Apparently 90% of the World's population have already seen TKS. And the rest will have seen it by this time tomorrow. So no point writing a piece aimed at helping you decide whether to see it or not. Instead let's discuss it and make some points I hope you will find of interest from my traditional socio-cultural approach.
Those familiar with my curmudgeonly personality are perhaps expecting me to slag TKS off. So let's get the praise out of the way. It is a very fine, well-made, and entertaining film. Firth gives his strongest performance of what is already an excellent career. Yes, he should get the Oscar. A big hand for the production design and art direction, and how they and the cinematography complement each other. BAFTAs all round.
Finally a lovely and subversive bit of shot selection. Camera tuition says on a one-shot (one person in the frame) you should either (a) position the character in the centre of the frame or (b) so their face is towards the top right or top left, with them looking "into the frame", i.e. towards the centre. When the camera switches between two people in a conversation, this will often involve a series of the latter shots with one character to top-right and the other to top-left. As both of them are looking into the frame this enhances for the audience the sense they are watching a dialogue.
In TKS this is subversively altered. When Bertie (the stammering George VI) and wacky speech therapist Lionel are conversing they are often captured with each looking out of the frame, away form the centre. This is very unusual, and is usually confined to experimental movies and the more pretentious pop videos. Watch the film and see what the effect is, which I think contributes a lot to the psychological realities of each character and of their relationship.
So that's the praise. Now on to the deconstruction.
TKS is on the way to being one of the greatest box-office successes in British cinema. First because it only cost a remarkably low $15 million to make. As this is what Cameron Diaz gets paid for one picture you'll see why US blockbusters now cost $300 million or more. Secondly because you lot are all going to see it, as is every American who loves that "cute old British stuff". Hence has already grossed $91 million after just a couple of weeks. So congrats all round to those responsible for this cost / take ratio.
This means TKS has to be counted as a successful commercial movie. Yet it will be regarded as worlds apart from the traditional Hollywood commercial movie that many of you out there like to go and see.
So let's consider TKS in the context of my obsessive twin missions on here. (1) To deconstruct the idea that "art movies" and "commercial" cinema are two rigidly separate worlds. And (2) that the former are always better than the latter. TKS is a classic hybrid. A commercially successful movie ($76 million profit and counting) with serious claims to be of higher cultural value than most "Hollywood dross".
And it is the claims to higher cultural status which will drive you reading this and many others, especially in the UK, to see it.
So what is going on? Does TKS merit this higher status claim?
1. It is a feel-good movie with a happy ending.
The art-house crowd's primary objection to the Hollywood they hate are these two elements. Yet TKS is 100% F-G and H-E. And you know it is going to be Happy Ending before you even buy your ticket, because all the publicity and reviews have told you. So has the word-of-mouth from your friends. Not to mention this is all actual history.
2. Absence of "jeopardy".
But hang on, there's more. Another criticism of Hollywood movies is their blatant emotional manipulation of their audience. This happens via the sequence of jeopardy then resolution. Boy meets girl, then loses girl = jeopardy (tension). Will they get together again? Boy gets girl again = resolution = happy ending. The predictability of this 3-act sequence gets criticised as simplistic.
In TKS there is NO jeopardy. No tension. From start to finish we head in a straight and smooth, non-bumpy, ride to the Happy Ending you knew from the start was going to happen. Yes, we see Bertie struggle with his speech therapy and we empathise with him. Yes we see vulgar, Aussie outsider Lionel struggle with his up-tight, snobby client, and we empathise with him. But at no point do we seriously doubt where this will end up.
So as it drives to its happy ending is not TKS even more simplistic, more predictable than a standard Hollywood movie?
3. It's a safe, British, costume drama packed with box-office stars.
On film and TV what the Brits probably do best is the costume drama. So it's a safe medium. And it sells very well in the US among a middle-class demographic brought up on Upstairs Downstairs and Brideshead. They love their toffs.
And the casting? Firth, Rush, Michael Gambon, Helen Bonham Carter, Derek Jacobi, Claire Bloom (did you spot her?), Timothy Spall, Guy Pierce, Jennifer Ehle. This is not exactly promoting new on-screen talent. No risks here. This is what is known as "Oscar bait".
