Posts tagged Matthew Crawley

Can someone gif this quote from The Emperor’s New Groove for Downton Abbey relationship explanation purposes?
Yzma: Why, I’m his third cousin’s brother’s wife’s step-niece’s great aunt. Twice removed.

I’ve been going through old posts today, and I’m having a lot of frustrated Downton Abbey feelings.

Remember when we were worried whether we’d get to see the wedding on screen? Remember when we thought the trailer was happy and beautiful? Remember when we thought the Sybil/Branson kiss was the resolution of a potentially tragic situation and not the foreshadowing of another? Remember when we were so thrilled with all the quotes about Mary finally finding happiness? Remember when we were waiting excitedly for a glimpse of Mary’s wedding dress? Remember when we were fangirling over Matthew driving the car? 

Gah.

To all of you lovely people who just watched the Christmas Special for the first time, I’m sorry. I’m sorry and I feel your pain.

If you don’t know what happened in the Christmas Special, you should stop reading this post now.

Before I begin, I just want to explain that I do not write this post in order to place blame onto anyone or claim victimization at the hands of real people for their effects on fictional ones.

But what I am is angry, and I want to articulate why.

We watch and read and listen to entertainment for a very good reason. Every day, in our ordinary lives, there are rules. One reality exists at a time, and it is how it is, governed by the laws of physics and time and experience. We are, however happily or unhappily, stuck there.
What a book or movie or song allows us to do is escape. Not in the sense of running away, but rather more in the sense of journeying deeper into ourselves. We see what could be, what might be, what isn’t, but would be wonderful if it was.
We see and hear things that are not concrete, that do not exist or perhaps never did, and, if we’re lucky, we feel that they do, anyway.
These things do not always have to be happy. In fact, they would mean very little at all if they were. They should be sad, sometimes, too. Tragic, painful, unsettling. But also hopeful, and intelligent, and triumphant.
When they are all of these things they are like us, defined as much by the good things as by the bad. They say something about the human condition. Something beautiful, with a little kernel of truth. We may not always be happy, but, at the very bottom of the Pandora’s box of our existence, if we look hard enough, there is always, always hope.

This lazy, flippant destruction of a character and a relationship that was this for us—that showed us how people can change and how life can take a turn for the better in the most unexpected ways—is angering. That story uplifted us in that imperfect way. A lonely, bitter, intelligent woman grew into a fulfilled and happy (and still as intelligent) one through a love that was as unexpected for her as it was for us. Now that guilt she sometimes feels, for keeping them apart much longer than they should have been, will be eternal. It will plague her for the rest of her days, as she soldiers on with her child, falling somehow back into her bitterness.
And don’t get me started on the young man who survived a war, paralysis, and the Spanish flu only to fall literally under a bus. Who apparently existed only to produce a child so that he could disappear from the story?
Things like this, I suppose, can happen.

But in drama, in a place where we desire to believe that intelligence defeats force; beauty, cruelty; love, hate; and good, evil, showing the opposite feels awful and wrong because it is. The real world is disappointing enough without imaginary ones growing to be the same. Harry Potter doesn’t end with Harry or Ron or Hermione dying at the hand of one of Voldemort’s last surviving followers. Les Miserables doesn’t end with Marius and Cosette tripping and meeting their end under a rushing carriage on their wedding day. Both of these stories have their share of sadness and death.
I am not mad because a favorite character died. I am mad because a beautiful idea is over. Downton Abbey, which used to be about basically good people trying to make their way in the world, about how, in the end, against all odds, even the saddest, loneliest people deserve true love, is about nothing at all. It is about chance and situation and the lack of control that we have over our own existence. Its plots feel forced and immaterial because they are, because the fourth wall is broken, and we know exactly why they did what they did, we know it served no story that anyone truly wanted to tell.
And this is not uplifting. It does not say anything worth hearing about the human condition. It is, quite simply and disappointingly, sad.
The worst part, of course, is that now, all the wonderful, uplifting, happy bits from before are forever embittered by this shallow end. A good story told well until the very end is no good story at all. I mourn not so much the character, because he is not real, as I must remind myself, and can exist anywhere in my mind, but the story, because it died just as surely by that car as he did. Something beautiful and hopeful is gone, perhaps through no fault of any one person, or of any person at all. But I mourn that it is gone because it was, for a time, truly wonderful.

Matthew is like Schroedinger’s cat right now, and we have to wait til Christmas to open the box.