Unpacking the Hysteria Around Princess Kate’s Whereabouts: Memes, Theories, and Reality
Princess Kate's 'Disappearance' and the Rise of Online Conspiracy Culture
Not since the hunt for Carmen Sandiego have I been so confronted by hysteria over an alleged missing person as one Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales. Not for nothing, but at least the people concerned about Carmen Sandiego had a truly addictive theme song (if unclear and borderline nefarious reasons for trying to stop her life of victimless crimes).
I am by no means a royal obsessive, and I guess I am naive in believing we had a revolution for a reason. That said, I can’t deny the particularly American interest in the royals and their world. Maybe we want what we can’t have, or at the very least, we like mess.
In recent years, the royals have provided a veritable mess hall, from the embarrassment of Charles’ attempts to seduce Camilla (google tampongate in your free time) to the rollout of Prince William as a future climate King to the debut of Spare and Archewell Productions. I am not up nights wondering about these people, so imagine my surprise by my sudden interest (like apparently the rest of the Internet) in the whereabouts of Princess Kate. Now, I want to state from the jump that none of us should actually be worrying about her life. She retreated from public life suddenly, announcing only that she would be receiving immediate abdominal surgery and entering a long and private recuperation. As a person who has had many abdominal surgeries in my life, the length of this recovery time tracks. For anyone who has not had anything like that, imagine waking up the day after you decide you want to start doing situps or core work and your abdominal muscles basically scream at you for trying to do things as rude as “standing” and “reaching for a glass from a cupboard.” That’s life in the slow recovery lane.
With this in mind, and also because my life isn’t revolving around royal surveillance (I’ve been too busy watching Love is Blind), I presumed all was going according to plan. However, this past week I started to notice a growing panic that Kate was “missing.”
Via @1followernodad
Via @MRSFVenom
These conspiracies (which I won’t print here) ranged from the absurd to the ridiculous: Connections to the wild speculations about the kind of cancer King Charles has. There were alleged connections between Kate’s disappearance and Welsh independence movements (?), speculation that she had plastic surgery, had left the Royal Family, was being kept from the public by her husband and his family for some unknown reason, etc. Of course, there were many connections linking her fate to that of Princess Diana.
Some people grasped the absurdity and joined in, like me when I’m at a family party and an older relative starts to tell an alleged autobiographical tale that would accurately be shelved in the fiction section of my local library. Rather than sit back like Maury Povich and hit them with “And that was a lie!” I sit back, and ask encouraging but probing questions. So how did you avoid jail and any paper trail for the incident in question, Uncle [name redacted to protect me at future holidays?]
I get the appeal. It can be fun to feel like you're part of a group online investigating a mystery.
Some people made art of the absurdity of supposedly real public concern.
Seeming to give in to the increasing frenzy around her (already explained) whereabouts, we were served photos of Kate riding in a car this week in an attempt to retake control of the narrative. Unfortunately, it does not appear to have stemmed the tide of panic.
Via Harpers Bazaar
The line between people making fun of the panic and playing into it seems to have blurred:
I love Meech and his very smart takes on pop culture, and whether or not this is her or a stand-in (?) is not my issue. For what it’s worth, royal watcher @matta_of_fact on TikTok speculates that Kate often serves the public some Facetime from behind the wheel of a car when she wants to be seen and not heard (or when she is asked questions she doesn’t want to answer). Therefore, according to anyone with any kind of sense, there is nothing to see here!
But why were people so swept up by this to begin with? The Internet loves mess, so for many, it was just a fun way to spend an afternoon and a reason to dig into Photoshop.
Via @balf4our
However, this entire public obsession with the well-being of a privileged seemingly fine person could also be read as the answer to the unasked question, “Is everyone okay?”
The world is consumed by genocide in Gaza, devastating climate change-related weather events around the world (I see you 10 ft. snowfall in the Sierras), and the ongoing political turmoil stemming from the resurgence of authoritarianism. So of course, let’s all obsess over whether or not Princess Kate is okay! How do we make sense of this nonsense?
Royal watchers wanting to explain this specific case cite things like the reduced size of the working monarchy making absences from public life appear even more glaring (Kate plus King Charles stepping back to deal with health issues causes a bigger stir than if there were more royals to cut ribbons, etc.).
But beyond fascination with the royals (or rich people generally), what is going on with the interest in the mystery of Kate’s “disappearance” and conspiracy theories that speculate about her whereabouts?
Part of it is definitely the comfort of a mystery. Mysteries have been prescribed as medicine as far back as World War I (and informally for much longer I’m sure), and many readers and viewers can attest to the appeal of the second most popular genre (romance being the first). As reporter Amanda Taub reflected in a January piece in the New York Times, mysteries offer the fantasy of order or solutions in a world that offers few. “The heart of this genre is not the murders that precipitate the plot,” she noted, “but the process by which they are solved - and, above all, the promise that they will be.” That the stories we are immersed in (those we read, watch, or those that involve us as central characters) may resolve and resolve cleanly for all involved is probably a pleasing thought for many. Writer Tana French echoed many who found mysteries particularly helpful during the uncertainty of the pandemic. “During the first COVID shutdown,” she wrote in a 2023 piece in Time, “I was popping Agatha Christies like Smarties, and I talked to a bookseller who said they couldn’t keep her novels in stock.” Echoing Amanda Taub, she too believes their pull is the pretense of the possibility for completion, for certainty, for the comfort of full knowledge of why things happen and what they mean. “We need to believe that sometimes things can fit together and make sense,” she writes, “even when that seems impossible; that someday our crisis will end and we’ll be able to leave it behind. The clean resolution offered in the structure of these books—A kills B, C finds out whodunit—makes mystery the perfect genre to speak for the hard-won triumph of order and meaning.”
