Celebrating with the celebrities: television in public space during two royal weddings

Abstract

The recent emergence of an increasingly participatory media culture has opened up new ways for audiences to collectively negotiate the cultural meanings surrounding celebrities. Public screens are one such phenomenon, where people gather to witness the live broadcast of celebrity events. Taking our point of departure in two recent royal weddings in the UK and Sweden, we explore the performative displays that public viewing affords, as participants interact with the event on screen, with other participants, and with media representatives in the venue. This article provides a fresh analytical perspective on how audiences engage with royal celebrities in such mass-participatory consumption contexts, illuminating a little-studied area of celebrity culture.

Keywords:

• public screens
• performativity
• royal celebrities
• intersectional ethnography
• media events
• identity

Introduction

Media have always played a central role in the construction and reproduction of celebrity culture. Movie stars and athletes, as well as royals, all gain much of their cultural power and status from a media environment centralised around the global distribution of audio-visual narratives. The recent emergence of an increasingly participatory media culture has opened up new ways for audiences to collectively negotiate the cultural meanings surrounding celebrities. Public screens are one such phenomenon, where people gather to witness the live broadcast of celebrity events. In this article, we explore the social and cultural engagements with royal celebrities that arise in connection with the mediatised rituals of the marriage ceremony, a key narrative of royal celebrity. Particularly when a member of the royal family marries a commoner, the wedding ritual opens a liminal space and the possibility of closer identification with the royal celebrity, which may in turn be expressed by participants in the public celebration. We take our point of departure in two such events – the weddings of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling in Stockholm in 2010, and of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in London in 2011 – both of which were broadcast on large screens in public spaces where thousands of people gathered as the (new) royals said their vows.

The aim of this article is to provide a fresh analytical perspective on how audiences engage with royal celebrities in mass-participatory consumption contexts, illuminating a little-studied area of celebrity culture. We address the performative displays that public viewing affords, as participants interact with the event on screen, with other participants, and with professional media present in the venue. While we expected many parallels between the mediated representation of the royal celebrity weddings in England and Sweden, we were also interested in how differences between the British and Swedish publics’ responses could provide depth and nuance to our analysis. Of course the worldwide public for the broadcast of the British wedding exceeded by many millions the number watching the Swedish wedding. More relevant in this context, however, are the different histories of the two nations and their royal families, the relationships they have with their respective subjects, and the significance of media coverage and the national press in forming their celebrity status. Although we are not conducting a strict comparison between public response to the British and Swedish weddings, we are sensitive to how factors such as the British public’s inclusion of participants from commonwealth nations and former colonies, or scandals involving members of the royal family, may be reflected in the ways people engaged with the specific wedding celebration. How did people in the public venues participate in these celebrations? Can we see members of the public identifying, in their dress and behaviour, with the royal celebrities? Can we identify supporting as well as oppositional positions to the events and to these forms of celebrity, as expressed through cultural symbols and performances? Finally, to what extent can these celebratory forms of participation be explained by the public venue of the big screen?

The sites selected include, for the Swedish wedding, the public viewing area established in the King’s Garden in downtown Stockholm, and for the British wedding, Hyde Park in London, an established site for public viewing in connection with a variety of events. We also include references to other quasi-public settings where the weddings could be viewed on large screens, as well as to postings via social media by participants located in these different sites.

The study is situated at the intersection of two strains of media research: first, the small but growing body of research into the reintroduction of screen-based media into public spaces and their impact on social practice (McQuire 2008, 2010); and second, the far longer and more fully developed (and critiqued) study of media events, understood as ceremonies that interrupt the routines of daily television programming and bind together the audience in the live common experience of a historic event (Dayan and Katz 1992). The literature on media events includes many that focus on royalty, including coronations, weddings, and funerals, explaining how these events are constructed and narrated, and the media’s capability of placing itself at the very centre of events (Dayan and Katz 1992, Wardle and West 2004). Yet when this research considers the audience, it has assumed a public situated in domestic space. Further, few studies address the concrete ways in which people actually respond to the integrative discourses that flourish; especially during royal ceremonies, and most notably in public settings.

Methodology

While media are in many ways central to contemporary constructions of celebrity, it is important to avoid a media-centric approach to these phenomena (Krajina et al. 2014). Therefore, while our point of departure is the large public screen erected for the live broadcast of the event, our investigation does not focus on the screen itself, but on interactions in response to events on the screen, in relation to other forms of expression and interaction taking place in front of the screen, and where other media technologies and personnel were often involved.

