Please beware that this post contains multiple spoilers for the third season of ‘Young Royals’.
I should probably also point out that this is most definitely not a post for the particularly busy bees amongst you, who keep overtaking me left, right and centre on the subtext-analysis motorway. So, if you’re one of the lovely readers in the ‘study group’ that keep sending each other several hundred Whatsapp messages a day about this show (or so one hears), this whole post is already charted territory for you, I’m afraid; I’ve already seen you discuss this in the comments. But please understand that I have to keep a bit of a balance on this little blog here and compromise between different types of readers because not everyone feels like approaching it all like a homework assignment. Which is why I’ve decided to write the post below anyway, so everyone can have some fun with this particular topic. I hope that’s okay for you, guys.
Did you know there’s a standard recipe for shooting a wedding scene?
There’s a very common shot sequence that you’ll find in many, many wedding scenes from your bog-standard romcom to some highbrow feature film and even the trashiest soap opera.
It’s so typical, in fact, that I could just kick myself for not recognizing it earlier when we had already talked about that very scene on ‘Young Royals’. But I was still missing the context of the scene, so I just did not see it at the time.
Now, we do have that context, and…Whoa! There’s a textbook example of a (subtextual) wedding scene on this show.
This shouldn’t really surprise us since the first two seasons of ‘Young Royals’ already contained strong hints that the writers of this show headcanon Wilhelm and Simon as staying together after the end of the show and eventually getting married…
I had discovered one such heavy-handed hint in season two and had originally written about it here, and my literature teacher friend had spotted the more subtle one in season one.
Now, season three pulls off an entire wedding scene shot for shot to give us poor fretting viewers a little chill pill: ‘Calm down, dear audience. Wilhelm and Simon will, indeed, stay together and even get married after the end of the show. There can be no doubt about that.’
It’s a very strong hint as to what the writers think will happen to the happy couple after the title credits of the final episode have rolled.
But let’s back up for a moment…
A typical wedding scene (the type of scene you’d find in a million different movies and shows repeated over and over and over again; and no, I’m specifically not talking about the ironic variations on and distortions of that theme, where the couple comes dancing down the aisle, for instance, or the bride runs off at the last moment, or some other other funny-ha-ha thing happens to mix up the formula a bit; I’m specifically talking about the textbook-example type of scene)...so, a typical wedding scene like that starts with the groom walking into the church on his own (i.e. without the bride!) and checking out the surroundings, eventually coming to a halt in front of the altar.
Next shot: The groom is now shown to be waiting for the bride in front of the altar. This is typically shown in a wider shot, say, a long shot or a medium long shot, so the audience can really take in the surroundings (the splendour of the church with the magnificent altarpiece behind him, for example).
In this long shot/medium long shot, the groom will typically appear to be slightly nervous. He is waiting for the bride on the happiest day of his life, after all. He might be shown adjusting the cuffs of his suit jacket, for example, tugging down his sleeves or just fretting over his clothes in general.
Next shot (reverse shot): The bride appears. She comes walking down the aisle. And while traditionally she’d be led down the aisle by another character (say, her father), in recent decades, the culture is shifting more towards showing brides walking down the aisle alone.
Note that these two shots can be switched, i.e. sometimes you’re shown the bride walking down the aisle first (!) to establish her point of view, and only then, do you get the long shot/medium long shot of the groom nervously waiting in front of the altar, adjusting his cuffs or whatever. This tells us that it’s through her eyes that we’re seeing him standing there, all fidgety and then in awe.
Now, you might think the ‘bride shot’ with the woman slowly walking down the aisle would be a long shot/medium long shot, too. After all, these large shot sizes are ideal for showing off the full length of the wedding dress, but interestingly, this ‘bride shot’ is actually quite often a medium shot, sometimes even a medium close-up.
