Princess Diana’s game of thrones

Two decades after her death she echoes across our TV screens, even on HBO’s hit fantasy saga. Her life has mythic resonance, writes Daniel Mendelsohn.

I bought my first television set so I could watch the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. I’d been in graduate school until a few years earlier, and in graduate school it was a point of pride not to watch TV – unless one did so ‘ironically’.

But that was still the era of network TV, well before the revolutions in production and technology that would make possible the new ‘golden age’ of television. Since then, writers of shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Six Feet Under have gone on to create levels of dramatic sophistication and complexity (and violence and profanity) unimaginable in the primetime dramas of the 1990s; while lavish cable budgets have raised visual spectacle to new heights, whether in fantasies such as Game of Thrones, with its dragons and sorcery and undead armies, or in meticulous historical recreations such as The Crown, the hit series about Diana’s mother-in-law.

The late ‘90s was also the era of AOL and 14400 bps phone connections, and it was, in fact, because I had dialed in for my nightly email check (“You’ve got mail!”) that I saw the news flash about what had happened to Diana. Until then, I’d successfully ignored her; she had always struck me as perfectly uninteresting while a member of the Royal Family and irritatingly needy once outside it. It’s true that, like many other Americans, I’m susceptible to British royal pomp: the austere and comparatively recent ceremonials of our republic haven’t been able to fill the regressive yearning that people seem to have for elaborate rituals and royal, or at least heroic, personages to enact them. Like millions of other Americans, I woke up at 4:30 on the morning of 29 July 1981 to watch Diana get married, and the display on show – the carriages and horses, the dresses and the uniforms and the hats, Kiri Te Kanawa singing Let the Bright Seraphim – was certainly worth the inconvenient hour.

But that show wasn’t about Diana herself. At that point, she wasn’t so much a character in a drama – the way that, say, Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte were characters in Brideshead Revisited, that other lavish British TV spectacle of the 1981-1982 season – as an attractive mannequin in an eye-popping spectacle. And I supposed that’s what many wanted her to remain.

Personal drama, impersonal spectacle: we seem to crave both equally and irresistibly, and the greatest entertainments, from Greek tragedy to Game of Thrones, have delivered both in equal measure. ‘Drama’ suggests that we are all alike, subject to the same emotional needs whatever the differences of class or provenance. Pomp and spectacle, however, emphasise those very differences, reminding us that certain people are always going to be special, to be powerful and wealthy, while reinscribing those differences in such an aesthetically stirring way that we are seduced into applauding the specialness of those others while accepting our own ordinariness. Just as, indeed, we accept the reality that certain people are always going to be stars, while the rest of us are mere spectators.

The tension between drama and spectacle – between our private selves, on the one hand, and our public selves, on the other – has itself always been the fulcrum of great theatre; it is also at the core of public fascination with the British monarchy for the last 100 years. As the characters in The Crown never tire of pointing out, the success of the ‘crown’ – of the monarchy and the public spectacle that symbolises it – long depended on the suppression of what they call ‘individualism’, of the human needs that flow from our private selves.

The greatest threats to the crown’s stability were moments when drama threatened spectacle – when the individuality of the people relied upon to play their ceremonial roles threatened to break through the carapace of the performance. Although Diana was, in some ways, representative of a specific generation, the ‘Baby Boomers’, with our expectations that life owes us happiness and fulfillment, in other ways she was just the latest in a line – from Edward VIII to Princess Margaret – of royals whose personal dramas imperiled the greater spectacle, which was the monarchy itself: mythic, symbolic, impersonal.

By the time I logged onto AOL that night two decades ago, it was hard to get away from Diana’s dramas, try as one might. As the years since the fairy-tale marriage passed, we watched with either alarm or sympathy as she attempted to carve out an authentic kind of personhood, to be a figure with a genuine psychology – or, at least, to have some say in which myth she would be reenacting.  I doubt I was the only classicist who, as “the people’s princess” became bolder in her efforts to strike out on her own – first by courting the sympathetic press, then by taking up causes both worthy in themselves and, invariably, worthy of photo-ops – observed that she’d started out as Iphigenia, a young virgin sacrificed to the powerful ambitions of royal men, and then moved on to become Alcestis, the vibrant mother and wife underappreciated by her husband, ferociously protective of her offspring and, indeed, solicitous of their success after her death. A story that ended, as so many tragedies and myths do, with an awful inversion: Diana the huntress, herself hunted to extinction. For all her attempts to create a new paradigm for herself, what strikes me now is how imprisoned in the old paradigms Diana was: how doomed she always seemed, how inevitable her death.

