There’s a brilliant little moment on ‘Young Royals’ that immediately caught my eye when I first watched the show:
In episode four of season one, during Wilhelm’s infamous drug party, the sauced-up Prince can be seen suddenly grabbing one of the blister packs of pills off the table and silently stashing it in the inside pocket of his jacket.
It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, so brief that the show seems to draw barely any attention to it. And yet it’s there; it even gets its own shot: a very nice tilt shot travelling from Wilhelm’s hands on the table up to his pocket as he puts away the pills, and then further up to the insouciant expression on his face.
To anyone with even just a passing interest in the visual language of films, this ‘pocket moment’ is instantly recognizable as a very well-known and commonly used subtextual element in the cinematic toolbox.
In other words, the ‘pocket moment’ is an important moment – so important, as a matter of fact, that we’re going to devote a good chunk of the text below to the question of what is happening there and why Wilhelm is doing what he is doing at that moment.