The Prince and Princess of Wales

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Kate Middleton’s latest video presentation, in which she runs through meadows while telling us how wonderful her cancer journey has been, is just about the most disturbing thing I have ever seen on the screen.

I’ve watched Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, which was just about the scariest thing I’d seen until now, in terms of the unsettling camera work and the fact you don’t ever quite see what it is so deeply, deeply wrong about it until the final frame. But this is somehow more disturbing.

Kate’s cancer journey movie is a lot like Don’t Look Now, with its soft focus wandering through beautiful scenery, interspersed with disorientating camera work, setting you on edge as the thing builds and builds to its worrying climax.

Instead of scenes of Venice and the love affair between Christie and Sutherland, we get the English countryside, and the love of Kate and William, with Kate sometimes with him rapturously, and sometimes meandering in these forests and meadows alone. It’s not the Venice lagoon—but the effect is the same.

I cannot see why the Princess of Wales or the powers at the palace could possibly have thought this video would be a reassuring update, unless it’s a straightforward piece of brainwashing designed to make the masses very happy to have cancer, and bear it beautifully, just like her.

“Cancer journey.” If I hear that phrase one more time, I’ll scream. So I’ll scream a lot. Everyone says it now. Cancer is no longer an illness, it’s a journey: an exciting, wonderful opportunity, or so the purveyors of the cancer-journey idea would have us believe.

As Kate tells us about her cancer journey, she is in a beautiful white dress, floaty, like an angel. She and her children laugh and gambol in these meadows—but they laugh distantly, with an eerie echo.

They appear sometimes fractured into multiple screens. It’s possible someone got too arty with the production after getting carried away, but it appears to me as though the way it is filmed is a message.

The quality is astounding—it’s Hollywood standard. I’m not saying Kate, William, the kids, Carole and Michael Middleton, who all appear, are acting. But they appear not to act so well it is fantastically slick—as good as any big-budget movie.

As we watch the family in highly stylized “behind the scenes” footage, Kate does the voice-over about her cancer journey, on and on, ever more poetically, piling metaphor upon metaphor, until you just want to shout out, “Okay, okay! I get it! Cancer is fucking fantastic! I don’t have it, but I want it now! Is that what you want me to say?” And then we get the big reveal…

If you haven’t seen the film, do watch it. If you have viewed the film already, take a closer look.

It begins with Kate, William, and the children walking through the woods. Piano music is playing. Mournful piano music. Harmonic minor chords.

In a soft, sad voice she says: “As the summer comes to an end…”

You see, we’re not only in the woods, but in summer’s end mode. Not difficult that. “…I cannot tell you what a relief it is to have finally completed my chemotherapy treatment.” Note she doesn’t say it’s worked, just completed. “The last nine months have been incredibly tough for us as a family. Life as you know it can change in an instant…”

But wait, she’s about to lay two more metaphors on us, and mix ’em, to boot.

“…and we’ve had to find a way to navigate the stormy waters and road unknown…”

That’s a lot of navigating. Almost too much, you might say. In statement analysis, when people overstate, it’s a tell, or red flag. They’re trying too hard to convince you.

“The cancer journey is complex, scary, and unpredictable for everyone…” She and William are sitting together in the woods, her head on his shoulder. Then they’re with the kids, playing in the woods. And then the camera cuts to her standing alone in a dense area, gazing up into these massive trees, as big as redwoods are, as she tells us she’s come face-to-face with her own vulnerabilities…

Now we cut to a fuzzy, juddery take of her pushing the kids on swings, split into three shots, like it’s old footage from the attic. But wait, this is still that happy day in the woods. So why are we imagining this being their old memories, and all they’ve got left?

The tall trees are filmed gorgeously, from the bottom looking up as the light shafts from the heavens break through.

Kate now begins what amounts to a sermon, in her soft but crystal-clear voice, about how she and William have had to “reflect and be grateful for the simple yet important things in life which so many of us often take for granted—simply loving and being loved.”

Now, listen here, Your Royal Highness. I take nothing important for granted—never have, never will—so you and William must be thinking of yourselves.

Perhaps the royal family take important things for granted. But anyway…

“Doing what I can to stay cancer-free is now my focus.”

Note she’s not saying she’s cancer-free, she’s saying she is trying to stay cancer-free.

