Alberto Rey
Updated Wednesday, March 6, 2024-12:48
The plan to replace
Indiana Jones with his son
did not work.
Introduced in the fourth film of the saga and played by Shia LaBeouf, Indy's son did not catch on.
The fifth installment of Indiana Jones surrendered to the obvious: Harrison Ford was so The King that anyone next to him looked like an absurd little prince.
That's what the
grandchildren of
Juan Carlos de Borbón
look like .
Call it Stockholm Royal syndrome or rancidity of the worst kind: if it's hard for me to say "King Felipe VI" (I still say "Prince Felipe"), how am I going to give all those kids identity.
Neither to
Infanta Elena
's drones
nor to
Cristina
's less party-goers
,
clearly benefiting from the context effect.
Next to Froilán anyone seems like a statesman;
Next to Victoria Federica, anyone looks like an aerospace engineer.
Juan Valentín, Pablo and Irene UrdangarinGTRES
But
reality doesn't help royalty.
With its members managing Instagram and us managing X,
goodbye to the halo of mystery, tradition
and good customs.
I want to read
The King's Nephews
, but I admit that its title led me astray: for me the King's nephews are still the children of Margarita and Pilar.
And Luis Alfonso, of course.
Quite gray characters.
In that comparison Froilán and Victoria do win by a landslide.
They do know how to live
in the society of the spectacle.
Especially because they give it.
Should they?
Probably not.
But who knows what the
world's monarchies need to survive
one or two generations (but I see it as almost impossible).
The recipe for its survival is to look more like the contestants of a
reality show
than the paintings in El Prado.
It was once said about Elena de Borbón and Jaime de Marichalar that they seemed to come out of some painting in the Madrid museum: those faces, those bodies, those clothes.
They were
as old as the idea of monarchy
and as modern as any Met Gala guest.
But the anachronistic law that controlled the succession to the Spanish throne prevented Elena, the king's first-born (sorry: the king's father), from becoming queen.
Of course
that would have made Froilán a future king.
Remove remove.