Drawing on prior experience in ‘intersectional ethnography’, during a study of spatially-situated media practices in a shopping centre (Fornäs et al. 2007) and further developed for a study of public viewing areas during major sports events (Becker et al. 2014), we address simultaneously many different aspects of public screen venues as contemporary ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai 1996). As our current research has found, audiences who gather in these venues engage with the expanding range of what Friedberg termed ‘screen practices’, drawing variously upon the movie screen, the TV screen, and the computer screen, ‘at the same time that the types of images one sees on each of them are losing their medium-based specificity’ (Friedberg 2003, p. 346, Becker and Widholm 2014). Our methodological interests are therefore aligned with contemporary visual researchers who, although coming from different disciplines, have a common interest in relationships between image content, social context, and the materiality and agency of images, as seen in our concern with the materiality of the public screen itself and its affordances. These researchers also share a commitment to reflexivity and collaboration, to which many of them find visual methods particularly amenable (Pink 2003, p. 179).

The fieldwork was confined to the day of each wedding, and involved participant observation and visual and audio documentation, as well as traditional field notes. We worked separately, with Becker carrying out the fieldwork in Stockholm and Widholm conducting the fieldwork in London.¹ We subsequently shared our field observations and documentation, which has enabled us to draw comparisons between the two weddings. Photographic investigation and documentation was particularly useful. Our ‘visual field notes’ made comparisons more tangible and also, following Anna McCarthy, helped us ‘to grasp the very concrete and tangible forms that institutions and cultures of the public screen take in social space’ (2001, p. 20).

We each began our observation outside the viewing area several hours prior to the ceremony, as people began to gravitate toward the city centre. Inspired by previous ‘multi-local’ ethnographic research characterised by the mobility of participants (Wulff 2000), we noted the different behaviours of participants in the celebration as they converged on the location of the screen itself. We photographed extensively, attending in particular to the boundaries and entrances to the viewing areas, the commercial and public activities taking place, the range of participants, including members of the public, vendors, security, and media personnel who were present, as well as the screens themselves at different times during the event. We were also attentive to how participants placed themselves in relation to each other and to the screen, and the particular activities that they engaged in, such as toasting, cheering, embracing each other, and taking pictures, and noted at what points in the wedding ceremony these responses occurred. When the wedding broadcast began, we located ourselves in the crowd in front of the screen, after which we started moving through the viewing area to gain different perspectives.²

Sharing our visual field notes enabled us to make many more comparisons between the two weddings, including similarities and differences between the structure of the sites, the positions of the screens, the presence of professional media and participants’ behaviours. New insights also arose as we returned to the photographs months and even years after these events, in an additive and oscillating process, as we incorporated additional theoretical perspectives and as our research into public screens expanded to include other events.³ The visual documentation was therefore central to the abductive research method on which this study was based.

In our investigations of other celebratory media events, we have found that people continue to use their portable media, following as much as possible their established routines to interact with individuals in their digital social networks (Becker et al. 2014). These practices become even more tangible, as people are urged by event organisers to ‘perform’ their own participation in the event through interaction on social media sites and blogs. In order to understand the cultural significance these interconnected media practices have for people gathered to watch these royal weddings, we complement the fieldwork with a few tentative examples of social media postings by participants in these venues.

Monarchy and celebrity culture in transition

Celebrities, and not least members of royal families, live their lives in the limelight of comprehensive and constant media attention. In a unique historical comparison of three Swedish royal weddings (in 1888, 1932, and 1976), media scholar Kristina Widestedt (2009) traced a shift in the media’s participation in the construction of the symbolic meanings of these national rituals. She argues that the myth of the mediated centre (Couldry 2003), whereby the media provide the public with primary access to and interpretations of ritual events, is a twentieth-century phenomenon, with visual access in the form of images as a critical component. In 1976, with the present King’s marriage to Sylvia Sommarlath, the enormous media coverage and visual representation of the event contributed to re-establishing the centrality of the monarchy during a time of political conflict in Swedish society. Widestedt underscores that by this time the media had attained a self-evident position in the symbolic process, resulting in a ‘naturalisation’ of the myth of the mediated centre.

Traditionally, royalty has been important to processes of constructing and maintaining ideas of national belonging (Smith 1994), and the royals are also folded into specific celebrity frames in the news media, partly as a result of their own media performances. For the modern self-identity, which is characterised by anxiety and doubt over traditional forms of belonging, royal symbols may provide senses of security and continuity in a time marked by increasingly global rather than national or local cultural flows. There is no doubt, however, that royalty also can be seen as typical examples of ‘blended’ constructions of celebrity, whose status and discursive meaning vary depending on context and media specificity (Redmond 2013). In Sweden, we have seen this in the recent media scandals regarding, for example, gossip about the king’s playboy life during the 1970s and 1980s, and controversies over statements about the queen’s father’s involvement with the Nazi party. A couple of decades ago, this kind of public critique would have been unthinkable in Sweden, as journalistic institutions usually have supported the monarchy through predominantly positive and obsequious forms of reporting (cf. Jönsson and Lundell 2009a). Scandals have also worked as a common celebrity frame in UK media, as was evident for example in the journalistic shame procedure following publication of a picture showing Prince Harry at a private masquerade party wearing a Nazi uniform.

