2x08 Dear Mrs. Kennedy

[8.2/10] I’m reminded of two pieces of received wisdom. “The grass is always greener” and “There’s no right way to be a woman.” “Dear Mrs. Kennedy” is an illustration of both ideas at once. Two iconic figures of the twentieth century -- Queen Elizabeth and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, are envious of one another’s lives, which spurs each to try to put down or top the other. But in the throes of the tough expectations placed on each, they recognize one another’s plight and find common cause, as one of the only two people who know what it’s like to be women in this kind of spotlight.

The episode writes it all on the screen a little too much for my tastes. Aside from the final scene, there's no internal thought either woman, or any character really, has that doesn’t get vocalized or beat the audience over the head with. But the performances are spectacular. Claire Foy is superb as always. Conveying Elizabeth’s self-loathing, her attempt at openness, her hurt quality, her triumphant joy, her queen bee preening, and her deep sympathy -- nothing’s too much for Foy. And guest star Jodi Balfour does a great job as Jackie O, giving the sense of her as the picture of glamor in public, but also a wounded dove behind closed doors.

But what I most like here is the trajectory of The QUeen’s feelings toward her erstwhile confidante and rival. The swings back and forth between hating and sympathizing with Jackie, trying to upstage her and trying to comfort her, in ways that feel true to the character and interweave perfectly with historical events.

You sympathize with Elizabeth when she gets a look in the mirror at the wrong angle on a rough day and starts to feel bad about herself. So when a woman comes to London who’s the same age, but who is the talk of the town for her beauty, charisma, and education -- three things that Elizabeth is already insecure about -- you can understand why she’s so put out. It doesn’t help when the Queen Mother and Elizabeth’s own husband fawn over Jackie. And while I think the show goes a little overboard in conveying the sense that Mrs. Kennedy is this adored object of fascination and desire, it soundly sells the idea of why Elizabeth would bristle at this interloper who seems to be everything she’s not.

And yet, if only to keep Jackie away from Philip, the Queen invites her closer, rather than pushing her away. There's a magnanimousness to Elziabeth here, allowing Jackie a certain intimacy despite the fear that this woman is outshining her, and her ignorance of decorum (watching the private secretaries balk at the Kennedys using the wrong protocols and titles was hilarious). They bond over mutual shyness, over being married to strong-willed men, over loving animals. With an olive branch, Elizabeth turns a potential enemy, someone she’s jealous of, into a friend she can relate to. If the episode had stopped there, it would have been good and interesting enough.

Instead, the pendulum swings the other way to devastating effect, when word gets back to the Queen about some harsh things Jakcie said at a local dinner party. (As an aside, I love the fact that Margaret is the one who stirs up trouble with all this, being practically vindictive in her efforts to undercut her sister’s joy.) By all outward appearances, Jackie betrayed the Queen and, as Elizabeth herself later puts it, “the spirit” of their interactions.

Elizabeth invites Jackie into her private spaces within Buckingham palace, the most inaccessible and reserved areas of her home, and Mrs. Kennedy’s purported response is to call it run-down and dilapidated. Elizabeth opens herself up to this stranger, and the report she gets back is of personal insults that cut her to the bone: about her age, about her “incuriousness”, about her responsibility for the declining state of the U.K.’s place in the world. The combination of envy and apparent camaraderie put Jackie in a unique position to wound Elizabeth, and the bombs she lobbed more than do the trick. Foy sells the hell out of the QUeen’s hurt to hear the report.

But Elizabeth doesn’t take it lying down. I’ll admit my ignorance of the big Ghana trip. I thought this was a plot that ended in, if not tragedy, than at least embarrassment. The Queen felt stung by being seen as a “puppet” and wants to upstage Jackie’s ability to smooth things over for the Americans in Paris. So she makes an ill-considered jaunt to an African country that's been sidling up to the Soviets in a bid that all of her advisors, formal and informal counsel against. Ghana President Nkrumah’s self-aggrandizing reception of her only further suggests it’s a grievous error and she’s being used.

