The Great, and Its Many Reflections on Power
So I’m going to begin this article today with a somewhat embarrassing admission. You know that famous Oscar Wilde quote: “Everything in the world is about sex except for sex. Sex is about power“? While I’d always found that quote funny and useful (acknowledging that it may be something Oscar Wilde never said), I don’t believe I ever fully understood what it was getting at until I was most of the way through binge-watching the first season of Hulu’s The Great this weekend.
You see, I’d always thought it was about lust as motivation and the way in which lust can transform and curdle. Or, to put it more directly and frame it in specific experience: Everything a dude does is to get laid because getting laid makes him feel powerful. And if you ignore the simplification and the sexism against both sexes implied in the phrase (women are expected to always submit and men are only driven by their dicks), you can find insights there, some real world examples, or just that fucking scene in House of Cards (ignoring the gross Kevin Spacey-ness of it all).
But that’s only one interpretation, and after finishing The Great’s just absolutely fantastic first season (an important secondary goal of this article is for me to never describe any part of The Great as…’great’), I have come to believe it is an incomplete reading of the quote. I didn’t understand the true focus of it. If everything in the world is about sex, and then sex itself is about power, then everything in the world is about power. It’s about power more so than anything else. Everything is power just as everything is sex. The two are not the same, not at all, but they are intertwined. The problem is the initial reading of the quote makes it sound like one follows the other when that is just not true. They are both everywhere, all the time.
And while I’m sure at least some of you find the preceding three paragraphs to be kind of obvious, the reason I bring up both the quote and my changing understanding of it is I don’t know if I’ve seen a television show demonstrate a comprehension of all the different vagaries and facets of power as well or as thoroughly as The Great.
Mild spoilers for the show below.
The Great stars Elle Fanning as a young and ambitious Catherine the Great (her official descriptor. I am not referring to the show. We’re still on track for the secondary target!), beginning with her arranged marriage to the current Emperor of Russia, Peter, played by Nicholas Hoult, and leading to her eventual coup.
The show does not in any way strive for minute, grounded historical accuracy. An entire generation of the Russian royal line is skipped, bowling is invented thousands of years late, and certain characters are changed to better suit the story. The title card includes an asterisk with the phrase: An Occasionally True Story. It abides by this qualification with admirable stubbornness.
This is not meant to be a glowing review of a…wonderful show (you thought I was going to say ‘great’ there. I know you did), so suffice it to say the dialogue is sharp as knives throughout. The plot, even with a very mildly saggy section in the middle that’s pretty common to streaming series, clicks along and is always enthralling even when you’re wincing. The way the tone can shift from cartoonish hilariousness to tragedy to acts of sickening violence and gore and back again in a scene is a masterclass in managing your audience. The acting, particularly from the two names at the top, is note-perfect and both Fanning and Hoult manage to shade their characters with surprising humanity for such larger-than-life people in such ridiculous circumstances. Elle Fanning may also be the most gorgeous woman I’ve seen on a television screen but that’s not really relevant to the quality of the show. Watch it, is the point of this paragraph, I guess.
What this article is meant to be, after a few detours along the way as always, is an inquiry into the two main forms of power The Great showcases and how their characters react to it. We might even make some present-world references along the way. Who knows. We’ll have fun with it.
We’ll start with State Power. This is both the most obvious of the show’s many versions of power explored, and probably the one The Great itself spends the most time on. Both Elle Fanning’s Catherine and Nicholas Hoult’s Peter are the biggest beneficiaries of this type of power, although Peter is of course by far the bigger one as he is both the ruling emperor and a man in the mid-1700’s (sex/gender power is another thing the show focuses heavily on and we will get there soon). Peter is shown to have essentially been shaped and ruined by the state power he’s been enveloped in his entire life.
He is childish to the point of hilarity, has clearly not been told no nearly often enough in his life, is bored by the actual mechanics of running a nation yet genuinely believes he was chosen by God to rule, and has such large mommy and daddy issues (double whammy) that they can be said to affect real-world policies that affect real-world people (here is where I refuse to make any connection to any current or near-current world-leader that may share similar characteristics. The fun thing is I can think of at least three that match this perfectly, including the obvious). He wields the power of the state like an extension of himself, unthinking, for almost any reason.
But here is where the show becomes truly…excellent (still not gonna say it). It also shows what this power Peter does not deserve has taken away from him. His power has isolated him, brought him loneliness. Peter is surrounded at almost all times by people in the show, yet there are only two characters that might be considered anything close to this friends. And while those two do seem to have a genuine history with Peter, Georgina (Charity Wakefield) and Grigor Dymov (Gwilym Lee) are also clearly putting up with him because of how close they can get to his power and because they are afraid of the consequences of it. Peter ruins the friendship almost automatically, his power making him assume he can have sex with Georgina anytime he wants, cuckolding Grigor, without any negative consequences. Being literally all-powerful for his entire life has warped his worldview so much he sees this as his natural right, not a destructive act.
