The death of spontaneity
Plus some thoughts on "The Crown" and the real-world royal show of the moment
The Lincoln Park Conservatory in Chicago is a Victorian-era greenhouse that’s managed by the city’s park district. It includes a room dedicated to orchids and another to ferns. It’s the kind of serene place you might wander through on a whim if you happened to be taking a walk on Chicago’s North Side.
But first you need to register — reserve a time — to get in.
I’m assuming the park district does this to manage the number of people who are in the conservatory at any given moment. Registration is free. Also: I’m pretty sure you can show up sans registration and the nice folks working the front desk will simply register you on the spot. It’s more or less frictionless, is my point.
But philosophically? I hate this.
You have to provide your name and an email to register and I hate that we’re forever being asked to give up a small measure of our privacy and anonymity for activities that otherwise shouldn’t require it.
I hate that we’re forever being nudged to plan everything in advance, which dampens a more general, free-flowing sense of discovery in our lives — of low-risk but impulsive decisions about the ways we spend our free time.
And I hate that this is how most people prefer to go to the movies.
I know I’m in the minority! And I get the appeal of being able to reserve specific seats ahead of time.
But still, I rant.
The moviegoing habit has diminished overall and I think some of that is because we view it as an activity that is more complicated than it needs to be. It used to be a thing you might do, spur of the moment, to fill a random afternoon. I always liked the serendipity of being with friends or family and someone saying, “Hey, you wanna see what’s playing?” Maybe you were already out and passing by a theater. And in my memory, the feeling was always: Sure! Why not?
Then again, “sure, why not?” is harder to come by if tickets are $20 or more.
But I like the idea that you could just show up. I guess you still can. But does anyone actually do this with regularity?
It’s why movie marquees used to be a thing — one of their purposes was lure in foot traffic. It created a sense of occasion that you didn’t want to pass up. Exciting stuff was happening inside!
In the Martin Scorsese docuseries on Apple, he talks about the moviegoing habit that existed when he was a child in the 1940s; in the hotter months, movie theaters were the only place with air conditioning, so “people would just go in there to be cool, they didn't care what film it was."
The world is constantly changing and our habits change in turn. That’s a given.
But this death of spontaneity has also changed how we interact with so much in our lives.
You never hear the phrase “channel surfing” anymore because nobody does it. The TV experience is now designed around on-demand options — streaming is the main culprit, but DVRs helped usher this in — which means there’s rarely a sense of discovery. Of casting about for something to watch on a weekend afternoon and landing on an old movie you’d never seen that grabs your attention.
A sense of spontaneity is why I think people still crave the bookstore experience. Or going to the library. Of browsing and picking up a title because the book jacket caught your eye, as opposed to the airless transaction of accessing books online.
I tend to think pining for the past is a bad way to spend one’s time. But I also wish we weren’t so quick to accept systems that are designed to suppress, or at least dampen, spontaneity.
A royal mess
I never understood the appeal of Netflix’s “The Crown.” But more than that, I never understood the conversations that were happening around the show.
Ahead of each season, there was so much preemptive foot-stomping and concern from Buckingham Palace and royal reporters that the portrayals would be “lurid” and “unflattering. As if!
Unlike creator Peter Morgan’s earlier examination of the British monarchy (the 2006 Helen Mirren film “The Queen”), his TV series about the Windsors is royalist propaganda through and through, envisioning The Firm only as the gilded cage that it is — and the dysfunction within a result of that — but ignoring that it is also an innately corrupt endeavor with a history of racism and other various coverups.
Nothing in the series builds to a larger thesis about these people or the institution itself. The impressively lavish settings only accentuate the emptiness of the scripts.
The series is squeamish about topics such as money, which comes up only briefly in Season 5. From my Tribune review:
The closest the season gets to any sort of critique about entitlement or finances is a discussion of the queen’s royal yacht Britannia, which is in need of an overhaul to the tune of 14 million pounds. Prime minister John Major (Jonny Lee Miller) suggests the queen, rather than taxpayers, bear the cost.
“All my palaces were inherited, they all bear the stamp of my predecessors,” she argues back, wounded, “only Britannia have I truly been able to make my own.”
To which one might be inclined to reply: “So pay for it on your own.” But Major folds like a napkin: “I understand.”
Morgan really biffed his timing with the TV series, though, because we are probably living through the most interesting moment for the British monarchy right now.
That’s because factions within the British media are openly criticizing the royal family with a renewed fervor in the wake of Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir “Nobody’s Girl,” in which she writes about the abuse she experienced at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and, allegedly, Prince Andrew.
Consider the headline for this week’s cover story in The New Statesman, a British magazine:
Abolish the Monarchy: It’s more than Prince Andrew — the House of Windsor is rotten to the core
Wow. Wow. Shots fired, as they say.
It’s not that I disagree. But I am surprised. There have been similar pieces that occasionally pop up here and there. This one ran in Jacobin magazine in 2023, noting that the “best time to abolish the British monarchy was centuries ago. The second-best time is right now” — but Jacobin is an American magazine.
There’s also this 2021 column from The Irish Times that describes being geographically located next to Britain and its monarchy as akin to “having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.” But again, not a British outlet.
The New Statesman is, which is why that headline feels like a gauntlet thrown.
