For decades now, it’s been said that we have a fairytale relationship with the Royal family. Is there truth in this?

Fairytales are often dark little mirrors with unhappy endings in which entire populations fall asleep, as whatever spell is cast upon a prince or princess is cast upon their people too. It may be the princess who pricks her finger on the spinning wheel, but the nation must lie down and sleep for a hundred years along with her. And when the handsome prince rouses his sleeping beauty with a kiss, all the subjects of the realm rise from their slumbers also. The people are but an extension of royal blood.

Isn’t that what is asked of us this weekend? We are being encouraged, as one, to "chant for the King as he is crowned. The entire nation is exhorted to stand to attention – whether in our living rooms or at the Sainsbury’s till – and take part in the "Homage of the People". Should you wish to offer your obeisance these are the words you will recite: “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God.” A fanfare will play, and you then can sit down, or finish paying for your groceries.

Homage. Allegiance. Majesty. Heirs.

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We are told Charles is a "modernising" king.

Over on the BBC’s website you can watch an interactive display which explains the history of the “dazzling” crown he’ll wear. A hat of solid 22-carat gold, finished with 444 jewels and gemstones – sapphires, rubies, amethysts and topaz. Doesn’t our national broadcaster do a fine job of transporting us back to the fairy tales we read as children?

The BBC "report"’ even casts the perfect villain: Cromwell. The broadcaster notes the usurper melted down the original crown after beheading the first Charles to sit on the throne. Charles II commissioned a replacement upon his Restoration.

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Another highly detailed BBC online "report" has diagrams of the Gold State Coach, the crown that will sit on Camilla’s head, the ampulla and spoon which will anoint Charles with holy oil, and the new King’s Orb and Sceptres. The sceptre denoting Charles’s “kingly power and justice” is topped with the Star of Africa, a jewel cut from the world’s largest diamond. There’s also an annotation of the throne, under which will be slid Scotland’s Stone of Destiny. We learned at the weekend that the Scottish secretary Alister Jack was guarding the Stone. Scottish Conservative MP John Lamont said the reason was so “nationalists don’t steal it again”.

Jack’s services really weren’t needed though. During the Coronation, the "King’s Champion" is on hand. Don’t you feel echoes of Arthur? Of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of Britain’s founding fairytales? The Champion will fight anyone who dares question the right of Charles to rule us.

Of late, though, after the scandals and the shame – the Dianas and the Andrews – we’ve come to talk of the relationship between the British people and the Royals less as a fairytale and more an extension of celebrity culture. We are not watching a fairytale unfold and discerning some truth, but rather we’re in the condition of the fan and the object of their desire. Fairytales have meaning, fandom is meaningless.

The royals understand this shift into celebrity. They use the tabloids with the same skill as a Kardashian. And like any celebrity, they are both fearful of the press, and dependent upon its megaphone.

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The shift into celebrity fits with the modern royalist view that monarchy is "great for tourism", that the Royals bring wealth to the nation’s coffers from American, Japanese and French tourists who come to stare at palaces and empty balconies. Leaving aside the financial accuracy of this claim, and the fact that royals can be tourist attractions long after nations become republics, as the Palace of Versailles well attests, there’s dreadful hollowness in this notion: it turns the British head of state into something akin to the Blackpool Tower, an object to be gawped at.

It accentuates what many see as the emptiness of the British monarchy. Republicans brindle at inherited wealth which performs no function bar the ceremonial. Rightly so, it can be said, for isn’t a nation, which cannot adequately feed its own people or efficiently rescue its citizen from a war zone in Sudan, paying £250 million to kneel at the feet of a man worth £1.8 billion?

So this is a very strange form of celebrity. What are we gazing at? It’s not the beauty or talent of a singer or actor. Why are we gazing? There is a deadness to the "British royal gaze", yet a hunger as well – a blind need to devour and own. One of the darkest aspects of our relationship with the royals is the sense that we control them: a repayment for their gilded lives.

An empty gaze, an obsession with mere glitter, the dehumanising sense of control, the hunger to look, to return to the hollow image repeatedly.

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If the British relationship with the royals somehow fits the model of entertainment and celebrity, it feels as if the most apt genre is pornography. For what is the pornographic image but the very definition of emptiness: a picture devoid of all meaning except the voyeurism, the unquestioning need, of the beholder. Pornography consumes the subject of the image; its stars often slowly devoured by the machine they live within. The consumer is also consumed, reduced to their fetishes and their obsessive need to look.

How fitting that we’re being asked to cry out in joy at the sight of the Royals this Saturday as we offer our collective homage, our submission, to those who are our mistresses and masters.

The sense of fairytale has long rotted. At least fairytales, whether they tell of Handsome Princes or Wicked Stepmothers, are instructive. They teach us something. We can look in the dark mirror and discern a metaphor for the country we live in and the way we shape our lives. However, with celebrity – the pornography of celebrity – there’s nothing: just a damned voyeur and their damned obsession.