Hi hi!! It's unfair of me to ask you to actually write the full essay on the rwrb red room kiss scene, but I saw your tags and am very interested in at least what the main thesis would be, if you feel like sharing!! No worries if not đ Have a good night/day/whatever time it is where you are!
The last few weeks have been, well. They've Been⢠and I'm going to use this wonderful ask to dust off my overthinking tag and write a meta post on this movie, these boys, and then hope more than three people care what I have to say.
The Red Room kiss scene is Iconic⢠and Important⢠and in this essay I (really) will discuss agency, framing, and why it always had to be Alex to be the one to make the move.
While book!Alex takes book!Henry to the Red Room, here he's waiting. Bundle of nervous energy. He doesn't know what to do with himself, how to hold himself, how to present himself when Henry turns up. He's backlit in this (which is a theatre technique, I see you Matthew) but it also adds to the drama and tension of the scene.
The (in)famous painting of Hamilton, about to bear witness to things.
We jump cut between Alex trying to find... something. Here he is realising his shirt has come slightly undone and he wants to try and be somewhat presentable. At least for the moment. But it speaks to Alex's physicality in this scene because he is shifting and moving so much that his clothing is shifting. There's also an interpretation that this suit represents the formality of the situation - the Prime Minister's dinner, at which he (the First Son) and the boy he wants to kiss (the actual Prinec) are supposed to be front and centre and the picture of formality.
He's coming undone in this moment because he's the First Son and he's waiting for the Prince, but he's also Alex and he's waiting for Henry.
Ah, yes. The casual lean against the wall. Fancy seeing you here, your Royal Highness, what do you think of the menu? But there's grounding here too. When you're spiralling focusing on a physical point of contact between you and and something can help ground you.
It's also a defensive stance in a way. You shall not pass, I'm not moving. Alex is claiming space and territory and he's controlling it.
"How dare you fucking kiss me, run away, ghost me, then walk into the White House like nothing changed." This is closed off, defensive, protective - probably why it's the quickest of the poses to be dismissed. He's got his back against the wall like he's scared or ready to come out fighting. And, in a way, both of those are true.
Book!Alex is mid-crisis on his bisexuality and while he logically knows he is very much into Henry, he's not gotten to the point of turning theory into reality.
Movie!Alex is more chill about being into guys, but this attraction to Henry is confusing him. He hates the guy. He wants to punch him in the mouth. With his mouth.
(What? That's literally book canon: and if he werenât already hell-bent on destroying Henryâs infuriating idiot face with his mouth right now, he would consider doing it with his fist.)
Casual lean against the table, less staged and jarring than the extended arm against the wall.
But then Henry walks in and Alex stands to attention and he is... rapt. He is calm and composed and he is focused. We're back to the back-lit position which helps frame him with a near-halo effect.
And you can see that he is relaxed. There's a slight drop in the jaw, his shoulders are sloped and rounded. Because none on what he was trying to convey before matters. Henry is here.
"Look" he starts with - he's expecting a fight. He's expecting Alex to go off on one for the kiss, for the liberty taken. Even if Alex is willing to forget that it ever happened, take Henry's secret to the grave, Henry gets one thing right in this.
"my behaviour was appalling"
Because it was. Look, Hen, I love you and I'm with Alex in the feeling that I will go to war for you to see you happy and safe. But you did kinda kiss him without consent (harsh reading) and you did ghost him without apology (soft reading) and for a boy raised in the Royal Household that... well... it's pretty much top items on the Very Bad Behaviour list. He did not act with decorum or dignity, he did not act in the way that his status and position demands.
(That's OK, Hen. Because the boy under the linden tree wasn't the Prince. It's OK to not be him, and Alex is going to spend the rest of his life loudly loving the man, not the prince.)
"Shut up, stop talking." // âShut up, shut all the way up, oh my God,â Alex hisses
Because even though both versions of Alex said he wanted to talk to Henry, in the moment that's the last thing he wants to do. And actions speak louder than words, right?
Henry needed to make the first move, that New Year's kiss, because there needed to be something to make Alex realise that this thing he's feeling is very much reciprocated, and that Henry wants it too. If Alex had kissed Henry for the first time on New Year's Eve/Day then it would have been too much of a leap. Alex, at whatever stage of his bisexual journey, has no clear idea of Henry's orientation at that party. It's only with retrospective viewing that he realises that Henry was low-key flirting, and that the sharing of these deeply personal moments wasn't just a "two bros in a hot tub" thing.
