Trauma & Influencers=$$$
But they’re influencers! They identify as enthralling!
Sadly, though, nobody wants to listen to their podcast.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that one podcast idea seriously mooted by Harry [Windsor] was to make an entire series about childhood trauma. Not just his own trauma, because he has obviously got enough mileage out of that elsewhere, but the trauma of a group best described as “world baddies”. As Bloomberg wrote, the concept of the show was as follows: “Harry would interview a procession of controversial guests, such as Vladimir Putin, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump, about their early formative years and how those experiences resulted in the adults they are today.”
And Harry is just the fella to do that because…erm…
Netflix is apparently getting ready to give Harry and Meghan the chop, refusing to pay them tens of millions of dollars unless they came up with a hit as successful as their recent six-part documentary. Which they won’t, presumably, because that documentary was literally the sum total of their entire lives.
Well can’t they just do another multi-part documentary about their lives, but in…pink? Yellow? Mauve?
Their current woes, it seems, come from giving up the good stuff too early. As an entity, Harry and Meghan are only interesting for as long as they can destabilise the monarchy. Their Oprah interview did that. Their documentary did that. Harry’s book Spare did that. Archetypes did not do that, and as such was roughly as interesting as listening to changing-room chatter in the world’s most insufferable yoga studio.
That’s it, that’s their next project – Meghan and Harry’s Yoga Studio Changing Room.
That would be an interesting show, if it were actually possible to get honest answers from real people. Decades ago I pondered doing a collective biography of a particular group of ‘baddies’, as I think understanding their shared childhood experience and the type of world they grew up in would go a long way toward explaining not only their collective actions but, in some way, the state of the modern world. But I realised, like any biographer or prospective biographer, that you’d have to be willing to live with your subject(s) for years and I didn’t think I’d be able to cope with them for that long.
I try to have empathy for Harry, who presumably had to put up with a lot of tough things in his life: losing his mother at a young age, having his every move scrutinized and gossiped about, and having many people declare he’s not entitled to any sympathy for those traumas because he is so privileged in other ways. And to a lesser degree Meghan, who I’m sure has had to put up with a lot of shitty treatment because she dared to marry Harry, even if I’m a little skeptical about some of the more sensational claims.
But at some point you need to pick a goddamn lane. Either you’re tired of the fame and scrutiny and just want to be left alone, or you want to be a content provider/influencer/whatever with millions of followers. They already had more than enough money to live a quiet life of comfort and security. Hell, Meghan could even continue her acting career and simply decline to talk a lot about the royals in interviews. But instead it’s memoirs and miniseries and podcasts and now they’re surprised that people are only interested in the gossip and family drama and not their amazing insights on life in general?
one podcast idea seriously mooted by Harry [Windsor] was to make an entire series about childhood trauma
They misspelled “muted”.
And what happens if they had no childhood trauma? What if it turns out they grew up as privileged individuals dining with delight on a stew of toxic masculinity, privilege, and misogyny (not to mention 2 scoops of ice cream)?
Frankly, I’m tired of the ‘childhood trauma’ narrative. I never bought in to begin with, but now the narrative has grown as toxic as the individuals it’s used for. A lot of us had childhood trauma (probably everyone, but not all children are abused or mistreated, it’s just ordinary trauma). Only a handful go on to be assholes. And I grew up with people who did not experience the trauma, and in fact were among the perpetrators for the rest of us. They were the ONLY ones in the family who grew up to be toxic. Those of us who experienced the trauma determined not to revisit it on others.
Screechy: totally agree. People (not me, but definitely quite a few others) were eager for Harry and Meghan to dish the dirt on the House of Windsor, one of the world’s most infamous closed shops, but that didn’t extend to interest in Harry and Meghan themselves and I honestly don’t understand the egotism that prevented them from seeing this. As I understand it, Spare sold pretty well, so I think the message is clear: more insider scuttlebutt or go away.
Frankly I’m sceptical (sceptre-cal?) of just how traumatised they actually are at this point. I’ll spot them that Harry’s loss of his mother was terrible, the House of Windsor is a deeply fucked-up institution, the British tabloid press is repulsive (even if they are some of the only media not to be totally gender-captured), and Stephen Fry had a point when he defined “countryside” as “the murder of Piers Morgan”. But they’ve left it all behind – quit the job, moved out of the house, and skipped town. They have beautiful children, plenty of money, and the freedom to live their best lives – all this chewing over the past is psychologically unhealthy and/or a cynical cash grab. (Probably both.)
But they identify as interesting.
Harry and Meghan can identify as interesting all they like, but that has no bearing on everyone else identifying as UNinterestED. Just like how a transman can scream “I’m a sexy gay man” until the cows come home, and a lot of gay men will say “yes, you are a hot valid gay man and of course other gay men will want to fuck you” in public, but it’s a discreet swipe left on the apps. You can’t force people to be interested.