The Queen is Dead, Never Forget
Having a moan about the Queen is counterintuitive to the idea that the Queen’s death is an unimportant event and that paying it any more heed is a worthless exercise. But it does elucidate an interesting current bubbling under British society that is worth paying heed to.
This was seen on the very day of the event. The rolling updates, starting with the announcement of concern from her doctors and ending with the announcement of her death, engaged at the level of the British consciousness that felt unreal. The mere image of journalists scrambling to Balmoral to report on the fact that it was raining was enough to generate the feeling of mass mediated contrivance associated with what Ravish Kumar would call Eventocracy: ‘where there is nothing greater than the event’. In fact, there was an all too recognisable element of near satire in the speed with which bus stop adverts were changed and the BBC rolled out her highlight reel. Cracking the footage open from storage, rolling the grief out sharpish. You can imagine the poor BBC lacky getting the call, looking up at the grey skies above, and muttering to herself as she carried out her Royal Duty.
While the event feels unreal, the establishment response has been much the opposite. True to form, we’re seeing the double pronged strategy of strategic media deployment and coercive activity. The way in which the Royals have used the cameras to construct an image of a family reunited, of one brought together by shared grief, has been impressive. Watch as the William, Harry, Kate and Megan go for a walk! Prince Andrew comes out of hiding to grieve for his mother, any dissent surrounding that Epstein fellow met with arrests under the newly imposed 2022 Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act.
The coercive activity is to be expected though; Britain essentially invented the practice. What is a point of real interest has been the lack of dissent to begin with. The carefully planned PR campaign surrounding Harry’s ‘defection’ to the US (Oprah’s sofa, vague accusations of racism) had generated the sense that, while Republicanism was still a very distant reality, the Monarchy was outdated: a turgid institution the presence of which would be greeted with apathy at best. In the aftermath of the Epstein fallout this apathy was beginning to curdle into anger. However, with the death of one of it’s members the Monarchy’s position is entirely buttressed. Not only is there an expectation of mourning, but a sense that anything less would be morally reprehensible. What explains this change?
My contention is that, with the Event of the death of the Queen, state television and the broader British mediasophere have deployed a filmic language of the Event to incur tacit approval through a flattening of moral affect.
Returning to this affect of the quasi-satirical nature of the day itself, and the subsequent invasion of Royal news across all media outlets. The barrage of information stages and shapes the event not as a political or social happening, but as a filmic rupture that is the Image concealing the Real. In other words, the language of film is deployed to dramatise the Event, too cover what is really is: the death of a 96-year old.
In this sense it is a similar mediatized construction to the reportage surrounding 9/11, which Jean Baudrillard best surmised in Requiem for the Twin Towers. It is not so much that the event has not happened, but the relaying of the event through the imagery of the media - imagery that bears close, if not identical, relation to the imagery of the proliferated Hollywood film - makes it feel as if it is a fiction playing out across real life. And, like the moral compass of a Hollywood film, the affect of this upon a population is a moral flattening where dissent is not only intolerable, but resolutely immoral and entirely inappropriate. Only villains heckle the procession of a dead Queen, while heroes carry the casket.
It does not matter if we cannot point to specific instances of fiction that show the Death of the Queen - although a certain Smiths song does come to mind - as much as the event was seen as unthinkable to begin with. It could only have been thought of in a fiction. This in itself is perhaps the only true tragedy of the Queen. Not a human but an image. A figurehead of no use and certainly one that did not deserve to be there, but one that jacked into a broader ideological apparatus and emptied of all human, even Monarchical, meaning. The idea that she was a reptillian comes as much from nervous conspiracy theorists as it does the constant dehumanity that lurked beneath her surface: sensed by all those exposed to her Image.
Because that is where power lies now. Its practices reside where we recognise (Number 10, the Houses of Parliament, the City of London), but the influence on public opinion, the power to generate tacit approval, exists solely in the interaction between the image, its fiction, and the social reality structured by it. A march for Chris Kaba becomes a march for the Queen.
The blatanty open condradictions of spending billions of pounds on the funeral of a dead woman in the midst of a generational economic crisis continues to generate no real anger. Instead, we get a drip feed of the seemingly innocous knock-ons from the Queen’s funeral, such as the cancellaton of thousands of hospital appointments, including cancer treatments while the NHS continues to be gutted. Meanwhile, the new PM undoubtedly sees this as an oppurtunity to sit on her lack of real policies until an ‘appropriate time’ of mourning has passed, while the one policy she has come up with unfairly rewards the rich while continuing to punish the poor. The UK, one of the oldest modern nations to espouse democracy, continues to engage in make-believe just at the moment where reality - Andrew is a peadophile, the Monarchy should not exist - threatens to rear its head.