Although royal institutions represent and uphold traditional values and ideals, modern monarchies have undergone significant changes, not least regarding their relationship with social structures such as class. In the evolving sphere of celebrity there has been an increasing association with ‘ordinariness’ and the everyday (Becker 1992/2007, Blain and O´Donnell 2003, p. 163), as seen, too, in the representation of royal celebrities. This is evident in the loosened conventions regarding royal marriage in the UK as well as Sweden. Until recently, it has been crucial for members of the royalty to find their future partner in royal families abroad or at least in the highest aristocracy of their home country (Church Gibson 2011). Prince William’s decision to marry Catherine Middleton, a middle-class girl raised among ‘ordinary’ people, clearly broke with these traditions (in the same way as Prince Charles did when he married Diana). Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, who chose to marry her personal trainer Daniel Westling, born and raised in a small Swedish town under modest conditions, is another example of the ongoing transformations of the modern monarchies in Europe.

Like other celebrities, monarchs have become increasingly enfolded into discursive frames that involve an illusion of intimacy (cf. Holmes and Redmond 2006). Jönsson and Lundell (2009, p. 9) see this relation between monarchy and media as an example of the tendency within modern celebrity and media culture to focus on the private and intimate aspects of the royalty. They argue that the intensified media coverage of the lives of royalty ‘constitute telling examples of how the media relentlessly try to make well-known, yet distant, figures of prominence more familiar and closer to the common man’ (Jönsson and Lundell 2009, p. 11). The British Crown’s relation to media may be an exception to this trend, however. Whereas in most European countries the media have got closer to the monarchy in increasingly complex relations, in Britain the Crown has rarely been required to justify itself as contributing to political modernity (Blain and O’Donnell 2003).

The focus on ‘transformation’ in contemporary celebrity culture (Marshall 2010) is evident in the royal domain. The transformation from ordinariness to royalty was a common theme in both British and Swedish media prior to the two weddings. UK tabloid The Mirror, for example, joyfully announced that ‘It is official – Kate Middleton has more coal miners in her family tree than Arthur Scargill!’ (Bennett 2011). Similarly, Swedish media repeatedly reported about the Swedish King’s worries about his daughter’s new boyfriend, who neither mastered the English language nor formal dinner conversations in the royal palace. In 2005, Swedish tabloid Expressen reported that the Swedish King had hired two mentors to improve Westling’s royal skills, thereby ‘making a prince out of him’.⁴ The royal wedding five years later can thus be seen as the symbolic end of a long process where Westling finally could leave his past as a commoner and become an accepted member of the royal family. As for the transformation of British royalty, Blain and O’Donnell had noted in 2003 that ‘“serious” speculation in the British media about a future wife for William limits itself to European royals, upper-class girls from England and occasional American heiresses’ (2003, p. 160). There are, as this suggests, strong parallels between the monarchies of Sweden and the UK, not only in terms of changing monarchical structures and celebritisation, but also involving new patterns of identification (and dis-identification) that the new era of ‘royal ordinariness’ may entail.

Engaging in the public ritual of a royal wedding

Monarchy excels in rituals, and the ritual events of a royal family are always public. As Redmond (2013) notes, ritualised public events provide a specific context that foregrounds particular aspects and qualities of celebrities. Blain and O’Donnell’s (2003, p. 164) claim that ‘major royal weddings in Britain possess a cultural importance which dwarfs other celebrity events’ could equally be made for the wedding of the Swedish Crown Princess. As they found in their study of the power of contemporary monarchy in Europe, ‘a wedding in a royal house produces a sustained passage of symbolic activity’ (2003, p. 9). Public screens have become a medium for expanding the sphere of contemporary secular rituals to include a larger public. Even in the pilot project for the BBC’s Big Screens in 2005, the director of BBC Live Events at the time, Bill Morris, saw ‘the capacity of the screen to serve as the site for the collective enactment of public rituals, including celebration and mourning’ (McQuire 2010, p. 574). Television viewing continues to be important during these events, as McQuire notes, binding the individual to wider community (and the nation), now potentially fragmented by transnational media flows. Alongside this, there is a renewed desire for collectivity where large screens in public space follow a similar trajectory (McQuire 2010).

Ritual, as we use the concept here, stands outside the routines of everyday media practice. As Couldry noted in his analysis of media rituals, these events and practices transcend the everyday, in their inclusive forms. They highlight our relationship to society as a whole, yet without necessarily assuming a social cohesion in the ritual practice and its meanings (Couldry 2003). At the centre of early studies of ritual was a focus on their transformative power for the individual participant and for the society, building on a deep community among participants, and where the limitations of everyday life ceased to function (Turner 1986). The events we are analysing here are rituals in a double sense: first, as the ritual of the royal wedding with collective significance for the nation and its subjects; and second, as a media ritual, an event experienced simultaneously by a nationwide (or larger) public through broadcast media. The public screen adds a further dimension, moving the ritual (in both senses) into a public mediatised space. As Klein points out in her introduction to a series of studies of contemporary rituals in urban space, it remains fruitful to consider the ways in which these modern secular observances follow the cultural form of traditional rituals (Klein 1995). First, rituals consist of repetitions; they follow a recognisable and repeatable form, both the ritual itself and its components. Rituals that take place in public become collective events, and the place itself carries meanings that can give the observance additional power. As Klein points out, rituals must also be seen in relation to larger systems; in the ways they are linked and continually refer to each other; in the ways they support and confront individual and collective identities; and in their continual referencing to social and political structure (1995, pp. 14–22). The royal wedding, as broadcast into public space, closely follows these attributes, and can provide insight into the relation between the royal celebrity and the audience drawn to the event.

