Historians are likely to judge that Diana’s reign–and reign she did–owed its brilliance to the tranquillity of the times. With no global wars or cataclysm, no Hitlers or Churchills to dominate the public realm, we could turn our full attention to diversions of gossip and fantasy. We now routinely view image and spectacle as large with meaning, with old-fashioned substance suddenly the boring trifle.
The irony is that with the end of her short life, Diana may well achieve a political goal more substantial than that of all but a few politicians. The shock of her death is being likened to the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Clearly, the analogy seems overdrawn, their forever-young influences on popular culture notwithstanding. Diana wasn’t president, and her death leaves no creative vacuum like that of an Elvis Presley or John Lennon. But just as Kennedy’s memorial was the Civil Rights Act, Diana’s could be ratification of a treaty banning land mines, not just in Britain (where her focus on this issue achieved results before her death) but in the United States, where skeptical senators may now have to contend with a new public groundswell. This could yet yield for her a reputation as a first-rank humanitarian as well as immortal icon of style.
If Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, Lady Di launched at least a thousand covers, and hundreds of millions of newspaper and magazine sales. In the 16 years since her marriage she became not only the most famous woman in the world, but the only personality who consistently sold big in the global marketplace. While paparazzi are not a new phenomenon, Diana-as-prey took the game to a new level. Instead of three or four photographers trailing a celebrity, it could, in her case, be 30 or 40, each hoping for that six-figure shot. This created a strange and perhaps emblematic protocol of coverage: the president of France can stroll down the Champs-ElysEes undisturbed; a divorced ex-royal couldn’t leave a restaurant without a high-speed chase.
Diana came to understand that the tabloids were simultaneously the bane of her existence and the source of her strength. In recent years, she not only developed working relationships with tabloid editors but learned to exploit publicity for her cause, be it skewering Charles or raising money for charity. One reason for her popularity was that the public essentially shared her splurge-and-purge attitude toward celebrity news. Readers buy it and bemoan it without fully confronting the contradictions. They want to inspect the clay feet of their heroes–then cry for the head of the sculptors.
Will this global hypocrisy market still work as it always has? In the short run, only a foolish publication would pay for gory pictures of the accident. To do so would risk a boycott. The more difficult question is whether Diana’s death might change the tabloid culture permanently. In recent years, with global news proliferating, photographers have gone from being a minor annoyance that came with the territory of fame to being a major source of anxiety for public figures. As their private loathing of the press boils over publicly, it will likely find a ready audience among millions already fed up with the news media–any news medium. The distinction between tabloids and so-called respectable news organizations will be difficult to uphold in the recriminations that lie ahead, and for good reason. If there had been no accident and the motorcycle paparazzi in the Paris tunnel had obtained a good shot of Di and Dodi kissing, most of the world’s newspapers would have tsked-tsked over the price paid for first rights to the shot–then published it themselves.
The pressure will mount now to tighten privacy laws, though they were not relevant in this case. The French already have strict privacy laws on the books, but they did not–and cannot–apply to what happens on a public Paris street. Or can they? There’s a chance that the fallout from Diana’s death will be a series of press restrictions never seen before in Western democracies. Voluntary codes of press behavior have failed miserably. Expect to see legislative efforts to make it easier to sue for invasion of privacy and perhaps some proposals for outright bans on pictures of minors without their consent.
Ultimately, nothing much can change because media coverage is the oxygen of modern public life. Watch now as celebrityhood is transmogrified into secular sainthood, courtesy of a publicity machine that will turn even its own remorse into just another story. Perhaps that’s appropriate, for it is the mighty communications culture that made Diana and shapes the world she left. The princess will never be queen, but maybe the titles don’t mean much. The England in which she lived will never be remembered as Elizabethan. It will be The Di Era. So sad she had to die for it.
