Episode 3: Harry & Meghan
Episode 3: Harry & Meghan
Changing heart and mind ****
Third episode’s a charm? I think so. I mentioned Bryony Gordon’s op-ed in the Telegraph in my previous post, and I have to mention it again on account of Gordon’s statement to the effect that H & M are not attempting to change hearts and minds. They may not have set out with that intention, but I can say categorically that this heart and mind has been… altered. Misgivings are banished. Preconceived notions are slowly receding. I might declare myself “Team Sussex,” except I am reluctant to take sides—although, the couple has successfully convinced me that the Royal Rota is truly an unprincipled system. The Royal Rota, not the Royal Family, is their enemy. It was only ever the Royal Rota who made the claim—and they did so repeatedly—that Harry and Meghan are in some sort of war against the royals. No, the war is not between brothers; it is not between father and son. It is not even between sisters-in-law. The war is between “Team Sussex” and the Royal Rota.
What is the Royal Rota? Harry explains it in the episode. By his description, it sounds much like the White House Press Corps. There is a list of media outlets who have correspondents, and they cover their particular sphere, in this case the royals. The selected “royal correspondents” have preferential access to royals for Court Circular engagements and tours—everything, in short, that the royals do. In exchange for that access, the correspondents get the stories, the scoops, the photos, and all the prestige that goes with it. The royal correspondents (“experts,” so called) are the ones who write the bestselling royal biographies. The Daily Telegraph, the Times, the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express—they all have royal correspondents, royal editors, and royal photographers who belong to the Royal Rota. “So all royal news goes through the filter of all the newspapers within the Royal Rota,” says Harry, “most of which, apart from the Telegraph, happen to be tabloids.” (He’s a bit wrong, actually; the Times is in the Royal Rota and, like the Telegraph, is a broadsheet, not a tabloid. But honestly, the broadsheets are all working within the same framework as the tabloids. Although they don’t pay for stories, and although they try to have a different tone, they occasionally report on the same things that the tabloids are reporting on.) Harry’s family, the Royal Family, “this family,” as he puts it, is there to be exploited by the Royal Rota. All the pain, the suffering, the crises, the drama—it’s all there for the Royal Rota to profit from.
Inserted alongside imagery of royals in action, there is a fascinating quote from now-King Charles, from when he was a much younger Prince of Wales: “Cameras poking at you from every quarter, and recording every twitch. If you don’t try to work out in your own mind some kind of method for existing, and surviving this kind of thing, you would go mad, I think.”
James Holt, the Executive Director at the Archewell Foundation, explains the “game” (the unspoken deal) that exists between Royal Family and Royal Rota. If you play for the cameras, if you play nicely, you will be covered gently. If you don’t play nicely, the Royal Rota will take every opportunity to print “or highlight negative” stories about you.
Newcomers to the royal family must be vetted. The Royal Rota needs to find the dirt on them, whether to exploit now or later. They poked around every aspect of Meghan’s life, every corner of the globe where they might find her friends and family. Doria Ragland, her mother, was a wall, but they found lots of dirt on the other side of Meghan’s family. They even found her father, Thomas Markle, willing to pose and talk. Meghan’s half-sister, Samantha Markle, eagerly jumped at every opportunity to feed the beast negative stories about Meghan.