Only then, she dances. I’ll admit, in an episode that's fairly blunt, it's hard for me to perceive how a simple foxtrot is able to win over Ghana’s leader back to the Commonwealth’s side. But as with the Kennedys, it’s a hoot to see stuffy British functionaries fret like schoolgirls over their beloved monarch daring to do a box-step. And taken generously, you can read it as the Queen being willing to show respect to another leader, relax and let out some of that personality that Lord Altrincham implored her to demonstrate. Even if it was mostly for show, you can see Elizabeth practically glowing at the gesture’s success, a subtle message to her arrival in Washington that two can play at this game.

Except things are not so wonderful for Jackie, despite Elizabeht’s image of her. That's what I most appreciate about the episode -- the reveal that each woman puts the other on a pedestal to some degree, and that each struggles to see the ways in which they’re both fighting against the same forces. It’s no coincidence that the direction and editing focused on Elizabeth during the Kennedys’ visit to London mirrors the direction and editing focused on Jackie at one of JFK’s speeches. The same subtle looks and worries about a wandering eye, the same fears that she’s being humiliated by her husband’s attention to their women, reveal that however much there's a perceived rivalry, Jaqueline and Elizabeth are in much the same place.

(As an aside, it has to be said -- I’m a big fan of Michael C. Hall from Dexter and Six Feet Under, but he is pretty awful as JFK. His accent sounds atrocious, and his acting style here seems dissonant from the other performers in The Crown.)

Jackie learns from her husband (who gives Philip a run for his money in assholery), that the whole Ghana trip was spurred by Jackie’s comments. Again, the show writes it all on the screen ehr, but I appreciate that knowing ehr comments got back to Elizabeth makes Jacki want to express her contrition.

The differences in presentation between the two women’s first meeting and their second is striking. The tour of Buckingham is reserved, intimate, personal. The latter reception at Windsor Castle is grandiose, formal, showy. One was to invite someone in. The other was to show off the weight of your office. This is Elizabeth not trying to be the bigger person, but instead to be the grander person, feigning an uncaring air about Jackie’s statements, even as everything from the dolled up guards to the formal tea service to the slathering of jam on crumpets screams “I’m confidently better than you.”

Only this time, it’s Jackie who opens up. She talks about her own hardships with Elizabth, intimating the troubles at home and the reason she was so apt to want to shine in Paris. She talks about the jealousy she dealt with from her spouse, with hints of abuse. She speaks of being basically drugged against her will, all giving Elizabeth an insight into the plight of this person whom she’d formerly seen as a mean demigod. And most importantly, for my purposes anyway, Jackie expresses her regret because of how much she admires Elizabeth -- for her grace, for her leadership, for being , in so many ways, all the things that Jackie fears she herself isn’t. There's a subtle implication that on both sides of the equation, these efforts to outshine or put down was a product of each woman looking at the other, and feeling less than.

That is profound and pathos-ridden. As I’ve said before, I see the central mission of The Crown to be to reveal the underlying humanity of these distant figures. And it’s hard to imagine what could do that better than showing that even these exalted, iconic women feel measured by one another, pitted against one another, envious of one another, when each is facing battles public and private that give them common cause and common understanding. It is, like so much on this show, a metonym for broader societal changes and societal pathologies that are still with us today.

The end result of it all is sympathy and a desire to support one another. It doesn’t excuse Philip, but I take Elizabeth’s quip on happiness to indicate that while she still bristles at Philip’s flirty behavior and general unruliness behind the scenes, she recognizes in Jackie that it can be worse. And so when those grim events of 1963 take place, she sees Jackie’s strength and defiance in the famous deliberate choice to wear the same outfit with her husband’s blood on it. She uses the levers of state to pay tribute to her and to her loss. And she writes a personal letter, not as a rival, but as a friend, as one of the few people who can understand what it’s like to feel the pressures of that envied but unenviable position, as an icon, and as a woman.

Therein rests the cinch. With the weight of gendered expectations, both of these admired women feel like they don’t measure up and yearns for the other’s life. But when they get to see it up close, truly understand what it entails, in the end, all they can feel is kinship.