Two couples dominate very different corners of the cultural imagination in 2025. On one side are John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette, frozen forever in late 90s minimalism and the tragic glamour of a story that ended too soon. On the other are Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, living in real time under the glare of global attention, navigating the peaks and valleys of public opinion with every interview, gesture, and brand launch.
“The dead offer the closed narrative. The living are trapped in the ongoing performance.”
The contrast could not be starker. JFK Jr. and Carolyn are remembered as a pristine image, impossibly stylish, alluring, and untouchable. Their story plays out now as a kind of cultural rerun, re-edited for television dramas and nostalgic essays, immune to contradiction because no new chapters can be written. Harry and Meghan are still making their story in public and the audience is not always kind. Their every move is parsed, mocked, or reframed as evidence of overexposure and self-promotion.
This is more than just a difference between the dead and the living. It is a clash between two cultural codes. One is the code of the closed narrative, where the meaning of a life is fixed and safe to idealize. The other is the code of the ongoing performance, where meaning is unstable, vulnerable to fatigue, and constantly renegotiated. How these codes operate, and why the closed narrative often feels more relevant, tells us something about the state of performative culture today and about our uneasy relationship with reality itself.
