My apologies for my sour comments about Princess Di. I made my
comments in haste, not fully considering that like for everybody from
Elton John to bookstores everywhere, even in death she represents a
wonderful opportunity to cash in.
The following article offers the template for Banal Movie Division to
folow; Sergio Leone to direct, soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. The
notion that Morricone should play Di in the movie is just plain silly.
We must get Paris HIlton.
Hugh Grant to play Prince Charles, Rick Moranis to play Tony Blair,
and some unpopular and dried up old actress to play the unpopular and
died up old consort Camilla. Perhaps Julia Roberts.
Let's do lunch.
August 31, 2007
The Princess Ten Years Gone
Dianified
By BINOY KAMPMARK
Plus ça change. Markets are turbulent, Iraq is disintegrating, and we
still have time for a dead Princess. Or so we can assume when looking
at some of the commemorative gush that is streaming out ten years
after Diana's death. Not even Winston Churchill, whose quotes dot the
after-dinner circuit, compares. The saviour of Britain and empire
doesn't even warrant a service. The ethicist Peter Singer
'encountered' the Diana myth in 2004 as one would a tree, finding
middle-aged women he unfairly described as resembling 'football
hooligans' in commemorative Diana dress. This still continues, though
the glow has dimmed.
The Diana story is a stage show. Its subplot is the idea of
Britishness. To be born British has been said to put you ahead of the
game, to win you 'first prize in the lottery of life'. Tony Blair did
not disagree, and proceeded to demonstrate what that might be, pushing
the envelope of the cult to an extreme. We could already see signs of
congenital mythmaking at Downing Street, and it looked like Blair was
preparing for a career on Broadway.
And what a show it was, something that came to resemble, in the words
of Carmin Callil, the Nuremberg rallies. If Diana is Saint, then Blair
is her High Priest. Blair managed to use Princess, death and
demagoguery to spin a fine tale of a princess both accessible and
vulnerable. She was the Ennio Morricone of the cult scene, writing the
death score as she was sped, Dodi Fayed at her side, to her doom by a
drunk chauffeur. Blair, a Sergio Leone in the director's chair, did
the rest. Alistair Campbell, in the aptly named role of 'director of
communications' was of course, in the credits, along with the nameless
paparazzi. The show might have been termed Once Upon a time in
Britain. Marketed as the people's princess, it was a New Labour
contrivance that placed Tony Blair closer to God and Diana closer to
the people. Neither case was true, but it didn't have to be.
Blair's role in the whole saga is now firmly ensconced in celluloid
format in The Queen, which had the negative effect of drawing
sustenance from the Diana myth despite humanising the wise denizen of
Buckingham Palace. Sadly, not even Dame Helen Mirren had the cinematic
clout to outflank the spectral 'Saint' Diana. Theodore Dalrymple would
complain in the Britannica Blog that the grief was of the pop variety,
insincere and 'pyschopathological
out of the stable with debilitating attributes: emotional incontinence
with an inclination to 'blubber in public' when not infuriatingly
rude.
Conspiracy theories flourish in the manure of myth. Diana loyalists,
and they are many, continue like new-age radicals seeking justice for
the princess. For them, the enemy is the very institution that
actually gave us the princess in the first place. She was flawed and
modern in the way the Queen isn't, but then again the Royal person was
never foolish enough to permit it. There are still suggestions rich
with the stench that Diana was done over both by forces within and
without, though these are starting to echo less with time. The
cheese-eating 'frogs' across the pond must have cut corners in their
investigation, but even this allegation is only held by the most
fervent Dianists. Besides, she died there, searching for happiness,
hounded by media vultures and spurned by the House of Windsor.
Prince Charles' wife Camilla, neither femme nor fatale, yet the object
of the 'crowded' relationship that was plastered with tedious
regularity across the papers, will not attend the Friday service. She
prefers the discomfort of home viewing at Ray Mill in Wiltshire.
Charles was openly 'defied', or that is at least how it was portrayed.
Then again, defiance is a common theme within the Windsors, who, when
not defying modernisation are best at defying each other. Once Mrs.
Simpson nabbed Eddie, the royal family was never quite the same again.
Binoy Kampmark is a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.
He can be reached at bkampmark@gmail.
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