Page 184 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL THEORY IN POPULAR CULTURE

scenario unified us ritually and re-awakened our sense of drama and the
uniqueness of individual events. The televised funeral ritual celebrated unify-
ing, emotional, symbolic objectifications of collective experience. It established
order and defined roles as it restructured time and space. It o ffered a security
blanket against the terror or boredom of mere profane existence. It celebrated
central tendencies and values in our global culture. These are the larger
theoretical concepts that classical anthropological theory and popular culture
theory have contributed. 5

The importance of ‘the popular’ and media celebrity

‘The popular’ today has the prominence the Church had in medieval society.
In the broadest sense, all areas of life today relate to and are subsumed by a kind
of media ‘noosphere’, to borrow a word from Teilhard de Chardin, that global
mental and spiritual environment expressed in the bytes of media circulating
everywhere and captured in human minds. Diana’s death and funeral illustrate
the ways in which popular media play the traditional social role of the Church
in today’s secular, pluralistic society.
The canonized saint can be of the humblest origins and the slightest worldly
accomplishments but is offered up for emulation as a role model for symbolic
purposes: ‘Be like Saint Teresa.’ Today the media celebrity plays this role. ‘Be
like Mike’ (Michael Jordan), that is, be delivered from your worldly miseries by
losing yourself in his celebrity. Diana became a celebrity par excellence. Even
when she separated herself from her largest claim on worldly power as the wife
of England’s future king, she remained in the public eye and continued to be
celebrated. She is a classic example of historian Daniel Boorstin’s observation
that a modern celebrity is famous simply for being famous, that is, that ‘worldly
achievement’ is not necessary to celebrity.
The scale of Diana’s celebrity cannot be denied. During her life and death,
she was featured on magazine covers in unprecedented numbers. Jacqueline
Sharkey (1997: 20) notes, ‘Economic and technological developments made
Diana’s image such a marketing force that broadcast network news operations
devoted more time in one week to her fatal accident than to any news event
since the 1991 coup attempt against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’. Her
death was the number one news story of 1997 according to the Associated
Press. Diana’s significance has been the subject of at least fifteen conferences.
Opinion polls in the UK rank her as high as second among the twentieth
century’s most important figures.
Such celebrity as Diana’s, in many respects, achieves what canonization was
intended for, role modeling and relief writ large, but does so on a scale
unimaginable to Church instruments of beatification and canonization. The
number of people affected, however slightly, by the Diana phenomenon is a
challenge to the theoretical imagination. Diana in life and death symbolized so
many things to so many people – beauty, compassion, glamour, responsibility,

173