Performance becomes a useful analytical concept for understanding how identities are enacted and reproduced through dynamic meaning-making in the space of the public screen. During the traditional ritual event, Klein notes, participants consciously take on specific roles, with special clothing or other attributes, and participation can involve a myriad of forms of expression and stylised behaviour. Within the ritual, these performances are designed to highlight structure and anti-structure through paradoxes and contradictions, and hierarchies of gender and power are often enacted and parodied. Visualisation is central, and the importance of ‘being seen’ often adds a competitive edge to participants’ behaviour (Klein 1995). Roger Abrahams drew attention to certain public arenas as places where values are put ‘on display’. He called these creative public confrontations ‘display events’, where ‘the rules of everyday life are suspended and given over’ and transgression is allowed (Abrahams 1981, p. 318).

In the case of public television consumption, performativity is both integrated in the media’s construction of the event (through scripts, choreography, modes of address) and in the public’s responses and sense-making practices of these constructions through acts of reflexive behaviour. Elsewhere, Becker has argued that performances of ritualised gestures, when seen in and by the media, become stylised and self-reflexive enactments, commenting on and transforming that which is taken for granted, and making it visible and available for reflection (Becker 1995, pp. 84–85). As noted by Edensor (2002), nationalist ceremonies such as weddings and funerals of grand monarchs usually ‘train’ the participants in how to perform properly. Furthermore, he argues that it is important to distinguish between intentional and unintentional reflexive performances. While the former arise as a natural or hegemonic acceptance of the media’s construction of a media event, the latter may also involve destabilising or ‘rebellious’ performances that contest or bypass codes, norms, conventions and, in the end, the dominant discourse of national unity and identity (Edensor 2002, p. 99).

The two sites of celebration

Hyde Park has a long history of public gatherings, and has become a key London venue for recreation, music concerts, festivals as well as political demonstrations. Large outdoor screens appear on a regular basis in the park, where thousands of people may gather for a collective experience of a television broadcast, or other staged event. The organisation of the venue differs, however, in significant ways depending on the type of event that is held there. The public viewing area organised in connection with the 2012 Summer Olympics was a highly restricted area with high fences and extensive security checks, limiting the number of visitors to 50,000. The venue was also highly commercialised, as seen for example in distinctive display of products and logos of the official Olympic partners. In contrast, the royal wedding site was less regulated, with only minor restrictions and few visible security guards. There was also unrestricted access to the viewing area, resulting in an estimated 500,000 visitors, 10 times the number allowed in the Olympics venue. In order to secure a pleasant experience for as many as possible, the organisers had erected three large screens, pointing in different directions, thereby expanding the ‘media space’ over a greater area.

The King’s Garden in Stockholm is in many ways similar to London’s Hyde Park. It has a royal history and has been a central location for public gatherings for centuries. It is important to note, however, that the venue is significantly smaller than Hyde Park, more like a large public square than a park. Nevertheless, the King’s Garden is big enough to host large concerts, national ceremonies, and political meetings with up to 50,000 participants, and has been the location for celebratory homecomings when national teams have returned victorious from international competitions. For the royal wedding, Swedish broadcasting company TV4 had set up a single large screen in the north end of the site, only some 100 metres from the royal palace and the palace church where the ceremony was held. Rows of small kiosks lined the sidewalk leading up to the bigger screen, selling food, souvenirs, and jewellery. Thousands of spectators were gathered in front of the large screen, and others were watching the event from the balconies of surrounding buildings.

