Tag Archives: The Queen

Friday Ravels in Review

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For a weekly recap, I’ll start with the best: the video I made about Whole in the Wall, a street art exhibit, although I did have to correct something I said in the video by noting some great street art blogs. In second place, inspired by a discussion about Francis Bacon, I was excited to see and write about his retrospective at the Met. Then yesterday I tried to explain why the film The Queen put me off with it mix of fact and fiction.

And then a long time ago, when it was May, we touched on some Vermeer forgeries via Errol Morris’s series of articles Bamboozling Ourselves. All 7 are now published, if you want to check out the full tale. I also got on my high horse about a poetry scandal in Britain. But that was long ago in May.

Now it’s June, and so I expect the weather will cease and desist with this dreary, cold rain. I keep giving it stern glances out the window.

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Preference for Fictional Fiction

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In the absence of my boyfriend and thus a live-in excuse to procrastinate, I took fate and a glass of wine in my own hands and decided to watch a movie last night. We don’t have a TV and the boyfriend downloads any movies we watch, so to secure and watch a film is a feat for me.

Watching The Queen with Helen Mirren made me feel a little as if I were peering with binoculars into the palace windows. The film used the royal handling of Diana’s death as its plot; I felt like a I was reading an imaginative, physchoanalytic tabloid. (Is the news footage of Diana’s mourers real? I think I remember hearing it was.) It was a well-done film, but it shares much the same problems as the novella The Uncommon Reader, also based on Queen Elizabeth. It’s a weird mix of real and immagined. The Queen is even more factious than the novella, if only because the novella’s plot was imagined and the film’s was real. I prefer my fiction more fictional, and my biographies factual. It’s handled as if a conflation of art and life would take on a greater degree of realism, but it comes across as celebrity speculation.
I quite like it when Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde conflates art and life to dramatize themselves; it just feels different here. Is it a function of the Queen Elizabeth’s reticence that people like to imagine her private inner life or does her position as Queen transform her into a public figurehead at the service of the arts?