Red, White, & Royal Blue: A Beautiful, Hot, Delusional Fantasy

Captured on Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios; Berlanti-Schechter Films

I am a purveyor of trashy media. It may surprise people to know, but I love bad films. I am obsessed not only with indie titles but also with reality television, anime, and, of course, romantic comedies (Rom-coms). I grew up on a diet of Sleepless in Seattle and Moonstruck as a kid, and I have not stopped watching such titles now (shout out To All the Boys I've Loved Before).

Red, White, & Royal Blue is the quintessentially RomCom. Based on the book by Casey McQuiston of the same name, it is about the steamy love affair between a member of the British royal family (the second in line to the throne, or the "spare"), Prince Henry (Nicholas Galitzine), and the son of the American president Alex Claremont-Diaz (Taylor Zakhar Perez). It follows the typical enemies-to-lovers trope as these two gays who thoroughly dislike each other learn to like and finally love one another.

It's refreshing that we are finally at the stage in the pop culture landscape where a gay rom-com can come onto the scene and not create a vicious media cycle, but the movie, although a fantasy, had some frustrating politics that I believe are worth diving into. And so let's don our royal apparel and cut to the chase, shall we?

Leaning into the fantasy

Politics in RomComs are often the backdrop for the romance, and that's fine, expected even, but that doesn't mean that the texts themselves do not have political messages in them, and Red, White, & Royal Blue wears its messaging on its sleeve. One of the film's central ideas is that the political office of the presidency and American politics, more generally, can be an institution for good. As Alex Claremont-Diaz tells Henry of politics during a bit of pillow talk: "To devote your life to helping others? To know that what you do has a meaningful impact on people's lives? I know it's my life's work."

Alex believes that working in politics is a net good. This perspective may seem naive to some, and his mother, the president (Uma Thurman), tells Alex off for it, but it is never disproven by the text. Alex's idealism ends up being validated in the narrative. He idealistically pushes for a new strategy to win Texas for his mother and succeeds. The thrill of the movie is leaning into the fantasy that this institution can be a force for good (if we fight for it) and that idealism can be enough to push us through.

That is an interesting perspective, but is the presidency indeed a force for good, especially when, in the current era, the biggest argument for voting is not usually the institution's benevolence but "harm reduction" and voting for "the lesser of two evils? Just this year alone, President Biden's administration has actively supported over half a dozen military conflicts — not all of them possible to frame as "good."

It's not that people cannot be helped at the margins with a presidential win. You are reading the words of a trans person. I am painfully aware that my access to medication and other fundamental rights depends on the outcomes of elections, but I would never say that I see the office of the presidency as a whole as good. Regardless of who gets elected, many bad things will continue to happen on our border, with our environment, and in our markets, and that's just the reality.

I think texts like Red, White, & Royal Blue try to ignore that complicated reality so we can lean into the fantasy of young idealism being able to "change the system" from within, and I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing. Alex may be fighting for something, but because he is so confident of the goodness of his actions, he never really has time to assess if he is devoting his time to someone who deserves it. His mom is just so nice, after all. She's getting him pizza after he comes out and monologues passionately about how much she cares for the American public. Why would you not want to give Uma Thurman Texas? It's not like we see her in the War Room ordering air strikes on Middle Eastern civilians (something that the president does in our reality) — this president is all cuddles and no bite.

And this whitewashing applies not just to the presidency but to the British monarchy, which I view in even less charitable terms than the presidency. There is a large thread throughout the film about whether Prince Henry can ever come out because of his duties to the crown. He is implied to be tightly controlled by his Grandfather, King James III, a man described throughout the film as cold and alienating. However, when he comes on screen for a single scene, he is played by the warm Stephen Fry. He may be stern, but he's also affectionate, worried about Henry's relationship more out of practicality's sake than outright bigotry (though he is still very much a bigot). "Oh, Henry, no one is suggesting that you don't deserve to be happy," he cuts in, "…The nation simply will not accept a prince who is homosexual."

This turns out to be wrong, as the public in the film does come out to support Henry's relationship, but it also places the burden entirely on the public. While the monarchy is a hanger-on from a previous era, rightfully worried that one long-term dip in public opinion will end their existence, it's not true that they are a passive institution. They have chosen a more conservative stance because that is the institution's overall disposition. As anyone who followed Meghan Markle's marriage to Prince Harry can tell you, it was often the monarchy itself pushing against that union. Markle allegedly received a lot of racist remarks from her new royal family, and the couple soon bowed out from royal life altogether.

Watching this film feels like looking at our world through a funhouse mirror, where bad institutions are recast as stifling but redeemable, given the proper representation, that is.

