In Netflix’s Harry & Meghan, Meghan Markle wants to be smart but plays dumb
Katrina Hutchins
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Meghan Markle wants us to know she is smart. In Netflix’s Harry & Meghan, she says she was never “the pretty one,” always “the smart one.” Haven’t you heard the dish soap story? How this enterprising young feminist’s letter convinced a company to exchange “woman” for “people” in its commercial? Well, don’t worry, she’ll tell you.
Meghan Markle, an international relations major, was always “bubbling over with ideas,” one friend says in the documentary. She acted for a living, but it wasn’t her passion. Only the world’s problems de jour truly animated her. She traveled to places with issues and wrote about them, and spoke to the U.N. about women and their issues.
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She was in the world and of the world. But apparently, she knew nothing about one of the oldest institutions running a good chunk of it.
In a now-viral moment from the documentary, she says she thought having to curtsy to the Queen of England was a joke. She giggles while recounting wearing jeans sans shoes to meet the future King of England for the first time and, we are supposed to believe, learns only then that British people are not “huggers.” She had to Google the British national anthem. Pity.
The Duchess of Sussex is a self-described intellectual sophisticate who wants to hide behind the naivete and helplessness of a 22-year-old ingenue. She graduated from Northwestern University, but when tasked to join one of the most recorded and analyzed families in history, couldn’t be bothered to read a book.
Though Meghan is quick to moralize about the British media’s disrespect toward her biracial heritage, the new Netflix documentary reveals her to have had zero compulsion to study her husband’s home and culture. The package didn’t include a Princess Diaries training montage, she protests. No, but surely it came with a library.
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Marrying Harry presented Meghan with a Rory Gilmore-style existential crisis that she doesn’t want to confront: She’s not as smart as she thinks she is. She was good at school and interested in girl-who-is-good-at-school interests. American society told her that merits a seat at the table, any table.
In reality, she is simply the product of what Paul Goodman calls “compulsory miseducation.” She excelled in a system that is mostly designed to produce workers and party members, not thinkers. When asked to solve a complex problem, such as cultural and hierarchical assimilation, she can only respond that it’s not a part of her programming. The portrait she paints of herself is always the brain. But sometimes the ingenue, suspicious only when feigning ignorance, absolves her of any responsibility to humility and growth.
Katrina Hutchins is a video editor and mother from Indiana. She formerly worked for the Daily Caller as an associate editor and AOC impersonator.