I have a confession: When Princess Diana died, I cried my heart out for weeks. I sobbed, I wrote in my journal, I brought a rose and stood in line to sign the condolences book in New York City, I attended an open-air memorial service in Central Park. I was heartbroken.
To understand how weird this is, you need to understand that I was never a fan of hers while she was alive. (And I know, she wasn’t technically “Princess” when she died. But she was more of a princess in the magical sense of the word than anyone else with that title, so I will continue to use it.) I was dimly aware of her, because of all of the non-stop media coverage of her life, and I remember her visiting Hong Kong while I lived there, but I didn’t care about it at the time. If anything, I looked down on the people who thronged to see her when she visited, and who followed news about her as if it were important. The truth is, I didn’t think much about them, or about her, at all.
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And then she died.
And it was as if a light had gone out in the world. As if something that should never be struck down had been struck down. I couldn’t believe it. And then, I became tremendously, tremendously, sad. I didn’t understand why, at the time, but I allowed myself to grieve this person I had never known nor cared about. From the outside, it might seem that I was simply swept away by the collective grief of everyone else. But my own sadness began before I had seen any of that. I didn’t watch much TV, and the only coverage I remember watching was the funeral procession and funeral itself. To this day, I still don’t fully understand why her death affected me so much.
Later this month will be the 27th anniversary of her passing, and I am transported back to that time more so this year, thanks to Netflix’s production of “The Crown.” The show has been a tour de force in many ways, with impressive production values and an exceptionally talented cast. But more than that, it provides an important lesson in the ways – and the limits – of narrative spinning.
One of the overarching themes of the series is the elevation of “duty” over human desires, needs and wants. In one dramatic storyline early on, a young, “sensitive” and “delicate” Prince Charles is sent away to a harsh, distant, boarding school despite his mother’s desire for him to attend the nearby, and presumably gentler, Eton. It occurred to me back then, as I watched this storyline unfold, that there was an explicit attempt here to humanize the not-very-likeable-in-reality then-Prince Charles. As the series progressed, this effort became more pronounced.
Later, while at Cambridge, Charles, enamored of the theater, is cast in a “wonderful role” in a production at the university. But he is pulled out by his family, so that he can spend a semester in Wales. The young Charles is clearly not happy about this, but – and not for the last time – is told to “put personal feelings aside.” Did any of this actually happen? Who knows. The show has been criticized for frequently conjuring up historical events out of whole cloth. But whether it happened or not, the inclusion of this episode forms one more important piece in the narrative that is being crafted.
We watch, a few years later, as the romance between Charles and Camilla Shand develops. The relationship is presented as the first time Charles is able to choose something for himself, and perhaps the first time he is able to be truly happy. But not for long. It is not long before the Royal Family schemes to keep the couple apart and pushes him to choose from among Crown-approved candidates.
Throughout all of this, Chales is compared to the Duke of Windsor, with whom Charles has struck up a regular correspondence. The Duke, who had abdicated the throne ostensibly for love, speaks of the family’s “fear of the character and freedom of thought, which I represented.” Charles admires him, and sees himself in the Duke, writing “…you were cruelly denied your right to reign alongside the woman that you wanted by your side. But I give you my word I will not be denied what you have been denied.”
We feel sorry for Charles. We empathize with him. Some of us may even admire him. We are being set up for his eventual betrayal of Diana. We are being set up to see that he married, and then cheated on, Diana, not because he was a sniveling coward, but because he was a true romantic at heart, thwarted only by the pressures of his position, and of an upbringing that conditioned him to accept those pressures and to place them above all other concerns. In fact – the narrative of “The Crown” explains to us patiently – not only was Prince Charles actually a tragic, romantic, hero, he was also the victim in this story.
The casting goes a long way to accomplishing this goal. Dominic West gives us a mature Charles who is charming, intelligent, warm, perhaps a bit hapless, but genuine, and with a burning desire to contribute, to do his bit to make the world a better place. We empathize with him – even when he is behaving in reprehensible ways. The producers do not shy away from showing us his unsavory deeds, they simply put them in the hands of an affable, misunderstood good guy, and curate his history to feed us a context that makes it – if not completely acceptable, at least understandable.
The portrayal of Diana is an entirely different matter.
Princess Diana in her early years is played by Emma Corrin, who brings much of the warmth and vulnerability of the real Diana to the role. We see her struggling to find her place in this – not a family, but a system – and we see her begin to take on her public role: Charming the people of Australia, and hugging children with AIDS (a gesture that would have an enormous impact in combatting stigma against those with AIDS.) We begin to see why people adored her.
