61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Street Fighter. The movie. A new one. With that chick from that Superman show. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about!
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Mad Men's January Jones struts her stuff in Vanity Fair. Plus: Damages returns, the latest Gossip Girl guest star and Donna Martin capitulates.
So, Prince Charles is finally going to marry Camilla Parker-Bowles, and royal-watchers
(read: British nerds) are in a fury over it. "He shouldn't marry after how he treated Diana!" they howl. The public, it was deemed when the wedding was first announced around February 10, would never accept this pairing.
The disapproval is two-pronged. First, there's the status of Diana as Saint Victim of the Cheating Husband Who Caused Her Bulimia and Subsequent Death By Paparazzi. For some reason, her unhappiness was frozen in amber, and despite the fact that in death, she can feel neither jealousy nor betrayal, people think it would be "disrespectful to her memory" for Charles to go on with his life.
Looming beneath the cult of Di is the darker, more moralistic argument that there can't be a happily-ever-after for adulterers. Put more succinctly, people want atonement. "I guess they're going to be rewarded for being selfish," my only royal-watching friend said in an email (I swear, in all other respects, she's perfectly normal). Heck, centuries before anyone heard of Princess Diana, Nathaniel Hawthorne made sure we knew, at the end of the Scarlet Letter, that "when we forget our God … it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion." For shit's sake, it turns out even if you repent, adultery on earth means you can't be together in heaven. That makes it worse than murder in terms of confession and forgiveness.
In other words, tons of married people do it, but nobody wants to talk about it. You can't talk about women who went from mistress to wife. Tina Brown, for instance. Joanne Woodward. Marla Maples… well, never mind her. In the end, no matter how long a marriage endures, if it started in sin, everybody says "ick."
This pitchfork of condemnation seemed to go straight through the very buck-toothed heart of Prince Charles and his social reputation. But along came Valentine's day, and people did begin to soften. Seen from a different point of view, this is actually a love story of star-crossed proportions.
After all, Charles and Camilla met and fell in love in 1970, when Diana was still in Underoos. They didn't marry then, she wed someone else, and when he finally realized she was his one true yadda yadda, they were kept apart by his domineering mother — who thought it would be too scandalous (irony of ironies) for him to marry a divorcée. Their friendship endured — some even say Camilla picked the unsuspecting Diana out for him and facilitated their woo-some — over the next decades, flaming back into passion despite a public infatuated with the perfect princess. With his divorce, hopes rose; with her death, they were dashed again. After so many years of being controlled and denied happiness by the censorious masses and a phantom princess, they are finally, in their fifties, making a stand for their own happiness.
You know, like King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson. Their later Nazi-sympathizing years aside, the fact that he abdicated the throne just so he could marry her — well, it just warms the heart, doesn't it? Then there's Charles' aunt Margaret, the queen's sister. The story goes that she was forced to give up the divorced man she loved — and remained forever loveless after the pain of that split. That durn romantic royal family. They sure do earn their tax dollars in sheer entertainment-factor.
There's something else to recommend La Camilla. She's old and haggard. She even referred to herself as "your devoted old bag" in one of the epistles d'amour so embarrassingly published in the early '90s (along with that "I wish I were your tampon" phone call — yick!). There's something about the dumpy, frowzy hausfrau capturing the heart of the Prince over the perfect Princess — it just speaks to the frowzy hausfrau in all of us. You know, like when Antonio Banderas ditched his sexy Spanish wife for Melanie Griffith. You go, old girl!
Anyway, far be it from me to actually give a good goddamn about the comings and ho-ings of the British Royals, and whether Charles will have to give up being king if he weds Camilla. I mean, as a friend of mine across the pond put it, "Anyone who's halfway normal is infinitely more interested in whether Elton John will marry David Furnish."
Now, THAT's a romance. Starring two queens!
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Amy Keyishian is a New York freelancer with four parrots and a bad
attitude. She sometimes writes young-adult fiction under an entirely
different name, but she's not telling you what it is here. She's a big fan of The Moth,
Venture Brothers, and Air America Radio.