So Henry had to kiss Alex first but then he had to run because there was no way that the mostly-closeted, private Prince could accept that a) he fucking kissed a boy, b) said boy is the one he's been dreaming of since Rio/Melbourne, and c) the boy kinda?? kissed him back?? Henry will have been having a low-grade anxiety attack all through January (and trying to reclaim some control with the date he went on in the book).
In this moment, Alex knows all the pieces. He's played this logic game to its conclusion and he knows all the facts. 1) Henry is gay. 2) Henry is into him. 3) He's into Henry. That last fact is something Henry isn't fully aware of (or at least can't bring himself to believe it to be true) and so it has to be Alex.
He doesn't want Henry to say something that would get in the way of this, doesn't want to hear any kind of pre-prepared speech of "yeah, we're better off as friends" that always happens when the couple get too close to getting together too early in the run time. Alex is full on shutting that down, shutting Henry up, and he gives as good as he got.
"Wait a minute" // Henryâs too shocked to respond, mouth falling open slackly in a way thatâs more surprise than invitation, and for a horrified moment Alex thinks he calculated all wrong, but then Henryâs kissing him back, and itâs everything.
And this time it's both of them. Framed between Hamilton and the books. The American political trailblazer and the literary. In the space between? There's our boys.
Alex's hand is on the wall again and he's controlling the space but Henry is very much in it. He's protective but in a different way.
In one frantic motion, Alex knocks the candelabra off the table next to
them and pushes Henry onto it so heâs sitting with his back againstâAlex
looks up and almost breaks into deranged laughterâa portrait of Alexander Hamilton. Henryâs legs fall open readily and Alex crowds up between them, wrenching Henryâs head back into another searing kiss.
Theyâre really moving now, wrecking each otherâs suits, Henryâs lip
caught between Alexâs teeth, the portraitâs frame rattling against the wall
when Henryâs head drops back and bangs into it. Alex is at his throat, and
heâs somewhere between angry and giddy, caught up in the space between years of sworn hate and something else heâs begun to suspect has always been there. Itâs white-hot, and he feels crazy with it, lit up from the inside.
Henry gives as good as he gets, hooking one knee around the back of
Alexâs thigh for leverage, delicate royal sensibilities nowhere in the cut of
his teeth. Alex has been learning for a while Henry isnât what he thought,
but itâs something else to feel it this close up, the quiet burn in him, the
pent-up person under the perfect veneer who tries and pushes and wants.
He drops a hand onto Henryâs thigh, feeling the electrical pulse there,
the smooth fabric over hard muscle. He pushes up, up, and Henryâs hand
slams down over his, digging his nails in.
The sensibility of the suits is on its way out, they're not the First Son and the Prince. And Alex is taking the lead.
Henry is somewhat passive in this - although he is fully engaged - but it's Alex who set this in motion. Pun intended. Alex who pushed him against the wall. Alex who pushed him up onto the table and hiked his leg up around his hip, Alex who is driving in. Because Alex needs Henry to know that third fact. The one he's worked out, the one that Henry is just catching up with. This isn't payback, it's not some prank. Alex Wantsâ˘.
There's a scene I'm writing in my current FirstPrince WiP in which Alex and Henry have a charged moment. And Henry wants to act on it but those princely sensibilities get in the way and he can't let himself be led into doing something that could be used against him. If Henry made all the moves then the accusation of him taking advantage, of the inherant imbalance that comes with status and titles and positions of power. So in the scene, and here, Alex takes the lead. There's no way anyone could accuse Henry of forcing Alex into doing this.
(Good luck getting Alex to do ANYTHING he doesn't want to.)
So Alex gives and Henry takes and he gets the memo very quickly.
Fact number three. Alex wants this too.
Then Movie!Amy walks in on them (which IMO is way funnier than Book!Amy hissing through a crack in the door) and these idiots try to act like they weren't redefining International Relations a second ago. Alex is by the painting, Henry is by the books. They've gone back to their sides and they're playing at being interested in what they find there. But they're not, it's all for show, someone who gives a passing glance at this point sees this part of them, this side of them The First Son and the Prince: the politician and the literary.
They're both backlit, they're in line even if it doesn't look like it, Alex is no longer on Henry's right, and they're both trying to act like the people that others could see them as.
But we - and they - know better. 1) Henry is gay. 2) Henry is into Alex. 3) Alex is into Henry.
4) Everyone is on the same page now.
(Also I know Casey talked about seeing the Red Room on a White House tour and so that's why they included a scene in that room in their book, but I cannot ignore the fact that red = love and passion and danger and fire [the counter to the water motif] and it's a warm colour designed to excite.)
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