At another time, he complains that a king can never be sure of anyone’s love despite his desperately wanting it, without ever coming close to considering his own actions. The state power Peter wields and lives with is exactly what isolates him further and then that isolation convinces him to use that power in increasingly cruel and divisive ways and the cycle just continues.
Catherine’s relationship and reaction to power is even more diverse and interesting, if anything. For one, she always has less of it than her husband. As mentioned above, she is both without the official power to rule, and a woman in the mid-1700’s. So while she is the Empress and is probably (at least by the time she has grown into her role about midway through the series) the second most powerful person in Russia, she is also inhibited by the only person in the country with a higher stature than her. Someone who, as she realizes fairly quickly, is not in any way equal to the responsibility he has been given. Her story then, is one of ambition, at least initially. She wants the power she sees and that is used against her for herself. In this, the show presents power as something to strive for and asks its audience to question just who deserves to wield it and if the qualities we use to make that determination are the correct ones.
This is where the Sex/Gender Power stuff comes into play. The fact that Catherine is a woman is presented more than once as one of her biggest obstacles in her proposed coup. There is the alleged ‘progressive’ senior in the Russian Orthodox church whose support she needs that refuses to even speak with a woman. There is the drunk middle-aged general with a crush on Catherine who can’t stop hitting on her when she needs to talk war-strategies with him. There is the violation she has to endure at the fingers of a different church official right in the first episode. There is the fact that many in the court for most of the first season essentially see her only as a pretty, smiling, walking womb to continue Peter’s family line.
And then of course, there is Peter himself, who wields both state power and sex/gender power over her. This is a show that has some genuinely romantic, some genuinely terrible, and some genuinely hilarious sex scenes. It is both fatally realistic and humorously over-the-top in its treatment of sex. The parallels between the show’s 1700’s and the real-world’s 2020 abound in this regard.
But this is also where The Great distinguishes itself from other less nuanced explorations of power and sex. It’s really…remarkable. (So close. I know) Because Catherine is never powerless. Either in state or sexual power. While the women of the show are living in a deeply misogynistic time and place, they are always shown to have their own agency, their own ways to at least attempt to affect change for themselves. Catherine learns to skillfully manipulate Peter, through many different avenues. Peter is also manipulated by his aunt, and by Georgina.
Men are also shown to be victims of state and gender power. Grigor is heartbroken by the routes his wife is forced to take to power, routes she is forced into by the culture and expectations for women at the time (although how ‘forced’ she is becomes more and more questionable throughout the season). The drunk general is eventually shown to be a full and rounded character beyond his stereotype, one hurt by all the violence he has done in the service of state power, and finally capable of taking Catherine seriously outside of her beauty. Even Peter, by the end of the ten 50-minute episodes, has proved himself capable of acknowledging the affects of his own power.
But it goes deeper than that. Catherine’s journey and relation to power is dynamic. Catherine is ambitious and is shown to very clearly have a better grasp of statecraft than her husband fairly early on. But things change. Peter is shown to have some at least baseline competency at the job. Catherine is given a chance at leadership early and flubs it. Power then becomes something to both covet and fear. A test of sorts. A constant, ongoing test of a leader’s character and mind. Power becomes seductive and comfortable after that. The show makes plain that Catherine is, after all, the second most powerful person in the country. There is convenience and privilege in that position. She begins to waffle, to wonder if maybe she can reform Russia from the inside. From safety and with little accountability. She becomes insulated by her proximity to Peter’s real power. She gets lulled into thinking her safety and comfort is everybody’s safety and comfort. I am sure no one reading this can think of any modern world-leaders who mistake their own wants and preferences for their nation’s.
It takes two tragic events for Catherine in the show to understand the consequences of idleness at the hands of power. She visits a battlefield and a plague comes to the country. She is forced to reckon firsthand with the real living beings who suffer as a consequence for her and her husband’s power. These scenes, especially the battlefield scene, are shot in drastically different fashion, with a drastically different color palette than the sharp and bright and sardonically happy color-scheme of most of the rest of the series. It feels like a different and grimmer world. Catherine is shaken to her core and becomes convinced once again that she must overthrow the emperor to create a better nation in which things like this are rarer. This is, I believe, the most important lesson The Great tries to teach about power.
When the powerless live a life unimaginable to the powerful, it means the system is so rotten the only solution might be to throw it all out and start over.
Once again, I can think of no modern day examples that might relate to this point.
Either way, watch The Great. It’s pretty great.
Shit. I almost made it.
If you enjoyed this article at all, please check out my New Adult Contemporary Fantasy Novel: Magic, Television, & Marijuana. Out now on Amazon.
