Just saw "The King's Speech". I had been very hesitant, reading what a distorted view of history it gave, but curiosity finally got the better of me. While I can clearly see why it got all those Oscars, being an engaging and enjoyable drama, well written and acted, it was, as I feared, too heroïc, imperialistic and simplistic. Interesting questions I wanted debated were:
- If the virtue of hereditary monarchy is that you get a random, average person as head of state instead of a streamlined politician, why is it then impossible to accept him as a human being with normal, average impediments, e.g. stuttering? Why must he trick his subjects into believing he is flawless? Must he, born into this privileged position, endure such a struggle in order to understand the hardships most of his subjects face?
- Was stuttering more common back then compared to today, and if so, why?
- How did his stutter affect his naval career, where he ended up as an officer giving orders, didn't he?
To make it more historically accurate, i would have preferred the King's untreated stutter as a metaphore for the British establishment's indecision regarding the rise of Nazi Germany and the Appeasement Policy, instead of it all looking like everybody recognized the danger and united prepared for war. It can be seen as a major distortion of history that the RF's balcony scene with Neville Chamberlain after his return from Munich (adding legitimacy to the Munich Agreement before it was ratified by parliament!) was not included.
"The King's Speech" is very similar to how the story about George VI's aunt and cousin Maud and Carl of Denmark (royals in search of fullfillment and a country in need of royals), as outlined in the new Bomann-Larsen biography, could be presented as a fairytale with a happy ending. What Bomann-Larsen also discusses is how Norway's great contemporary playwright, Ibsen, did write a nationalist play about a struggle for the throne (Kongsemnerne, The Pretenders). But Ibsen's hero is not the hero who ends up on the throne (Håkon IV Håkonsson), but his antagonist (and father-in-law), Duke Skule Bårdsson. Ibsen did not take part in the bashing of King Oscar II and the hero-worship of Fridtjof Nansen and adulation of Håkon VII. He was much more interested in those who failed and fell from grace. As such he would have been interested in Edward VII, but a true and novel Ibsenesque royal drama involving a handicap would have been the story of "cousin Willy", who with tremendous zeal overcame his handicap in order to fullfill the image of a monarch, but still failed in the end, helping to launch a world war that cost him his throne, perhaps because he had tried a little too hard to prove himself? That would have been drama on a more interesting level than "everybody uniting against Hitler due to the monarch learning to deliver inspirational speeches and living happily ever after" and the same overused old British royal family.
