Zoomer Magazine – September 2019

(^78) – SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019 everythingzoomer.com
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rub shoulders with the established upper
classes, the tension between aristocracy
and meritocracy was perhaps the biggest
of those issues.
What a difference a few years makes.
When Downton concluded its run in
March 2016, Justin Trudeau had just
become prime minister, and a Donald
Trump presidency was not yet a reality.
The intervening years have since seen
bigotry of all kinds on the rise, be it in
post-Brexit Britain or the increase of
racist extremism and anti-Semitism in
North America. Safe to say that in the
movie, the household is headed into the
increasingly straitened economic and
political circumstances of the 1930s.
Storm clouds of nationalist intolerance are gathering
on the near-horizon in Europe, and the Crawleys will
likely also have another brush with the similar fascism
that gave rise to Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts
heyday. (In season 5, Edith’s publisher and lover,
Michael Gregson, you’ll recall, was killed in Munich by
Nazi Brownshirts.)
For all its blue-blooded glamour, there’s always been the
sense of a society contending with history and advancing
equally toward doom and progress. The first episode
set in 1912 introduced viewers to a world of hereditary
wealth, where white male entitlement literally reigns
supreme, and begins with the fallout from the sinking of
the RMS Titanic. It has weathered the First World War
and subsequent atmosphere of
unease, as well as social upheavals
like female emancipation.
The series ended on the cusp
of 1926 ringing in the New Year,
and the movie picks up the family
saga in the autumn of 1927, a new and more egalitarian
era with the suffrage movement. An amendment gives
all women over the age of 21, regardless of property
or marital status, the right to vote. With the current
threats and backsliding on women’s rights, it’s a
reminder of need for a renewed push on intersectional
feminism to protect the ground women have gained.
“What else could we drink to?” Isobel (Penelope
Wilton) asked in the final episode as they raised a toast.
“We’re going forward into the future, not back into the
past.” As usual, Maggie Smith’s dowager countess got
the last line, though in light of how much reality has
changed since her rueful coda, perhaps not the last
laugh: “If only we had the choice.”
Clockwise from above: and scene –
filming Season 2 of Downton Abbey;
Lord Julian Fellowes, the creator
of Downton Abbey; the film poster