Mary Queen Of Scots – Finally, A Truly Capitalist Film

That the world of luvvies trends culturally left wing is obvious and true. This has always been something of an oddity as the business itself – of film making, the record charts, even of actor’s careers – is one of the most ruthlessly capitalist and free market in the world. Bring in the money and you’ve a glittering career and great wealth is heaped upon you. Do stuff that no one likes or wishes to pay to see or hear and you’re stuck singing songs in between delivering the veal. There is no other possible explanation for Megan Fox.

So, it is with great pleasure that we note the arrival of a truly capitalist film. Mary Queen of Scots. Which, The Guardian tells us, portrays one of the great victories that the capitalist system has achieved:

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] “I was fighting for a period in a period movie,” she says. “Those were instructive discussions about how honest we were being about women’s bodies and what they do, women’s pleasure and what that is, and a queen’s body as a political canvas. I felt that was something I hadn’t seen before, that I just really wanted to show. There are not many of us who know what it feels like to be a crowned head of Europe – but what we do know is what it’s like to fight for the rights of our bodies.” She got her way in the end: the scenes are still there. “We need to show this stuff. It does need normalising. A journalist asked me how hard it was to shoot the scene where Mary has her period, and my answer was, ‘Not hard at all!’ There were six women in that room, and it was probably the thing that just most easily staged itself. But it does continue to freak some people out.” [/perfectpullquote]

A late medieval – Reformation if you prefer – Queen would be suffering what we today would call the most appalling period poverty. Something which, despite the regular claims in today’s press, just doesn’t happen to day. As Schumpeter told us about Queen Elizabeths’s stockings. We do know that she had a pair, we even know the day she was given them. But it took the construction of those Dark Satanic Mills, driven by that lust for gelt and pilf, for the girl who worked in one to be able to have her own pair.

Capitalism is, of course, the most feminist economic system ever for it has indeed solved this particular problem. A quick Amazon check tells us that there are at least 20 pages, each with 10 entries, for “tampon“. That’s at least 200 different solutions to this age old problem, each, any and every, of them vastly better than that available to a Medieval – OK, Reformation – Queen. Many of them available at truly interesting prices. £1 – that’s about 10 minutes of minimum wage labour – would seem to buy a box of 20 or 24, an entire month’s supply on average. Around and about, we being men here and not entirely and wholly sure of these things.

So, there we have it, clearly the film is contrasting how the rich of old were nowhere near as well off as the average or even poor of our day. The people who could command the resources of entire countries were worse off than the girl training to be a hairdresser today. All brought to you by that lust for profit which drives the miraculously feminist system of capitalism.

That is how they’ve filmed it, isn’t it? For we cannot think of any other way at all in which this story could be told.