The King's Speech (2010)

The King's Speech is first and foremost a well-made, beautifully acted film about friendship. Our friends, we learn, are our own courage to get through life. It is a beautiful message, and one in a fine tradition of British film (I'm thinking especially of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.)

But my main interest is not in this heartwarming historical drama, but in King George VI's stammer. What makes someone stammer? To those of us who don't, it is a curiosity not easily explained. It really, really does seem as if someone could just "get over it"--obviously that isn't the case, but the viewer eagerly soaks up every bit of information (or pseudo-information) about the disorder, the quack methods supposed to cure it, and the new (and delightfully contrary and democratic) therapeutic approach that Lionel Logue employs. For a large part of the movie, I was more interested in the disorder than in the future king's (unpleasant, defensive) character. (So that I had some very naive movie-going thoughts, such as, "If he can declaim a text perfectly well when music is blasting in his ears, why doesn't he just read his speech with music blasting in his ears?") In the last analysis, the movie's cultural observations and historical glosses were somewhat trite and shopworn, but the central speech defect completely fascinated me.

Now, I think it is wildly inappropriate to psychoanalyze a character from a work of art, e.g. for Great Expectations, to try and say in just what Pip's neurotic behavior consists. But The King's Speech really and obviously is about a psychological disorder and its treatment; moreover, the movie itself leans heavily on the Freudian themes of childhood recollections, the brother's sexual enjoyment and renunciation (Totem and Taboo)... not to mention the Lacanian topic of the Voice. My contention here is that a number of the movie's scenes only make sense and can be tied together meaningfully with the help of specifically psychoanalytic ideas (mostly the Oedipus complex, repression, the neurotic symptom).

One lesson we learn from Sartre's Questions de méthode is never to explain history by making theoretical categories intervene as direct motivations for historical agents. I like to apply this to art, as well. To take psychoanalytic terms and pin them upon characters, merely re-describing a perfectly good story in undramatic terms: this is less than useless. At its worst, it turns narrative into an endless  allegory of the same thing: boring! To reference Sartre again, the point is to make history or narratives "intelligible"; philosophy or psychoanalysis et al should solve problems. The classic example: "Why does Hamlet wait so long to take action?" Ernest Jones' book on Hamlet is a classic for the very reason that it takes the text's own concerns as its starting point. I'll try to do the same here. Why does the character Bertie stammer? And how is he cured? (I can't pretend to deal with the historical reality here.) So I will here attempt that dubious thing, a psychoanalytic reading of The King's Speech.

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In The King's Speech, to be King is to speak. On the occasion of his Christmas radio address, Bertie's father George V violently lectures him on how important it is to speak like a king, given the advent of modern broadcasting technology. But even to not be King is also to know damn well how to give a speech: witness Edward VIII's resignation speech. Guy Pearce, whom I have mostly seen playing American or Australian roles, delivers the famous lines about "the help and support of the woman I love"--a much more famous and fluent speech than the titular address--with a beautifully English period accent and solemn weightiness. He is showing off.

I ask the reader here to grant me one point that the movie does not advance explicitly: the existence of the Oedipus complex. This once granted, everything falls into place. [The Oedipus complex is, for a boy child, a love for his mother on one hand, which is on the other hand prohibited by the father, who wields the "castrating" authority that makes him an antagonist of the boy. The so-called successful Oedipus resolves itself more or less by "identification" with the father. The unsuccessful Oedipus, for example in the case of "Little Hans," can manifest as a phobia. The child develops an irrational fear of horses, because he has displaced onto the idea of horses the fear that his father will castrate him. Thus, this fear of horses has its root in the love of the mother, a love that is repressed as such and only emerges in this unhealthy fear.] And so I assume that Bertie at some point in his childhood, before he begins to stutter, had desired his mother and correspondingly feared a retaliation from his father, the king. Thus the child would, to protect himself, have renounced this desire, which could only look like the desire to "take his father's place" in bed. But this "in bed" is repressed even further, and modified into a renunciation of the desire to take his place "on the throne."

To give Bertie's symptom its meaning: the stutter is in fact very articulate, since every unbearable pause and swallowed-consonant communicates in full voice, "Daddy, I don't want to kill you." Just as  Oedipus' limp marks him as fated with this desire (to kill his father, the king), Bertie's stutter is only ever saying, "Look, I'm not a threat, I couldn't be king, don't worry about me." If being a king=speaking like one, then not speaking like a king=not wanting to take the place of his father.

