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‘The Crown’ depicts pace of change, rule

By Alyssa Rosenberg, The Washington Post
Published: December 2, 2016, 6:04am

Pop culture tends to be broadly progressive in its outlook, in the sense that history moves in an enlightened direction, and social gains, however painfully secured, are generally permanent. Movies and television also tend to be optimistic to the point of excitability about people who have previously been excluded from power gaining it, convinced that when women or people of color obtain high office that they’ll transform the institutions they inherit, rather than being transformed by them.

Netflix’s “The Crown,” a sumptuous drama about the reign of Elizabeth II (Claire Foy), joins “Game of Thrones” in its skepticism about that second proposition. In “Game of Thrones,” power is a malignancy, eating away at the women who possess it, corrupting their efforts at rebellion; in “The Crown,” at least so far, the office is amber, freezing the young queen in time and separating her even from the people closest to her. Either way, these stories suggest that progress isn’t permanent, and that what seems like a moment of change might be a trap.

The women of “Game of Thrones” have grown up in a viciously misogynist culture. Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) has been subject to more than a decade of marital rape. Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) was abused and sold by her brother, Viserys (Harry Lloyd). Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner), who initially harbored romantic notions about the system in which she lived, was humiliated and abused by her first intended husband, Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), married off to his uncle Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) in attempt to humiliate them both, and married off again to Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon), a psychopathic serial rapist.

But while “Game of Thrones” acknowledges their feelings of revenge and liberation, the show is clear-eyed about the extent to which these women play out old scripts and fall into old traps in their quests for safety and freedom.

Cersei’s need to consolidate power and quash dissent, driven by the real abuses and humiliations she has experienced, ultimately leads her to an act of state terrorism: She bombs the Great Sept of Baelor, killing the High Sparrow (Jonathan Pryce), who publicly humiliated her; the young Queen Margaery Tyrell (Natalie Dormer), who challenged her; and ultimately, her own son Tommen (Dean-Charles Chapman), who commits suicide in despair.

Daenerys styles herself a liberator, ranging across Essos with an army of freed slaves. But she’s thought more about grand gestures than governance; Dany feels bad when her vanity costs the people she wants to free, but she doesn’t actually know how to stop putting them in positions of great precarity. And when she sails for Westeros at the end of the show’s most recent season, there’s an air of unfinished business in this mass mobilization. The answer to failing to rule one society effectively is not to go conquer another.

And Sansa, who has suffered the worst cruelties of all these three women, becomes a canny but cruel operator in her turn. Her victory in the Battle of the Bastards is the result of the same deceptions and manipulations that have marked their own life. She’s willing to exact terrible casualties to spring her own trap. These women can’t transcend the norms that marred their lives; they can only master those same tools.

“The Crown” is a gentler show, both about the patriarchal society in which Elizabeth II grew up and the extent to which she’s embalmed by the station she embodies.

The series begins with her marriage to Philip, who becomes the Duke of Edinburgh (Matt Smith), a man who tries to get her to take his adopted family name for her dynasty and who is prone to making remarks that were impolitic even in the 1950s, but who recognizes Elizabeth’s status. The other powerful men in her life, among them her prime minister, Winston Churchill (John Lithgow), and her uncle, the Duke of Windsor (Alex Jennings), may be paternalistic, but they are hardly malign. They want to make her the best incarnation of the Crown she can possibly be.

“The Crown” is attentive to the power of the institution, even as it recognizes the personal costs to Elizabeth of submitting her will and individuality to the requirements people expect of Elizabeth Regina. Her long struggle to accept that she cannot behave as a sister to Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) without compromising her duties to the church and the laws she’s sworn to defend are the saddest part of this acclimation process.

It might be wise to read both as a cautionary tale about anything we might be tempted to see as an augury of great and permanent transformation of society. It’s not so much that winter is coming this time, but that history tells us, if only we’d remember to read it, that winter comes again. And ultimately, so does spring.

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