Attending the wedding

All wedding ceremonies are bound to various cultural and religious rituals that shape the way the ceremony is organised and performed by the participants. The guests arrive first, so that all are in place when the bride finally arrives. The bride’s walk up the aisle, the marriage vows, the matrimonial kiss, and the couple’s appearance on the steps of the church following the formal ceremony are typical components that together form the ritual of the wedding. Wedding guests are also expected to wear a specific type of clothing, which marks their accepted presence in the bounded space where the ritual takes place. It was apparent in the crowds who converged on Hyde Park and the King’s Garden that many had come dressed especially for the occasion. Thousands of people came to the public viewing areas dressed in formal wear. Black ties and shiny shoes could be seen everywhere in the sites. In London, many of the women were wearing large fancy hats. In Stockholm, several couples were dressed in regional costumes, which are accepted attire for weddings and other ritual occasions. Those who were not dressed in formal attire nevertheless wore clothing that referred to this event; many wore crowns (in Stockholm, the local Metro newspaper had passed out crowns with its logo), and many girls and young women were dressed as brides or princesses (a point to which we return below). Many people had brought picnic baskets with special food and drink, obviously prepared to celebrate with the royal couple. As the wedding unfolded, it was evident that those who had come to watch the event on a public screen saw themselves as part of the broader ritual. This could be easily seen from their performative gestures and responses at key moments during the broadcast ceremony. They took pictures of the screen at significant points, and a few tears of joy were shed as Victoria and Daniel turned to each other to say their vows (Figure 1). At that point, the sound of many corks popping was heard, as the public cheered.

Figure 1. Tears of joy as the royal couple exchanges their weddings vows. Kings Garden, Stockholm.

Photograph by Karin Becker.

These obvious expressions of participation in the event were further enhanced in Hyde Park by the images from the crowd that appeared on the screen. The screen in the King’s Garden presented only the scenes broadcast from the church where the wedding was taking place. In Hyde Park, however, the narrowcasting of scenes from the crowd gathered there raised the level of participation and sense of reflexivity. As people realised they were visible on screen, they launched into even more expressive forms of behaviour (Figure 2). This points to the media as actor in the ritual, and to the reciprocal relationship between media and the audience in these venues, one that extends to the participatory character and construction of this celebrity event.

Figure 2. In Hyde Park, participants cheer as they see themselves on the big screen.

Photograph by Andreas Widholm.

Mediatised rituals of royal celebrity

Coverage of major public events is often used by media organisations as an opportunity to highlight their introduction of new media technologies. Although public screens were no longer ‘new’ in 2010, Channel 4 was the first major media organisation in Sweden to broadcast an event onto a big screen in the King’s Garden. Widestedt notes the pattern through the three royal weddings; she examined of the press’ interest in using ‘cutting edge information technology’. In 1988, this meant exclusive illustrations and photographs by ‘the court photographer’. In 1932, the emphasis was on ‘sound film’; and for the present king’s wedding in 1976, headlines pointed to the saturation of television (Widestedt 2009, pp. 51–55). In a telling example of the ways media are interwoven into the ritual events of royal celebrations, Kuhn (1995, pp. 59–83) recalls being photographed in the ‘ceremonial dress’ her mother had made for her for the Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, and watching the ceremony together with neighbours who had gathered in her family’s house, the only one with a television.

The significance of public screens for these contemporary royal weddings can be seen in the number of media organisations reporting from these sites. In the King’s Garden there were news teams from Norway and Estonia, and the Swedish TV4 had raised a platform that provided their cameras with an overview of the crowd and the large screen. In Hyde Park, dozens of international journalists and photographers were moving through the crowd, interviewing and photographing members of the public. Usually they picked participants engaged in the most colourful performances, and wearing the most striking outfits. We saw media professionals ‘directing’ audience behaviours on several occasions, and most people accepted their advice by performing in a media-friendly manner. For example, a group of women in Hyde Park who had baked special cupcakes decorated for the occasion obligingly held them up for the TV team, turning their celebratory picnic into a media performance (Figure 3). In Hyde Park, cameramen were also filming the crowd from the stage that had been erected in front of the three screens, while an announcer directed the public by exhorting certain performative behaviours. This clearly adds an additional self-reflexive layer that ‘thickens’ the mediated experience of an event. While people could see flickering images of hundreds of international celebrity guests arriving for the ceremony, from David and Victoria Beckham to Rowan Atkinson and Elton John, they could also see themselves on the big screens. Experiencing a celebrity event under such conditions not only involves passive and distant consumption, it also allows for active engagement where the ‘self’ becomes increasingly integrated into the media spectacle as such. The screen thereby mobilises senses of recognition among the public while it also strengthens people’s emotional engagement with the mediated symbolic centre: the monarchy. The wish to be recognised was also evident in the public’s behaviours, and those who expressed the most expressive performative behaviours were also the ones who received most attention on the screens. As our research has shown (Becker and Widholm 2014), this new form of ‘internal’ narrowcasting has become an effective public space broadcasting technique, especially when combined with traditional forms of broadcasting.

Figure 3. Cupcakes baked for the occasion of the royal wedding get their moment of media fame, from Hyde Park.

Photograph by Andreas Widholm.

Historically, one of the ‘magical’ functions of broadcasting, from radio and traditional linear television to live broadcasting on the Internet, has been its capacity to create ‘despatialised simultaneity’ where the mediated or experiential space of an event is expanded more or less endlessly whereas its temporal order remains fixed (cf. Thompson 1995). However, when this effect occurs in public space, where a mass public can gather in one particular location, experiences seem to become increasingly energised as well as reflexively performative in nature. The space of the experience expands as people at a greater distance from its ‘centre’ become integrated simultaneously in the ritual event. At the same time, increasingly larger numbers of participants are positioned outside the control of the central power behind the event, making their behaviours harder to regulate. Although the area of the big screens for these royal weddings expanded the space for observing this ritual ceremony, they also opened up participation to include demonstrative behaviours and displays that would not be allowed in the church.

