“My understanding and my experience of the past four years
is it’s nothing what it looks like.”
Oprah Winfrey’s explosive interview with Prince Harry and Meghan,
Duchess of Sussex,
was an attempt by the couple to reclaim a narrative
which has so far been told about them.
“Were you silent or were you silenced?”
Here are our key takeaways from a deep reading of the interview
and how it defined Meghan’s symbolic role for our era:
as the center of a transatlantic culture war and our times’
biggest challenge to the Royal Family’s future relevance.
“My regret is believing them when they said I would be protected.
I believed that.”
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Netflix series The Crown raises the idea that --
to be a “fairytale” protagonist like Harry’s late mother Princess Diana
-- you have to be seen as a victim.
“To be the protagonist of a fairy tale, you must first be wronged. A victim.”
But after Meghan Markle’s initial “Cinderella story” introduction
into her royal story --
“From the outside, it looked like something
out of a fairytale.”
-- starting around 6 months after Harry and Meghan’s wedding,
the Duchess of Sussex found herself getting cast by the British Press
as a villain.
“The narrative about, you know, making Kate cry, I think,
was the beginning of a real character assassination.”
This began an overarching press narrative in which Kate Middleton,
Duchess of Cambridge,
was the sympathetic victim-slash-hero and Meghan was the antagonist.
“Kate eating avocados to help with morning sickness.”
“Oh, I heard!”
“You were eating avocados; a fruit linked to water shortages.”
In this interview, we see Meghan actively recasting herself
from villain to victim.
“You say the narrative with Kate, it didn't happen.”
“The reverse happened.”
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There was a distinct feeling of déja vu in the many parallels Meghan’s interview
brought out between her and Princess Diana.
“I just wish that we would all learn from the past.”
The very act of giving such a direct and open interview is itself
a reference to Diana --
“My mom even said to me a couple of months ago,
‘Did Diana ever do an interview?’”
-- who shocked the world in 1995 by speaking with unheard-of candor
about her marital troubles with Charles.
“Well, there were three of us in this marriage.
So, it was a bit crowded.”
Like Diana, Meghan spoke about her mental health struggles.
“I just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”
“Just wake up in the morning feeling you didn’t want
to get out of bed.”
“Maybe I was the first person ever to be in this family
whoever had a depression or was ever openly tearful.”
And both women were victims of their own popularity --
hunted by paparazzi and torn down by a bullying British Press.
“The tabloids who are vicious -- they’re bad here,
but they’re vicious over there -- have tried to kill her, literally.”
“Yeah, they have, they have.”
Harry and Meghan clearly wanted to evoke these parallels,
like when they said their Australia Tour was a turning point precisely because
it evoked memories of Diana’s Australia Tour in 1983.
“It was also the first time that the family got to see how
incredible she is at the job.”
“Are you saying that there were hints of jealousy?”
The Crown dramatizes how, starting with this tour,
Diana’s ability to connect with the people of The Commonwealth
made Charles intensely jealous.
“This is supposed to be my tour! And thanks to you--"
“Thanks to me, people have shown up! Thanks to me, people are interested!”
“No! Thanks to you, people are laughing in my face!”
So Harry and Megan draw this comparison purposely to suggest that
Meghan’s overwhelming success threatened today’s other royals.
“Do you all watch the Crown?”
[Meghan laughing]
“I’ve watched some of it, We’ve watched some of it.”
“We watched some of it.”
When Meghan speaks about the intense loneliness
of her royal life --
“I haven’t left the house in… months.”
-- it likewise draws to mind how Season 4 of The Crown
depicts a young Princess Diana alone and isolated in the palace.
And Harry has explicitly said he feared his wife meeting the same tragic end
as his mother.
“My biggest concern was history repeating itself.
Definitely far more dangerous because then you add race in
and you add social media in --
and when I’m talking about history repeating itself,
I’m talking about my- my mother.”
Meghan’s visual styling even alluded to history,
as she wore Diana’s diamond Cartier love bracelet
(likely a gesture to her and Harry’s love story).
Her hairstyle and Armani dress with a lotus evoked a famous shot
of Wallis Simpson, another American and divorcée,
whose marriage to King Edward VIII required him to abdicate the throne.
“He, like Harry, a Windsor who wanted to do thing differently.”
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“There is a level of control by fear that has existed for generations.”
Meghan and Harry painted a picture of the Royal Family
that is governed by fear, “trapping” its members like prisoners
with the mantra that this is how it’s always been.
“It’s a very trapping environment that a lot of them are stuck in.”
Decades ago, Diana too spoke about the coldness of the family --
“Nobody ever helped me at all!”
“No one prepares you?”
“No!” -- as The Crown has also portrayed.
“A cold frozen tundra.”
Perhaps the most fascinating part of the interview was Harry --
the ultimate insider of British society, an actual prince --
speaking openly about things that we might all assume,
but which those in power don’t say.
“What’s termed or referred to as ‘the invisible contract’
behind closed doors.”
He acknowledged that the monarchy’s position is actually more fragile
than we tend to realize --
“The institution survives based on that- on that perception.”
