Putting Away Childish Things: Looking at Diana's Funeral and Media Criticism

Abstract

I had not planned to watch Diana's funeral. Like so many, I had learned of her gruesome death while viewing CNN, and had observed with some surprise how my shock grew into something like grief for a woman I had never met and only managed to see once from a great distance while attending some pompous horse show in London. Surely, the loss of Mother Theresa the night before was much more significant, if not more tragic, and I would tune in to her eulogies the next day, after a good night's sleep. I had seen enough of the voyeurism that intruded on Diana even into death, and felt no need for another crass media spectacle. Or so I told myself, trying on the cynical posture of my intellectual friends, struggling as a feminist to keep at bay my disturbing fascination with a beautiful, wealthy, jet-setting, blonde princess. Perhaps it was my dream that caused me to awake inexplicably in time to see them carry her, in her flag and flower-draped coffin, into Westminster Abbey. Or it could have been the e-mails from my friends Jane Sutton and Anne deVore that week, posing the disquieting questions why our society kills women, and why they are appreciated best when dead. Probably it, was all of these. In the dream, I am staying in a house, waiting nervously with many other guests for an airplane flying overhead to drop some unknown cargo through a hole in the roof. I am fearful that, from this height, whatever is dropped will demolish the house and kill all of us inside. But the Queen (not that one) is there. She tells me not to worry; all the royal houses are built with an unfinished roof, a perfectly round opening, for this very purpose, and the pilot will fly low enough so that the package will land safely. Later, I remembered that, from earliest times, a monarch's crown is not gilded over completely, but remains open at the top, for the infusion of the spirit, and as a reminder that the king and queen are not the gods, but merely their earthly emissaries. In my dream the airplane, technology's attempt at a bird, is descending into a shaft prepared for its arrival, and whatever it has to deliver, though not revealed to me in sleep, is very important. So upon waking I let myself be drawn inside this historic monument for dead kings, which became, for an hour, the crucible of an astounding emotional meltdown, barely but movingly contained within a ritual enactment as old as the cathedral walls and as new as the TV cameras behind its columns. The rest of the weekend was for me a time of descent, a forced downgoing, as I soon discovered it was also for many of my female friends. Alternately I gave in to my own sadness and tried to contain it by writing up the seeds of this essay at my computer. Red-faced and bleary-eyed, I was compelled to unwrap that package the airplane dropped--to understand the mystery in Westminster Abbey--and hopefully to enable myself to climb out of the hole into which I had fallen. Like I often do when trying to comprehend a dream or a film, I let myself float freely among the thoughts and feelings I had that weekend, and what emerged were associations between the public experience of the funeral and my own experience as an academic mass media critic. When the editors asked me to contribute something for this issue, I decided to pull together these associations. In what follows, I reflect first on the funeral as a ritual of the hunt. Before coming around again to my experience of it, I consider how like the hunt our critical practices have become, and how feminine ways of valuing might reform them. I. The child of a preacher, I must have heard the words of the apostle Paul to the Corinthians a thousand times. But something about the way Britain's prime minister, Tony Blair, spoke them, with what I can only describe as stunned wonder, made me listen to them as if for the first time. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge . …

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