4. Accurate history?
TKS is being sold as a true, historical story. "Based on the incredible true story" says the trailer. Spin which is being passed on via word-of-mouth, witness my friend who saw it first. It is a true story in that these are real characters and Bertie did have a stammer, with which he was helped by Lionel Logue. But "based on" is the important bit. Bit like "from" or "up to" in other marketing.
Hollywood is regularly criticised for its treatment of history, ranging from more minor errors to the downright outrageous. The USA won WW2 on its own, Americans cracked German codes etc.
But hang on a minute. The characters in TKS are divided strictly down the middle into goodies and baddies. Evil whore Mrs Simpson, her snobby gimp lover Edward VIII, Bertie's cruel Dad, his cold Mum, and, of course, Hitler, are all on The Dark Side.
Firth's Bertie starts off snobby but Learns His Lesson and ends up calling Lionel, well, Lionel. He is never truly bad. Rush's Lionel is unequivocally wonderful. The future Queen Mum is a bit snobby but also warms up, and otherwise is loving and wonderful. Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are cute and wonderful. Even Tim Spall's Churchill is wonderful. In TKS we are spared the episode when Churchill set armed troops on striking Welsh miners.
And the wonderful Royal Family of Bertie + Future Queen Mum + Princess / Future Queen Elizabeth? In TKS these guys are contrasted with the stiff, cold, aristocratic virtual child abuse of Bertie's parents. The emotional drama here is Bertie's ability to throw off his horrible childhood deemed responsible for the stammer.
This gives us a familiar device in film: it mirrors the social progress from that sort of parenting to the more enlightened, touchy feeling parenting of the post-Dr Spock generations. So the message of TKS is social progress: nowadays we are more enlightened, more equal, and more in touch with our feelings than back then.
But hang on a minute. This story about Royal parenting and bringing up damaged Princes I seem to have heard before. Remember Diana? Remember the tabloid spin about how a major part of her tragedy was the equal tragedy that Charles has been badly brought up by a cold, snooty, aristocratic family? In other words by Queen Elizabeth with the aid no doubt of the Queen Mum.
So in telling its tale of bad / cold / snooty Royals and progress towards good / warm / cuddly Royals TKS gives a false version of history on the emotional level that is the core of its appeal. And are we really that more equal in the UK today?
5. Good v evil.
In case you missed it, TKS is structured around a neat split between goodies and baddies which could have come straight out of a Hollywood Western. None of the moral ambivalence or anti-heroes of, say, The French New Wave.
6. The Politics
So TKS ends up making us feel good via our identification, in part, with Bertie and Future Queen Mum and their lovely daughters. Would it be outrageously ultra-leftist to suggest that TKS thus functions as an ideological production which will not exactly drive us into Republican hordes storming Buckingham Palace?
Thus TKS remains a very good film. The six preceding points are not to say it is not a good film. They are to question the extent to which TKS deserves to be embraced as something radically different to Hollywood. For it is a very conservative film on many levels. Casting, genre, plot, and portrayal of the Royals.
Which leaves the crucial question: why will many of you go and see it while telling yourselves you are watching something more akin to arthouse cinema than to commercial Hollywood dross? For if all cinema is one or the other then this has to be, well, one or the other.
Because cinema is an example of what French Marxist Louis Althusser dubbed "ideological state apparatuses". He wanted to explain why in Western capitalist societies it was so rarely necessary for the forces of the state to intervene directly in maintaining a class society. As in when Churchill and Thatcher set troops and armed Police on the respective miners of their eras.
Following the lead of his Italian Marxist predecessor Gramsci, Althusser suggested these ideological apparatuses - religion, education, cinema etc. - function to maintain a cultural domination over society by the ruling classes. Gramsci termed this "hegemony". As The Clash put it, we are "controlled in the body, controlled in the mind". Most of the time, these ideological apparatuses function to support the state as a repressive apparatus. The population, in effect, represses itself, mentally. So the state can take a back seat until really needed.
This contrasts with autocracies. Take Saddam Hussein. Millions of Iraqis were very clear that they hated and opposed Saddam and his Baathist thugs. Rebellion, even discontent, was suppressed via direct violence.
Marcuse famously said "we define ourselves by the products we buy". Guided by the marketing industry we "identify with" products. And we do this primarily to tell ourselves where we are in the class hierarchy. No one wants to place themselves at the bottom. Which is why "chavs" buy Burberry. We are all desperate to buy ourselves into a good self-image. Which is why in a 2009 poll 80% of UK respondents said they are "middle class".
