Full disclosure, y’all, I am not entirely sure I’ve ever heard anyone in the current Royal Family actually talk for more than thirty seconds in my life. I read lots of gossip about them. Hell, I’ve been watching things about them since I was a kid! But the only one I ever actually sat and listened to was Princess Diana when she gave her explosive Panorama interview in 1995 and talked openly about how her POS husband was cheating on her throughout their entire marriage. (Whoops, he’s the King of England now!)
What I’m saying is that I didn’t watch Harry and Meghan in their Oprah interview and I haven’t listened to Meghan’s podcast. Everything I know comes from gossip blogs, and whoo boy, are those vicious! They would have me believe that I have to choose sides between the entire history of England and Meghan Markle, an American actress from the show Suits. Not only that, but everything bad that happens to the Royals is Meghan’s fault, and there is a neverending catfight between her and her sister-in-law, Princess Kate.
People, I am a feminist. I reject this nonsense idea that two women must be pitted against each other. It’s sexist media manipulation and I want you to understand that. You have been told for months now that the Harry & Meghan Netflix documentary, directed by Liz Garbus, is about Meghan leading Harry astray and forcing him, using her evil womanly wiles, to trash his family. Judging by the first episode, you have been told wrong.
This is Harry coming for the British tabloid media that destroyed his mother’s life.
AND I AM HERE FOR IT.
The ghost of Diana hangs over the documentary as it clearly hangs over Harry’s life, and I’d be lying if I said the images of Princess Di’s death didn’t hit me nearly as hard all these years later as they did at the time. I remember watching her funeral with tears streaming down my cheeks, astonished even then at my silliness over a stranger. But it wasn’t Diana that made me cry back then, it was Harry. It was that little boy, and that little envelope on her coffin. It was the obvious grief in his eyes. More than that, it was the obvious, blatant wrongness of forcing that child to walk down a street in front of thousands of people and millions of eyes via camera, living that nightmare. But no one could stop it from happening. It was what the Royal Family did, who they were, and how we interacted with them. They put on a public show of traditional royal pomp and we watched. It seemed exploitative but also…expected?
I really feel, with Diana’s death and the creeping realization of our own voyeuristic complicity in her sons’ grief, that public understanding of the Royal Family began to change. The conversation finally cracked open a little then, with celebrities speaking out about the paparazzi culture that chased Diana to her death. Was it entirely the fault of the paps that her car crashed? No, but they absolutely contributed. More than that, the lack of protection from the Royal Family contributed. The lack of any boundaries between public and private lives for that family contributed to the tabloids’ feeling–and the public’s feeling–that the Royals don’t deserve privacy.
Here’s the thing: they didn’t choose it. They were born into it. Except those women, am I right? The ones who marry in–Diana, Kate, Meghan. They choose it, so they don’t get to complain about being followed everywhere they go by a hundred men with cameras who hide and use telephoto lenses to sneak the juiciest shots of them in their most private moments. They don’t get to complain when their phones are hacked or their private calls recorded and released, right?
Wrong. Of course they do. They are not prey. It’s a disgusting culture of exploitation, and it’s the one Prince Harry grew up in.
In this first episode, we see video footage of him at a few hours old, being presented to the press like an offering. At the time, as a child myself, I thought it was a wonderful thing to see this footage. Through the eyes of someone who’s given birth, I now see the panic on poor Diana’s face, being forced out there so soon, her newborn in her arms.
Harry tells us, over footage of Diana playing with her sons, that he doesn’t have many early memories of her. Instead, “the majority of my memories are of being swarmed by the paparazzi.” On family trips, he tells us, there was always someone jumping out of the bushes with a camera. Within the family, the advice was don’t feed into it, don’t react, and there was always pressure, there were always tears, especially from Diana. He implies that this was when he began to realize that he was part of something strange, that his family was different.
We see the royal children on a ski trip, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie quite small, trying to get up a snowy hill but being prevented by reporters. “Paparazzi used to harass us to the point that we had to be forced into smiling and answering questions to the smiling press pack,” Harry explains. On the video, the little princesses look ready to cry and young Harry asks if they’re okay.
Is this all manipulative? For sure. But why shouldn’t Liz Garbus fight fire with fire? Why shouldn’t Harry? His story has been told by a manipulative press his entire life, after all, and in his mind the press has actually shaped the events of his life.
He kept his relationship with Meghan secret for as long as he could because every other romantic relationship he ever had was, within months, destroyed by the media–with not only his girlfriends but also their families splashed across the pages of the tabloids.
One of his school friends describes getting to know Harry shortly after Diana’s death, when there seemed to be an agreement in place between the Palace and the media that Harry and William would be left alone while at school. And then, when school was over–apparently at age 14–the friend describes “day one, we left the house, a scrum like nothing I’d ever seen” of paparazzi outside yelling for Harry. We see the footage of this scrawny kid, accosted by a hundred men with cameras. Imagine your eighth grader having to run that gauntlet on his own and tell me that’s okay because he was born famous.
As Harry goes through Eton, the headlines follow–he’s smoking pot, he’s dating. He tells us he was followed everywhere, and often chased on foot down the street. As a teenager. “It was too much,” Harry says, his voice breaking even now.
At this point, Harry went to Lesotho and spent some time with Prince Seeiso, with whom he later founded Sentebale, and we feel Harry’s relief from the relentless UK press. It’s interesting to see this connection to Africa, that it’s more than simply continuing Diana’s work begun with Seeiso’s mom, it’s actually that this was a place and a people who took care of young Harry, which did not happen in England. I’ve always assumed the Africa work was Harry doing the typical colonialist noblesse oblige, but, this documentary would have us believe, in fact Africa is Harry’s psychological lifeline.
Sprinkled throughout, of course, is the story of how Harry and Meghan met and fell in love. It’s cute. It’s sweet. They had a long-distance courtship and then finally spent a week together in Africa and fell in love. I don’t know, I’m a sucker for romance. I buy it. I don’t know why anyone would put up with the nightmare of the British tabloids if she weren’t actually in love–it looks horrible. And Meghan Markle was already rich and somewhat famous. She could do whatever she wanted. What did dating a prince get her?
Robert Hazell, a British historian, says the Royals live in a gilded cage lacking freedom and autonomy to choose their own futures, religions, careers, and spouses. Harry talks about how even getting Meghan through the gates into Kensington Palace while they were secretly dating was a risk because the police might rat them out to the paparazzi.
And when his brother Prince William’s spokesman tells them they’ve been scooped by the tabloids, they know what’s coming. They go out that night in Halloween costumes with Harry’s face covered, to have one last night of being regular people, and the next morning their lives change.
Instantly the racism begins in the headlines. The first episode ends with one headline that sets the stage and reminds us how we really shouldn’t think it’s all just silliness when the tabloids engage in this level of misogyny and racism: “Meghan is a version of the antichrist.”
Harry–or Liz Garbus–makes a point throughout of how much worse the exploitation is for the women of the family. Not only Meghan, but also images of Kate appear. And Diana, always Diana. For me, the most satisfying moment of the entire episode was when Prince Harry, who starts off the documentary by telling us that his job is to “expose the exploitation and bribery within the British media” talks about Diana’s infamous Panorama interview with Martin Bashir. God bless Harry, he is no longer following directions from The Firm. He cuts right through the bullshit spin the Palace has put on the Panorama interview it in order to bury that most damaging of PR hits to the new King (the BBC is no longer allowed to air the interview): “She was deceived into giving the interview, but at the same time she spoke the truth of her experience.”
Damn right she did, and now so is he. I can’t wait to watch the rest!
