The Death of Diana Spencer

The August 31, 1997 death of Diana Spencer, former Princess of Wales, in a Paris auto crash, and the circumstances surrounding it constituted an extraordinary large media event. Whether viewed through the lens of the crisis of sovereignty in the British monarchy, and of the sovereign principle in late modern states more generally, the function of extreme celebrity in postmodern culture, the import of a quasi-fictional life narrative of transfiguration—Diana’s “fairy-tale” marriage to the Prince of Wales, the subsequent birth of heirs to the throne, the tabloid break-up of their marriage, the eating disorders, the attempt to become a philanthropist through the use of her image, the potential happy ending with Dodi, an Egyptian billionaire’s son, the death by pararazzi, the funereal equation with Marilyn Monroe via Elton John’s rewriting of “Goodbye Norma Jean,” the final internment on the Spencer estate on an island in the middle of a lake—from all of these perspectives and in all of these representations, as well as in the extraordinarily widespread groundswell of mourning and regret (an estimated 2.5 billion people watched live televised coverage of the funeral), it is possible that a certain kind of threshold in the establishment of a world mediated celebrity culture has been crossed. (The coincidental death of Mother Theresa several days after Diana’s and the coverage of it might be seen to have confirmed or disconfirmed such a belief.)

Shortly after her funeral, Theory&Event invited comments on the meaning (or meaninglessness) of the death of Diana Spencer. We offered a series of questions as a set of provocations:

To what extent should or could this death and its coverage be understood as an event? What does the death suggest about the role of celebrity in the late modern era? What is the role of the mediated image in the size of this event? Does the “red giant” quality of the event—its monopoly on coverage and then its sudden disappearance from the front pages of newpapers shortly after, in a manner similar to the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide of this past spring, signify anything? How and why was the death so “affective” for so many people?

Here are some responses.