Representation politics

Red, White, & Royal Blue does not view the monarchy favorably, as all the characters believe it to be an extravagant waste. Still, the power of celebrity it wields is seen as important. In fact, even more than the positive nature of liberal politics, an overarching theme is that representation politics is a net positive by itself.

If we return to that bedside cuddle, Alex went on about how representation was critical, saying: "My father was 12 when my abuela brought him and his sister over from Mexico. You may not understand this, but in America, if you're an immigrant with a Z in your last name, there's not a lot of people in positions of power that look like you or sound like you. I've been given a chance to be someone in the world that my father didn't see when he was growing up." We don't know anything about Alex's political positions, but his existence in politics is itself seen as a positive change.

We could also look at the child of the Vice President, Nora Holleran (Rachel Hilson), who runs a nonprofit akin to Emily's List with the goal of getting women and femme-presenting people elected. We don't know anything beyond that, although it's assumed they have some vaguely liberal-aligned goals, but uplifting this identity is what is seen as good.

And finally, when Prince Henry comes out, people around the country rally on his behalf. He becomes an instant symbol for queer people everywhere. "Apparently, there are crowds gathering in Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Liverpool," Princess Beatrice tells Henry excitedly.

Like the nature of the presidency, the existence of queer, brown, and femme people in levers of power alone is seen as a net good, and I really want to push back against this idea. Minority leaders are elected all the time who are detrimental to those same groups they come from. Eric Adams is a Black mayor, and his tough-on-crime approach has hardly been a boon for New York City. The same goes for Muriel Bowser and a host of other diverse (i.e., nonwhite, cis, and male) politicians.

We don't need to go far from the direct parallels in this film to further this point. Emily's List is a PAC devoted to electing Democratic pro-choice women into office (similar to character Nora Holleran's nonprofit). Its name comes from the phrase "Early Money Is Like Yeast," in reference to getting money to pro-choice women candidates early in their races so they can build momentum. However, Emily's List has become a de facto benchmark for high-spending donors, arguably defeating its entire purpose of getting money to many candidates early as by the time they "prove" themselves to be worthy of the endorsement, it is already well past the time it would act "like yeast." This leads to a political ecosystem where the women who secure Emily's List's endorsement tend to be better at raising money already and consequently more conservative (at least in the context of democratic politics).

Emily's List has also been criticized in recent years for its electoral strategy of valuing one issue over other intersecting ones that also affect women. For example, the organization only stopped supporting Kristen Sinema in 2022 for her refusal to overturn the filibuster, despite her rightward turn being obvious well before then. They supported her (and a lot of other more conservative Democrats) because she was outwardly pro-choice. Other groups, such as the Matriarch nonprofit, have emerged in response to such criticisms with the explicit goal of electing working-class women. There has been a general push to take a more holistic approach to who should be elected into office.

I bring this up because it’s the same perspective I see with Red, White, & Royal Blue. It’s a movie that has not challenged the structure of anything it’s talking about, either politically or narratively. It argues that you instead need to coopt the structures around you to change them. When director Matthew López sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to discuss this film, he pointed out this fact directly, saying:

“If we see romantic comedies that have people who are like Alex in it — and are like Henry — if we can really mess with the DNA of what Hollywood bread and butter looks like in terms of storytelling and take those things and turn them into something that looks exactly like it used to but also not at all what it used to? This film’s structure is such a classic structure. We haven’t done anything to the superstructure of the romantic comedy at all. It’s still built the same way, is still the same architectural design. But you’re making an entirely new building that looks different and that is used differently by different people….We have the opportunity, we have the right, and we have the ability to make people feel by taking those old architectural plans and making our own buildings from them.”

López is essentially making "the seat out the table argument." You get social minorities and other stigmatized groups into the halls of power, and positive change is bound to happen.

However, as we have already discussed, that is only half the battle. It's all well and good to be inspired by someone's identity (I know I am all the time), but politically, the ideologies and preferences these candidates hold still matter. I don't care if a person with my identity is representing an awful institution on behalf of an awful party. In a candidate, we should want more than a shared social identity; we also should want them to fight for our rights; otherwise, there is no point to them.

A Royal Conclusion

Red, White, & Royal Blue is undeniably a cute and heartwarming movie that captures the essence of a romantic comedy. The film features a cast of lovable characters, from the witty and passionate Alex Claremont-Diaz to the precocious yet sweet Prince Henry. Their on-screen chemistry, as well as the evolution of their relationship, was a delight to watch.

However, the film presents a romantic and idealized vision of politics that may be appealing but overlooks the complexities of real-world institutions in favor of a more saccharine ideal of representation. While the film celebrates the idea that politics can be a force for good and that representation matters, it fails to critically examine the inherent flaws within these perspectives when you don't also factor in power dynamics such as classicism.

While fantasies may be a treat, there is only so much sugar you can put on a cake with a bitter base.