The Madness of King George · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

They strap him into a chair. Not the throne — a heavy wooden restraining chair with straps for the wrists, into which Dr. Willis and his men bind the King of England so they can "fix" him. The dossier calls this chair the throne's grotesque double, and that phrase is the key to the whole film. Two seats. Same body. On one he is the office; on the other he is a patient. The Madness of King George lives entirely in the distance between them, and it turns out Deleuze gives us the exact tools to watch that distance open.

Start with what monarchy actually is here, on screen. It is not power exercised; it is power performed. The film keeps framing George inside the apparatus of kingship — the ritual of being dressed, the ceremony of dining, the procession, the throne. Deleuze would call each of these a gest: a posture or attitude that doesn't do anything but shows a social relation, holds it up for us to read in the body itself. A king, in this film, is a man arranged into certain positions by other people. That is why the illness is so devastating and so funny at once. When the body that is supposed to hold the pose starts twitching, ranting, soiling itself, the whole edifice of gestures it was carrying begins to wobble. Hytner, a theatre director, knew this in his bones: he blocks the court as a machine of attitudes, and then films the machine seizing up.

Which brings us to the film's deepest structure — the thing Bennett borrowed from the old idea of the king's two bodies, and that Deleuze names the crystal. A crystal-image is a moment where two faces of one thing can no longer be told apart, the way you can't say where a mirror stops and its reflection begins. George III is a walking crystal: the natural body (a sick old man) and the body politic (the Crown, the constitution) are fused into one person, and you cannot separate them. His private bowel is a matter of state. His delirium can topple a prime minister. The film's genius is to show this crystal decomposing — Deleuze's precise term, crystal-decomposition, for an ordered aristocratic world rotting from inside. The court doesn't collapse from without; it curdles from within, at the exact center where a man and an office are the same flesh. Fenton's score makes the rot audible. Handel is the music of George's own dynasty, and playing those stately Hanoverian measures over the indignity of the restraint scene, the film lets the grandeur ironize the ruin, the way a crystal cracks along its most beautiful seam.

Now watch the camera. Andrew Dunn's photography is restrained on purpose so that one thing can carry everything: Hawthorne's face. Deleuze's affection-image is precisely this — the close-up, a feeling registered but not yet spent in action, a face that has stopped being a point on a map of movement and become a landscape of pure intensity. What makes Hawthorne's performance almost unbearable is that it is an intensive face, not a serene one: a sharp mind feeling itself fail in real time, micro-movements of terror and wit crossing it at once. And around that face, the film gives us its counter-image. The watching, calculating eyes of everyone else — the son, the physicians, above all Willis "fixing the king with his eye." Deleuze calls this doubling a dicisign: the camera perceives people who are themselves perceiving, so we feel ourselves watching the watchers. Willis's cure is nothing but a war of gazes, and the film knows it.

This is not, to be clear, a time-image film. Its plot is a taut sensory-motor engine — the Regency Bill, Pitt against Fox, will the king recover in time — and it resolves. But it borrows the time-image's instruments to feel something the political thriller alone could not reach. And it belongs to a real lineage of craft. Ken Adam's candlelit Georgian interiors run straight back to his own Barry Lyndon; his grammar of rooms-that-dramatize-authority comes from the War Room of Dr. Strangelove, only now the architecture of power houses a man losing his mind inside it. The two-bodies tension — public office, private agony — is the inheritance of Becket, The Lion in Winter, and Amadeus, that last one showing exactly how you open a stage play out to film and anchor it to a court composer's score. Bennett and Hytner sharpen the old device with a modern scalpel: porphyria, a real illness, so that the metaphysics of kingship gets diagnosed like a symptom.

What did it do to the form? It proved the heritage film could think. Most costume drama offers the past as upholstery. This one uses every period surface — the robes, the Handel, the gilt rooms — as a working argument about what a sovereign is. It hands you the crown and then, gently, shows you it is worn by a body that leaks and forgets and reads King Lear aloud and recognizes itself in a broken king. Watch it again for the two chairs. Everything is in the space between them.