Which is why, when Logue suggests to Bertie in Hyde Park that Bertie would make a good king if his brother Edward VIII (David) were to abdicate, Bertie flares up and breaks with Logue, insulting him viciously so as to ensure that the separation "takes." Why? Surely Bertie is not upset at the compliment itself. It is rather that this insinuation--that he could or should supplant the king--is exactly the disavowed, repressed content of his stutter. The stutter says, "(Dear father,) I don't want to kill the King of England." (Meaning: "I do want to kill...") To tell Bertie that he would be a good king--which Bertie readily identifies as "treason" on Logue's part--is to say, "Don't you want this (which your entire symptom is a negation of)?"

To show that I'm not making too much of this: consider the use of Shakespeare in the movie. Shakespeare is always associated with Logue (in the exercise of having Bertie read out the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet while music is blasting from earphones; in the game of guess-the-quotation which he plays with his children; in his audition for the part of Richard III). All of this is seamlessly integrated into the plot, to 1) show that Bertie's problem is not "mechanical," 2) to give a glimpse into Logue's home life or 3) his ambitions as an actor and the obstacles his own speech (he has an Australian accent) presents.

But the clue to all of this Shakespeare is given by a remark David makes to Bertie. At his Scottish castle, when affairs with Mrs. Wallis Simpson are coming to a head, David accuses an interfering Bertie to watch himself--he is evincing desires which come awfully close to that (most awful) one, wanting-to-be-king. And David adds, it is like something out of Shakespeare. At this point, Bertie later tells Logue, he is completely struck dumb--all their progress vanishes.

But we know what Shakespeare David is thinking of: either (since they are in Scotland) the "Scottish play," as Logue's children call it--where Macbeth "murders sleep," killing Duncan in his bed; or, the deformed and throne-hungry Richard III--and where have we seen that play before? or... that ultimate Oedipal drama, Hamlet--and where have we seen that in this film?!

In short, "Shakespeare" (explicitly with David, but implicitly with Logue) always equals "killing the king." And Bertie is right (thematically) to see in Logue an instigator, a whisperer-of-forbidden-thoughts, a bad angel--don't we learn that Logue's favorite play is Othello, a play whose Iago is the ultimate in encouraging dissension and envy, of painting pictures of inappropriate pleasures? Just so, Bertie recognizes in these instigations and in the cure itself a danger to himself: the more fluent and "kingly" he becomes, the more his Oedipal desire (so the unconscious thought runs) risks calling down on itself violent reprisals. So, every time someone else (David, Logue) brings up Bertie's wanting-to-be-king, his speech fails and the cure hits a wall.

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So: how does Bertie get cured? The crucial scene is when Logue is revealed not to be a doctor at all, but only a failed actor. At this point, the magic of his cure vanishes; Bertie has lost all confidence--and right before his coronation, too!

What does Logue do? He sits on the throne of England himself--mimicking in his posture, you will note, Olivier in his film of Richard III--and shows absolutely no respect for the throne or the monarchy. The point being here: the truly pathological thought is to believe that one "really is" King. The King only is such because he is recognized as being such, because he fills out the bizarre English constitutional order, because someone has to lead this empty life of pronouncements and ribbon-cuttings while the real business of government goes on. It is an empty position, as Bertie often notes: no real power, only rubber-stamping and posing-for-photos, and living an isolated, rule-bound existence. And yet Bertie protests at Logue's "blasphemy"--this wooden chair is still to be treated as a sacred place.

When Logue is unmasked as not really-being a doctor, everything in the cure that depended on Logue's credentials for a support falls apart. But when Logue, with his roguish Australian impudence, himself occupies the empty place of power, Bertie sees the utmost incompatible object sitting in the position of his father. At the same time, Bertie understands what his father George V could not understand, and what, from the point of view of his symptom, Bertie was protecting his father from: the emptiness of kingly authority.

That is to say, the stutter is (as we saw above) performed for the father. But it is performed for the father who is imagined as having-speech, as full of authority, as occupying a real position of power (like Oedipus' father Laertes). It is in this sense that the stutter keeps the father from knowing..., because the stutter shows back to the kingly observer his own position as deserved and meaningful.

So when Logue is sitting in the throne (talk about the psychoanalytic transference!!), there is literally no one for whom to perform the stammer anymore. The stammer (in the Oedipus complex) was meant to disavow any interest in the father's place, for the view of the father. But now the father's place (the throne) is looking at Bertie from out the vulgar eyes of the son of an Australian brewer. There is neither the Oedipal disavowal nor the meaningfulness-of-power to keep up for this observer any longer, because the observing king/father has been replaced, on one hand, by the therapist, and on the other hand, because Bertie no longer sees his coronation as an usurpation.

The paradox being here, of course, that being King means he has to "own" (i.e. pretend to believe in) this meaningless wooden chair and silly medieval ritual, and speak to the country as though all of this were full of consequence and metaphysical divine right. But here he is assuming a different viewer than that of his father. He is now performing from the throne, and not for the throne. Thus he has moved into the point-of-view for which the stammer originated as an object of spectacle.