So drama had finally outstripped spectacle – or rather, the two had become fused. How could I not go out and buy a TV set to watch it all? And yet what surprised me was how strangely wrong it seemed, the ceremonial that I had once enjoyed so much. Whatever emendations they’d made to accommodate Diana’s tastes, her charities, her showbusiness friends – Elton John, this time, instead of Georg Handel – it was still, in the end, the grand old Windsor ceremonial, flawlessly rehearsed in every detail, as measured as the tiny steps of the pallbearers struggling beneath the weight of the leaden coffin.

Immobilised by the requirements of her public role, Diana had broken free of the Royal Family only to find herself encased in one of the oldest myths of all, one that goes back to the Greeks and has been enshrined in every genre since, from Antigone to Giselle, from Madama Butterfly to Thelma and Louise:  the myth of the beautiful woman whose efforts to become independent of family or convention create high drama, tantalizingly suggesting that the paradigm can be changed – only to reassert that paradigm when the woman dies.

It is impossible not to reflect on Diana now, on the dramas and spectacles that structured her story. Not simply because it’s the twentieth anniversary of that strange and overwhelming week, but because it’s so hard to escape the poignant conviction that she lived, and died, just a little too early – a feeling I have whenever I watch TV lately.

The television set I bought that weekend was long superseded by others, most recently a huge flat-screen; but because it’s always worked perfectly well, and because it evokes certain sentimental memories, I’ve never been able to bring myself to throw it away. It came out of the cellar last week after the flat-screen got knocked over, just before the season 7 finale of Game of Thrones, and so it’s been on what I call the “Diana set” that I’ve been watching that and some other favourite programmes: The Crown, Broadchurch series three, The Fall series three, Prime Suspect: Tennison.

Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that these and so many other recent TV dramas are focused on the stories of women – young women, mostly, sometimes even girls – who are born into overwhelmingly patriarchal societies and must struggle with special cunning to assert themselves. Whatever the individual story lines, royal accessions or police procedurals or crypto-medieval pseudo-histories, the real dramas are those of helpless girls learning to be authentic and authoritative human beings.

Some viewers may, indeed, find it ironic that The Crown so sympathetically represents the young Elizabeth II as – well, a Diana figure: a young female royal whose attempts to assert herself in the face of tradition are constantly defeated by the entrenched and overwhelmingly male establishment. But whereas Elizabeth, because she was the Queen, had in the end to conform, Diana could at least try to escape, and because of that attempt she became, in the end, the greater ‘character’.

The fictional heroines face the same struggles. You have only to think of the strikingly feminist trajectories of the female characters in Game of Thrones, so many of whom, from the evil Cersei Lannister to the two winning Stark daughters, Arya and Sansa – one a tomboy, the other susceptible, at least at first, to fairy-tale stories of handsome princes and their pretty brides, as Diana herself apparently did at first – embody the private arcs of real women, commoners and royals both, who have had to shake off the yokes of their fathers or husbands or both in order to find themselves.

You may think, too, of a certain other heroine. A lovely and tremulous blonde girl, well-born and well-bred and little else, is taken from home to marry a king; but this marriage is very different from what she had expected; soon she is alone in the world, and must fend for herself. Over time, a special ability that she has – one that may be the result of her own private sufferings, and which is certainly unparalleled in the history of the royal houses of the era – an intuitive capacity to empathise with and connect to the downtrodden, the outcast, the oppressed and maimed, wins her a huge international following that gives her a power far greater than any power that her marriage could have granted. 

I am thinking, of course, of a girl named Daenerys Targaryen; but if her story sounds like that of a girl named Diana, it shouldn’t be so surprising. Art and drama often work out the traumas of real life, making them into instructive tales – we call these ‘myths’ – adapting and adjusting them for new audiences and new mores. In real life, the real life, that is, of nearly a generation ago, the story had to end tragically. But now? No one, of course, knows how Game of Thrones is going to end, when its final season airs next year. But if Dany survives to triumph, who’s to say it’s not because of Diana?

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