A weekend at the movies: The King’s Speech, and Battle: Los Angeles

I took the family to Fargo last Friday, and we wound up spending the weekend at the Holiday Inn after the blizzard shut down the Interstate. Soooo, we indulged ourselves in a few movies on the room’s big flat-screen TV.

We watched The King’s Speech in Fargo, then when we got back Sunday I really indulged myself and went to see ‘Battle: Los Angeles.’

I found them both inspiring. And the combination thereof lifted my spirits considerably, at a time they needed it.

Now please hear me out before you dismiss me as a rank philistine for equating a schlock, cliche-ridden SciFi alien invasion flick with the inspiring true story of a man who became the man and the king his country needed in its “finest hour.”

Over at the Celebritology blog (“Enabling celebrity news and pop culture junkies since ’06”) Jen Chaney and Liz Kelley wrote under the heading “Battle: Los Angeles
wins and once again critics lose.”

“Battle: Los Angeles” was marketed as an epic alien attack movie. Also epic? The bad reviews that accompanied it. (Roger Ebert’s in particular was a masterpiece: “Here’s a science-fiction film that’s an insult to the words ‘science’ and ‘fiction,’ and the hyphen in between them,” he wrote. Dang.)

But the critical flogging didn’t matter. “Battle” won the weekend box office with $36 million.

B:LA had all the cliches, and if they missed any could you spot it? The Young Commanding Officer who has never seen combat, the Tough Old Sarge who’s seen it all, the marine who blames him for his brother’s death, the Rainbow Band of Brothers of all races and ethnicities, the Beautiful Civilian Lady, the Cute Kid who has to be comforted when his brave dad dies, and even the new cliche The Tough Chick soldier.

What critics forget is, archtypes become cliche because sometimes they are true.

For example, in all branches of the military it is quite common for young and inexperienced junior officers to command non-commissioned officers older and more experienced. It’s a division-of-labor/career path thing. Officers often enter the military through schools that teach them theory of strategy, structure of military organization, logistics, etc. Non-coms are educated via the school of experience under the guidance of other non-coms.

A veteran of Marine Force Recon once explained to me, “We need officers to do the paperwork.”

At any rate as far as realism goes, if you can use the term about an alien invasion movie, I think this is pretty good. The portrayal of the responsibilities of command, and the nature of real leadership is done pretty well without hitting you over the head with it in the midst of all the shooting and explosions.

One thing that grated on my nerves was a brief newscast which described what they figured the aliens were after – to use our water for fuel, “and the level of the oceans is already going down.” I cannot bother to go into how absolutely absurd that is. The sheer ignorance of science that implies, and the calm assumption that the audience would be ignorant enough to swallow it without gagging was insulting.

But then it occurred to me that this could be taken as a comment on the scientific illiteracy of contemporary journalists and I cheered up right away.

Now here’s what it has in common with The King’s Speech, it’s a movie about courage. And that’s out of fashion among critics these days.

Albert Frederick Arthur George no-last-name (unless you count “Windsor,” a WWI-era adoption after they figured “Battenburg” or “Saxe-Coburg Gotha” sounded too German) was not intended to be King, and didn’t want to be. Among other reasons he was painfully shy and stammered badly.

In spite of his position of privilege his upbringing appears to have been ghastly. He was bullied by his father, his appalling nanny, and his older brother, later Edward VIII/Duke of Windsor. Born left-handed he was forced to become right-handed (evidently a common precursor to stammering) and had knock knees “corrected” with iron braces.

However, what shows through the movie in some very touching scenes is he was witty and clever in spite of his speech defect. The bedtime story he tells his daughters Elizabeth and Margaret is a hoot, and there is some very good repartee with his therapist Lionel Logue.

His brother abdicated amid controversy over “the woman I love,” the absolutely awful Wallis Simpson. Among its other virtues, the movie corrects the treacly reputation of the Duchess of Windsor as a wronged woman denied her rightful place as Queen just because she was American.

The real Wallis Simpson was a nasty piece of work, more than a bit slutty, probably sexually deviant, and though the movie doesn’t mention it – a thief. (After her death the royal family quietly re-appropriated some jewelry she’d run off with.)

Edward himself was a self-indulgent weakling and among other things, a Nazi sympathizer.

‘Bertie’ (the King’s nickname among his family, and Logue) is deathly afraid of public speaking, which is not uncommon at all. In his case he literally can’t get through it without his diaphragm seizing up to the point he has trouble breathing, much less speaking.

He’s got a loving and supportive wife, and good councelors (Winston Churchill among others) but the one thing he needed that Logue provided, along with his expertise in speech therapy, was a friend.

Bertie doesn’t lack courage, he’d obviously rather be under real fire than give a speech. And that’s an interesting reflection on courage, that there are different things that terrify different men. It’s often not just fear of dying, it’s different ways of dying, or even things feared worse than death.

Fighter pilots and submariners both have to have courage. But the cockpit of a fighter plane in flight might give a submariner intense uncontrollable vertigo, and life in a submarine might give a pilot the claustrophobic heebie-jeebies.

(And BTW that’s SUBMARINE-er. A sub-MARINER is an inferior sailor.)

Logue taught the king techniques he’d discovered while treating shell-shocked soldiers in WWI, but his real gift was showing him how to face and conquer his greatest fear – and not by shouting at him to “Just buck up and do it!”

You’ve got to see the flick to see how he does it.

Bertie and Lionel remained friends for the rest of their lives, probably the only friend and equal Bertie had in his life. Lionel, according to the screen credits, stuck with Bertie in every public speech throughout the war. They died within a year of each other.

Bertie’s wife, Elizabeth the Queen Mother, reportedly believed to her dying day (at 102-years of age) that the strain of being king killed him.

“The courage of your friends gives you strength.” Arab proverb.