Like The Crown? Watch The Deep Blue Sea
If the Queen and Princess Margaret were reimagined as one non-royal character, she would look something like The Deep Blue Sea’s protagonist.
The Crown really hit its stride in season 2. The buzzy Netflix series about Queen Elizabeth II’s reign was great from the start, but there was something about the recently released second season that truly tapped into the 2017 zeitgeist. Maybe it was Elizabeth shaming the weak men in her life. Maybe it was Margaret’s fury. Or maybe it was Elizabeth slowly waking up to the horrors of the world around her.
Whatever it was, The Crown‘s latest batch of episodes proved that the series is more than the sum of its gorgeous, expensive costume drama parts. Like the best pop culture, it was entertaining, enjoyable, and managed to say something important.
It’s also left a very specific, 1950s Britain shaped hole in my life, a gap that can only be filled by the The Deep Blue Sea. The 2011 film is about a married upper class woman in a doomed love affair with a WWII vet.
Here’s why the film makes for a great companion piece to The Crown:
Both center on women in love with men who don’t deserve them
Similar to the dynamic between Queen Elizabeth II (Claire Foy) and Prince Philip (Matt Smith), The Deep Blue Sea‘s Hester Collyer (Rachel Weisz) loves her partner more than he loves her. This wouldn’t be quite so heartbreaking if Elizabeth and Hester weren’t in love with complete jerks. Unfortunately they are.
Freddie Page (Tom Hiddleston) of The Deep Blue Sea is an alcoholic ex-RAF pilot and likely suffers from PTSD. He does care for Hester — he certainly doesn’t stop her from leaving her husband — but isn’t able to give her the emotional support she needs. He forgets her birthday, ignores her and bullies her. Hester, on the other hand, will do anything to keep Freddie in her life, even as she recognizes that their relationship will never be two-sided. “Zero minus zero is still zero,” Hester observes when someone asks if Freddie’s feelings for her have changed.
Elizabeth is in a similar situation: although she is the monarch, her husband holds all the power in their marriage because he cares less. Philip is petty, resentful, and behaves like a privileged brat. Yet Elizabeth is the one who makes concessions. Her cousin, who’s also in an unhappy marriage, believes that’s because “when you really adore someone as fully and as hopelessly as I think you and I do, you put up with anything.”
That’s it in a nutshell. Elizabeth and Hester would rather be miserable with Philip and Freddie than miserable without them.
Both feature very glamorous meltdowns
Much of the The Deep Blue Sea‘s first half follows Hester shortly after a suicide attempt. She stumbles around her apartment as she looks back on her passionless marriage and eventual relationship with Freddie. The scenes of a shattered woman pacing, drinking, and chain-smoking will be mighty familiar with any Crown fans. In “Beryl” and “Matrimonium,” romantic disappointments drive Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) to rage. She throws things, drunkenly sings and dances, yells at her servants and gets her birthday portrait taken by someone besides the royal photographer (!) — and she’s impossibly elegant while doing so. Seriously, I’ve never seen smudged mascara look so lovely.
With the thick, wafting cigarette smoke and perfectly mussed pin curls, the ladies of The Crown and The Deep Blue Sea make depression beguiling but never shortchange the pain their characters are feeling.
Both explore the social upheaval of WWII
Finally, The Deep Blue Sea is also set in 1950s Britain. The country is still feeling the effects of the war and, as a character from The Crown says, “has changed beyond recognition.” Britain is losing its international influence, people are questioning the monarchy, divorce is becoming more common, and women are claiming more freedom. In fact, much of The Crown‘s second season is about Elizabeth’s struggle to get with the times. She’s been so cut off from the real world that she no longer knows how to relate to her subjects’ lives.
Hester is basically a stand-in for the evolving Britain in The Deep Blue Sea. She abandons the luxury of married life to a nobleman in order to live with Freddie, who is very much working class. Living with the man she loves in a dingy apartment is worth much more to her than an empty, comfortable marriage. As a result of her decision, Hester is rejected from her old world and raises eyebrows in her new one. Yet she’s a far cry from a pariah. Mostly, the people she meets as “Mrs. Page” know her story and mind their own business anyway. Like Hester and Freddie’s landlady, they “neither condemn nor condone.”
Next: Widowhood makes My Cousin Rachel a modern girl
The Crown will literally be a different show when it returns for its third season. New actors will take on the series’ characters and a different era of the Queen’s reign will be mined for drama. Seasons 1 and 2 of The Crown are hard acts to follow, but not impossible.
If you want to dive back into post-WWII Britain or are simply interested in other narratives about romantic and domestic disillusionment, The Deep Blue Sea should be your first stop.
You can rent The Deep Blue Sea on Amazon, iTunes, and other platforms.