“The Crown” Hates America

Princess Margaret and a corn pone LBJ 

“The Crown” is almost a perfect Netflix show.  It’s beautiful to watch, eminently streamable, smart enough not to insult your intelligence, but not so smart that you can’t figure out what’s going on.

It’s sometimes compared to “Downtown Abbey,” and while they do both come out of the same genre of aristo-porn and purport to dramatize a transitional era in British history, they are quite different shows.  “The Crown” is a serious show that takes its viewers seriously and “Downton Abbey” thinks its audiences are too stupid to figure anything out on their own, spelling out every theme and plot point at least three times.

As much as I like “The Crown,” though, I am uneasy by how the show depicts America and Americans.  This is the one area where “Downton Abbey” (and I can’t believe I’m making this concession) has a more nuanced view of the New World.  In “Downton,” Cora Crawley’s mother and uncle, played by Shirley MacLaine and Paul Giamatti, are vulgar, but they are also full of energy, forward-looking and optimistic.  The show is also frank about the possibility of upward mobility in the States.

Considering the huge audience that “The Crown” has in America, it’s surprising then that the show seems to go out of its way to take shots at our country.

The most egregious example is in the eighth episode of season 2 (“Dear Mr. President”), when President Kennedy is depicted as being physically and emotionally abusive to Jackie as well as an overall jerk.  The moral of the episode is that old admonition not to be jealous of other people because you don’t know what their lives are really like.  The show posits that Queen Elizabeth is so envious of the hugely popular American First Lady that she goes on a world tour to show off her own monarchical charisma, only to find out that Jackie is downright miserable and hopped up on pills because her husband is a miserable cheating dog.  I’m sure JFK was a serial cheater but abusive?  Only in an anti-American fever dream.

“The Crown” gets a little closer to the truth with JFK’s successor President Johnson, who this season is depicted as a coarse, corn pone, vain Foghorn Leghorn type with a grudge against Great Britain because of Vietnam.  All true, but it’s highly improbable that Princess Margaret was able to change his mind about financially bailing out the British by reciting a few dirty limericks.  It’s even less likely that LBJ would publicly trash JFK at a state dinner regardless of how he felt about him privately.  But it suits British vanity to think that a princess with no diplomatic training can twist an American president around her finger with a few compliments and lewd jokes.

The incident that made me really bristle, though, occurs in episode seven of season three (“Moondust”), when Prince Philip is smitten the heroic Apollo 11 astronauts who landed on the moon and wants to meet privately with them to learn what insights they gained from standing foot on a celestial body.  He’s dismayed to learn that they think like engineers, not poets, and are not prepared to dole out any profundities. He later complains to the Queen that they were “banal.”  Neil Armstrong banal?  Buzz Aldrin acting like a hayseed tourist in Buckingham Palace?  I think not.  I seriously doubt that the astronauts, products of a seriously religious society, were unaware of the spiritual aspects of their journey.  After all it was Frank Borman and the other crew members of Apollo 8 who delivered one of the most profound messages ever seen on TV when on Christmas Day, 1968, they read the opening verses of Genesis as they orbited the moon.

To be fair, not every American on “The Crown” is a yokel.  Prince Charles approvingly quotes Saul Bellow, and the Queen is so taken with the preaching of Billy Graham that she invites him over for a chat.  But on the whole, Americans act very déclassé and not quite worthy to wipe their feet on the palace rug.

“The Crown” is not the first British cultural product to look down its nose at America.  Particularly egregious is “Love Actually,” which regrettably raises its preposterous head every Christmas.  This movie, which purports to depict the various permutations of love, features an outlandish U.S. president played by a reptilian Billy Bob Thornton, who makes a pass at Prime Minister Hugh Grant’s assistant and is a hegemonic bully to boot.  To make matters worse, one “Love Actually” character, who’s essentially a British incel, goes to a college town in Wisconsin, where the American women are silly, beautiful and loose.

It is perhaps natural that the British, who once ruled over a quarter of the globe, would resent their diminishment as a world power and the ascension of the United States as a superpower.  And the show can’t help but project a Rule Britannia vibe in the early seasons even though UK has disposed of most of its colonies by the time Elizabeth ascended to the throne.  Not until the very end of Season Three, when a coal miners strike periodically shuts off the nation’s electricity, does it become apparent that the British economy is on the rocks.  The very sumptuousness of the production — the gorgeous palaces, estates, and dinners — make it seem like the Queen still governs over an empire instead of a small bankrupt island.

What’s strangely missing from “The Crown” is an understanding that even as England lost its economic and political power, it started really punching above its weight culturally, especially in the area of popular music, design, film, and fashion.  The British Invasion influenced generations of Americans and yet you never hear the Queen gratefully utter the words “John, Paul, Ringo George.”