Apparently, some filmmakers have figured out that, perhaps, showing off the dress and body shape of a woman should take a backseat to accentuating her face. Not a bad choice, I think. Because what’s far more interesting than the dress is a happy character’s radiant smile and the love in her eyes, and a smaller shot size just focuses the viewer’s attention on the face first and foremost. The bride is happy. She is nervous; she’s walking up to the man she loves in order to marry him. It’s lovely.
Depending on the order in which the ‘groom shot’ and the ‘bride shot’ were shown, filmmakers sometimes cut back and forth between the happy couple once or twice as the bride walks up to the groom. The two lovebirds look at each other. They’re both smiling.
Next: Here you sometimes get a shot where you get some spatial context. This establishes the surroundings even better (the church, the pews, other people, flowers, etc.). There can be some variation here.
And then…crucially…You get the happy couple in front of the altar!
They are standing very close to each other, smiling and gazing into each other’s eyes adoringly. At this point, you’re getting very close shots, i.e. close-ups or medium close-ups.
And here comes the brilliant part of it all: While there certainly can be some wedding scenes where the 180-degree rule isn’t broken, i.e. where the camera stays strictly on one side of the couple (for example, the ‘church-pew side’, cutting back and forth between their faces shot-reverse-shot style), this can give you a very static and boring scene. You’re just watching the bride and groom in the very way you’d see them if you were actually sitting there in that church, attending the wedding ceremony.
The cool thing about cinematography is that it can give you so much more than just a realistic depiction of an actual, real-life wedding. The way the camera handles a scene can influence the way you feel about it.
So, what’s done surprisingly often in wedding scenes like this is the following neat little parlour trick: The camera starts to break the 180-degree rule at the point when the happy couple stands in front of the altar.
In case you don’t know (or don’t remember) what the 180-degree rule in cinematography is all about, here’s your little primer/reminder (if you do, in fact, know this already, you can skip the next couple of paragraphs):
In cinematography, the camera (marked ‘initial camera position’ in the image below) will usually try to stay on one side of an imaginary circle around the characters (marked A and B in the image below). The camera can move along this 180-degree semicircle (to give you character A first and then character B in a shot-reverse-shot sequence, for example), but it will usually not jump over to the other side of the circle (marked as ‘subsequent camera position’ in the image below). It will typically try to stay on one side of ‘the line’ (also called ‘the line of action’).
If a jump across ‘the line’ suddenly happens, this will feel very disorienting to the audience watching the movie or show because it disrupts the continuity of space. So, jumps across the line, whenever they happen, are a deliberate artistic choice to achieve a specific effect.
Directors can have different reasons for employing this trick: Sometimes they want to make sure the audience feels dizzy and disoriented (horror films do this all the time, for example); sometimes they want to highlight the fact that a conversation between two characters is changing direction, and sometimes they just want to visualize the fact that there’s a power shift happening between the two interlocutors in the scene.
And then there’s another very simple reason: You can make space almost ‘disappear’ in this way. If you want the audience to focus on the characters’ faces and nothing else, if you want to show the fact that the whole world around these two characters is practically ‘melting’ away, then a few jumps across the 180-degree line might just do the trick.
And that’s usually the reason why directors resort to this trick at this specific point during a wedding scene, i.e. why they will keep changing the position of the camera when the bride and groom are standing in front of the altar, so it will shoot the happy couple from the altar-side of the church, then from the pew-side, then from the altar-side again, etc., jumping back and forth across the imaginary ‘line of action’ running through the characters.
When coupled with a small shot size that accentuates the faces and with a shallow depth of field in which everything behind and around the bride and groom is out of focus and blurry, these jumps across the 180-degree line can give you the marvellously weightless feeling of losing all sense of time and space as you watch two people in love gaze adoringly into each other’s eyes right before they exchange their vows…
If all of this sounds kinda familiar right now, then that’s because you’ve seen an exact scene like that in season three of ‘Young Royals’, and within the first few minutes of the very first episode, too.
