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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
CBS airs images of a dying Diana the same week her Speedo-sporting son makes a splash in the tabs.
Apr 23, 2004 | In the seven years since she died in a high-speed car crash in a tunnel in Paris, the pictures of the bafflingly mangled black Mercedes that ferried Diana to her death have become almost as famous as its most precious passenger.
Looking at the pictures, snapped at night with flash photography (like many of the pictures of Diana), it's difficult not to wonder at how such an expensive, glamorous, chauffeur-driven, bodyguard-accompanied limousine could end up such a shapeless mess -- or how such a mess could have been a car at all, let alone such a famous one. To wonder how a limo whisking someone from the Paris Ritz could have turned so suddenly into a hearse. To wonder just how mangled the expensive, glamorous Diana was.
But of course, no matter how hard you look at the picture, you can't see her -- she has already been whisked off to the hospital where she would die soon after from "internal injuries" (something we know she had been suffering from for many years, and they were not caused by any car accidents). Until this week, Diana's expiring body is literally obscene -- "off scene" -- in a way that much of her life was not.
Standing in for the totaled body of Diana, the wrecked Merc -- the ultimate rubbernecking image -- has somehow become a symbol not of prurience but of discretion. We all knew that pictures of a dying Diana in the back of the car were snapped by the paparazzi pursuing her moments after the impact, and that these landed on the desks of newspapers the next day. Until the CBS documentary about her death this week, no English-speaking publication or TV station has dared to show us the pictures. The media always has to navigate between catering to public curiosity and voyeurism, and on the other hand avoiding provoking the disgust of their audience -- with themselves. "What kind of lady do you take me for?" is ever the response of Dame Public when they feel they haven't been romanced enough before being given "what they want." The public could not get enough of Diana -- but after her death, they turned out to be as bulimic as the shy, awkward, exhibitionistic, sophisticated girl they voraciously consumed.
Unsurprisingly, the British press has been fairly unanimous in its condemnation of CBS. The left-liberal Guardian denounced the way CBS had plumbed "new depths of prurience"; the Daily Mail thundered on about the "ultimate betrayal." Much of the media here, though, had few qualms about showing images of, say, mutilated Americans in Fallujah. JFK's head has, of course, exploded on U.K. prime time more often than fireworks on the Queen's birthday.
Mohamed al-Fayed, the father of Dodi al-Fayed, Diana's consort that evening who also died in the crash, ordered his lawyers to write to CBS before the broadcast to make a "personal plea" stating, "We cannot imagine that CBS News would want to be the first enterprise to breach the collected understanding of the media based upon good taste, propriety, decency and sympathy." Good taste, propriety, decency and sympathy are qualities that Mr. al-Fayed, the Pharaonic proprietor of Harrods and chief retailer of Diana conspiracy theories, is well known as exemplifying.
