There's no nuance when it comes to Diana.
My thoughts on The Crown Season 6, Part 1 (with spoilers!)
I binged all of the first half of The Crown last night. The package of 4 episodes follows Princess Diana in her final days and focuses primarily on her relationship with Dodi Al-Fayed. Reception of The Crown has slipped since Diana came into the series, but it was the aspect of the show that I was most excited about, considering I was a child during the 90s and remember quite a lot about what happened. The season 4 trailer even masterfully frames show the show with the dread of psychological horror. Stuff’s gonna get intense. We had to expect it.
I Saw Diana in Myself
I was 10 when Diana died. Coverage of her life was rampant in the late 90s. Literally everywhere. Newspapers and magazines in the grocery store lineup. Every nightly news show my dad watched featured a segment about her in some regard. I remember watching TV documentaries with my dad about how she was “the most photographed woman in the world”.
I internalized that message. Seeing pictures of her always felt so momentous. She was loved simply for being herself. I wanted to wear pretty outfits and have people in awe of me, but then I also internalised seeing the way she was always covering her face while surrounded by cameras. There was a real dichotomy in wanting to be loved while also wanting to be alone.
I didn’t quite understand who Dodi Al-Fayed was. The news referred to him as Diana’s “lover”, but Diana was once married Prince to Charles, yet divorced him and was still a Princess? I remember my dad trying to explain that one, that “technically” she wasn’t a Princess but she could still be called one, simply because the people just liked her so much.
It didn’t make sense, technically, but I could never see her as not a princess. It really just felt like she would always just be there, immortalized in photographs forever. Then, on that summer night in 1997, my sister and I were watching a rerun of Hanging with Mr. Cooper and the show was interrupted by breaking coverage of the accident. Dodi was dead but Diana had been transported to hospital.
I was annoyed. I just wanted to watch my show. New updates kept coming, interrupting it over and over with how serious a situation the accident was. I remember being annoyed, thinking it was irrelevant to cover it so seriously. She was going to be okay, for goodness sake. The surgeons would fix her. She was Princess Diana. They’d take more pictures of her again.
And then another Breaking News segment interrupted the show and the reporter bluntly stated that “Diana, Princess of Wales, ha[d] died.”
COre memory there, that feeling of my stomach sinking.
I remember writing in my journal about it before going to bed. Again, I was 10. I had no real sense of death in my life. I was still mad about the Mr. Cooper episode. Was I mad at her for dying?
I remember being glued to the news following her death, watching the mass piles of flowers outside of Buckingham Palace grow and grow and grow. I remember specifically seeing a bouquet with a playing card on it: a queen of hearts. I collected articles. I read and watched every possible thing I could.
I remember when they drove her coffin out of the hospital, and I wondered how drivers could still drive the hearse while the windshield was completely obstructed with flowers thrown by the crowd.
My parents recorded the funeral. Every time they had guests over for dinner, they’d put the funeral on, and all the adults would be glued to the TV. I don’t know how many times I watched the camera zoom in on the envelope sitting atop the casket.
MUMMY
I was hoping that Prince Harry’s Spare would touch on what was actually written in that letter, but he didn’t and I’m glad that he didn’t. As much a spectacle as the royal family is, they are still real people. At the end it all, I am just another woman who saw a bit of Diana in myself.
She really was larger than life to me.
Diana’s Too Much for a Character Drama
Previous seasons of The Crown were so nuanced. They had a soft touch, because earlier seasons focused on the people inside of the fishbowl. We don’t really know Elizabeth or Charles or William or Camilla or Margaret or Anne. They’ve never been entirely candid, so when it comes to presenting them as characters with nuance, the show succeeded in doing so. It only takes a little bit of nuance to make a robot seem real. Still, there’s a touch of uncanny valley with them. something we don’t know. A mystery, which is what we all crave, right?
Diana, however, was an outsider. She tried to fit in, but she always remained an outsider. You can’t tell the Diana story with the same nuance. She was honest. She told it as it was. Diana was always blunt. She spoke so eloquently of her past and her unresolved trauma. She strived, above all things, to simply be authentic and understood.
I appreciated that they gave Diana some humour, some antics, some chaos, some ulterior motives. I appreciated that they framed her relationship with Dodi as two troubled people trapped in traumatic situations working their way through the turbulence of it all.
