In episode one of season one of ‘Young Royals’, we see Simon sit down to a simple spaghetti dinner. He can be seen chewing and slurping loudly, almost ostentatiously, stuffing himself with pasta in a carefree and uninhibited way.
In the same episode, Felice avoids the dining hall at her boarding school, claiming that she is not hungry. The scene is written and filmed in such a way that we are meant to understand that she is lying; she is most likely struggling with an eating disorder brought on by issues of self-perception and body image.
These two scenes are connected in the subtext. And not just connected…they are actually the same thing.
Subtextually, they tell us the same story about the same character – about one character, not two!
To understand what is going on deep down in the subtext here, we have to look at a new metaphor this week, a metaphor this show uses about as consistently as the ‘water’ metaphor and the ‘music’ metaphor.
This new metaphor we’re going to talk about is actually an ‘umbrella metaphor’, i.e. it encompasses several metaphors we have already discussed on this little blog (the ‘pizza’ metaphor being just one such example).
If we examine the meaning of this particular ‘umbrella metaphor’, we will gain a few new insights:
We will find out why Wilhelm keeps bringing Simon sandwiches, for instance, and what that scene in which Simon rejects Wilhelm’s sandwich in season two actually means – and why Wilhelm’s joke that Simon should have made himself a sandwich before he rescued Wilhelm from the football pitch is objectively the most hilarious thing anyone has ever said on this show…
Most importantly, we will finally understand why Wilhelm is so surprised to see that Simon is having his lunch at the Skogsbacken dining hall in episode one of season one and why Wilhelm’s question and Simon’s reply in that scene have a very important subtextual meaning for the general theme of this show.
If you’re all seated now and have your napkins folded in your lap, let’s move on from this little appetizer to the first course underneath the cut; I wish you all, “Bon appétit!”