It’s been another of those non-stop weeks for me but there seems to be only one big international story, namely the Meghan and Harry intervew with Oprah. I wasn’t going to watch it but found myself sucked in by the spectacle. The aftermath has left the Royal Family with some tricky questions to answer, Piers Morgan out of a job, and Meghan Markle with an even more polarised standing between her admirers and detractors.
The more I watched the more conscious I became of Meghan’s previous roles as an actor and a social media ‘influencer’. If she wanted to press two hot buttons she could have hardly chosen better than ‘race’ and ‘mental health’. Her revelations that someone in the Royal Family wondered how “dark” Archie might be, were enough to send the liberal heart of America into convulsions. Who would have thought it!? Her confession of suicidal thoughts showed how cold and callous the Royals were, how out-of-touch with all the current therapeutic thinking. Another shocking realisation!
Call me a cynic, but what did she expect? It’s hardly news that the Queen and her mob are not the most warm and wonderful people. They have spent their entire lives doing their duty, facing up to their responsibilities… and hating it. They are glorified figureheads that reside in a gilded cage. If they opened themselves up to the caring & sharing ways of the world, as recommended by The Guardian, the entire institution would probably crumble to dust, like fresh air destroying the murals in some ancient tomb.
Meghan, however, seems to have imagined herself as the new Lady Di, destined to humanise this age-old instititution and make it a force for good. She failed, and quickly wanted out. The Windsors probably wish they had never let her in. Now she has trashed them internationally, and the Queen can only reply demurely that “recollections may differ”.
While they detest the British tabloids Meghan and Harry have a far more welcoming approach to the American media. In England they shunned publicity, but as new Hollywood celebrities they embrace it. I’m not about to have a Piers Morgan moment but there was something about the studied sincerity of the Oprah interview that smacked of calculation. Meghan is hardly the only woman to suffer depression during or after pregnancy, but nobody has ever weaponised their depression so successfully. As for the race card, that’s a nuclear strike in today’s world, in which some anonymous Royal speculating about Archie’s pigmentation becomes just as heinous as a policeman kneeling on George Floyd’s throat. It’s interesting to note that the couple’s popularity has plummeted in the UK while it has risen the United States. Whatever trials Meghan and Harry suffered during their brief stint as official ambassadors for “the Firm” (as they call it), by virtue of the Oprah interview their story has now become a media event. The way their grievances were stage-managed will forever influence the way they are perceived in the future. They have embraced the idea of life as a public soap opera, keeping themselves in the spotlight even as they claim they only want to set the record straight and play happy families.
To this is more a story about the self-consuming nature of celebrity, which feeds on public displays of scandal and redemption. Better to be loved and loathed in equal measure than to be simply forgotten. While Meghan and Harry may have a sincere desire to use their high profile to do good, they obviously have no intentions of being ignored.
Back to the world of art, there are two columns this time around because the newspaper got so excited about Bill Henson’s show at Roslyn Oxley9 they ran the review in mid-week, almost as soon as I’d filed it. This means they had room to use the Margel Hinder review that had been sitting on the shelf for a while. They are very different pieces – Henson always brings out a speculative dimension, while the Hinder show is a slice of local art history. I’ll run the former straight away, and send you to the newspaper page for the latter, at least until Tuesday.
The film column looks at the 2021 Alliance Française French Film Festival, which has its good points and bad points. On the whole, the festival is an amazingly good thing – a raging success with an Aussie public whose adoration for French movies never slackens. The French film industry has its own cast of celebrities who appear in one feature after another, but they’re very unlikely to sit down with Oprah to tell the sad story of their lives to millions of people. When it comes to acting I’ll take Isabelle Huppert over Meghan Markle any day.