Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 23:10:28 +0100 From: ian flitman <I.Flitman-AT-herts.ac.uk> Subject: Re: Interview Request Here in the UK, as elsewhere, the death of Diana was unbelieveable. It was simultaneously too tacky,too bizarre, too perfectly brutal an ending to be true.And what do we do when we want confirmation? We turn on the TV. The main channels here, BBC and all the Charlton regional channels, were wall to wall with it. The schedules were abandoned.Every image from the car wreck, to Prince Charles arriving in Paris, to the coffin were metonymic devices reiterating the sad mantra "Diana is dead" "Diana is dead". It was a Sunday and so fate was kind in that we had all day to savour the national tradegy.Thus we sought solace in the very media who were seen to have killed her. There was no alternative. This produced the concomitant effect of making consumers feel like conspirators. The nation was united not so much by grief as by the camaraderie of accomplices. Those in grief are said to be often angry at being deprived of the object of their desire, or here, of avid consumption. Diana was the fly in the constitutional ointment of Great Britain. As such, her very existence was the creative narrative irritant in the soap opera that the Royal Family had become. There is something cannabalistic in the final frenetic consumption of Diana. To offset this, we virtually canonise her,cleanising her of all the sordid detail we sought about her when is was alive (Mother Teresa just couldn't compete with those legs). She is the perfect mother(her children conveniently packed off to boarding school).She is a caring humanitarian (morbidly attracted to the suffering of others as an oblique confession of her own). But this hypocrisy, this shameless volte-face is too spectacular to remain completely unrecognised. There is a deep unease. You can cut it with a knife. ian flitman
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