to the fore. Unlike her namesake, Queen Elizabeth II does not have to worry about the Spanish Armada invading the Southern coast or employ a spymaster to torture Catholic subversives. Instead, she has to fret about her sister Margaret’s choice of lover or whether the Royals appear to be uncaring after the horrific Aberfan disaster. In other words, tension is created primarily by the Royals facing public relations disasters — a particularly feminine form which goes some way to explain why so many women are addicted to “royal drama”. Yet, when we extrapolate the themes of “scandal” a little further we see that what is being placed in jeopardy is the appearance of Tradition, the mystique.

The Queen, who we often see praying by her bedside at night, is in the odd situation of being Tradition incarnate, while at the same time unable to address or pass commentary on the fact that the wider world, and her inner familial circles, are modernizing — which is to say, liberalising. Despite the myriad objections to the series peddling falsehoods and historical inaccuracies, I do believe the portrayal of the Queen as belonging spiritually to a different era is correct. Thus, try as she might, she and the institution itself are inherently political merely by existing.

The grand narrative arc of The Crown takes us from the halcyon days at the end of World War II up to the Blair era, with different actors taking on key roles as the Royals age. The acting is impressive throughout, and the script, particularly the “Middle Age”, is refreshingly intelligent and relatively free from political correctness — though the final episode featuring a young Elizabeth dancing with black American soldiers on VE Day made me wince.

The reason I feel like “going easy” on this show is that, for the first time in an eternity, we have a grand depiction of Britain in modernity. Yes, it avoids all the more gruesome issues (mass immigration is never mentioned) but despite it all, it touches on and, to be honest, exploits our collective cultural memory as British people. The Crown is all about the “member berries” but they are at least our member berries.

We were a people, once.

As I made my way across the years within the series I found myself thinking ahead, trying to pre-empt the writers as to what historical events or dramas would be up next in the nostalgic hit parade. The writers and producers were keenly aware of this dynamic, of course, and so the storylines are written more as British history as seen through media than actual history. The Crown is essentially a journey through 70 years of Britain speaking to itself via its own cultural institutions. There are images and forms embedded within our collective psychology that the writers know they can mine and manipulate. An easy way by which we can explore this narrative crafting is in the last season and Prince William’s Nokia mobile phone which was ubiquitous in the early 2000s. William could of course have his phone set to silent, but that would mean we would not hear the iconic “beep, beep….beep, beep” alert sound that we are all familiar with.

Likewise, the Queen at Balmoral elicits imagery of her wearing a headscarf, wellies, and a Barbour jacket while driving a Landrover. Charles has a habit of inserting one hand into his suit pocket while leaving the thumb outside. Winston Churchill always needs to have a cigar and a glass of cognac, Tony Blair has an insincere grin, and Margaret Thatcher carried her handbag two-handed and in front of her body, her voice oddly measured and husky. None of these tropes are inaccurate reflections of the people, but they are all ways in which the media presented them to us — and writer Peter Morgan knows it. Morgan certainly knows how to write a satisfying story arc, but he also knows what imagery is instantly recognizable to the collective psychology of the British people. The result is that we get concentrated distillations of our expectations. It is a hyperreal incarnation of the famous and infamous of recent British history. We do not simply get Margaret Thatcher, we get Turbo Thatcher, even better than the real thing.

There are of course many characters, especially in the earlier seasons, who are not as familiar to a modern audience. These include Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Princess Margaret’s lover, Peter Townsend. Our unfamiliarity with such people, as per media representation, means that they come across as authentic in a world populated by cartoon characters or professional impersonators.

Harold Wilson is primarily known to the masses as a somewhat stuffy academic socialist who smoked a pipe. There is therefore not much to repackage in exaggerated and intensified form based on media representation.

In terms of narrative construction and storytelling, relaying back to the audience what they already know or are vaguely conscious of by tickling member berries is a neat trick. It is a form of iconolatry wherein the icons are not being demolished but reaffirmed and sanctified. However, what happens when the icon in question is possibly the most photographed woman in history? What happens when the individual already exists within a media-saturated hyperreality?

The general consensus among royal gossip aficionados and drama critics is that The Crown was excellently written and acted until season five when the wheels began to fall off and it lost its magic. As noted above, the little trick of presenting media imagery to depict semi-factual scenarios of the rich, powerful, and famous works well enough when latent cultural tropes are reignited and dusted off. The problem Diana presents is that she already is almost entirely a creation of media. Indeed, their obsession with her killed her.

It is at this juncture that we must explore another clever trick that Peter Morgan has up his writer’s sleeve: he knows that we know what the future holds for the characters.

Though Diana’s main arc gets underway in season five she’s introduced at the beginning of season four as a teenage girl in a leotard. We do not see her face, she flits about dancing and giggling, and neither do we know her name. The music deployed is an otherworldly, enchanted female choral that lilts gently to the mystery girl’s playful dance. What’s being signaled to the viewer is that this harmless and shy young girl is going to matter a great deal in the future, the show is ominously saying “here’s a taster, she’s coming!” Of course, if The Crown was a purely fictional drama series such an odd scene would be entirely nonsensical, but it isn’t. It is written with the pre-existing knowledge of the viewer in mind. Morgan gets to have his Royal buttered jam scone and eat it.

The young Diana is introduced with foreshadowing similar to Rose on the Titanic noticing that there aren’t enough lifeboats for everyone, only then to be deftly slipped back up Morgan’s sleeve.

Princess Diana is one of the most photographed and scrutinized people in the modern world. As such, the member berry tickling tactic deployed in The Crown finds itself overwhelmed with possibilities. The Queen as an omniscient presence is replaced by Diana in her “revenge dress” or Diana on the Australian Tour or Diana going to the gym, Diana visiting sick children and Diana startled like the symbolic stag she shoots at Balmoral, just in case you aren’t getting it.

