The Chicago International Film Festival is in town, and Jackie and I went to see Stephen Freer’s latest, The Queen. First we had to sit through an exceedingly painful interview with the director, conducted by some dimwit who sounded like Robin Williams pretending to have a hangover, asked a series of unrelated questions about British parliamentary elections, said Freer was “like Shakespeare”, and nearly started a riot when he asked the director about a scene at the end of the movie we were about to see.

I highly, highly reccomend this film, so you might want to stop reading if you haven’t seen it. I lack not only the vocabulary of a film critic, but also the ability to talk about a movie without giving the show away. You’ve been warned. Everyone is talking, apparently, about Helen Mirren’s performance. It is really fantastic, and so is everyone else’s. I particularly liked the actors who played Tony Blair, Prince Charles, and QEII’s husband.

Most of the movie is about the week immediately after Diana’s death, when the royal family refused to come down from Scotland for several days, until Blair convinced the Queen that the monarchy was in danger if she didn’t make some concession to the public hysteria. Now, it is not quite clear if Freer thinks the public was in fact hysterical. If they were not, then the queen’s response simply reflected what everyone was saying about her and the nobility in general, that they have been out of touch for decades now. Perhaps they are, but I don’t think that was the point of the film.

Human emotions are not, as a rule, terribly complex. We share them with most of the higher mammals, because we have the same underlying neuronal circuitry. But our emotional experiences do differ from the other animals because the circuitry for all the other things we can do is hooked up to the emotional centers. This includes the parts of the brain responsible for rational thought, for language, and for decision-making. The influence runs both ways, so that rage, for example, can prevent us from reasoning accurately, and reason, in turn, can prevent us from doing harm while we’re angry. The ancients, even though they knew nothing about the brain, knew that all these faculties play their part in the soul (which they did not think of as some immaterial ghost in the machinery). The result of all this interconnection is that the parts can work together properly (which is what the ancients called virtue), or they can be out of balance (which we call neurosis).

Emotions are powerful precisely because they are so simple. They have the force of more years of evolution than we can properly imagine, and they spring from the struggle for life and the inevitability of death. Their age and “earthiness” no doubt are what caused the ancients to personify them as the cthonic deities: dark, elemental, radically irrational. Perhaps at one time there was some kind of balance between these gods and the Olympians, who represented the higher faculties of reason and will; though I personally suspect this is only nostalgia. There is always a temptation to worship the wrong thing. It may be that we moderns have, as Thomas Mann writes in The Magic Mountain, tried to separate life from the consciousness of death, and in doing so allowed the dark things to become monstrous. But ancient history is full of its Molochs and Baals, demanding child sacrifice, Maenad dances, and temple prostitution, and on the whole I suspect things have, if anything, improved greatly.

It ought to be clear from this digression what I make of the public response to Diana’s death: an orgy of self-indulgent sentimentalism. And the queen was right not to join in the frenzy, because that is precisely what royalty is about. This will seem like a silly example, but there is a line from an old Christian Bale science fiction movie, Equilibrium, that has stuck with me. The conceit of that movie is that emotion, because it leads humanity to self-destruction, has been outlawed (ridiculous, I know) and suppressed through some sort of compulsively administered super-Prozac. Christian Bale goes off his meds, goes underground, and meets the leader of the resistance (cliched, yes), who tells him this: emotions are good, and no one has the right to take them away from you; but for some of us, because others depend on us, have to choose not to feel them.

Really, though, it’s not so much a problem of not feeling one’s emotions (which is probably impossible, and usually unhealthy to attempt) but of not being mastered by them. Easier said than done, because powerful emotions affect the reasoning, and only through long-nurtured habits of resistance does anyone become truly self-ruled.

The strange thing, in my experience, is that it’s the emotions I struggle to rule that I feel the most powerfully, and become the most beautiful. Those, and the ones that simply have no explanation, like what I felt watching dolphins swim under the bow of a boat last Sunday in Monterey Bay.

(cdm | KingsAndQueens)