File spoon-archives/baudrillard.archive/baudrillard_1997/baudrillard.9709, message 17


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
   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005