davailable today on Netflix i first three episodes of Harry and Meghan (the next 3 will be released on December 15th). Through videos, unpublished photos, archive images, the opinion of experts and friends, their story is retraced. The common thread is privacy: «Meghan gave up her freedom for me. I gave up royal duties for her». And so a skein unravels with at the center their love, the conflict with the media, the constant comparisons between Meghan and Dianathe discomfort towards the Crown in the racist centuries.
There is still no trace of photo-gaffefor which they have been accused of photo-montage (paparazzi photos, used to tell the fury on Harry and Meghan, who however were there for something else). Instead, one immediately senses the meaning of those sentences spoken by Harry in the trailer: “We are the victims of a dirty game”, “A hate campaign against Meghan to satisfy the goals of certain people”, up to the accusation of racism against Meghan.
The first episode tells the birth of their love story, dwelling on the comparisons between the former American actress and Lady Diana, («Meghan is very similar to my motherhas the same compassion, empathy, security, has the warmth of my mother,” she says). The second episode explains who Meghan is: he talks about her, her mother, her father, her friends, focusing on her being mestizo, therefore on the problems related to ethnicity that lead to racism. The third speaks of the period from their official engagement to the day before the wedding. The claustrophobic sense of persecution experienced due to the paparazzi and the media that tormented them is always described.
Harry and Meghan: on the first date he is half an hour late
First of all the royal couple who self-exiled in California, in one super villa in Montecito, answers a trivial question that everyone asks themselves: why make a series about their story? Harry replies: “Books, newspaper articles, photos, any kind of news about us have come out. All fake things. It does not make sense. The level of exploitation was too much. We want to be the ones to tell the truth. And this is not just about our story».
Because we talk about the duties of the court that crush (especially women). And there is talk of the relationship with the media that “stalkerize”. And of racism.
So here is how the truth of Harry and Meghan begins. They met on Instagram: a mutual friend had posted a video of her having dog ears. Harry gets curious. She learns from a friend that the Prince of England wants to meet her, but instead of immediately saying “yes”, Meghan first wants to understand who she is (as if she were a complete stranger).
He sifts through Harry’s social profiles, sees environmentalist photos from his time in Africa, understands that there may be a similar sensitivity, in the end he accepts. They exchange phone numbers and set up a first dinner date in London. He arrives half an hour late because he is stuck in traffic. Out of breath, sweaty and mortified, Meghan understands that it is not the “classic who pulls it”.
The day after, on the second dinner date, she is the one who arrives late (“But only by 5 minutes,” she says). He confesses that he has drawn up a list with the characteristics that his ideal woman should have. Meghan had them all about her (but what the characteristics of the list were is not known, Harry refuses to show it).
Meghan as Lady Diana
It’s love right away. But Harry solemnly replenishes it by saying, “In my family, you have to marry someone with royalties, rather than the one you seem destined to spend the rest of your life with. It’s the difference between deciding with your head and with your heart. My mother made most decisions with her heart. And I am my mother’s son».
At this point Harry’s childhood is told, growing up happy and carefree, but always tormented by the paparazzi. Don’t miss the image of dad Carlo cuckooing him with a handkerchief. Nostalgic is the old original video of mother Diana facing a paparazzi while they are in the snow, putting her hand on the video camera: «I want to defend my children».
Harry gets straight to the point: «Since we were children we have been tormented by the paparazzi. I’ve always been uncomfortable. The photographers they were incorrect: they agreed on photos, but then continued to follow us on the sly». The examples of their torment are varied. We arrive at the tragic epilogue of Diana’s funeral, and it is always heartbreaking to see William and Harry, small and strutting, behind the coffin. «I don’t want history to repeat itself,” Harry says in the series. It is his obsession with him: to find a partner willing to put up with this media intrusion that he defines as “ferocious”. Once found (Meghan, in fact), the fear, indeed the terror, of losing her is triggered.
The only solution for Harry is to keep the story a secret for as long as possible. They finally fall in love on a five day Botswana holiday. To be seen is Meghan who often flies from Canada to England. And when the two learn that the scoop on their relationship will come out the next morning, they go wild at the disco in the evening. It was October 2016. «Then everything changed,” they say.
Meghan, the family, being mixed, the first time with William, Kate and the queen
We are on the second episode. Now that the story is public, Meghan has to learn to deal with popularity. «Don’t respond to paparazzi. If you even smile, they think you like him,” Harry tells her. Thus began a “very difficult period”. Meghan is being stalked on the set of Suits, sitcom in which he was the protagonist. The media begin to dig into her past, and the Netflix series is an opportunity to take stock of her family. Black mother, English father. Parents who separate when she’s not even a teenager. Meghan is seen growing up peacefully with her mother. From an early age she dreams of becoming famous. She suffers when as a child, for the first time, she is called black (but in the series he never pronounces black, he says: «that word with the n»).
The noble intention of unhinging all forms of racism permeates all the episodes. In the second emerge the numbers: “England is a white market. Blacks are 3.5% of the population and 0.2% of journalists. A woman, black or mestizo, becomes easy prey».
Then back to the story of the couple. On the first time Meghan met William and Kate. «At a dinner I showed up in ripped jeans, barefoot, I hugged everyone. I didn’t know the formalists,” says Meghan. Her first meeting with her queen came as a surprise: “I had to have tea with Harry, he in the car says to me:” Can you curtsey? Jokes?”. Then she improvises a bow with open arms in front of Elisabetta. “Did I go well?”, he says right after. We do not know the reaction of the late Elizabeth. Then the episode ends with the wedding request: on the lawn of Kensington Palace Harry puts 15 candles, uncorks a bottle of champagne, kneels down and asks for her hand. She: yes, it’s a dream.
Harry and Meghan: the paparazzi who pay 100 thousand euros for fake photos of Meghan’s relatives
The third episode begins with the image of the engagement ring (a central diamond from Botswana with two smaller lateral ones taken from a Diana brooch, then the jewel it has been modified). And it ends the day before the wedding. In between is all the mass of falsehoods that the media have told about Harry and Meghan. She who comes from “a ghetto”, her half-sister Samantha (father’s daughter) who pretends to be a dear relative, while Meghan says she has only seen her twice. The intimate relationship that she instead she has with Ashleigh, daughter of Samantha, raised away from her biological mother. The trauma of not having been able to invite her to the wedding to avoid further scandals.
And the ruthless media willing to pay 70 thousand, 100 thousand dollars for fake photos of relatives (with a friend of Meghan they didn’t succeed, with dad they did). And the pain of the duchess when she found out from the newspapers that her father would not have come to the wedding and would not have led her to the altar, as planned.
Also in the foreground are the charitable activities of Harry and Meghan, their humanitarian commitment, the exursus on Harry’s experience in Afghanistan as an Apache helicopter pilot. «They made me very different from my royal family». And again references to the colonial splendors of Great Britain which abolished the slave trade in 1807 and “the slave empire” in 1830, but also fails to mention that slaveholders were paid £20 million to free the slaves. And Meghan who did everything to integrate into the royal family (“I gave up on color, I only wore neutral clothes, I didn’t want to appear,” she says).
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