And we had even talked about that scene before! I had explained to you back then how the jumps across the 180-degree line make the space around Wilhelm and Simon ‘disappear’ and how this trick draws our attention to their faces and makes the castle around them just magically vanish for a moment. All of that wasn’t wrong per se, but as I had cautioned back then: We were missing the context!
And now that we’ve got said context, it’s very obvious that that castle scene we saw in the first season three teaser Netflix released a few months ago was actually subtextually a wedding scene all along! (And yes, I’m still kicking myself for not realizing it back at the time. The shot sequence is really pretty standard for a wedding scene.)
So, what have we got in this scene?
First we get a groom, i.e. Simon in a medium close-up, walking into the room, checking out the surroundings (this shot is actually missing in the pre-released teaser clip and only appears in the finished episode).
Then we get our ‘bride shot’: Wilhelm is slowly walking into the room in a medium shot. The camera moves with him and reframes to a medium close-up. We establish his (Wilhelm’s) point of view: He is looking at Simon in front of the mirror. He is smiling.
Then we get a textbook example of a ‘groom shot’: Simon is shown (from Wilhelm’s point of view) in a medium long shot. He is standing in front of a mirror, somewhat nervously tugging at the hem of his shirt. (As I said above, showing a groom to be fretting over his clothes in front of the altar is a standard way of depicting a groom who nervously awaits his bride.)
Now, Simon is actually standing in front of a mirror in that shot. And back when we had first discussed that teaser scene, I had flat out refused to discuss the mirror because we were lacking any and all context for it. I had literally said:
“[...]We can be absolutely certain this scene is mirroring another scene or situation, and I’m sure we will find it eventually and uncover a wealth of new information just based on that.
But for now, I’m going to exercise some self-restraint: We don’t know. I would hate to speculate, so we’re not going to do that. We will ignore the obvious reflective, glassy elephant in the room.[...]”
Wealth of information…oh, my! So, how about this:
Simon is dressed in purple here, so we get a really, really strong hint that he isn’t mirroring another person in this scene. He is mirroring himself.
How can you mirror yourself? Well, when you mirror yourself in a different timeline, of course.
In other words, this is either Simon from a past timeline (before the show even started). Or it’s Simon from the future (i.e. after the end of the show’s run).
As we have seen, Simon has a backstory of sexual abuse that is written all over the subtext but is never disclosed to the audience in the plain text of the show. Nonetheless, I don’t think that this mirrors a scene between Simon and his abuser because obviously those two never got hitched, right? That would have been ridiculous.
We do however get two strong hints in season one and two that Wilhelm and Simon will eventually get married after the end of the show. So, there’s that.
In short: Looks like we’re getting a mirror scene from the future here; Simon is mirroring himself on the happiest day of his life. Aw.
So, Simon. Happy, happy, nervous groom in front of the altar. Tugging on his clothes. Nervously waiting for Wilhelm. It’s all very adorable and cute, right?
And you know what I really, really love about all of this?
The mirror!
Look at that mirror. This antique gilded thing and that (marble?) tabletop of the ornate side table underneath. Doesn’t this whole ensemble look quite a bit like an altar? (I mean, obviously you wouldn’t literally stand this close to an actual altar as you got married; you might not even get married in a church with an actual altar but at a different venue. But please remember that this is all symbolism, okay?)
So…Simon in front of the altar, waiting for Wilhelm…
And here’s the thing I honestly don’t know but sorta, kinda really hope is true:
On a show that is built so heavily around the idea of mirrors and mirroring, where mirrors play pretty much the most indispensable role for understanding the subtext because of the fact that they point out mirror characters and mirror scenes and mirrored plotlines, on a show that places such importance on the concept of mirroring, isn’t it a brilliant move to have an actual mirror represent an altar?
The mirror is the most sacred part of this whole show. The concept of mirroring is the sanctum sanctorum of this story, as we have seen time and time again.
And we subtext aficionados routinely worship at this altar of altars: a mirror!
I don’t know if the show meant it in this way, but I bloody love this idea.
