When a fairy tale becomes a horror movie
Anyone with a scintilla of empathy who watched Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, and her husband, a certain Duke of Sussex known to millions as Prince Harry, only one verdict about the centurieslong grift by the British royal family is possible — they are the most discreet and well-mannered monsters in existence.
Or more precisely, the system that produces, perpetuates and, arguably, “protects” the royals is inhumane and inclined toward creating more monsters in its image. Both Meghan and Harry referred to the royal apparatus at Buckingham Palace that drove them to resort to self-exile to protect their sanity as “The Firm.”
As Meghan and Harry shared their struggles with the royal family in dignified sighs with Oprah, I kept thinking of the only movie that provides an uncanny parallel to their real-life predicament — Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror classic “Get Out.”
Much like the royal reality, which is far scarier it seems, “Get Out” is about being paralyzed by a diabolical, upscale social order and forced to live out a monstrous new existence where you’re forced to smile whether you’re naturally inclined to do so or not.
It was easy to see Meghan as Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris Washington character, striving with all his might to break out of “the sunken place” to which he’d been exiled by his girlfriend’s family as tears streamed down his face.
Prior to “winning” the princess sweepstakes, Meghan Markle was a minor American starlet. She quickly learned after marrying into the family that she was expected to live a bifurcated existence as a symbol of the British royals’ commitment to a multicultural future while juggling roles as both a smiling courier to the former colonies and an ever-compliant victim of bullying by the sadistic keepers of the palace decorum.
Meghan Markle told an astonished Ms. Winfrey that a year after her royal wedding, she was in such a dark and sunken place that despite being five months pregnant and the world’s most adored princess bride, she “didn’t want to be alive anymore.”
“What?” Oprah asked before using the word “suicide” in a follow-up question. Ever the deft interviewer, Ms. Winfrey rarely let the dust settle before following each revelation that came with the regularity of traffic lights in midtown traffic, with the next most logical question that had to be asked. Still, Oprah did so with empathy even as she pushed the disillusioned duchess to be more specific.
Out of Meghan Markle’s own mouth came tales of microaggressions, routine tabloid media takedowns of her image and cries from the heart about psychic pains caused by the royals that summoned the ghost of her even more glamorous mother-in-law Princess Diana, who was chased down like an elegant gazelle by paparazzi three decades ago.
“I just didn’t want history to repeat itself,” Prince Harry said explaining why they had to resign from the royal family business and retreat to California to raise chickens when Oprah followed up with questions regarding some of Ms. Markle’s most explosive allegations.
One couldn’t help but alternate between feelings of horror and titillation watching the interview as it unfolded. This was as sordid a morality tale as could be imagined and contained every sin beginning with “C” from colonial privilege to colorism. The only horror missing was cannibalism, but at the rate the revelations were coming, even that could’ve fit right in.
By the time Prince Harry pushed back against Oprah’s legitimate inquiry about the identity of the person who brought up the subject of their baby’s potential skin tone as a “problem,” millions of us watching at home knew we were actually watching the BBC version of America’s centuries long racial freakout.
We knew in our bones that the torture of Meghan Markle wasn’t the result of a class-based, raceneutral animus aimed at an American commoner. It was the same colonial-minded, stiff-upper-lip racism that gave birth to the American colonies in the 18th century. It was fear of race-mingling and the scourge of biracial babies who would pollute the bloodlines of unsuspecting Anglos. Whether they intended to or not, the exiled couple were testifying to the pernicious reality of that ideology in its most refined form. In a way, we in America were watching ourselves refracted through a royal funhouse mirror.
It took a royal soap opera to get us thinking about the burden of colonialism and the absurdity of curtseying to royalty, even if the royal is someone’s relatively nice grandmother. Meghan Markle’s pain was a dramatic reminder that in order for a confidence game on the order of the British royal family to continue, there has to be community buy-in. After all, every royal family in the Western world is at its roots a successful crime family that agreed to leave its banditry behind it decades ago in exchange for “rule” in name only, a public stipend, land and royal adoration.
The torture of Meghan Markle laid bare the hypocrisy of this insular privilege. It would’ve been impossible for a woman of color not to have disturbed the status quo of the Windsors in ways it hadn’t been disturbed in a century. Certainly there was nothing in the Windsors’ roots as warlords in medieval Germany that prepared them for a biracial American woman centuries later who identifies as Black and declares herself so unimpressed by their pretentions that she insisted to her prince that they get as far away from it as possible.
The choreographed theater of British royalty is so fragile and soulless that it found itself threatened by an emotionally vulnerable young woman who is selfaware enough to seek a dignified way out of an intolerable situation. Now, when we look at pictures of a smiling Meghan Markle, we can’t help but think of the pain and indignities she was probably dealing with that day. She had to deal with a hostile press pitting her against her popular sister-in-law. She had to deal with a secret miscarriage. She had to deal with suicidal ideation. Naively, she thought she could inject some much-needed humanity into an institution that told her to be quiet, smile mindlessly and do what she was told. Princess Diana failed at that quest, too.
Given the depth and richness of the revelations she was being handed on the equivalent of a silver platter, Oprah wisely decided not to waste any time quizzing Meghan about her estrangement from her father who had acted as a paid agent for British gossipmongers in the runup to the royal wedding. In a less consequential interview, such triviality would’ve been fair game, but Oprah had higher ambitions. She was putting the British royal family and the idea of royalty itself on trial.
The most startling comment came from Prince Harry. At one point, he expressed enormous empathy for his father, Prince Charles and his brother, Prince William, both of whom we sense disappointed him in a major way. He said that they were “trapped” in a system he and Meghan narrowly escaped and that they were unwitting victims of a colonial illusion that killed his mother. It was a stunning ending to a fairy tale that turned out to be a ghost story many centuries old.