Lady Di and the triumph of nothing
This Thursday, August 31, marks the twentieth anniversary of Diana's disappearance. His popularity was as fictitious as his humanitarian struggles. A princess who loved pictures, not words. A somewhat silly princess. Writer Robert McLiam Wilson breaks Diana's secret: becoming so famous she ceased to be real.
The English-speaking world is made up of feelings. This is the world of Trump and Brexit, what else? Stupid as its feet, it's a world that leans politically to the right or to the left depending on our mood. We are zero in philosophy, but we are brutes in haggard sentimentalism.
Obviously, this is all the fault of the 80s.
It was in the Anglosphere that the "Great Vampiric Lie of Unbridled Capitalism" found its plumpest virgin. Crazy dealers - Reagan the jerk and Thatcher the cannibal - sold us a wreck with no brakes or flywheels. A bad deal. A suicidal purchase. Who called for palliatives, angels and icons to pass the pill. And among the multitude, Madonna and Michael, there was this scintillating avatar: Diana, Princess of Wales.
English, tall, blonde, too stupid to obtain any diploma, she is this privileged mediocre who hits head-on an eighties version of the fairy tale: instant, global, devastating fame. Just by marrying Prince Charles, heir to the British crown. A wonderful time, the dawn of the com. Ah, the com! This spiritual foil of consumerism, this antidote to public sincerity. Diana was the Nefertiti of the RP, their Cleopatra, their Boudica.
In a decade of counterfeiting and nonsense, Lady Diana set to work. She met Mother Teresa and AIDS victims (when I say "meet", of course I mean "to be photographed with"). It touched lepers and the poor. Let me laugh. She still waited until 1989 to cuddle HIV patients. On this date, the people were fighting to fiddle with a max of seropos (now that we knew it was safe). Landmines, cancer, sick children. Everything, as long as there are pictures.
Photos were his thing. She collaborated in the writing of the manual of the photo opportunity. It was the only thing that interested him. She exercised a remarkable control over her image, scrupulously forbidding the pictures of her bad profile. Her marriage, like her divorce, was plagued by transcripts of clandestine recordings and confessions off to unscrupulous confidants. But she let it go. However, when a photo of her sweating in a London gym was stolen, she immediately sued the British newspaper and issued injunctions around the world. She was the princess for whom words didn't matter. The pictures, yes. Over all.
And when "Photo Princess" spoke, it was usually miserable. Formatted speeches written for her by a clumsy assistant, or infantile attempts at self-aggrandizement in interviews given to unscrupulous and ill-chosen plumitifs. Di was a planet surrounded by sordid and greedy satellites. A round of hagiographers and parasites, augurs and crooks. Whether it was the butler's revelation books or TV interviews with nasty and malicious bootlickers, she was regularly betrayed by charlatans who knew her celebrity's exchange rate.
She continued to campaign in the press during and after her divorce from Charles. Always more ops from charities, technique of selling the vacuum. A giant ad for an invisible product. But she was now sailing off the coast of the monarchy, freed from her fallacious printer. Everything was colder, harder. Her love life, endless tabloid flesh (her terrible taste in men didn't help). Inevitably, we, her audience, turned against her, she became a figure of disgrace or mockery. And until the day before her death, the British newspapers called her a household breaker, an unworthy mother, Jezebel. There again, its emptiness worked wonders. We used to fill the blanks with fairy-tale fantasies and sweet dreams. Now, on that blank screen, we projected our bitterness and disdain, our anger and disappointment. She hadn't changed. We do.
And then she died, and our turnaround had the violence of a spin. Suddenly London was dripping with ersatz emotion - acres of flowers and candles in a sea of sobs. The whole new truth was that we had always loved her, unconditionally, without reservations. The awkward memory of recent criticism or mockery evaporated. Those who did not show enough respect were passionately yelled at by mourning totalitarians.
The hypocrisy was complete, it was a hit. And yet the streets of Glasgow, Belfast and Manchester weren't inundated with tears (at its highest, his approval rating never exceeded 47%). His popularity was as fictitious, as fantasized as his landmines and lepers. She was in the media. Like this artificial mourning but strangely affirmed and furious.
Of course, there it is, Diana's secret: becoming so famous that she ceased to be real. The ordinary young woman had always been invisible, eclipsed by the two-dimensional photographs that occupied her so much. But what was this other dimension that millions of photos missed? I do not know. But I know that's the only thing that makes me sad about him.
I was in Paris when she died. I was awakened by the news. A strange, muddy, surprising moment. It's always strange when someone you think is stupid dies. Death is too serious a thing for them. I did not know what to say. I was a little ashamed.
In English, scapegoat is called "scapegoat" (literally, "the goat of the landscape"). But it's not the same idea. The emissary is missing. There is no such notion as useful or worthy of a message or a messenger. Scapegoat carries something of limitless cruelty, infinitely more futile. She was our scapegoat, led to meaningless death, for an absolution we were never going to feel.
She was a princess. Everyone loves princesses. Why ? Because the princess is used to put the woman in the simplest stories. Otherwise, there is the wicked mother-in-law, the old peasant woman, the witch. Better to be a princess. Or not.
What would have happened if she had lived longer? In the post 9/11 world, the world of social media? She would have been perfect. Her humble skills fit right in with the "now" she helped create. She would have been the queen of Twitter, the empress of Facebook.
But the most interesting question concerns those who grew up after his death. What do they think of her? In a sense, they are the ideal consumers of what she had to sell. This empty box, this white screen. Now that she is no longer alive, she is no longer likely to taint or deflect the black, charmless light that we can continue to project onto the small human space she left behind.