Thus Bourdieu's "cultural capital". The real basis of an unequal, class society is economic - income and wealth: do we own and / or control the means of production, as Marx put it? Most of us do not. That is economic capital.
But we can buy varying levels of cultural capital, ranging from the most affordable to the most inaccessible. Even at the lower end products enable people to reassure themselves they are not working-class: Sky subscriptions, "designer" clothes. But at the top end are the turbo-rich, like UK tax avoider Sir Philip Green, whose wife kindly bought him a solid gold chess set for his birthday.
So within the world of commodities there are huge gradations. But what is important is that we can all tell ourselves we are not working-class, we are not "chavs".
This has a political angle. For in the modern world of political marketing, political parties and their policies are also commodities.
Voting Conservative has always offered working-class people a route to de-identify with their own class and take on airs. Thus what used to be known as in psephology as the deferential vote", exemplified by the controversial 60s TV character Alf Garnett. Made easier in contemporary Britain by a millionaire Tory leader who describes himself as middle-class. Thus the happy Britain of 2011, in which White Van Man with his Sky Sports can stand shoulder to shoulder with his equals in the Tory Cabinet.
And since 1997 the Labour Party, or New Labour, has wanted to get in on the same deal. Relentlessly chasing the same middle-class votes, including the votes of those working people who have bought the right products to delude themselves they, too, are middle-class.
So what does all this have to do with TKS?
THE KINGS SPEECH is a film about social class.
Bertie refers to Lionel, the son of a brewer, as "the first ordinary person I have spoken with". For a King, the son of a businessman running his own enterprise is "ordinary".
Where is the out and out working-class? We see them in TKS. Servants hold doors open for their masters, silently. In the streets we occasionally see people from even lower down the social scale, who ogle the rich and famous, silently. In the film's final scene Bertie has successfully made his famous speech and, flanked by The Future Queen Mum and the Lovely Princesses, heads out on to THAT balcony. Below are the masses. Tens of thousands of them. Perhaps more. They are now longer silent, for they cheer and clap their beloved Ruler.
But the Buckingham Palace crowd are just that, a faceless crowd, shot from way above, far away. They are as invisible to us as they have been to Bertie, who just about gets to meet an "ordinary" capitalist's son. Luckily for this heaving mass, Bertie, along with the other hero, Churchill will get them through the War. Their own future massive contributions, digging coal, manufacturing bombs, and, above all, dying - unlike Bertie and Churchill - are not signposted in the film.
Back to cultural capital and class.
Cinema is both an ideological apparatus and a commodity. As Marcuse told us, we define ourselves by the cinematic products we buy. Or at least the ones we tell our friends we buy. So going to the cinema is an opportunity to tell ourselves that we are not chavs.
We cannot do this by seeing Avatar or Pirates of the Caribbean - both extremely well-made films. We must do this by seeing the socially constructed concepts that are "art films", "European cinema", "World cinema", and their smaller, national versions, "French cinema", "Indian cinema", and so on. We will gloss over the fact that most films watched by French and Indian people are not the ones sent to the UK and marketed to the middle-classes.
So is TKS a British film? In many ways yes. The cast are mostly honourable British luvvies, with Aussie Rush thrown in. And it was filmed across a host of UK locations from Battersea Power Station to Ely Cathedral.
But it was financed and / made by several cooperating production and film finance companies, including ones from the UK, Australia, and the USA.
Among the latter is the Weinstein Company, set up by brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Who made their names working for the ultimate Hollywood company - The Disney Corporation. Bob and Harvey have gone on to set up several different companies, each involved in production or distribution. Among the films the Weinstein have helped make it to the screen are Rambo, Halloween, Hellraiser, The Amityville Horror, Scary Movie (and 2, 3 and 4), Piranha 3-D (Kelly Brook takes her clothes off), Zack and Miri Make a Porno. And most recently, another British classic, Lesbian Vampire Killers.
TKS, yes, a British movie, but with significant Hollywood input as to production and distribution. And remember, it is the Producers who get up on stage to collect the Best Picture Oscar.
So bear all this in mind when you watch it. And when you describe it to your friends. Yes, it's a great film, and deserves all its praise. And yes, it's a better film than many others, including many Hollywood movies. But it is not completely different from a Hollywood movie, in content or financing.
TKS is a very effective and successful commercial movie with very conservative production values, content, and socio-political messages. Watching it does not make you a better person.
