PrintMaking Meghan Markle make sense
Since Halloween 2016, Meghan Markle has received lots of attention.
Much came with her boyfriend, and later husband, Prince Harry (and his place in the British line of succession). Some was generated by the Sussex Squad, a small, dedicated, and bellicose fan base.
Early on, there was excitement for this newest British royal family member. She was the "brash American," a breath of fresh air for a stuffy palace. Early reports of conflicts with staff and family members were counted as culture clashes. Her go-getter ways were misinterpreted. Staff emails sent at 5 A.M. were a time zone mismatch due to business with California contacts.
Some Meghan missteps were just odd.
There was her first royal family walkabout with the late Queen Elizabeth II. Wearing a hat that couldn't not be seen as a poo emoji, Meghan was photographed sticking out her tongue at the public. More than once. Apparently seized by inspiration from visiting a charity, she wrote banal words of encouragement ("You are strong," "You are Brave") on the skins of bananas intended for distribution to women that People magazine described as "street sex workers." Riding in an open carriage after her royal wedding ceremony, she was heard dropping an f-bomb.
While expecting her son Archie, Meghan's bump size fluctuated wildly, sparking allegations of moon bump use and a fictional or surrogate pregnancy. Lady Collin Campbell speculated several times, on her YouTube channel, that Meghan might wear a moon bump while pregnant for attention, to conceal the due date, or to conform to Hollywood convention, where pregnant characters always look ready to pop.
Signs surfaced that the tales of strife swirling around this misfit duchess weren't just overdramatized misunderstandings.
An unprecedented nine of Meghan's staff resigned. Harry and Meghan told the queen that Archie was too young to fly to Scotland to visit, just before flying with the baby to Elton John's French estate. As Prince Philip was dying, Oprah's interview aired their vague accusations of royal racism (which Harry denied to British journalist Tom Bradby two years later).
Harry claimed they asked permission to name their second child after the queen. The baby's name was not Elizabeth, but Lilibet, the queen's intimate nickname she'd requested never be spoken after Philip died. Meghan's father has begged to resume contact with her, which she ended after his heart attack just days before her wedding.
On the public stage, Meghan speaks incessantly of compassion and elevating women's voices, and change.
I recently watched a video from a series on the YouTube channel Cheere Denise, showing the host's comments on Tom Bower's "Revenge."
She voiced astonishment that Meghan clearly communicates how to live a decent life, and sympathy for less fortunate people (in Markle's preferred words, "the marginalized"), without demonstrating those principles in life.
Cheere Denise is not alone in her bafflement. Meghan's inconsistencies go way beyond a disconnect between expressed ideals and private behavior.
Stories from her own life, told multiple times, were consistently inconsistent. International fame created opportunities for many people to notice, collect, and attempt to fit the pieces together.
In Meghan's New York Times op-ed, her 2020 miscarriage started while changing Archie's diaper.
In Netflix's Harry & Meghan, Episode 6, cramps started as she greeted a visitor at the door.
In Spare, after waking up with cramps and bleeding, she collapsed on the floor.
There's her please-don't-tell-it-again story, broadcast by Nickelodeon's Nic News in 1993, wherein 11-year-old Meghan's complaint letter to P&G about a sexist dish soap ad changed the world.
In one telling, critiquing advertisements was a homework assignment. Another version had her watching TV at home, infuriated by the ad. When her classroom's TV happened to show the ad, two boys commented that she wouldn't like it.
A mismatch between witnesses' and the Sussexes' reports, the "nearly catastrophic car chase" in Manhattan, was a scenario so implausible that an IMDB search yields one result: a 1961 promotional film about Chase Manhattan Plaza (the French Connection chase was set in Coney Island). No lawsuits have been announced.
For a while, I suspected that inattention to consistency was a hangover of sloppy old habits, developed when ghosting friends and noping out of events wouldn't have followed Meghan far. Inconsequential for a Hollywood wannabe or a small fish in the small pond of Toronto (where she'd latched onto Canada's beautiful people like fish that nibble parasites off sharks' skins), but famous people's inconsistent stories do get noticed.
Watching Cheere Denise's bafflement, it hit me why Meghan is so maddeningly indifferent to discontinuity. It's irrelevant to her purposes. She doesn't see herself, as we do, as someone living her life.
Meghan's creating a grand production — arranging scenes and set pieces that will eventually be the movie: It's Her Wonderful Life. She's writer, director, producer, and star — ready for her close-up, Mr. DeMille.
She could say to Oprah she was an only child. She was playing a character who'd been an only child. Young Meghan sharing a bathroom with her half-sister wasn't relevant. If it's part of a movie, actions unlike her statements aren't hypocrisy — just a character named Meghan played by an actress named Meghan. Her public speeches don't have to make sense, just feature photogenic moments and words like "impact" and "sustainable."
Now, add a Hollywood practice called scrapbooking — filming a movie or show with no script or outline, then, after filming, selecting scenes to string together. (The Blair Witch Project and the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters had no scripts. Famously, Casablanca was written during filming.)
Even a scripted film's problem scenes can be edited or cut.
Scrapbooking a production explains why Meghan is indifferent that people see her as villainous, but incandescent when unflattering opinions of her are published. Nobody cares if a movie star is difficult off set. But bad reviews can tank a movie.