“Although I have finished chemotherapy…”

Never did anyone say that word more beautifully. She almost makes it sound like one of the most beautiful words in the English language…

“…my path to healing and full recovery is long, and I must continue to take each day as it comes….” Then she talks about “this new phrase of recovery.”

I think that’s pretty clear. Anyone who doesn’t see through all that is a moron.

Now the music changes. It becomes briefly quite scary, then it goes Irish for some reason. We are now in an Irish lament. Fiddles eek out their mournful dirge, as she says:

“To all those who are continuing their own cancer journey, I remain with you…”

Now she’s wandering a meadow of wheat and wildflowers. The violin music builds, and she makes her final statement, very slowly:

“Out of darkness can come light…so let that light shine bright!” And she releases a white butterfly from her hands—I actually shuddered—and it flies away, and the camera cuts to an upward shot of the trees, pointing into the sky.

Now the kids are running through the fields alone. Then the family is together, briefly. Then the thing cuts to a Kodak-style line of photos, as if in their memory box again.

The violins build and soar higher and higher, and the photo album shots on the screen fade to white. Pure, pure white. Intense, bright white. Nothing but white. Is this what heaven looks like?

Dear God, can anyone be so stupid as to not work that little lot out? This is nothing less than the rebranding of serious illness ending potentially in an untimely death as something positive.

Cancer is now one in two, if you believe the statistics. Neoplasms, like the one in my mother’s neck, have gone off the charts since 2021. Loads of horrible illnesses are off the charts suddenly, including in young and middle-aged and previously healthy people. Sepsis is a quarter of a million a year. Shingles is one in three. Heart attacks, well, we all know how many are having those. We don’t need the official statistics. Whether the figures are right or wrong, or cooked to high heaven with new presentation formulas, we see those in our families and social circles dropping from their hearts going bang, like my father from a blood clot, or like other friends of mine needing a new valve.

Death is all around us, and so the feeling grows, to paraphrase a song used in another schmaltzy movie.

The grim reaper is now such a frequent visitor that we could be forgiven for starting to think death has never been more normal. But it’s a big stretch to go from not questioning excess death figures to saying that actually getting really ill from cancer is exciting, and an opportunity, and I’m getting a warm, fuzzy feeling about it.

Look, I’m a believer. I believe nothing happens in God’s world by mistake. If you have a health setback, you bear it with grace if you can, and you try to make some good come out of it. I admire those who live with cancer, and those who overcome cancer, and those we’ve all lost who have died from it.

But I have to say, I don’t want to get ill, and I don’t want to welcome illness if I get it. What I really want to do is look the hell into why so many young, previously fit, and healthy women like Kate got cancer in the first place these past few years, along with so many others of all ages getting all these heart attacks and strokes.

We’ve had a headful of brainwashing for several years now, with all the celebrity “brave fights,” but this Kate video is going too far.

Kate has so much clout with the masses that it matters when she runs through meadows in a floaty dress with long, flowing lustrous hair to make a point about cancer.

She should not do it, any more than she should have told people to get the Covid vaccine in the recordings her and William made about that, and being photographed having it.

The royals should stay out of telling us what to do medically, and what to think and feel about our illnesses, as much as they should stay out of giving their opinion on Gaza.

I can understand people saying, “What a lovely film, Kate must be better.” But I would say if she just wanted to tell us she’s doing well, getting back to work, and on the road to recovery, which we hope she is, she’d just do an interview saying that, and we’d say great and wish her well.

This Hollywood style mini-movie with full-on soundtrack protests too much. With its constant pace-changing and big-reveal white butterfly moment at the end, as scary to me as the little girl in the red cloak turning round at the end of Don’t Look Now, this is about saying to all the one in twos, take your cancer on the chin and don’t ask questions how you got it, because half the population is on a cancer journey, even our beautiful princess.

This is about showing how cancer will and must take you on a voyage of inner discovery, and while of course the destination is often death, who knows, maybe death’s a journey too, even though we keep insisting we’re all atheists now.

It’s challenging, the cancer journey, but all journeys are. There will be moments where you think, “Hang on, maybe it’s that Covid vaccine, and this is a huge balls-up and I’m going die needlessly!”

But that’s to be expected. It’s normal to have irrational fears and to doubt how wonderful cancer is. But take heart. The rewards are great. You will get a new perspective on what’s important: loving and being loved, or something or other…

So if you have been diagnosed, get started on your cancer journey today (without complaining about how or why you might have gotten it). And be like our beautiful Kate…