The first and second episodes of The Romanoffs address the place of the Romanovs within Russian history somewhat obliquely. The third episode take us to the heart of the Romanov story. In this episode, an American actress arrives in Vienna to participate in a six-part miniseries about the Romanovs. As in the first episode, this plot line is utterly cosmopolitan. The actress playing Empress Alexandra is American, the series is shot in Austria, and the director (a former actress) is French.
Unlike the previous episodes, the mood of the episode is dark, mysterious, and often surreal. As in a typical horror movie, the American actress is driven to the set by a creepy chauffeur, occupies a room in an old hotel that seems to possess its own secrets, gets startled by people coming to her door (with script notes, it turn out) late at night, and finds hotel staff behaving strangely. Apparently, the nightmarish quality of the episode is meant to set the stage for the nightmarish conclusion of the Romanov miniseries.
The episode portrays several different scenes of Romanov history. In one scene in the miniseries, Tsar Nicholas is braiding his wife for her conduct with Rasputin. In another, Rasputin throws himself at Alexandra. But there's no doubt that the central point of this miniseries is horror. A wounded Rasputin is thrown into a river while still alive. The Czar, his wife, and his children, are all massacred in a basement, their bodies set on fire.
The emotional core of this episode is the American actress' personal response to tragedy. Having lost her mother, she's vulnerable further emotional distress. Although a self-confident actress, she's increasingly unsettled by an eccentric director, an on-set love affair with the actor who plays Rasputin, and by the character she is portraying. She begins to imagine things, including a young child, dressed in Romanov clothes, who runs through her room at night. Was this girl real or imagined? She no longer knows.
The episode concludes with the American actress being forcibly abducted in the middle of the night and tossed into the basement where she and her family will be murdered. As it turns out, the murder is a farce. Horrible as the scene is, the dead are all actors. However, when everyone else gets off the ground, the American actress remains where she is. While she had earlier expressed skepticism that anyone could ever die of fright, she has, apparently, done just that.
The episode requires viewers to ponder the nature of art. What would it take for this mediocre American actress to become a great one? According to her director, she would need to really occupy the position of the Empress. She would need to be simultaneously powerful and weak; powerful insofar as she rules a husband, who in turn rules an Empire, and weak insofar as she fears for the health and safety of her hemophiliac son.
But the episode also invites viewers to think of about the meaning of the Romanov murders. Why are we still creating miniseries about the Romanovs/Romanoffs? The episode suggests that the enduring legacy of this crime is related to the fact that the Romanovs were utterly unprepared for their fate. Led into the basement, the czar, expecting to be photographed, but probably fearing the worst, only had time to make a feeble protest before the slaughter began.
The episode also suggests that the murders possess lasting symbolic, aesthetic, and mythological significance. After all, by the time of the massacre, Nicholas has been on the thrown for a very long long time. But neither the Austrian miniseries, nor the Romanoff episode that tells the story of this miniseries, spend much time on political narrative, or narrative of any sort. Rather, the miniseries and Romanoff episode dwell upon one relatively brief, if spectacularly gruesome, moment in time.
Why privilege a moment in time over a long storyline? The French director provides some clues.
At one point, the director claims to be a Romanov; later, she admits she is not. In a sense, she seems to be saying that insofar as the Romanovs have become a part of world mythology, we can all claim to be Romanovs. That is to say, the Romanoffs aren't really a particular clan who made important choices 100 years ago. Rather, they are archetypical victims, or perhaps archetypical victimizers/victims if one has participated in the myth more deeply.
At another point in the episode, the director tells her assistant that she can change the specific facts of the Bolshevik coverup for cinematic purposes. Who, after all, is around to point out her errors? Here, she seems to be saying that the Romanov murders must now be treated as aesthetic, rather than historical, events. They are horrible, but not for any particular political or moral reason. Instead, they are horrible because the villainy is so unmitigated, and the victimhood so self-evident. Like the Clutters in In Cold Blood, Nicholas and his family died for no reason at all, and a basement was involved. The murders of Nicholas and his family remain horrible, after all, even as they migrated from Siberia to Vienna to Hollywood.
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