Today when people think of Diana they visualize her tilting her head downwards and to the side, while her eyes hold the gaze of her (male) interlocutor. The imagery of Diana as the alluring victim is, naturally, primarily a media creation and the head tilt and downcast expression is mainly one she adopted during the infamous Martin Bashir interview. As ever, the iconic imagery became the reality and subsumed the actual person into itself. In The Crown, Diana adopts the head tilt and downcast eye poise in almost every single scene!

Again, the media is drawing on the media to depict people we know from the media and hand them back to us.

The observant reader may have noticed that we are well into Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation territory here.

Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.

The tragedy of Diana’s story is that, having courted and encouraged the attention of the parasitic “paparazzi” she lost control of her creation and was left helpless as her simulacra replaced her actual self. Dying young meant that her image was frozen, forever, in the simulacra which replaced the original truth in the minds of the masses. Seemingly frustrated that Diana can no longer dominate, Morgan goes so far as to bring her back as a ghost in season six who haunts the conscious of Prince Charles and the Queen!

The Crown provides the masses with the simulacra because that is what they know and expect, and in doing so he reaffirms the simulation as a whole.

Writ large, Morgan’s simulacra encompasses all of modern British history itself. It is a certain “Disneyfication” of our collective psychology deploying a multitude of signs and cultural touchstones — the most interesting of which have lain dormant for years. Of course, as noted above, it is presupposed that there is a collective British experience, an identity, to begin with.

What, for example, does a montage of the Northern Ireland “Troubles” in the 1970s mean to a Somali immigrant? What significance do the Miner’s Strikes have for a Turk or an Iraqi? When Charles flew out to Paris to identify Diana’s body in the morgue, Britain was still around 97% white native and the day her death was announced I was sitting drinking in the Three Bulls Heads in Newcastle’s Haymarket. As a boy, my world was dominated by three matriarchal figures - my grandmother, the Queen, and Margaret Thatcher.

Morgan’s The Crown, whether it wants to be or not, is about our identity and history. Yet rather like the Queen herself, we find that we exist both within and outside of the simulacra. A recurring theme throughout the entire series is the Queen relinquishing her identity as a free and independent young woman and, without having any choice about it, embracing her role as Sovereign and a life of duty to the Nation. Ultimately, this is what the Disneyfication of our history offers us all — but it just feels so damn nice. It is impossible not to adore steam trains bellowing out plumes of white clouds as they trundle along bucolic coastlines or peering into the trendy London socialite scene of the 1960s. It is a balm for a soul bereft of signifiers and symbols exclusive to one’s own kind.

As noted above, a gloomy foreshadowing hangs around the Diana era like a thick mist. Royals such as Princess Anne ominously warn that Diana will have to bend to protocol or she’ll break. Prince Philip outright threatens her but Morgan stops just short enough to prevent implicating him in her death.

Yet, it is also possible that some characters are absent simply because, again, we as the viewers know the history. Enoch Powell is entirely absent from The Crown. He is never even mentioned despite being one of the most influential politicians speaking about the most incendiary topic with vast public support. I have a feeling though, that if The Crown were made in 1995, Enoch Powell would be depicted, even if as a crank or extremist. In the 2020s the historical simulacra has no place for Powell because his literal foreshadowing of future events would transcend the screen and hit the public directly in the real world. This, we can think of as “dark” or negative signifiers embedded within the cultural psychology of Britain. Narratively speaking, an Enoch Powell storyline would place the Queen in the uncomfortable situation of having to address exactly who or what she represents. Like the Queen Mother’s genetically undesirable cousins locked away in a lunatic asylum for life, such national family secrets are best left well alone — not to be prodded and poked at. Earlier Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was cast as a danger to the establishment because of his socialism and rumoured connections to the USSR. The show is comfortable with this arc, including a plot by Lord Mountbatten and the secret services to stage a coup to remove Wilson from power.

Why, then, is Netflix, or modern media in general more comfortable with a deep-state plan to stage a coup than it is with touching on Enoch Powell? The problem, once again, is the intersection between reality and drama. Millions of viewers would be hearing Powell for the first time, millions more would ask why he, rather than Wilson, was cast into the historical wilderness. The public today does not fear a communist takeover or the nationalizing of services or socialist economics, but they are acutely aware of the immigration issue and its correlating cultural impact and white guilt narratives. Throughout the show, the Queen is depicted as being discreetly on the side of the common man, particularly in her tense interactions with Thatcher. An Enoch Powell arc would demand an answer to the Queen’s allegiances. If her subjects defy the dictates of the power structure and seek assistance from the sovereign, then why is the Queen not on their side?

Instead, mass immigration as a policy of Parliament being imposed on the public against their will is more conveniently cast (if at all) as simply being part of a modernizing Britain. That is to say, the changing ethnic makeup of the country is an emergent phenomenon, not a top-down imposition. The cultural story the media prefers to tell us is one in which non-white faces appear naturally in a ‘‘changing Britain’’ alongside eco windmills and Nokia mobile phones. The truth, that an enormous and cataclysmic crime is being committed is simply too incendiary to handle, and it is precisely that truth that Powell would signal.

The Crown, then, offers us an escapist Disneyfied version of Britain after World War Two. It is certainly not as egregiously offensive as many of the standard ‘‘woke’’ dramas of the current era, it is politically correct more by omission than ideological grandstanding or aggressively pushing a narrative.

I suppose that, in the end, my experience of watching The Crown can be best summed up by Prince Philip in season two:

In the long reeds of difficulty and pain, that’s where you find the treasure.

The treasure for me was being unwittingly reminded by the series that we were a nation, a people, once.