Theirs isn’t a love story. It’s two people finding intimacy and a space to really be raw. And there’s no way for anyone to really know what was happening between them, but I appreciate the nuance behind it all.
Plenty of scenes feel very formulaic, so the four episodes do ultimately feel like watching a romantic drama. I used to pride myself on hating genre fiction, but I let myself go along for the “Diana & Dodi” ride. Tropes are everywhere in this season, but they’re carefully crafted with some decent twists on the trope itself, which in turn, creates nuance.
There’s an intimate scene where Diana and Dod are being physically intimate on his yacht, but neither can openly admit what they like most about the other.
There’s a proposal scene and that becomes a scene where Diana stands up for herself and also helps Dodi realize that he needs to do the same.
There are plenty of scenes that portray Diana in times of strife, but they’re relatable, not saccharine:
There’s a scene where she’s talking to her therapist on the phone, waving her hand about like a hysteria patient as she discusses the madness that still reigns over her life. Her therapist tells her that she needs to get away from chaos, and Diana admits that she knows she should. She makes the intention to, anyway.
Then there’s a scene where her detoured outing with Dodi causes her to miss her scheduled phone call with the boys, and she furiously bites over her finger in frustration.
There are moments when she’s having the time of her life with Dodi. She’s laughing and being goofy and carefree. There are moments when she knows that being with him is silly. There a moments when she loses herself entirely in the cage of her situation with the paparazzi, and has no choice but to let Dodi helplessly attempt to help her out of it.
Nobody’s ever going to get the Diana story correct, but at least for me, watching it made her feel so real and fun and chaotic while being compassionate and dedicated and yet wanting to be seen as more. The female experience in a nutshell. It doesn’t get any more blunt than that, really.
About Those Ghosts
Lastly, there’s the pesky “ghost” trope that everyone’s complaining about. Because they’re not ghosts, dammit. They’re figments of imagination.
I read those scenes more as Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth's interpretation of Diana validating them. Like a last convo to ease their guilt in some way.
Like closure, but selfish closure.
Diana thanks Charles for being raw and broken after he identifies her remains in the hospital. She praises him for simply acting human. Charles expresses regret for his actions, but he knows that is powerless against the humanity she brought to the royal family. He will never escape it. He knows this. He admits to it.
Diana tells The Queen that it wasn’t her intention to destroy the perception of the Monarchy, but that in light of everything it it would be best to express sadness because it’s what her subjects now expect. The Queen does what is expected of her, and later prays at her bed before ending her evening. She looks over her shoulder during her prayer, and perhaps will always be looking over her shoulder from that point on, knowing that staying true to her “duty” knowing there will always be something dark looming there.
Dodi tells his father that it's foolish to try to impress the Western world because he'll never be seen as one of them. Later, after he sends Diana’s clothing and possessions back to the family alongside condolences for their loss, he never receives any note in return. No thanks. No gratitude. No compassion. Dodi was right.
The “ghosts” of Dodi and Diana They represent closure that the three guilty parties attempt to get for themselves in the aftermath. We all do this. We all try to have that “last conversation” with lost loved ones. Sometimes we have multiple last conversations. In entertainment, this always comes in the form of a “ghost”, which it a trope if there ever was one, but because this is a dramatization, dammit, and public perception IS the ghost that hangs over Charles and The Queen and Mohamed.
My Overall Thoughts
I see this package of episodes a bit like a spinoff miniseries of The Crown. It’s not up to the same par as earlier seasons of The Crown. It definitely lacks nuance and at times is rather blunt and formulaic in its storytelling, but you can’t tell the Diana story like you’d tell The Queen’s story. The Queen DID take the side stage during Diana’s reign over the people. It wasn’t a nuanced time in monarchy history. It was full-on soap opera fodder. The Royal Family still is a real-life soap opera, for better or for worse.
I’ll be waiting avidly for Part 2. I was so damn obsessed with Kate Middleton in the early 00s. I’ve been pretty nostalgic for that time of my life. I was just an insecure young woman back then, and I’m really excited to see how they portray Kate’s early party-girl days with William and Harry.
Overall, as an introverted party-girl, I had a blast watching this and can’t wait for the rest.