Mobilised nationalisms

Royal weddings are grand national spectacles that provide resources for collective imaginations and for identity-making. To celebrate a royal wedding is, in many respects, to celebrate royalty as a constitutive element of a collective national identity. In the sites studied, it quickly became clear that the royalty served as an imaginary discursive space onto which people could project senses of identity and belonging, intense emotional engagements, and not least publically articulated negotiations of the dominant meanings surrounding the royal court. The close connection between royalty and national identity was evident in London as well as Stockholm, where thousands of people came to celebrate, draped in the national colours of their home country. Many had also painted their faces as a way of signalling their positive acceptance of the ceremony. In London, thousands came to the venue with flags, which they enthusiastically waved as a collective national gesture during the televised ceremony. The performances often took ‘fannish’ characteristics, similar to the audience behaviours that take place in connection with large sport spectacles such as the Football World Cup or the Olympics (Figure 4). The wearing of flags, scarves, and hats in national colours – often produced by commercial interests and sold at such events – as well as face-painting illustrate the systemic links between these different ritualised performances of nationalism (Klein 1995). In the King’s Garden, these commercialised signs of national fandom were seen alongside those who expressed their identity with the nation and the crown by wearing the traditional dress of their region. The public’s willingness to take part actively in the celebrations was easily exploited by companies, often media concerns, who use the events as an opportunity to display their brands for a mass audience. Prevalent examples in Britain include Hello magazine and the Daily Mail, which had produced thousands of flags with their logos. In Stockholm, Aftonbladet had produced flags with the text ‘Säg ja!’ (‘Say yes!’) and, as mentioned above, the newspaper Metro had distributed crowns with its logo (seen in the background in Figure 1). As participants in the celebration wore and displayed these logos, they were also captured by media who in turn distributed them to the broader public situated in other places, in forms of re-mediation that simultaneously commercialise and ritualise the event.

Figure 4. Signs of national identity at the royal wedding in Hyde Park. Note the affinity with football fandom.

Photograph by Andreas Widholm.

Even as the public’s performative response draw heavily on ideas of national identity, it became clear both in London and Stockholm that people of various nationalities took the opportunity to express their cultural belonging. Stockholm and London are both cosmopolitan cities and popular tourist destinations, inhabited by people who may have several overlapping identities. Thus, while public engagement with the royal celebrities drew heavily on nationality and belonging, it included for some participants the colours and flags of their countries of origin, which transformed the royal wedding into a celebration of cosmopolitanism. Obviously, the magnitude and power of attraction that characterise a royal wedding mobilises a wide range of public responses and forms of identification. Contemporary societies are increasingly marked by cultural globalisation, which destabilises the nation-state as the natural space for collective identity-making (cf. Giddens 1999). Against that background, royal weddings are contradictory in nature – in the sense that they, on the one hand, can be seen as highly conservative cultural forces that are rooted in ideas of history, rituals, and tradition. On the other hand, it is obvious that these forces also activate other identities than those constructed by the organisers of these grand spectacles.

Princess for a day

In addition to the performances of national identity that we observed, we have also documented a large number of performative practices that expressed more complex forms of identification with the royal celebrities. Kings and queens as well as princes and princesses have been key ingredients in cultural narratives for centuries. We have already mentioned the number of participants of all ages wearing crowns. Many participants in Hyde Park, young and old, were either dressed as fairytale-like princesses (especially children) or as brides in white wedding dresses. In Stockholm, too, there were many young princesses, but interestingly no one was dressed as a bride. The only ‘bride’ we saw in Stockholm was on the day of the British royal wedding in the Tudor Arms, an English pub where a celebration of Prince William and Kate’s wedding was in full swing. This suggests a significant difference between cultural attitudes toward marriage in Sweden and Britain. In Sweden, where broad public acceptance of the status of unmarried couples (and where Princess Victoria and Daniel’s nine-year relationship prior to their wedding is an example), the wedding is not as laden with symbolism as it was in the past. In Britain, on the other hand, the bride, dressed in white and wearing a veil, may still carry an aura of ‘purity’ on the threshold to her new status as wife. This liminal status and its symbolism may also account for the ways we saw the figure of the bride contested in Hyde Park.

