All the ideas seemed obvious and like something another film blogger would do better than I would, given their greater interest in research.
Top five references to the queen in the movies? Top five portrayals of the queen by actresses? I thought of things like The Naked Gun for the former and The Queen for the latter. There's that part where Kevin Kline's character says "Oh look the queen!" before knocking out an airline passenger for his tickets in A Fish Called Wanda.
Not the makings for a particularly insightful post, you will agree.
So I decided just to ditch a real movie tie-in and talk about the extraordinary presence Elizabeth has been lo these 70 years she reigned prior to her death on Thursday.
It went beyond movie references and song references (The Sex Pistols) and TV references (The Crown) and literary references (plenty, I'm sure). It went beyond her being a person to being an institution entirely.
The first thing that occurred to me -- that has occurred to me for some time, knowing she would not live forever -- is how weird it would be, how wrong it would be, to refer to "the king." England is a patriarchy, of course, but it has not felt like one for my entire lifetime, and the lifetimes of 80% of the people currently alive. This may be sort of sexist in its own way, but it has felt to me there's something maternal about the "protection" the queen had provided to her commonwealth -- like there was a sort of benevolence in the mere fact of her gender, one that a king could never manage.
Of course, Elizabeth was not perfect. I know that from watching The Crown. She had the wrong opinions on things sometimes. She neglected her own children sometimes. Some of that neglect may have turned them into monsters. One in particular, who fortunately is not the one who has just become king.
But if The Crown is in any way a fair representation of who she was, she also seems like a person who tried her best to be the person she was expected to be, having assumed the crown at a very young age, reluctantly, after her father's early death, when her sister might have been more naturally suited to the responsibility and wanted it more. She became an iconic representation of a famous sort of British stiff-lipped stoicism, and we could not imagine any other person being the monarch.
Now we will have to. Charles is king. After a ten-day period of mourning, he will be officially coronated, though he has already assumed the title. The thing his mother had sought to delay as long as she could -- another case of neglect of one of her offspring, one might argue -- has now happened, and England has a king again.
It was nice to believe that Elizabeth might just live forever. One hundred certainly seemed attainable. Her husband almost got there. She fell a lot shorter, but still lived a very impressive 96 years.
To quote the Sex Pistols, who certainly didn't mean this sincerely:
God save her.
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