POP CULTURE AND THE LEGACY OF PRINCESS DIANA
Difficile d’incarner une icône de la culture populaire. C’est pourtant le défi que relève Kristen Stewart dans Spencer, le film de Pablo Larraín sur la princesse de Galles. Alors que Diana est décédée il y a près de 25 ans, elle reste une figure marquante de la famille royale. Comment l’ombre de celle qui a tant marqué les esprits risque-t-elle de planer au-dessus du règne de Charles ?
As he prepares to take on the role for which he has waited so long, it must be very odd for Prince Charles to still have to deal with the attention lavished on his wife. His late, first, wife, that is, who still sells papers, shifts magazines, gets the clicks and draws in the viewers almost as magnetically as she did when she was alive.
2. Hence the new movie Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart as the people’s princess, and
1. to take, took, taken on endosser, assumer / odd étrange, curieux / to deal, dealt, dealt with gérer, affronter / to lavish prodiguer / late défunt(e) / to shift ici vendre, écouler / to draw, drew, drawn in attirer / viewer téléspectateur.
2. hence d’où / to star avoir dans le rôle principal /
which has already created a bit of a stir. Stirring it up is of course precisely what Di liked to do in the years after her estrangement from the heir to the throne. In those days she’d deliberately turn up to some do in a dramatically cut dress just to overshadow some tedious speech he was giving on the other side of town. Now, posthumous iterations of her personality by a succession of young actors – Naomi Watts (Diana), Emma Corrin, Elizabeth Debicki (The Crown) – try to catch her spirit and continue to entrance fresh generations.
3. Gen Z, for example, born in the very year, 1997, in which she died. People, in other words, in the prime of their adulthood, who have no contemporaneous memory, of the late princess of Wales, and who only have the archive footage and the semi-fictional versions of events in series such as The Crown to grasp at. They are still being recruited, these fresh votaries at the shrine of Diana, Queen of Hearts.
PRO-CHARLES AND PRO-DIANA CAMPS
4. Indeed, Diana has been haunting them ever since she died in that car crash in Paris. The days immediately after her death marked the worst crisis the House of Windsor had been through since the abdication crisis of 1936.
5. The population divided firmly into proCharles and pro-Diana camps. It was a kind of early, prototype intergenerational culture war of values and attitudes of a kind that we’re nowadays all too familiar with. Harry and Meghan have inherited the kind of compassionate, dare one say “woke” values
that Diana embodied, and they are trolling Charles with them.
6. The cult of Diana seems stronger than ever, even though its saintly figurehead died almost a quarter of a century ago. She has the benefit that age shall not weary her. Her golden reputation never had the chance to suffer from the inevitable mistakes she would have made.
7. A lot of the enduring attraction is radiated by those doe-like eyes, which Stewart spends a significant amount of Pablo Larraín’s Spencer trying to emulate. From the first images of the then Lady Diana Spencer’s peering out from underneath her fringe, that semi-shy, sideways look just commands attention and sympathy. 8. The qualities that made her hunted then make her still wanted, if not worshipped, today - style, class, kindness, an instinct for fashion. Maybe that helps her be such a gay icon and a queer hero now. She was woke, as we’d call it now, in all sorts of others ways, and modernising, very much the spiritual ancestor of Meghan.
DIANA'S LEGACY
9. Diana was ahead of her time in adopting the cause of mental health, when it was even more stigmatised than it is now, just as William and Harry were to later. We now know more about why: Diana understood what mental anguish and a cry for help was. The same bravery goes for her missions to get rid of the land mines in Africa, still maiming kids years after various civil wars had ended.
10. You can exaggerate the power of Diana in death, but Prince Charles must by now be resigned to the fact that he and Camilla will never be able to emerge from her shadow, and not even when he is king. Even if the British public may have softened over time, pop culture is making sure that Diana’s legacy lives on.
11. Things actually haven’t moved on that much since the early years of Charles and Diana’s marriage, when he went on a walkabout on their first joint trip to Australia. Adoring crowds lined the street, but poor old Charles overheard a couple of fans voice their disappointment that “she” had been allocated the other side of the road to them, and “we’ve only got him”. Much of the public haven’t really shifted their view of the heir to the throne since then.
IRREPLACEABLE DIANA
12. But back to the present: When Charles becomes King, will Camilla be Queen? Attitudes have softened somewhat from the venom felt towards the now Duchess of Cornwall, but the idea of Queen Camilla still horrifies, and the wider cult of Diana shows no sign of fading away, such is her enduring after life in popular culture.
13. Thus, the new king and his consort will find, funnily enough, that there are three people in their marriage, so to speak, and that only one of them has the star quality. As Charles Spencer put so prophetically it at the Abbey: “the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana, whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds”.