This certainly speaks to me and explains why I keep seeking out mysteries (and cozy ones if possible) while the world burns. (I also think mysteries like Murder, She Wrote and Poirot present characters who move through the world in ways I read as queer without apology or retribution, perhaps a topic for another day.)
Mystery writers themselves seem to appreciate that this is the major appeal of their work. Agatha Christie herself, along with many British detective fiction authors of the early twentieth century formed The Detection Club, a literary society, in 1930. One of their core rules was that all members swear an oath that their fictional detectives “shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them.” What Tana French calls “wild” mysteries that fail to offer a clean solution were not allowed. This is kind of a contradictory requirement for Christie of all people to insist upon when her own life posed a mystery of Kate Middleton proportions. In 1926, she disappeared for 11 days, leading to a nationwide manhunt. (I will talk about what caused this, what people made of it then and now, and how it does and doesn’t compare to the Princess Kate fervor in my podcast episode this week).
Broadly speaking, times of confusion and disorder often breed a desire for the comfort of answers. However, life sometimes offers few of those. While I may take comfort in Murder, She Wrote, many meet these same moments of structural stressors by trying to assign meaning and pattern to events where there is none. That’s why so much of the Princess Kate stuff went beyond the realm of mystery into conspiracy theory.
In recent years, psychologists have studied why conspiracy theories seem so seductive to so many. “Overall,” a recent 2023 study published in the Psychological Bulletin concluded, “people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment.” This “existential motive” as professor of social psychology, Karen Douglas, PhD, referred to it explains in part the desire to cultivate and believe them. “Research has shown,” she explained on the American Psychological Association podcast, “that people who . . . feel powerless and disillusioned do tend to gravitate more towards conspiracy theories.” Who doesn’t feel powerless in 2024? The political and environmental climate combined with the pressures of late-stage capitalism leave most of us feeling like we’re Bradley Cooper, shelling Philly Cheesesteaks from a self-funded food truck in a meaningless effort to impress Oscar voters in a race we know we can’t win.
You know what does feel like a win? Spotting things that others miss. Solving mysteries and crimes that others can’t. This, in part, is what struck me about this obsession with Princess Kate. The people for whom this “disappearance,” and therefore their unsolicited investigation, were real and warranted felt empowered by seeing something the rest of us couldn’t. This feeling of superiority is also what researchers cite as a driving force behind some people’s belief in conspiracy theories.
The willingness to believe something isn’t right can even allow some to believe in multiple conflicting conspiracy theories at the same time. As Dr. Douglas described in an interview, one study she ran asked people to gauge the believability of multiple conspiracies involving Princess Diana. One, she noted, asked if they’d be willing to believe “that Princess Diana was assassinated by the royal family. Another one that she was assassinated by MI5, nothing to do with the royal family or others, also, but crucially, I think, one that she was assassinated and is dead. And another, that she was helped to fake her own death and that she's sort of living it up somewhere on an island having a great time.” Dr. Douglas explained that many people were open to believing many of these conflicting stories because all that is required is a core belief that “something” wasn’t right about the general narrative of Princess Diana’s death.
I will be watching to see how the public stories we tell about Princess Kate continue to unfold, whether they present inspiration for mystery or conspiracy. For those fanning the flames of conspiracy, it’s worth noting the real-world consequences of that (and not just for privileged royals who I have less sympathy for in general). As the royal commentator @matta_of_fact shared, her own mental health was harmed by online conspiracies that King Charles may have pancreatic cancer, as her own father succumbed to that illness and she herself was undergoing genetic testing for that condition as this speculation plays out in public.
I’m most interested in what work the stories about Kate (and others in the public eye) do for us and to us. Memes can be a funny and interesting way to write fanfic about current events or protest about any number of things. The Princess Kate memes and mystery in particular could just be some of us letting off steam, having fun, and calling attention to the absurdity of the speculation about people whose lives represent insane privilege and outmoded customs at a time when the disparity between them and the rest of the world feels more extreme than ever.
This tendency to use seemingly innocuous events as a jumping-off point for memes, mysteries, and conspiracies can also be a diagnostic tool for society generally. When something relatively minor is taken as a sign of a broader conspiracy, it does confirm what professor of clinical psychiatry Dr. Richard A. Friedman referred to as “The human preference for the instant gratification of meaning and plausibility over facts and truth” in a 2021 article in the New York Review of Books. It makes me long for the days of Clippy on my Microsoft Word. Not because I want him to annoy me again (sorry Clippy, not trying to make you lose your job), but because I remember being annoyed by Clippy when I was also first learning about the beauty of spell check. That tool was a central portal through which I confronted my lifelong penchant for phonetic spelling. Lately, more than any other technological innovation, I wish there was a similar and singular “fact check” tool (not Google) that might stop some of us in our more impulsive moments from believing nonsense. For now, a popular turn toward believing only verifiable news is proving as elusive as Carmen Sandiego.