I’m cynical enough to have assumed this renewed disgust with Andrew would have blown over quickly. Even after his disastrous 2019 BBC interview about his connections to Epstein (an interview that resulted in him stepping down from royal duties) there wasn’t much energy from the British media, let alone anyone in parliament, to demand more. Namely, a criminal investigation and possible prosecution.
So I anticipated the same when Giuffre’s book came out, both through the natural churn of news cycles and because there would be pressure from the palace to simply move on.
But I was wrong. Maybe there has been pressure, but the British media is not moving on. On Thursday, it was announced that Prince Andrew is being stripped of all titles and will henceforth be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.
Will the British people find this significant, or just more bullshit? As an American, I think titles are stupid and meaningless, so this seems like barely a response to the allegations. Real people suffered, some allegedly at his hands, and the big play here is to just not call him a prince anymore? That’s supposed to be significant? I guess it is because it’s unprecedented, but still …
There’s also an effort to get Andrew (and ex-wife Sarah Ferguson) to vacate Royal Lodge, the expansive estate he calls home. There are many questions about how much (or little) he has paid to live there, and it’s perhaps par for the course that at one point, ideas being floated for alternate living accommodations included grand houses that are part of the Crown Estate. Either way, the speculation is that wherever he lands, he won’t pay anything, and has also likely negotiated some sort of seven-figure payoff from the king. He will continue to live lavishly.
Here’s an interesting twist: Andrew’s younger brother, Prince Edward, and his wife Sophie, are now also under the microscope for the lease on their expansive estate, Bagshot Park.
Edward doesn’t have the same sordid allegations to outrun as Andrew. And yet now he too is caught up in this more general desire to look under the monarchy’s hood.
One rarely sees this “what the hell kind of system is this??” energy from the British media, which is typically far too deferential to look too closely at the monarchy’s arrangements, financial or otherwise. Even when “challenging” stories do run — “Prince Charles given 3 million euros in cash in bags by Qatari politician, according to report” from 2022, or “Prince Charles repeatedly sought the advice of Jimmy Savile, who was later revealed to have spent decades sexually abusing women and children” also from 2022, or “Revealed: King Charles secretly profiting from the assets of dead citizens” from 2023 — there is limited outrage, and then the stories are more or less forgotten.
Investigate them all, I say, and then do something about it.
I am curious why Giuffre’s book has become a tipping point. It’s a terrifying and traumatic account of her experiences and therefore deeply disturbing; I just didn’t expect the British media to actually treat it with that seriousness, and for a sustained period of time.
Giuffre also alleges in the book that ABC, a U.S. television network (!), feared losing access to William and Kate, leading them to not air an interview she did on camera in 2019. This isn’t new information, so it’s fascinating that various media entities were cowed by external pressures six years ago but aren’t proceeding quite the same way now.
Who knows if Great Britain will ever seriously consider getting rid of the monarchy. But as a consumer of pop culture, I do recognize a good story, and I have concerns that Netflix might be compelled to pull Peter Morgan back into service for yet another season of “The Crown” to tackle however this moment plays out. I saw someone with a sizable following literally type out the words “I would 100% watch another season of ‘The Crown’” and … (stares into the void).
Unfortunately, Morgan has neither the curiosity, the intellectual rigor nor the emotional constitution to conceive of these real-world events as anything but a tragedy for the Windsors, absent any analysis or insight. He’s too reluctant to tackle the dirty reality.
From my review of “The Crown” Season 5, which premiered two months after the queen died in 2022:
… her personal fortune was estimated at half a billion dollars. As king, all of that has gone to Charles, untouched by inheritance tax. That’s because the royal family was able to negotiate this exemption for itself in 1993 — during the very period that Season 5 takes place. And yet no mention of this [in the show], either.
If the various players here weren’t members of the Windsor family, would their lives be deemed interesting enough for a TV series? I would argue no — they’re not compelling enough as characters. The ongoing fascination with “The Crown” is dependent on their position in the world.
And what is that position?
By the way, here’s a podcast featuring Will Lloyd, the author of The New Statesman’s cover story about abolishing the monarchy, and he makes a cogent, persuasive argument:
Also, if of interest: Brooke E. Newman’s non-fiction book “The Crown's Silence: The Hidden History of the British Monarchy and Slavery in the Americas” comes out in January and is available for pre-order.
Imagine a miniseries that tackled just how the British monarchy accumulated all its wealth, and didn’t turn the damn thing into yet more wealthaganda.
Here’s the book’s synopsis:
For centuries, Britain has told itself and the world that it is an abolitionist nation, one that, unlike the United States, rejected human bondage and dismantled its Atlantic slave empire without tearing itself apart in violence. An abolitionist nation headed by a just, humane monarch who liberated enslaved Africans and recognized their descendants as free and equal subjects of the British Crown. As Prince William put it recently, “We’re very much not a racist family.” When slaveholding nations write their collective history, the enslavers hold the pen.
Now, acclaimed historian Brooke Newman reveals the true story: the enslavers were supported by members of the royal family. From the 1560s to 1807, the British monarchy invested in the transatlantic slave trade and built a slave empire in colonial America and the Caribbean, with the labor of millions of enslaved Africans who would see none of its riches. It profited from African slave trading and hereditary bondage, setting the stage for other colonial powers to develop brutal slave systems that remained legal long after full emancipation in the British Empire in 1838. The scars of this history remain visible the world over, from economic inequality and educational and health disparities to racial discrimination and prejudice. Still, Crown officials continue to insist the legacies of slavery “belong to the past.”