But by season 5, this part of her story, and of her character, has all but vanished. Elizabeth Debicki won a Golden Globe award for her role, and I cannot comprehend why. Debicki’s Diana comes across as shallow, self-absorbed, needy and superficial. She is not especially likable, is a little cold, and lacks all of the magic that we were beginning to see in Corrin’s portrayal.
Barely a mention is made of the passion she had for her charity work until very near to her death. When her advocacy on behalf of victims of landmines, and support for efforts to ban the use of landmines, is mentioned, it comes with a tasteless joke that she makes on the topic, comparing her marriage to Charles to stepping on a landmine.
Did the real Diana have flaws? Of course, as we all do. And it’s possible that some of those flaws are revealed in Debicki’s depiction of her. But as much truth as it may contain, that depiction is rendered hollow by virtue of what it leaves out, which is: Everything about her that mattered.
What “The Crown” mentions, but does not really show, is how much the British people loved Diana. They loved her. And they weren’t alone. People all over the world loved her. And there was a reason: She was genuinely charming, and genuinely genuine. If she was putting on an act, she was damned good at it. But I don’t think she was. I believe she was exactly what she presented herself to be: A passionate, vulnerable woman who entered into a marriage believing it would be based on love, and was crushed when she found it was not; A woman who found that she cared very deeply for others, and who used her position to advocate for causes that she actually, genuinely, did care about.
The perception at the time was that she was “a breath of fresh air”, a real person who had somehow ended up in the midst of a stodgy, out-of-touch monarchy, and was shaking things up. Not in a rebellious or antagonistic way, but simply by bringing her heart into the mix. By being real and genuine in public, and by caring. Not representing caring, as everyone else in “the system” had been raised and trained to do, but by really, truly, doing it.
And people could see the difference. They could feel it.
By contrast, the public’s perception of Prince Charles back then was that of a cold, stiff and awkward man. One who, as “The Crown” shows us, had been raised by a system for the system’s sake. And indeed, his upbringing does appear to have been a tragedy. But it did not produce the soft and cuddly tragi-romantic hero that Netflix wants us all to believe in.
I cannot believe that a TV show like “The Crown” contains no broader agenda, no manufactured narrative its creators wish to shove down our throats. Indeed, the massaging of public perception of the monarchy is a recurring theme in the show itself. My own opinion is that one of the primary purposes in making “The Crown” was to make a King Charles somewhat palatable to the public.
To some extent, this effort has likely succeeded. Probably, many of those who have seen the show will find themselves a little more sympathetic to the man who now sits on the British throne. But there is only so much that propaganda can accomplish, only so far that human minds and hearts can be manipulated into seeing a version of reality that someone else wants them to see.
I know with absolute certainty, for example, that an entire nation would not have wept had it been Charles in the back seat of that car instead of Diana. And there is no amount of narrative crafting, of opinion spinning, no number of seasons of TV shows reframing Charles’ life as that of a misunderstood romantic, that will ever change that.
We live in a world where it can be difficult to distinguish between what is real and what is manufactured, and where everything we see in the news or on social media feeds feels manipulated. Powerful people with nasty agendas for the rest of us have entire armies at work crafting the lenses through which they want us all to experience reality. It is tempting to become cynical about all of it and just declare everything that makes its way to a screen to be a deep fake.
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But believing that is to give the power hungry far too much influence over our experience of life. We all know things in our own lives to be genuine, and it is possible that there are things that make their way onto the mainstream media’s screens that are also what they purport to be. There was a time when such a phenomenon was less of a rarity than it is today, and I believe Diana was one of those things: Someone who was just what she presented herself to be. As crafted and controlled and protected as her image was, something undeniably real and heartfelt pushed its way through all of that artifice and made itself seen.
It is worth remembering this.
It is worth remembering, when Charles dies and hundreds of thousands of people fail to weep openly in the streets; when truckloads of flowers fail to appear at the gates of Buckingham Palace; when the entire world fails to stand still for an entire week.
Remember that they are not the puppet masters they so desperately want to be. That they cannot manufacture what we have in our own hearts. That they do not have the power to dictate our experiences, what we see, what we feel, what we believe to be real. They cannot make us love them, or love their puppets. Remember that as much as they would like us to think that they can, they cannot conjure up the kind of magic that a nineteen-year-old girl from Norfolk could.
Diana had something very real that Charles never had and never will have. I know it was real, because I experienced it myself – in spite of myself, and in spite of what I thought my opinions were at the time. Her magic worked on me without my even being aware of it. I still don’t fully understand what happened to me twenty seven years ago. What I witnessed was a massive outpouring of grief, the likes of which I had never before seen, and I know it was real because I felt it too. Millions of people around the world who had never even met her, found that they had loved her. I think maybe I loved her too.