Nothing on this show, no prop, no character even, is as important as the mirrors that are strategically placed all over the show’s sets. That’s how important the concept of mirroring is for understanding this story. And in this scene, the most sacred, holiest symbolic element of any church, the altar is visually likened to a mirror. We subtext-loving fans have all basically been worshipping at this subtextual holy place, haven’t we? I love it.
Not to stretch the metaphor too far, but did you notice who can literally be seen in this mirror-altar of sorts? (Of course, you did. You guys notice everything.)
Simon’s reflection.
Simon is in that (subtextual) altarpiece. He’s a part of it.
Now, altarpieces are an incredibly important part of European art history and can depict a lot of different subjects and scenes, but you know what you can find fairly often depicted there?
Angels!
Simon is our (subtextual) angel on this show. (We’ve been told this over and over and over again.)
And lo and behold, this mirror, this (subtextual) altar gives us Simon’s reflection. An angel.
But it arguably gives us this angel for the very last time.
I’ve told you before that the ‘division of labour’ Wilhelm and Simon have got going on, the one where Simon is the angel and Wilhelm is the worshipper (as identified by the cross around his neck), isn’t a healthy one. If you think your romantic partner is an angel and worship them, then you’re not really open to them being an ordinary human being with their own problems, their own dark past, their mistakes, their pains and their suffering. The cross around Wilhelm’s neck shows you how one-sided this relationship is and how naïvely Wilhelm is worshipping Simon in season one.
This has to stop, and you can see that already in season two: There’s no cross around Wilhelm’s neck anymore in that sex scene in episode five of season two, while the music, that ‘Holy’ song playing over the scene, shows you how these two characters have started to realize that they’re both holy and that the thing that’s holy here isn’t the fact that one of them is an angel; the thing that’s holy here is their love for each other.
That’s a beautiful realization. And a very important one.
Now, in this castle scene, that is actually a subtextual wedding scene, you might get a last hint of this angel theme, a very last goodbye, so to speak:
Simon’s fleeting reflection in that mirror that might represent an altar: Simon, the angel, can be seen for the last time here, and then…
…that reflection is gone.
It starts to vanish the moment Simon turns around and looks at Wilhelm over his shoulder. That’s the moment only a partial reflection is left in the mirror. And once he’s fully turned around so he faces Wilhelm, the reflection vanishes. It’s gone forever. The angel isn’t there anymore the moment he faces Wilhelm fully.
The camera has been moved, so it shoots the mirror from an angle where it will appear to be empty. No more angel in that altarpiece. Just two mere mortals in front of it. Two normal human beings facing each other fully and seeing each other for what they truly are: human beings.
Just two people in love getting married.
I cannot tell you if this is intentional or not, but if it’s a coincidence, it’s a very, very beautiful one.
The only thing I can tell you is that cameras don’t change position on their own and that directors and camera folks are usually hyper-aware of what a mirror shows or doesn’t show when they move a camera. Reflections are a big deal in cinematography.
It also really looks like they want that mirror to represent an altar in this subtextual wedding scene. Whether this last nod to Simon as the angel is intentional here or not, I don’t know. But if it’s not, it’s a really, really beautiful coincidence.
(Also, can you tell I spend a lot of my time looking at altarpieces? It’s become so second nature that I just cannot not notice something like this.)
Anyway, so we’ve got Simon (from Wilhelm’s point of view) in a medium long shot, nervously waiting for Wilhelm, tugging on his shirt. It’s all very weddingy, so to speak. And then Simon half turns around (like an actual groom in a church) and suddenly spots his future spouse. And look…he smiles at Wilhelm in the exact way you would if you’d just realized that your beloved was finally there. Honestly, it’s too much. I can’t…
Well, and there he is: Wilhelm slowly makes his way towards Simon in a medium close-up (very, very typical shot). And he’s all smiles now. Absolutely radiant smile, that. So much love in his eyes as he walks down this (subtextual) aisle. Typical, typical ‘bride shot’.