Catherine Middleton’s blended status as celebrity, being both a future queen and a middle-class commoner, seems to have made an impact on several people’s preparations for the wedding ceremony. Some women had written personal messages to the Prince on big placards, seeking their own celebrity status. One example was a young woman whose sign read ‘Hey William, you picked the wrong Kate Elizabeth’. The catchy phrase received much attention not only from other participants, but also from the many news photographers who covered the event directly from Hyde Park. Images of Hyde Park’s ‘Kate Elizabeth’ appeared instantly on social media sites such as Flickr and Facebook in the direct aftermath of the event. The Daily Mail English newspaper also published a photograph of the same sign the next day. The woman herself published an entry on her personal blog ‘Kate the conqueror’⁵ a few days after the wedding ceremony:

Kate looked positively gorgeous (and seriously, did anybody not love her fabulous Alexander McQueen dress?!), and William looked so happy. They really just look like they truly love each other. We all had a fantastic time watching the wedding together, dancing in the park for hours afterward, and feeling truly British […] But none of this is important. What is important is that I am now famous.

In this short excerpt, the blogger articulates three forms of social engagement, and the way these intersect can be seen as a unique for mass participatory consumption contexts. First, she expresses a profound admiration of the wedding couple, and especially Kate Middleton, whose fabulous dress serve as a desirable object in the text. Kate’s fairylike beauty and the couple’s unmistakable love for each other is, after all, what we can expect from a perfectly staged royal wedding. Second, the author clearly accentuates that public space broadcasting gives rise to collective experiences which are fundamentally different from those created in domestic settings. Furthermore, it suggests that fandom of royal celebrities becomes socially and collectively meaningful when it is connected to a larger discourse of a collective identity (in this case, senses of being part of Britain and to feel ‘truly British’). Last, but not least, the blog post also suggests that the public’s emotional investment is bound to a desire for fame and recognition. After all, what mattered the most for the young blogger was the fact that she had been recognised in and by the media. Although only for one day, she had become famous.

Transgressive behaviours and royal celebrity

So far we have focused on the dominant modes of social engagement and identification we identified during the royal weddings. The increased performativity of audiences in public settings, however, also mobilises a wide range of alternative interpretations of the event, where social roles and statuses of royalties are challenged in transgressive public behaviours. Royal weddings are bound to a large set of rituals and myths, which include not only discourses of national identity but also identities bound to class and gender. In Hyde Park, it became increasingly apparent that we could not equate the mass excitement we observed with simple acceptance of the broadcast narratives or in the celebratory architecture of the public viewing area. We found significant examples of rebellious behaviours articulating critical interpretations of upper-class manners, social boundaries, and gender stereotypes. Scattered throughout Hyde Park there were men wearing wedding dresses, often in combination with heavy make-up and exaggerated articulations of ‘royal femininity’ (Figure 5). Many of them were mimicking typical royal gestures, as seen for example in front of the centre screen where two men in bridal gowns sat and waved graciously to the people passing by. Hundreds of people wore facemasks of William, Kate, Queen Elizabeth, and others as a way of signalling a similar critical or ironic deprecation from the more serious celebrators gathered in the same venue. Although not common, we also saw several distinct political messages; for example, a young man who had veiled his face with the classical Guy Fawkes mask. On a message written on his white T-shirt, he accused the monarchy of committing ‘precrime’ against the people of Britain.

Figure 5. Brides and princesses celebrating in Hyde Park. Note the t-shirt that claims ‘Will should have asked me first’.

Photograph by Andreas Widholm.

These performances point to the need to acknowledge the carnivalesque as a distinctive feature of the public responses in Hyde Park. However, just like many of the other performative modes, critical or ironic behaviours were also evidently aiming for public attention. The presence of media, including the multitude of photographic devices, and where posing for our cameras must also be counted, heightens the awareness of being made visible beyond time and place of the big screen. These more carnivalesque aspects of performance extend the transgressive aspects of the ritual out into the broader public sphere. Such performances were remarkably absent among participants in the King’s Garden. This may be explained by the differences between Swedish and British symbols and conventions of marriage, as noted above. Nor was anyone seen addressing any of the recent scandals regarding the Swedish royal family (in which Princess Victoria, it must be said, was never implicated).

The atmosphere in the King’s Garden was more restrained, with little evidence of transgressive behaviour. The lone man watching the screen in a Viking wig (usually worn at football matches) may be the single example that confirms the most striking difference between the these two public viewing areas (Figure 6). In Hyde Park, alongside the majority who were decked out to celebrate the new royal couple, there were many oppositional performances, humoristic displays that parodied the British monarchy, the status of members of the royal family, and the wedding ritual itself.

Figure 6. A lone Swedish Viking in the crowd in the Kings Garden.

Photograph by Karin Becker.

However, we have found examples of critical gestures among the many movie clips that were uploaded on YouTube from Hyde Park and other places in Stockholm. In a video entitled ‘Drunk auntie at Victoria’s wedding’, an old woman dressed in an evening dress can be seen drinking fizz directly from the bottle just seconds after Daniel and Victoria are declared husband and wife. In another clip, a user has documented his friend’s attempts to get a discount in the nearby McDonald’s restaurant due to the fact that it was Victoria’s wedding day. In another sequence, the same man can be seen crossing one of the roadblocks set up outside the royal castle by the Swedish police with the argument ‘If it’s Victoria’s day, it is also my day’. These now-public behaviours, performed with a great proportion of irony, do indicate how large public events provide a space to act in ways that appear strange and even unacceptable had they been performed closer to the event itself. This suggests that the wider media environment that now includes social media also offers participants a distanced perspective from which to view the royal wedding. It may, further, open the possibility for critical or transgressive performances that would otherwise be excluded from the event.

