National Post (National Edition)
Katrina Onstad, Colby Cosh, plus how we got here.
We get the royal wedding we deserve. Harry’s parents threw a very ’80s shindig, and not just because of the pirate-puffed dress sleeves. Down the aisle walked Diana, a maudlin bride who refused to include the word “obey” in her vows and would one day seek marital emancipation like a late blooming secondwaver. Then there was Charles, sputtering the last gasp of generational masculine duty, who would take only 15 years to stand up to mom.
And now Meghan and Harry are culturally on trend for the times we’re in. Behold the age of levelling, where commoners act like celebrities and celebrities act like commoners — a trick that led Trump right to the White House. Saturday’s wedding is a reboot of the franchise that is the Royal Family, an attempt by an ancient institution to remake itself in the image of its modern audience, for better (multicultural, accepting) or worse (selfserving, unreal). Either way, for a big, fluffy hetero wedding, this one is actually pretty radical. I’ll definitely be tuning in.
The concept of “ascribed” celebrity — fame that one is born into — and “achieved” celebrity — fame that’s earned — merges beautifully in Harry and Meghan. In this supernova of stardom, we see the distance between the elite and the masses collapsing, which is pretty much how fame functions these days.
Digital life means we expect a new kind of intimacy from modern celebrities. They should broadcast their brunch selections, maybe even like our Tweets, and definitely not be hidden away behind castle walls. At the same time, we cultivate our own mini-celebrity statuses posting our brunch selections and kids’ reports cards, tending our brands hourly. Availability — online, or in the media, and always carefully curated — has become a potent currency.
Royalty used to require the opposite; reserve and remoteness are the source of its power. But Meghan comes from our world, and we’re going to expect the new instalment of the Royals (Royals: Infinity War?) to share and post and let us in. To an extent, they’re already doing so, thus avoiding becoming obsolete. Celebs and normals: united at last in self-promotion.
Markle and Kate Middleton are both outsiders to the Royal Family, adding some fresh DNA to the gene pool as a preventative strike against webbed feet etc.
This is good news for the dusty holdover that is the British monarchy, which has been snailishly inching towards “modernization” since losing Diana, trying to figure out how it fits into this accelerated, borderless world. That process has involved a slow and steady unclenching of the royal sphincter that’s allowed the family to behave, little by little, more humanly.
The Queen thumbs-upped her son’s second marriage, and participated in an Olympics opening ceremony sketch with Daniel Craig. She even pays taxes these days. Meanwhile, Will and Harry have spoken openly about their emotional lives after their mother died, upper lips slowly unstiffening. Yes, every move out of Kensington is orchestrated within an inch of its life, but the intent is to show that the monarchy ain’t so high-falutin’ after all (and certainly not at all in need of overthrowing! No, not at all! Look! Over there: Funko Pop! dolls in the shape of the Queen and her corgi!)
Nothing says “common” like major screw-ups days before the wedding. Who can’t relate to the pre-nuptial nervous breakdown that Markle must be experiencing this week? Many brides and grooms have grappled with parental letdown and the spectre of uninvited guests. So when Markle’s dad did something totally embarrassing and/or got sick mere days before the wedding, and some rando relatives (her half-brother’s ex-wife Tracy and her sons Tyler and Thomas) showed up in London without invitations, we get it. This is the kind of garden-variety dysfunction that occurs at any wedding, just on a bigger scale. It makes Markle all the more adorable, really. She’s really embracing her role as one of us.
The more surprising rebel in this union is Prince Harry.
After centuries of arranged marriages, here he is making a bold choice of his own, even oneupping his big brother, who also went the “commoner” route. But Meghan is no rich Brit from the University of St. Andrews, like Kate.
She’s an American
… divorced … actress…of colour.
Suck it, Will.
Of course, we always suspected that Harry would be the one to shove this wacky family into the present. With almost zero chance of becoming King, he’s had a little more room to move around in the world. He’s talked about doing his own grocery shopping and just wanting to be ordinary. As a reformed party boy, he seems like the royal most comfortable with a new, less rigid kind of masculinity, admitting he sought treatment for mental health issues and calling out the press for being racist about his girlfriend. He’s shacking up with an older divorcee and appears to be super cool with all the baggage that comes with a complex, fully actualized 2018 woman. He’s practically a millennial — check out the beard.
Of course, calling Markle a commoner is somewhat disingenuous: Harry’s not exactly marrying the cashier from the aforementioned grocery store (sorry it didn’t happen for you, Ashleigh). Hers is a particular type of celebrity that didn’t exist a generation ago. She had middling fame in a supporting TV role, but was mostly known by those who did know her at all for her stylishness on social media, and the way she leveraged that TV role to speak out on social issues. Google Meghan Markle and up high is a video of her speaking at a 2015 UN Women conference, proudly declaring herself a feminist.
But perhaps nothing anchors her more in the present than the fact that she’ll be a Windsor of mixed race background. This is a big deal for the monarchy, a white institution that has often governed black bodies. Markle’s is the first black body invited to join the family, and that really is radical.
Biographer Andrew Morton recently said he thought the Queen would be ecstatic about the match. He told the Telegraph: “If you were sitting in a script office in Hollywood, and you said ‘give me a character that will make them relevant for the next 100 years’, they would have said: OK, she’s biracial, divorced and an actor.” This seems correct but also creepy, and I don’t think we should be too cynical about the wedding of Meghan and Harry. Their marriage feels more inevitable than constructed, a product of the age which reared them (and us), as self-conscious and idealistic as a #blessed Instagram post.
Plus, it’s not so romantic to think that Harry flipped through binders full of women until he found his perfect celebrity counterpart, yin to his yang. And all symbolism aside, they do seem to like each other. Then again, when I used to play wedding with my Barbie and Ken dolls, posing them over and over and over, eventually they, too, started to seem real.