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Originally Posted by Sauron the White
My point about the Queen in WWII Britain was simply that in wartime allowances are made even among the royals in terms of relaxing ceremony and the pomp and circumstance of it all. And that was the condition depicted in ROTK.
In such times, actions which may otherwise be considered as breaches of manners or even disrespectful are allowed given the emergency circumstances everyone found themselves in.
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Well, yes, I suppose your point about the Royal Resolve does deserve more than a throw-away line.
I think the two examples, Her Majesty the Queen Mother's forays into the bombed out areas of London, and PJ's depiction of Gimli in the throne room, actually have opposite meanings, not the same meaning as you suggest.
First of all, Her Majesty had begun the habit of making tours into the public domain soon after the Abdication of Nauty Edward and subsequent Coronation of Shy George. These provincial tours were designed to bring the new king more into the public eye and help eradicate the perceived scourge of the Abdication. So they were a form symbolic role playing, something the former Duchess of York was exceptionally gifted at, particularly with her great social ability of 'connecting' with people. Even before the war, she was engaged in "Majesty-making."
And this is what the tours of bombed London were designed to continue--to instill in the British people a sense of steadfast, brave and unflinching continuation of the stiff upper lip, of British resolve and the British way of life in the time of, in the words of her Bulldog, "their darkest hour". In creating this symbolic role of Mother and Grandmother, she was maintaining and perpetuating Royal Authority and Royal Resolve and thereby gave hope and encouragement to her subjects. The chaos and disaster of war did not diminish the Royal Presence or the sense of Social Order, but magnified it.
The newsreels ate it up.
PJ's flippant positioning of Gimli does not do this. It does not lend authority and credence to The New Hope but rather reinforces the condition, as you said earlier, that normal life was rendered meaningless.
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Originally Posted by StW
It was wartime plain and simple. That kind of urgency has a brutal and immediate way of cutting through all the social nicities of normal life and rendering them all pretty meaningless.
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Perhaps the difficulty PJ faced was the cynicism of contemporary culture over heroism in war--or over just plain war. But the grace and presence of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, born a commoner, told a different tale. Pity that PJ could not have imagined that.