Samantha and Meghan are polar opposites. Whatever one says, the other denies. The story is never identical between them. Everything clashes. Samantha claims to have been close to Meghan when the latter was growing up. Meghan denies ever being close to Samantha. Oddly enough, and Meghan happily admits in the episode that she is extremely close to Samantha’s biological but estranged daughter. When Ashleigh Hale reconnected with the Markle family, she found a kindred spirit in her nearly-the-same-age “aunt” Meghan. Yet while Meghan and Ashleigh are dear friends, Ashleigh is entirely on the outs with her mother. The production team for the documentary reached out to Samantha for comment and were told that quotes attributed to her had been “fabricated” by the media. Bizarre! Keeping up with the Markles, it’s exhausting! But if Meghan’s family has some ruptures, there was plenty of conflict in Harry’s family too. The “Blackamoor brooch” worn by Princess Michael of Kent is trotted out in the episode as a strike against the royals. This is part of what Harry calls “a huge level of unconscious bias.” It’s no one’s fault, he says, because unconsciousness cannot be held accountable, but once there is awareness, it is incumbent on us to learn to do better. “It’s education, it’s awareness, and it’s constant; it’s a constant work in progress for everybody, including me,” he says. I’m glad that he addressed his infamous “Nazi uniform” scandal from 2005. If we talk about Princess Michael’s Blackamoor brooch, we have to talk about the swastika armband at the “Colonials and Natives” costume party. Harry was either 19 or 20 when a fellow partygoer took the notorious flip-phone picture of his racist costume. His father’s press office went into overdrive to soften the scandal. Harry was deployed to meetings with Holocaust survivors and Jewish clergy. He brushes over it rather quickly, insisting that he did the hard work to deal with the shame and regret, and he committed to doing and being better. But then the series pivots to Harry and Meghan visiting Mcguire Air Force Base in 2021. This is merged with Harry telling us about his ten years of active duty in the British army. This is presented as the catalyst that broke the bubble of his existence. He was born into a fishbowl—a fishbowl that was pierced by the Nazi armband scandal, thus letting a new awareness, a new consciousness inside him. And then the fishbowl was pierced again by his military service, especially by his two deployments to conflict zones in Afghanistan. And, as he reminds us, all that was before Meghan!
Meghan entered the royal fishbowl from the outside. We see the new “Fab Four”—a quaint description invented by the Royal Rota for Harry, Meghan, William, and Kate. They were meant to be four patrons united for the Royal Foundation, an umbrella charity originally set up with William and Harry as joint patrons, but successively expanded to include their wives. (Now, it’s just William and Kate, since the other pair have established their own court.) We see Meghan in the hot seat, committing what is regarded as a bit of a faux pas in mentioning controversial movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp. This was another line Meghan had to learn (the hard way) not to cross if she was going to have a longterm future in the Royal Family. There is a very fine line that royal patrons must walk, and there is a subtle boundary meant to keep them from being activistic. Political discourse has to be diplomatic and neutral. The royals cannot be partisan. They have to be inclusive and respectful of all citizens’ points of view. That was new territory for Meghan, given her fairly well publicized statements in support of the Democratic Party and very obviously against Donald Trump. That was fine for Meghan Markle, but it would have to change if she meant to live and work the rest of her days as HRH the (“working royal”) Duchess of Sussex.
Circling back to racism, the documentary addresses the colonial, imperial roots of the British Commonwealth of Nations. In the first half of the 20th century, Empire was making its last stand. It was on the downward slope, especially after World War II. The powers that be in “Crown and Country” saw the writing on the wall. They acted accordingly, to ride the tide in a way that protected longterm political and commercial interests. Nations were carried through the transition from colony to independence, and the monarchy remains intact over this international network so that, for so long Queen Elizabeth II, and now King Charles III is the head of state in Belize no less than in the British Isles. The Sussex camp has taken the daring (and not unreasonable) position that challenges the notion that the Commonwealth is entirely good. On the one hand, Monarchy and Commonwealth are glue that bind nations and people together. As with many things, however, there is an underbelly. Systemic corruption, poverty, and inequalities persist. They introduce the topic in this episode, and they float curious ideas, but fail to round them out. It feels like the couple trying to work out this other layer of Old World, historical injustice. I’m hoping they return to this topic in Volume 2.
The episode ends on the sad note of Meghan’s father’s betrayal. Here again, as with the sister drama, we have two opposing narratives—two truths completely at odds with each other. Irreconcilable, like Harry and Meghan themselves trying to navigate a higher level of consciousness in a world full of conflict and drama. The father feels betrayed and ghosted by the daughter. The daughter feels betrayed, but maintains that it was he who abandoned her. She says he would not answer her texts and phone calls. Whoever you choose to believe, it’s a horrible story. A father lost his daughter and a daughter lost her father. Harry, caught in the middle, takes it hard, for he believes that if he and Meghan never fell in love, she would still have her father.
That’s it for Volume 1. Volume 2 comes out on tomorrow. I’m giving Volume 1 four stars for editing, direction, and story.