Elizabeth II and James Bond: how the sublime learned to be funny

For a great man to appear ridiculous – incongruous, profane, petty, ordinary – is unacceptable: supreme power is ceremonial, awe and mystery. Olga Fedyanina tells how this state of affairs was maintained and how it was overcome.

The phrase “from the great to the ridiculous is one step” (in fact, “from the sublime to the ridiculous”) was not invented by Napoleon, but Napoleon made it popular. This is what the emperor said, lamenting his military defeats, saying that fortune is fickle. Napoleon was a parvenu and a monomaniac; to be a laughing stock for him was a personal insult to fate. But dynastic rulers also protected themselves from such experiences – if not for the sake of the human pride of the monarch, then for the sake of the dignity of the crown.

In fact, the concern for preserving the pathos of power is only a special case of the division of genres. The great and the funny should not mix.

In Aristotle, comedy and tragedy differ not only in plots, but also in the set of characters – funny incidents and common people are inappropriate in tragedy, representatives of higher hierarchies and deadly intrigues are inappropriate in comedy.

Of course, culture knows that profanity and greatness can coexist – as an exception. Shakespeare does not refrain from introducing comic inserts into tragedies – but these are just interludes. And if there is action inside, then some jester in “King Lear” is only a jester by title, you won’t get anything funny from him, sheer philosophical pathos. And the royal person in a comedy is either someone no older than the Duke, or Oberon or Prospero, that is, a fairy-tale character who is not performed in real life. In the finale of Molière’s Tartuffe, which is also formally a comedy, everyone is saved by the “royal officer” – the envoy, the replacement of the taboo king.

Don Quixote, one of the most pathetic heroes of world literature, goes towards ridicule as fearlessly as he goes towards death, his greatness is born from the dual nature of this fearlessness. But Don Quixote is not even a duke.

In the Russian theater in the 19th century, during the years of a special flowering of morality and censorship, the preservation of the greatness of power was taken care of in all genres: royal persons could not be depicted on stage at all – censors banned plays with the participation of, at first, Russian sovereigns, and then any. The very transformation of the anointed into a character was considered indecent profanation.

In the 20th century, greatness became, as they began to say in the 21st, toxic: it became too obvious that one step is the distance not so much between the great and the ridiculous, but between the great and the monstrous. Remaining funny in the circumstances of the 20th century has become a new heroism—and a kind of luxury. Chaplin’s little tramp is probably the main figure of the century, concentrating in himself its main pathos – the pathos of renunciation of power and greatness, along with all their representative and ceremonial temptations. Power and pathos seemed to be forever transformed into either historical matter or a metaphor for triumphant evil.

Eleven years ago, director Danny Boyle managed to orchestrate a moment in which grandeur and absurdity were in perfect union. That this happened on British soil is hardly an accident.

We are talking about a six-minute episode inside the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London, which begins with a mini-Cooper driving into the cour d’honneur of Buckingham Palace with James Bond/Daniel Craig at the wheel, and ends with Elizabeth the Second entering the honorary rostrum of the Olympic Stadium.

In these six minutes, Bond and Elizabeth (on video) leave the palace, board a helicopter and, having flown over a jubilant London after them, parachute in the colors of the national flag from the Olympic skies to the Olympic soil, where Her Majesty The Queen personally opens the 2012 Games .

This video still receives tens of millions of views on YouTube, so that anyone can verify that this is six minutes of pure, crystallized profanity. Profanation in this case is not an assessment, but a designation of a genre. The director of the ceremony, Danny Boyle, with cloudless impudence, collects in his video the most common clichés of Britishness – from the agent 007 himself to Big Ben, from the Churchill monument to the pigeons in Trafalgar Square. And in the center of all this souvenir paradise is a real palace with its real butlers, protocol service, security service, with corgi dogs – and with this 86-year-old lady in a pink dress, with real royal dignity, walking along the corridor next to the costumed superspy.

Her Majesty knows that for these six minutes she is Mickey Mouse at Disneyland. The situation obliges it to become the brightest part of the souvenir set for the entire planet. She presents herself, her palace, her dynasty, her monarchy to the world – and this gives the show a completely unique ceremonial pathos.

The important detail of this ceremony was that it had no secret, no need for illusion at all. The morning after the opening of the Olympics, the largest British newspapers will print detailed making-of-reports – with photographs and interviews of all the stuntmen, with a transcript of how the chief of royal protocol studied Boyle’s script, with a description of all the stunts, all the details of sewing these unique dresses the color of steamed salmon. for the Queen’s understudies in the helicopter and parachute part of the program. With a story about how Her Majesty joked about a Bond girl, and Daniel Craig complimented the Queen’s acting talents. The entire kitchen of the ceremony was immediately dumped outside – and its grandeur was not at all canceled or damaged. The great turned out to be a step into the funny – with open eyes, Chaplin-like meekness and quixotic determination.

Over the 11 years since that video, this pathos of profanity has gained enormous popularity, and if Danny Boyle created a hit out of obvious incongruity, then his followers learned to make a whole style out of it. The fear of being funny has become a sign of weakness and vulnerability. Real pathos, to become strong, learned to be funny and not be afraid of insulting your feelings and dignity. Even if this is just a temporary advertising strategy, it is one of the most humane and effective.

True, in the new biopic “Napoleon” (directed by Ridley Scott, Napoleon by Joaquin Phoenix), which is being released worldwide just these days, judging by the trailer, everything remains the same.

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