When Madness Matters: The limits and affordances of representing madness in contemporary biopics of historical royal women

This chapter explores three contemporaneous biopics of royal women: Spencer, (2021: Dir: Pablo Larrain), Corsage (2022, Dir: Marie Kreutzer) and The Favourite (2018, Dir: Yorgos Lanthimos). The three films share striking similarities in their content (all follow a single European royal woman across a short period of time, attending particularly to her mental distress or madness) and their approach (presenting less idealised versions of royal womanhood). We argue that all three films encourage a complex closeness to their protagonists and their experiences of madness, mental distress, and mental illness, which are more commonly represented through frameworks of disgust, bewilderment, and othering. We explore how the films draw on cinematic techniques, contemporary conceptual frameworks, and agentic revisionings to accomplish this compelling and unusual closeness, and we analyse its politics. Specifically, we suggest that while the approach these films take to madness can be deeply meaningful, it can also be limited in its ability to make a radical intervention into the politics of madness through its focus on women of extreme privilege, its reliance on glamour and aestheticizing, and its individualisation of systemic and collective issues.