The same idea was at the heart of Marilyn Monroe’s star image: that she couldn’t really help being so sexy, it just breathed naturally out of her. This idea that sex appeal is at its most appealing when it is unintentional, a product of innocence, is a familiar one. “I have never seen such a strong charge of innocently provocative sex,” wrote one wedding guest in his diary afterward. “The British public was instantly enchanted by this delightful mixture of feminine messages - modesty, sexuality, and affection for children.”ĭiana would manage to preserve that contradiction all the way through to her wedding day. “The picture was so obviously, and beguilingly, a show of inexperience,” writes Tina Brown in The Diana Chronicles, the definitive Diana text. What made the picture iconic, and what made Diana an instant sensation, is the fact that she clearly did not know her legs would be visible in the photograph, that she clearly had no intention of showing them off, and yet there they were anyway. Diana was a lovely girl, but there were plenty of lovely girls hanging around Prince Charles in 1980. And it wasn’t only because they had realized she was pretty. “I knew your legs were good,” Prince Charles is said to have commented upon seeing the resulting news spread, “but I didn’t realize they were that spectacular.”įrom then on, whether or not a love affair blossomed between Diana and Charles, there was certainly a love affair blooming between Diana and the media. The fabric went transparent, so that in the finished photograph, Diana’s soon-to-be-famous long legs form a striking silhouette. Diana posed outside with a couple of children from the classroom, and halfway through the shoot, the sun came out, backlighting Diana’s skirt.
Then one day in 1980, a photographer from the Evening Standard came to the kindergarten where Diana worked and asked to take a picture. She didn’t strike the press, then, as particularly pretty or particularly special. She was just his unremarkable new girlfriend, the one the tabloids had dubbed Shy Di because of her trick of ducking her head and laughing nervously when the paparazzi photographed her. The picture that made Princess Diana famous was taken when she was still known as Diana Spencer, before she was engaged to Prince Charles. From left: Marilyn Monroe on the set of The Seven-Year Itch Diana Spencer in the 1980 photo that made her famous Britney Spears in the video for “Baby One More Time.” Left and center: Getty Right: SME The contradiction was fundamental to her image. Diana became famous for being accidentally sexy. It’s the story of the women we love to death. It’s the story of the women whose combined innocence and sex appeal and star power makes the public worship them the story of women hounded for the idea that they might be using all that sex appeal and star power to make the public worship them on purpose, rather than out of sheer innocence. Not just in tellings and retellings about Diana herself, but in the stories of other virgin sacrifices, other famous women who match the Diana archetype. There must be something about Diana’s story that is very appealing to us, because we repeat it so often. The Crown has been laying out a seven-course meal for seasons now, and Diana and her death are the entrée. It features shot after shot of her slipping into the back seat of a black Mercedes like the one she died in shot after shot of the paparazzi coming in too close, just as they did on the night she died. So The Crown lingers on the foreknowledge of that moment with exquisite care. What, after all, was the 2006 film The Queen - written by The Crown showrunner Peter Morgan and taking place in the days after the car accident that killed Diana - if not a statement of intention that her death is the moment that must be the inevitable climax of The Crown? Her death is built into the structure of the show, the moment we’ve all been waiting for it to catch up to. And most importantly, we’ve been waiting for her to die. We’ve been waiting for Diana to show up and liven things up with scandal. There is Princess Diana, who will win over a nation, rend the Windsors apart, and die young and beautiful and tragic. And was there ever a virgin sacrifice like Princess Diana?įrom the moment that Diana first appears on Netflix’s The Crown, a gawky 16-year-old tiptoeing away from Prince Charles with her supermodel face peeping out from behind a schoolgirl’s costume mask, a thread of electricity runs into the show: Ah, at last, there she is.
0 kommentar(er)
