Madison, Madison…(examples: “Young Royals”, “Splash”)

“Far out in the ocean the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest cornflower, and as clear as the purest glass. But it is very deep too. It goes down deeper than any anchor rope will go, and many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is down there that…”

…we can encounter Madison!

Yes, really, Madison from ‘Young Royals’! 

We’re finally circling back to Madison this week. And in order to do so, we will have to talk about what a parable is.

I can practically hear the record-scratch sound in your brain now, dear reader, as you wonder, ‘Hang on, why a parable? Didn’t you tell us that Madison was an allegory?’

Yes, that is correct. On ‘Young Royals’, Madison most certainly serves the function of an allegorical character, i.e. a personification of Simon’s past.

She is therefore, in a sense, the most important character on the show: She tells us, in every single scene, with every single line, facial expression and hand gesture, what happened to Simon prior to the events of the first episode.

That is Madison’s function on the show, after all: She is, for all intents and purposes, Simon’s backstory.

And if you’re a longtime reader, then you know, of course, what horror is hidden in the deepest, darkest pit of the show’s subtext: Simon Eriksson was sexually abused when he was in seventh grade. The abuser was most likely a teacher from his old school – a man the Eriksson family knew outside of this context, as well, a man they all trusted. The most heartbreaking thing about it all was the fact that, at the time, Simon himself did not understand what was happening to him; he had a crush on the abuser and was manipulated into what he thought was a romantic relationship, i.e. Simon is a grooming victim.

There’s a very good reason, after all, why Madison’s valentine in season two reads, “[...]Is it a crime that I want to make you mine?[...]” and why its sender is never revealed to us.

Madison isn’t a character so much as a concept: Every single thing that happens to her tells us more and more and more about Simon’s backstory. (You know all of this, of course. We’ve discussed it many times before.)

That’s because characters aren’t just written into screenplays at random. They all serve a function. They’re all structured around each other in a way that furthers the subtext. They’re all just as important as any of the metaphors that appear in the script (if not more so).

And even though the show’s creators ultimately decided against explicitly disclosing Simon’s backstory in the text of its final season, it is still definitely there. It’s written all over the subtext of the entire show, in fact; it dominates almost every scene, every shot, every prop and costume decision, every metaphor and character function in the story.

And that’s why Madison is such a juicy character, of course. We have to know about her if we want to find out something absolutely fundamental about one of the show’s two main protagonists: Simon.

We will take another stab at Madison today, but while we looked at her through a microscope last time, going scene by scene and line by line, we will choose a totally different approach today:

Instead of examining her intra-textually, we will be coming at her from an extra-textual angle this time.

And to do that, we need to understand what a parable is. 

And no, no, no, in case I’ve just triggered you and given you terrible flashbacks to your maths classes now, don’t worry. No, I don’t mean those kinda things:

That’s a parabola, not a parable.

This is a parable:

They both go back to the same Ancient Greek word παραβάλλω (parabállō), hence the confusion. It means, “I throw side by side,” which is exactly what we’re going to do today: We’re going to cast our net pretty wide and catch ourselves a Madison; we’re going to throw everything we have at her.

So, no Archimedean shenanigans for you, don’t worry. (Unless you count a flooded bathroom as a reference to Archimedes, that is.)

And yes, we really need to know all of this if we want to understand Madison. (Also, if you have your eureka moment as you read the text below, this will definitely all turn out to be extremely useful for all your future film analysis adventures. I promise that the topic of today’s post is actually applicable to a lot of other shows and movies.)

Intrigued?

Okay, then let’s take a closer look at parables. What are they? And what is this tertium comparationis in the image above? (I promise it sounds far more complicated than it actually is. We will discuss it, and it won’t be even a little bit dry – by which I mean: It’ll literally be a very wet affair.)

We will look at a piece of world literature for this. And at a movie that you might or might not know.

And in doing so, we will identify a completely different function a story’s subtext can have – one that we haven’t talked about before at all.

Because, you see, subtext can sometimes be used in an entirely different way from the ways we have discussed before with our subtext decoder ring in hand.

Well, and then…eventually, we will circle back to Madison. (Is it even allowed to use the word ‘circle’ in a post that is so utterly parabolic? I’m no mathematician, so I don’t care.)

We will circle back to Madison, that most enigmatic and mysterious sphinx of the show ‘Young Royals’.

And most importantly, we will realize that we could have known! We could have known what the ending of season three would turn out to be. We could have known it a long, long time ago if only we had paid more attention to Madison from the get-go.

So, let’s jump under the cut headfirst with a nice, big splash now and dive for some subtextual shells we’d left lying around on the seafloor the last time we said, “Madison, Madison…”