-- and it’s dependent on a friendly national media.
“But I also am acutely aware of where my family stand
and how scared they are of the tabloids turning on them.”
In the late ‘90s, the Royal Family dealt with dangerous unpopularity
after Diana’s death.
“The Royal Family has been accused of not showing enough remorse
over Princess Diana's death.”
Since then, the institution strategically aligned with a press
that can sometimes be deeply ugly and vitriolic.
“There’s a reason that these tabloids have holiday parties… at the palace.”
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For all her echoes of the past, there’s a significant aspect in which
Meghan’s experience differs.
“Do you think it’s because of his race?”
“Concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be
when he’s born.”
“What!?”
It’s undeniable that the British tabloids’ treatment of Meghan
has been straight-up racist.
“Racist abuse online aimed at Meghan Markle.”
“Referring to her as ‘straight outta Compton’.”
“How far they were gonna take it and get away with it,
and be so blatant about it.
That’s the bit that shocked me.”
Meghan also implied there were racial motivations to discussions
about not giving Archie a Prince title.
“While I was pregnant, they said they wanna change
the convention… for Archie.
Well why?”
Though as The Guardian reports, this situation is a little complicated.
According to George V protocols, Archie wouldn’t be entitled
to the Prince title
until his grandfather Charles becomes King,
and the cost-cutting conversation
around quote-unquote “slimming down the monarchy,”
lest it gets bigger with every generation,
does predate Meghan’s entry.
Overall, many see the loss of Harry and Meghan as senior royals
as a missed opportunity --
“It was Harry and Meghan who were supposed to be the modernization.”
-- a development that again evoked how the institution alienated Diana,
a figure who offered great value to their future.
“Perhaps someone like Diana is well placed to--”
“Hug everyone else too?”
“Connect with the modern world.”
“Here you have one of the greatest assets to the Commonwealth
that… the family could have ever wished for.”
As people increasingly feel they need to pick a team
between Harry and Meghan and the Crown,
this puts the Royal Family --
an institution that needs to be perceived as a unifying force --
on one side of a culture war.
The British tabloids
(who once adored the old cheeky royal “bad boy” Harry)
have turned on him for becoming a “woke warrior”
as he’s transitioned into talking about topics like his upcoming
“mental health” project with Oprah
and how he’s been unlearning unconscious racial bias.
“I’ve spent many years doing the work.”
Meghan herself is the primary symbol of this culture-war divide --
“So much of what I have seen play out is this idea of polarity --
where if you love me, you don’t have to hate her
and if you love her, you don’t need to hate me.”
-- which is largely generational --
a development that doesn’t bode well for the future of the institution.
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The interview was full of mentions of “the firm” --
“It’s a family business, right? So there’s the family,
and then there’s the people that are running the institution.”
-- leaving us with a murky picture as to who exactly is responsible
for the “firm’s” decisions.
“So the institution is never a person or is it a series of people?”
“No, it's a person.”
“It’s a person.” “It's several people.”
Harry and Meghan shrewdly expressed love
for the much beloved Queen but attacked the increasingly
less popular institution.
“I went to the institution… and said that I needed
to go somewhere to get help,
and I was told that I couldn’t, that it wouldn’t be good
for the institution.”
And that institution may be in grave trouble when
the far less popular Charles becomes King
(with some advocating for the crown to skip directly to William).
The serious allegations against the Queen’s son Prince Andrew
represent another weakness, while the family seems to benefit
from the British Press being noticeably soft on that story.
“The theory was that they used Meghan as a shield,
and that all the negative media attention that Meghan Markle received
was helpful to them in downplaying Prince Andrew’s relationship
with Jeffrey Epstein.”
This interview was an act of storytelling --
from the wardrobe choices and choice of setting
to the visual window into Meghan and Harry getting
“back to basics” in their $14.5 million dollar mansion --
“I think just being able to live… authentically.
Right, like this kind of stuff that's so... it's so basic,
but it's really fulfilling... and just getting back down to basics.”
-- and plugging their upcoming projects.
“You know Harry and I are working on this mental health series for Apple.”
“How will you use Archewell as… a means of speaking to things
that are important to you in the world?”
We saw Meghan portray herself as a lotus flower
rising above dirty water and a modern-day Little Mermaid.
“She falls in love with the prince, and because of that,
she had to lose her voice.”
(Though you might argue Harry’s Ariel, since he’s the one giving up his fins
for a new world).
If it felt somewhat like a filmed press release,
this might be viewed as a corrective, considering that for a long time
the couple wasn’t allowed to even respond to the narrative
being painted about them.
“They were willing… to lie to protect other members of the family
but they weren’t willing to tell the truth
to protect me and my husband.”
A theme that kept coming out of Meghan’s words
was the disconnect between perception and reality.
“When the perception and the reality are two very different things,
and you’re being judged on the perception.”
Especially as times change, it can be hard to pin down
exactly what the Royal Family is.
But given that its purpose these days is mostly symbolic,
it’s more important than ever to ask oneself:
what should it be a symbol of?
“Now it wasn’t just about her, but it was about what she represents.”
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