Interesting opinion piece. Read on.
Source: The Sunday Times, Dec 10.
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Diana’s dead. Now get over it
India Knight
For such a titchy and broadly secular nation, Britain has a weird, supersized love of myth. Reality is never quite enough for us and seems feeble compared with the soaring, self-aggrandising mythologies we prefer to soothe ourselves with.
Maybe it’s to do with a lost empire and an impotent rage at not mattering terribly any more. So Britain fights a war and it’s got nothing to do with anything as vulgar and pedestrian as oil, dear me no: it’s about the future of civilisation, if you please.
Equally, the death of a troubled young woman in a Paris underpass is not — cannot be allowed to be — about anything as sad and ordinary as a drunk driver and a car accident. That is too small, too grotty, too commonplace an ending: we need to turn it into Greek tragedy. We need to make it even worse than it is to make ourselves feel better and to show we care. It’s really quite mad: if the nation were a person, we would be sectioned.
In the case of Diana, Princess of Wales this was an obvious culmination. As her brother pointed out at her funeral, Diana — or Artemis, if we are going to stick to the Greeks — was the goddess of hunting, herself hunted to death.
Or you could say that, pursued by the Furies for much of her public life, those foul harpies finally got their girl. She could be Prometheus, stealing fire (or fame) from the gods (or the royal firm), and giving it to mortals for their own use; or Cassandra, predicting her own fate in a series of tapes and telephone calls; a female Narcissus, gazing doomed and entranced upon her own reflection in magazines.
If deification is the object, there is an embarrassment of source material to find parallels with. And there is also the ultimate icon, the Blessed Virgin, mater dolorosa, beautiful and sanctified in her grief and sacrifice.
All of this is nonsense, of course. How Diana Died: The Conspiracy Files, a TV programme to be broadcast tonight, will claim that new DNA tests on blood samples taken from Henri Paul, Diana’s driver that night, prove conclusively that he was drunk. Moreover, they show Paul’s blood samples could not have been switched with someone else’s and that there was no cover-up. Lord Stevens’s inquiry, the results of which will be announced on Thursday, is said to come to the same conclusion.
Diana — categorically unpregnant, according to her friend Rosa Monckton on the programme — died because she got into a car driven by a drunk on tranquillisers who was going too fast; the presence of the paparazzi did not help. No half-Muslim baby, no MI6. Just a car crash. How sad. How banal. It happens to 10 ordinary people every day. No wonder that, according to a poll, three in 10 of us refuse to believe it.
There is something peculiar within the national psyche — something in us that believes reality is best left to random young people winning TV shows: it has been hijacked by Big Brother. Its people-pleasing, populist appeal is deemed too lowly for those whom we profess to love and admire. Those people deserve better: nothing less than a grand Greek existence and a grand Greek departure from it.
Diana was not Artemis. She was a complicated, troubled youngish woman, trying her best to find happiness, married into a tricky family and dealing, as so many do, with the unpleasant aftermath of a messy divorce. What is odd about our need to deify her is that her alleged “ordinarinessâ€, or at least the “ordinariness†of her struggles and concerns — weight, food, men, children — is why we loved her in the first place: you might as well seek to deify Kate Winslet.
By half-believing in some of the more reasonable — all things being relative — conspiracy theories, we deny her the two things we claim to want for her: the right to rest in peace and peace of mind for her children.
I could understand it better if we were a Catholic country, programmed to weep and sanctify, with a martyrology that needed observing. But what happened after Diana’s death now seems the populist equivalent of a drunken telephone call or a particularly injudicious one-night stand: everybody cried, everybody got cross at the royals and everybody felt a bit embarrassed about it in the cold light of day.
How else to explain that extraordinary outpouring of grief followed by an equally extraordinary silence? We don’t even mark the anniversary of her death unless we are the Daily Express — and it’s not like it happened in the mists of time.
There is something in us that remains terrified at the idea that ordinary little things happen to dazzling big people — but equally there is something in us that loves them for it, Diana’s story being a case in point. The more she faltered, the more we loved her. Were we waiting for her to rise from her own ashes? Do we feel robbed of the happy ending? Because our behaviour is inconsistent: we made a saint but we won’t let her rest or afford her the respect we were so sure she deserved. She has been endlessly exhumed, examined, prodded, pulled, in the most unseemly and gruesome manner.
This has happened before on a worldwide scale. Marilyn Monroe, another modern goddess, died from a tawdry little overdose in August 1962. She was a divorcee with a difficult childhood, a pill-popper, a sad person trying to pull her life together and one night everything went wrong. In the following years there were hundreds of books about her being murdered by, variously, the Kennedys, the mafia, her studio bosses, her maid. A review of the case in 1982 found that she had, as sane people knew, just taken too many pills. But the world still wants her victimhood to have produced a giant cinematic ending; it adored her too much to accept such a prosaic fall.
We used to think such hysteria was some loopy aspect of modern American fandom — but it has long since taken hold in Britain and we have come to be in thrall to that tendency.
Diana was perhaps the last of those old school celebrities. Since her death — and I don’t think this is entirely coincidental — we have done a U-turn when it comes to fame: now we want to feast our eyes on celebrities’ misery and pain and punish them for their transgressions, which are seen to be self-imposed.
Diana belongs to a kinder age: we did not want to punish her, we did not see her sins as entirely of her own making and we just wanted her to be happy. Well, here is our chance. Isn’t it about time she got to rest in peace?
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