For whatever goddamn reason, I watched the romantic comedy Kate & Leopold probably around 10 or 15 times when I was a kid.
We had the VHS tape of the film that stars Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman, and it was just a kind of mindless film to put on in the background.
What I didn’t realize as a kid is that the movie is slightly terrifying in its implications in that Meg Ryan’s character basically gives up her entire life to go back in time and has been in an incestual relationship.
***
In the film, Kate McKay is an ambitious career woman working with a market research company. She’s on her way to being promoted, but she doesn’t exactly like her job.
One day as she rustles through her ex-boyfriend’s apartment looking for the stylus of her Palm Pilot (could you be any more early 2000s?), she meets a strange man wearing strange clothing.
He identifies himself as Prince Leopold Mountbatten and alludes to being from the past. Thinking he’s just a bad actor, she dismisses him, but like any bad rom com they eventually fall hopelessly in love.
He probably has syphilis being from 1876.
What she doesn’t know is that he really is from the past and has followed Stuart Besser, her ex-boyfriend, from 1876 to the present day.
Besser is revealed to be a descendent of Mountbatten’s and wanted to explore the past having discovered a number of portals in time around New York.
Anyway, so near to the end of the film Kate is able to confirm that Leopold’s actually from the past in the form of a photograph that’s she in and chases after him as he leaves. She’s transported to the past and completes this 4D web of shenanigans.
Basically, if she hadn’t gone into the past to marry Leopold he would never have had the rights kids who would eventually give birth to Stuart who would go into the past, bring Leopold to the present, and send Kate to the past to begin the whole loop.
So there are some horrifying implications about this, other than the ramifications of what would happen should the loop not have been completed, but there are also some more practical issues.
For “Love”, Kate McKay throws away her career and plunges into a past and into a time before women’s rights and suffrage. In other words, yes there were some cool things going on, but she’s also going to live through one of the most horrifying times in modern history.
***
Kate’s Career is Important to her
A career woman and a bumbling, well-spoken idiot following her around.
During the film, Kate doesn’t exactly flourish at her job, but her title is something that she has nonetheless worked hard to earn. Her job involves marketing, mostly, bad products to the general public.
It’s your typical marketing gig and she was actually about to be made a partner in her firm.
After using Leopold in one of their commercials he tells her in response to hearing her doubts about the products, “when one finds oneself participating in an endeavor entirely without merit, one withdraws” to which she responds, “I don’t have time for pious speeches from two hundred year old men who have not worked a day in their life.”
Ok, so sometimes people hate their jobs and she has a pretty slimy boss, but she fought for her career and earned herself a comfortable lifestyle. Damn, she has her own apartment in New York and lives a good life, but she throws it all away to live in a past where women don’t even have rights.
The worst part of this is that she ultimately has no choice in the matter. Since this is a causality loop, she needs to go back in time in order to meet the Duke, have kids, and eventually be the ancestor of Stuart Besser, which brings us too…
Stuart and Kate = wincest
Stuart, seen here, is actually related to Kate, so yeah.
There could be many branching marital trees between the 1870s to the early 2000s, but essentially in modern day Stuart has most likely been having sex with his great, great, great grandmother.
Interestingly there’s actually a deleted scene in the film where it stresses that Kate and Stuart may actually be related in some way.
It must have been a bit of a rough realization for everyone involved, but Kate’s never really told about the relationship. She leaps into the past not knowing that in some way Stuart is actually her descendent.
The Duke is Dead
Seen here a man most likely with horribly crippling Haemophilia.
So there are some pretty staggering problems with Kate leaving the modern world for the uncertain past.
The first of which is Prince Leopold, the Duke of Albany. If based on the real guy, he only has about 8 years to live. Yes, the actual duke he takes after died in 1884 due to complications of having haemophilia.
Haemophilia was a common genetic disorder in many royal families due to inbreeding. It affects the body’s ability to scab when cut leading to severe bleeding with even the smallest injury.
Open wounds in a time before antibiotics means that dying from infections is pretty likely, so after a few years of living with the duke he would likely die.
***
So Kate McKay is now in the past living with the Duke. She’s now a Duchess and lives a pretty comfortable life even without the modern conveniences that she’s grown accustomed to.
If she survives the next 50 years, she’ll witness some amazing historic moments, but also live through the Great Depression, the First World War, and several other horrible things.
The fact that there is no record of Kate McKay in the past suggest she didn’t exactly achieve much in the past. You’d think that someone with her knowledge of the future would be able to at least use that to her advantage, but it seems like she faded into obscurity.
In her quest to find true love, she ends up a time traveller never to return to the people like her brother who really do care for her. She also gives up a promising career for a man likely to die in the coming years.
Kate & Leopold is a lot scarier than I remember…