In episode two of season one, Simon suddenly cannot find his phone. It’s a very brief moment, but it’s so important: He’s sitting in his mother’s car, about to head off to the horror movie night, and for a second, he cannot locate his phone.
In the very same episode, Wilhelm tries to pay his bus fare with a credit card, then with his phone and is eventually told he has to download an app on his phone in order to pay for the bus ride.
In season three, the school is withholding the students’ phones from them. A lot of emphasis is being placed on this struggle between the kids and the headmistress, and some very interesting scenes are born out of it.
Phones are everywhere on ‘Young Royals’, and yet you could almost overlook them. After all, phones are something we all use every single day; phones are ubiquitous in our lives. And if you know any teenagers personally, you might have noticed that they basically come physically attached to a phone these days.
In short, phones seem as normal and common as the air we breathe or the light by which we see or the force of gravity that keeps us from floating away into space. We don’t usually sit back and start to wonder why they show up in a film or television series in the first place. We don’t really consider that they could be…just a metaphor.
And yet, on ‘Young Royals’, they are!
I find it really sneaky of the writers to hide a deeper metaphorical meaning in something as commonplace as a phone, which is why I will award this specific metaphor my ‘stealth-metaphor-of-the-year’ badge in gold.
But subtextual stealth technology or not…the ‘phone’ metaphor is actually not an unheard-of literary device in screenwriting.
It might not be as omnipresent as the holy trifecta of screenwriting (You all remember what that was, right? The ‘water’ metaphor, the ‘music’ metaphor and the ‘food’ metaphor!), but the ‘phone’ metaphor is still surprisingly common, so you will come across it from time to time in your cinema-and-television watching endeavours.
I say let’s dive under the cut and examine this curious beast, alright? Let’s ponder the question of why Simon couldn’t locate his phone in Linda’s car before the horror movie night. Let’s ask ourselves why Wilhelm, unlike the other students, owns one of those fancy flip phones.
And let’s discuss why Wilhelm had to download an app on his phone to pay for his bus fare. Because this is no Swedish cultural studies class, people!
Just as Simon being allowed to have his lunch in the dining hall despite his being a non-boarder, this bus payment scheme actually serves a metaphorical function. (I mean, seriously, who would think otherwise? If the writers had just wanted to give their viewers some fascinating cultural insights into their country, they could have definitely picked something more intriguing than the ins and outs of the Swedish public transport system or the house rules and dining hall etiquette for external students at Swedish boarding schools. Scenes like this are virtually always purely subtextual. They haven’t got anything to do with cultural studies. They’re all about the metaphor; that’s the only reason why they exist!)
So, yes, let’s examine Wilhelm’s peculiar bus ride and ask ourselves why the credit card and the phone alone were a big no-no here.
But above all…let’s try and find out why that much-discussed question, the question of whether Wilhelm just remembered Simon’s phone number on the football pitch in episode four of season one or restored said phone number through the recovery settings of his phone…let’s look at why that is a pointless discussion, why the question itself is subtextually irrelevant, and why, if we take it apart, we can still get some truly brilliant subtext out of it.
So, grab your phone book, take out your metaphors, I mean, phones (whether fancy flip phones or old-timey rotary dial telephones), and let’s have ourselves a nice little chat, guys.