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  • The Indestructible Beauty of Suffering: Diana and the Metaphor of Global Consumption
  • Scott Wilson (bio)

“Cover her face
Mine eyes dazzle
She died young”

—The Duchess of Malfi, (cited by Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, September 8, 1997, p. 12)

Nancy Banks-Smith’s epigraph to her commentary on the television coverage of the death and funeral of the Princess of Wales draws an analogy with Jacobean tragedy. Like many other commentators, Banks-Smith notes the comparison even as she contributes to the media fictionalization of the Princess”s life. The Princess of Wales lived out a life of “brilliant fictions;” 1 the media not only told her story, it wrote and re-wrote that story according to a variety of familiar genres: fairy tale, romance, soap opera, morality play, tragedy and so on. The blanket coverage of Diana’s life and death turned, essentially, on the suffering of a young woman whose beauty, frozen in the glare of photographers’ flash bulbs, did not diminish. As Bank-Smith’s quotation subtly suggests, this “coverage” involved both the endless, painful exposure to the rigors of popular narrative and the effacement of the “real” human suffering it produced. To the end, Diana’s face was covered by the dazzling images that immortalized her.

At the same time as her death crystallized the iconic image of Diana, another image was withdrawn from media circulation: the image of the Princess dying in the crumpled Mercedes taken by the “paparazzi.” A taboo was placed on those images that recorded her dying moments, unconscious or in pain. They were subject to universal moral censure, deemed to constitute the very limit of intrusive prurience, the accursed part of the photo-archive, the dazzling, unbearable core of the story that must be covered over. In their place the newspapers printed the image of the smashed Mercedes, a substitution that for some betrayed the same prurient impulse (i.e. she was that crushed Mercedes). Already commanding a high price, the withdrawal of the pictures only heightened their value and desirability—and not just in simple economic terms. The British Sunday newspaper The Observer acknowledged the fascination the pictures would exert: “These crash-photos are likely to become under-the-counter cult objects—authentic-snuff—pictures and a repellent symbol of the amoral code of the tabloid photographers and the editors who profit from prurience.” 2 This sentiment expressed a common view that these pictures do more than simply record a newsworthy event, a view that assumes, without fear of contradiction, that there is something more prurient or obscene in these images than those, for example, depicting the suffering of victims of war or famine. But it is no “amoral code” that allows the photographs to be taken, sold, and reproduced across the world. The profit is gained from the very morality that, as with so many other pictures of the Royal Family taken incognito, likes to see in order to condemn, that shakes its head at the image it has just bought. It is a “News of the World/National Inquirer” morality whose sustenance depends on the objects of its salacious disapproval. In this case, if the volubility of the condemnation is not simply the result of a disappointed moral prurience, then it is because morality wishes to be protected from the destructive reality of its own desire.

But in fact some of these “snuff” images were indeed “reproduced” in the British press, on the day after her funeral, by the Sunday Times in an article by the Insight team on Princess Diana’s “Last Hours.” The photographs were not reprinted, but they were described:

One was a clear shot of her face, a hand stretched out as if reaching for Dodi. “She looked superb,” said Sola, “she was still very, very beautiful and nothing suggested she would die a few hours later.”

The princess was unconscious. Her head was resting in the gap between the front seats. Her face was serene. There was just one bruise under her left eye. A trickle of blood ran down the side of her forehead. 3

The pictures are recorded as described by one of the photographers, the aptly named, to the...

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