In summary

The public viewing areas of Hyde Park and the King’s Garden provide us with interesting examples of what Marshall (2010, p. 636) has called an ‘intensification of the cultural experience’ created by new technologies and opportunities for both production and consumption of celebrity-oriented media content. As our analysis suggests, the investment by an audience in mass participatory contexts is constituted by an intersection across three dimensions of experience/performance. First, the broadcast images available on the big screen establish a collective and instant experience of the event. Second, interaction with other members of the public as well as with media professionals thickens this experience and locates it in a social and performative context of public visibility and identity. Third, it is also reasonable to argue that there is an expanding number of symbolic centres of the royal wedding as a media event. For the thousands of participants gathered in Stockholm and London, the large screens offered more than symbolic access to a distant event. We see here how public viewing areas actualise new forms of spatial ‘pluralisation’, as additional places for participatory consumption and interaction also become central to where an event can be said to ‘take place’. Participants in one ‘place’ become part of a larger collective experience, symbolically connected to others celebrating the event in other locations. This, let us emphasise, is not a specific feature of royal events, but occurs for all types of media events where national identity is the prime mobiliser of audiences’ social engagement.

At first sight, it could be argued that people’s performances in these venues reflect the type of social practices that Michael Billig (1995) has attributed to the implicit as well as explicit reproduction of banal nationalism. That is, in essence, the repetitive, symbolics or ‘flagwaving’ reinforcement of national identity we see on a regular basis in most countries across the globe. As we highlight in our analysis, the public viewing area as such often appears in the media as symbolic evidence for a successful event and for public ‘absorption’ of nationalism. This is in line with Couldry’s (2003) argument that media constructions of grand ceremonies are increasingly linked to a specific logic that puts media institutions – and participation ‘through’ the media – at the very heart of the event as such. Thus, in terms of scale and significance, the public viewing area clearly plays a new and increasingly important role for how this is put into practice in an increasingly participatory media culture. However, the social significance of public viewing areas reaches far beyond such a ‘media-centred nationalism’. As our analysis suggests, the studied sites rather appeared as a complex ‘performative’ discursive space where people could cultivate their individual admiration of specific royalties, express their ‘double’ belonging through cosmopolitan gestures, or even manifest their disinterest or ideological distanciation by ironic or mere foolish and carnivalesque behaviours.

Finally, a central paradox in the public viewing area, of special relevance in the encounter with the image of celebrity, is the tension between proximity and distance that arises in the experience of the image on screen. The relationship to the royal wedding is at once close and palpable, suggesting a physical presence at the event itself, at the same time as it is removed, distant, and out of reach. An ‘illusion of intimacy’ (cf. Holmes and Redmond 2006) is created, enhanced by the heightened affect that is evident across contemporary media genres. This illusion of intimacy with the royal couple performing the nuptial rite on a public screen becomes an opportunity for participants to perform and express their own desires, as they alternately identify with or confront the monarchy, according to their own personal, cultural, and even political positions. The dynamic interface between a virtual and physical relationship, with all its ambiguities, is continuous and ongoing in the presence of the celebrity on screen.

Funding

The research on which this article is based was supported by the Swedish Research Council [2009-29680-64897-65].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Widholm

Andreas Widholm is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Södertörn University, Sweden. His research centres on journalism, globalisation, and social and cultural consequences of new media technologies. He has also conducted postdoctoral research at Swedish Radio where he was researcher in residence 2011–2012.

Karin Becker

Karin Becker is Professor Emeritus, Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research examines cultural histories and contemporary contexts of visual media practices, currently focusing on media in public space. She directs the Nordic Network of Digital Visuality and ‘Changing Places’, a research project sponsored by the Swedish Research Council, examining global and local events as mediated through public and private screens.

Notes

1. Becker was accompanied by colleague and media scholar Alexa Robertson, whose observations were helpful, not least as a sounding board throughout the event.

2. All field notes, interviews, and photographs were shared between us, and then drawn upon for interpretation and analysis, a research triangulation process based on a body of shared experience and knowledge. Through this diverse material from the two primary locations and subsequent reflection upon our individual perspectives and experience of the field, we were able to trace intersections that are typically difficult to locate and examine simultaneously.

3. See, for example, Becker and Widholm (2014).

4. The article is available online: http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/radgivarna-som-ska-gora-daniel-westling-till-prins/ [Accessed 19 December 2014].

5. Blogpost available online: http://katepaccioretti.blogspot.se/2011_04_01_archive.html [Accessed 19 December 2014].