The real problem with these potshots at America is that when an American sees how wrongly depicted our presidents and astronauts are, he begins to wonder about the accuracy of the British characters too.  Did Lord Mountbatten really act like a slightly more benign Tywyn Lannister?  And was Princess Margaret really an alcoholicly sexed up Bellatrix Lestrange?  I completely buy Olivia Coleman’s uncanny portrayal of the Queen but I wonder if she was really so cold to her oldest son.

Not that any of this would keep me away from the next three seasons.  Like most other viewers, I watch with one eye on the screen and one on Wikipedia to see if that seemingly astonishing plot twist really did occur.  Did Prince Charles’ sister sleep with his second wife’s first husband?  Apparently so.  Who needs to make things up when the truth is so weird.  That should go for “The Crown” depicts America too.

 

“A Catcher In The Rye” Anniversary

America loves its anniversaries, even literary America.  And yet there has been no discussion about the upcoming 70th anniversary of what is arguably the most important lost weekend in post-War American literature. 

I’m speaking of the “The Catcher in the Rye,” the novel by J.D. Salinger that has enthralled generations of disaffected young men since the 1950s and inspired at least two assassination attempts (on Ronald Reagan and John Lennon).

The story depicts 72 hours in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, who’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown after being expelled from his boarding school. Not wanting to face the music with his parents, Holden spends a long weekend wandering around New York City while musing on the “phoniness” of society.  

Although Salinger’s theme of teen alienation is nearly universal, the novel is unusually particular and specific about its time and setting.  In this respect it is similar to the peripatetic adventures of another lost soul: Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” Like Bloom’s Dublin, Holden’s Manhattan is a very real place and his journey is easy to retrace even seventy years later.  And just as the action in Ulysses can be identified as a specific date (June 16, 1904, otherwise known as “Bloomsday,”) so too can Holden’s weekend be traced to a precise moment in time: December 17-19, 1949.

All it takes to establish that date is a quick Google search. According to the novel, Holden and his erstwhile girlfriend Sally Hayes go to see a Broadway show featuring “the Lunts,” (i.e., the actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne).  This must have been the now-forgotten “I Know My Love,” which ran on Broadway from November 2, 1949 to June 3, 1950. This narrows Holden’s weekend to December, 1949. A quick look at the calendar for that year shows that Friday, December 17 is almost certainly the night Holden leaves his prep school, Pencey, given that the previous Friday (the 9th) would have been too soon for the semester to be over.

“A Catcher In the Rye” is hardly the universal touchstone today that it was for knowing teenagers in the decades following its publication, but it still sells a quarter-million copies a year and every time I read it, my heart bleeds again for Holden and the sensitive boy that I, too, once was.  

The first time I opened those pages I was in the eighth grade and younger than Holden. Now I’m older even than Holden’s father, for God’s sakes, so my perspective has changed considerably.  I see now, for example, that no book, TV show, or movie did more to convince me that New York City was the most thrilling and exciting place in the world.  But I also realize that as a young teen I didn’t fully appreciate the sadness behind Holden’s weekend of night clubs, highballs, cab rides and cultural touchstones.  Instead, the novel made me yearn for the sophistication of a metropolis that was at the height of its power just a handful of years after World War II. And not only was Salinger’s New York glamorous, it was safe; Holden walks the empty streets and roams Central Park in the middle of the night without worrying about getting robbed, stabbed, or worse.

To a 21st Century consumer, what’s most striking about the New York of 1949 was how affordable it was.  Consider what Holden does with the birthday money from his grandmother. He stays at a midtown hotel, visits and buys drinks at three different nightclubs, buys two tickets to a Broadway show, sees the Rockettes perform at Radio City Music Hall, skates at Rockefeller Center, pays for a prostitute (granted, it’s only a “throw,” but still), makes a nostalgic return to the Museum of Natural History, and takes five or six cabs.  Today a weekend like that at Christmas would cost well over a thousand bucks.   

But if the New York City of “Catcher in the Rye” is a distant memory, its portrait of teen angst is more relevant than ever.   A common theme of 21st Century pop psychology is the loneliness of our youth in a social media-dominated world. And yet, even before Instagram and TikTok, Holden was deeply alone, an outsider longingly peering in at a society where everyone else seemed to be enjoying himself, no matter how superficially.  Out for drinks with his former dorm adviser, he admits “I’m lonesome as hell.” He invites his various cab drivers out for drinks, tries to get some little kids to socialize over hot chocolate, donates money to two nuns he meets at a coffee shop, and pays for the drinks of the three female tourists from Seattle. None of this addresses his alienation.

“Bloomsday” is celebrated each June 16, with marathon readings, pub crawls and other festivities.  We could do the same with Holden’s Weekend. For one thing, “Catcher” is a lot more accessible than “Ulysses” and would lend itself better to public readings.  And many of the locations mentioned in the novel are still standing, which would make for authentic Holden walks. But most important, now, more than ever, we need someone like Holden to take down the “phonies” and advance a discussion on how to make deeper human connections.