The text below is the longest ever to be posted on this little blog. It is also my favourite in a very long while (ever since the ‘music’ metaphor or the ‘water’ metaphor one, I think), so I hope you enjoy reading it just as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Did you ever wonder why, after that infamous ‘football match date’, it was specifically Ayub who gave Wilhelm a ride on his scooter and not Rosh?
You could probably come up with a myriad of explanations directly motivated by the surface-level plot for why this is the case (maybe Ayub is the better driver; maybe Rosh doesn’t feel comfortable with some stranger sitting right behind her, etc.).
But remember what we always say about film analysis: The characters on screen aren’t real. They can’t really make any decisions of their own.
Ultimately, all of the explanations above would mean assuming that Rosh and Ayub are real people instead of fictional characters, and none of these explanations would take into account the fundamental, subtextual meaning of the ‘scooter scene’ that this particular writing decision was made for.
And then there’s, of course, Yasmina. Or is it Yasmine?
Why do Simon and Ayub argue about her name? (And no, I don’t mean because Simon and Ayub are bad at remembering names. Again, both of them aren’t real people; they’re fictional characters. What I mean is: Why did the writers decide that these two characters should have an argument about Rosh’s ex-girlfriend in the first place?) What does it mean? Why were lines (and precious screen time) wasted on this seemingly pointless squabble? And why should we care?
I hope the long post below will answer these questions for you – and by ‘answer’ I specifically don’t refer to the surface of the text; I mean the subtext of the show, in which both Ayub and Rosh serve a very specific literary purpose.
For this, we will have to return to a storytelling technique which we have already discussed earlier, a technique by which characters are structured around each other in screenplays. But I promise it won’t be even a little bit academic or dry.
With the help of this technique, we will, for example, find out what Simon’s exact thought process was during his first time in bed with Wilhelm; we will also look into an old Biblical story, and we will even briefly visit an actual 18th-century castle together, you and I.
But let’s back up a bit…
Christopher Nolan’s 2010 heist movie ‘Inception’ features two interesting side characters: One of them is called Eames (played by the versatile and absurdly talented Tom Hardy) and the other one is called Arthur (played to a crisply-suited perfection by a subtly dry-witted Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
Eames is a forger, a bit of a lovable rascal, always wearing all sorts of ridiculous outfits (think: garish Hawaiian shirts on an otherwise surprisingly posh-sounding Tom Hardy, and you’ll get the right image). He also says maths was never his strong subject. But then, he’s insanely creative, so he’s got that going for him.
Arthur is a stickler for rules. He comes across as an always prepared, systematic, sober-minded, conscientious high-IQ sort of gentleman. But he is said to have no imagination whatsoever.
Arthur never gets a surname in the film, and Eames is conspicuously lacking a first name throughout the entire story.
For reasons that are never explained to us in the text itself, Arthur and Eames seem to be at each other’s throats at any given moment in the movie – but it’s a humorous rivalry fuelled by playful teasing and one-upmanship. And we very quickly get the impression that these two go way, way back, that they have a backstory together that we’re just never told. It’s like we’re dealing with an old, married couple bickering their way through the narrative.
We never find out anything about their backgrounds. (How do they know each other? Were they best friends? Did they perhaps serve in the military together somewhere? Did they get into some fight because they were competing for the same girl? Have they been low-key adversaries ever since? Or were the two of them actually boyfriends to begin with? Did they break up in some ghastly (comical?) fashion, and we’re now just seeing the backend of that crashed relationship?) And we never find out where they’re going after the end of the movie either…
At one memorable moment, Eames calls Arthur ‘darling’ with a sort of pitch-perfect, quintessentially British condescension. At other times, they look about ready to throttle each other. And you never know if, at any given moment, they’re about to tear each other limb from limb or rip each other’s clothes off.
What’s up with them? And what has this got to do with ‘Young Royals’?
Didn’t I promise you some cute scooter discussion, Simon’s thoughts when he ended up in bed with Wilhelm for the first time and a few more insights into the mysterious character of Yasmina/Yasmine?
And why is this whole post entitled ‘Rosh and Ayub’?
Well, follow me under the cut, and we will find out together.