…scratch sound! Hang on, did tvmicroscope just imply that Wilhelm is the bride in this scenario?
Well, I didn’t. The show did, okay?
And let’s face it. They did it more than just once. It’s the show that keeps mirroring Wilhelm with (subtextually) pregnant ladies again and again. That’s not my fault.
And we will talk about this whole Wilhelm-as-the-bride thing under the cut, I promise.
But let’s return to our typical wedding shot sequence.
So, Wilhelm slowly walks up to Simon. It’s a brilliantly sneaky idea actually, seeing as Edvin Ryding has perfected this quintessential Wille-walk on the show, so, unless you know this is a subtexual wedding scene, you won’t suspect a thing. So what? Wilhelm is just walking up to Simon in those typical slow, measured strides; he always does that, right? Right?
They obviously couldn’t have had Wilhelm hold an actual bridal bouquet because that would have been a bit too much, so he has his hands behind his back, as he so often does. Nothing to see here. Except for that smile in his eyes. And that slow walk. Brilliantly sneaky. I mean, really! They’ve hidden it in plain sight. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it: It’s a typical ‘bride shot’, okay?
Next: Long shot of the two of them. Simon is actually standing there, waiting in front of the altar…I mean, mirror. (And the reflection is now gone.) Simon is all small and purple. And so human. Not an angel anymore.
I can’t. Honestly…I can’t.
The way he’s just standing there, happy, little, smiling, purple groom. I have tears in my eyes because I’m laughing so hard. This show! These utter, utter bastards. They hid this from us. I can’t.
And Wilhelm then comes to a halt in front of him.
Then we get a two-shot, and we get our little ‘look-around moment’. As I said, there can be some variation here. Both Wilhelm and Simon draw our attention to their surroundings. (We’ve discussed all of that when we discussed the teaser, and I – idiot that I am – did not realize that I was looking at a typical wedding shot sequence.)
Then, once they’re close to each other, the whole jumping back and forth across the 180-degree line starts. We get much smaller shot sizes now, that make us concentrate on their faces and have the effect of making the space around them melt away. The cinematography does everything to make us forget where we actually are right now. Because subtextually, we aren’t at a castle at all. We’re at some wedding venue where somebody is officiating their wedding.
How typical are these jumps across the 180-degree line in a wedding scene? Well, as I said, above: Sometimes you get a very static scene where the happy couple are just shot from one side of the imaginary 360-degree circle around them – just from the pew-side, for example.
But this kind of setup makes for a really boring wedding scene. Which is why filmmakers often decide to jump back and forth across the ‘line of action’, (pew-side, altar-side and back again). (If the wedding scene is set on a beach, say, you might even get the camera actually circling them in a full 360-degree circle.)
Just so you believe me: Here, have a typical ‘exchanging-vows’ moment. This one is from the infamous wedding scene in the ‘Twilight’ saga (and before you ask; yes, tvmicroscope really knows all the crap, too). The jumps across the 180-degree line start at the 1:24 minute mark in the video, and if that’s the only scene you’ve ever had to see from that whole vampire slog, then just thank your lucky stars, trust me. But the jumps across the ‘line of action’ are nicely executed in this one. And you even get that shallow depth of field that makes the space around them disappear. (And in case you now say, “Wait. But Bella is notably veiled in that scene, and Wilhelm isn’t,” well, we’re getting there, guys. Patience, okay?)
It really is the very, very typical way of shooting a wedding scene and specifically that moment in front of the altar. (Cue: me, myself and I indulging in some more self-kicking because I didn’t see it when we were first discussing this teaser scene at the castle.)
Now, I want to discuss the dialogue in Wilhelm and Simon’s subtextual wedding scene and the ensuing intimacy scene in the adjacent room, too. But since we’re going to be talking about sex a little bit there, I hope you’ll forgive me for not discussing this above the fold. So, more about this under the cut.