When Diana was killed in a car crash in August 1997, my dad drove our family to the beach in Eastbourne. It was windy and empty of people, and we sat for hours without television coverage or phone reception. This was the point: my dad was determined to avoid the outpour of Royalist sentiment surrounding the event. But doing so also meant ignoring the insurgent republicanism that had crystallised around Diana’s life and would go on to characterise her death. Contemporary commentators captured this subversive edge. Darcus Howe wrote in The New Statesman that Diana exposed a shift in British politics, “not simply a rush of blood with its accompanying hysteria… but a measured entrance released by the death of its commander-in-chief, Diana Spencer. A movement that has been simmering beneath the surface of British society”.1 For many, Diana’s confrontation with Prince Charles and her declaration, in the now controversial interview given to Martin Bashir in 1995, that she would not “go quietly” and would “fight to the end” to protect her children from the Royal Family, endear her as an icon of British republicanism.
In the intervening years, more jaded examinations of British class politics have rejected the rebellious reading of that moment, considering Diana in more passive terms. Hilary Mantel toys with the idea that she was “reacting”, not “rebelling”, reading Diana as nothing more than a posh woman acting out: “Throwing a tantrum when thwarted doesn’t make you a free spirit. Rolling your eyes and shrugging doesn’t prove you are brave”. Meanwhile, Diana’s story undergoes a perpetual audiovisual renaissance, from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s wooden Diana (2013), to Emma Corrin’s meticulous recent performance in The Crown, and a constant flow of tell-all documentaries, all of which continue to add detail to the narrative of her public life. In Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, the myth is recast once more, representing Diana in terms of revolutionary animus and introspective bourgeois idealism at the same time, a critique of monarchy explored through the melodrama of the psyche. While previous iterations of the Diana narrative have reproduced linear biographical facts, might Larraín’s conceptual, contradictory snapshot, ricocheting between scenes of intense drama, tragedy and hilarity, say something more interesting about British society?
With Spencer, Larraín has ignored the long view, dramatising a solitary Christmas weekend at the royal residence of Sandringham House in 1991. The film details the conflicts that would expand beyond its confines to form seismic shockwaves of anti-royal feeling, basing its narratives on interviews with people who were present at the time. While Visconti’s The Leopard (1963), a canonical film about the death of a dynasty, used battle scenes, crowds and family melee to depict political ferment, Spencer works to recoup layers of historical feeling into a single time and space, telescoping a life into a moment – a microcosm of wider political significance. Sandringham is first shown from above in a drone-like shot that tracks Diana’s open top Alfa Romeo into the sweeping central driveway. Initially creating a distancing effect through one apparatus of state surveillance, the film soon zooms into suffocating proximity as Diana clatters along carbolic-scrubbed tile floors or pads determinedly across ancient carpets thick with impenetrable dust: “This was once Queen Victoria’s room. It’s all of her skin floating around in here.” Huge interiors are filmed tightly cropped and candlelit. Cinematographer Claire Mathon tints the colour palette a warm sickly yellow, even though the house is freezing cold, as if ironising the nauseating jollity of the season. Heavy, cluttered, gloomy rooms are made tolerable only because they are constantly cleaned by a hundred household staff. A luxurious film, Spencer continually sets the drama and detail of Diana’s life (and outfits) against Royalty’s studious anti-spectacle in which the family can never be seen to enjoy its ever-abundant wealth: a way of softening the obviousness of inequality and preserving the idea of a natural and necessary national order.
Larraín’s refusal to describe the Royal Family in detail is central to the film’s aesthetic critique of upper class power, in which authority is demonstrated through distance and detachment. Throughout, the family is pushed firmly to the back of each shot, blurred and distant. As the camera pans across the dinner table or drags around the living room, their faces are passed over largely unidentified, figures made uniform in over-embroidered damask dresses, thick tweed blankets and drooping Elnett curls. We rarely hear any of them speak. If their silence is contemptuous, so too is their silencing. This is merciful: for once we are spared the desperate construction of Princess Margaret as a great wit. At one of the high-points of this non-verbal face-off, Diana snaps off her giant pearl necklace – a loathed gift from Charles who has given the same to Camilla – and the beads clunk into her cream-topped green soup. Picking out each pearl with a golden spoon, Diana shovels them into her mouth, devouring the symbols of the class she has come to loathe.
Often the metaphor-laden script clunks along so leadenly that the weak attempts at satire register more obviously as farce (how many jokes about Charles’s preference for organic vegetables can writer Steven Knight hammer in?). But the film’s real strength is its melodrama. Echoing the anxious camera movements and quick cuts, Johnny Greenwood’s repetitive score, crashing through the Christmas Day church organs or growing slowly and dreadfully louder at dinner, is always overwrought. Elsewhere, Diana’s feelings are relentlessly externalised through constant close-up and dramatic tableaus. As Girish Shambu writes about the Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972), “the viewer is both drawn into the tale and yet steadily distanced from it by the stylizations of its telling”. So too with Spencer, which alternately draws close with gentle, personal framing before pulling back to a hyper-spectacle of feeling. Yet this melodrama, ultimately removed from reality, is most in line with the Diana image, more appropriate than the needlepoint of satire, and a more exciting way to expose the congealed relations between state apparatus, patriarchy, and capital accumulation that the narrative represents.
For some critics, enjoying Spencer has required a suspension of anti-monarchist feeling. Writing in Jacobin, Eileen Jones recommends “[putting] aside all desire to watch the House of Windsor drown in the River Thames and actually enjoy the show”. Must this be true, or should we accept the film’s thesis of Diana as a bourgeois revolutionary? As the film progresses, the bourgeoisification of Diana goes into overdrive. Listing off her “simple and ordinary” passions (love of Les Mis, Phantom of The Opera, “fast food”), Diana compares herself to the victims of the Royal Christmas Day shoot: “I’m taking my place amongst the pheasants”. In his article The Origins of the Present Crisis in the New Left Review, Perry Anderson argues that, unlike France, England never enjoyed a full bourgeois revolution, with the result that the aristocratic class hung onto power and England “never went through a truly egalitarian phase and so never struck at the ideological rationale of the aristocracy”. Dooming society to perpetual decline, everything sinks under the weight of a self-satisfied upper-class hegemony: “Traditionalism and empiricism henceforward fuse as a single legitimating system: traditionalism sanctions the present by deriving it from the past, empiricism shackles the future by riveting it to the present”. As Diana’s hallucinations intensify, dream-like revelation replaces experiential knowledge as the film’s dominant mode, providing increasingly explosive critiques of royalty. Again and again, Spencer centres Diana’s distaste for aristocracy: undermining the family’s love of ceremony, she declares to her sons that “here there is only one tense, there is no future – the past and the present are the same thing”. Should Diana, the descendant of Charles II and Mary Queen of Scots, be considered as a late embodiment of the 17th century revolution that England was denied? Spencer’s constant hallucinatory, fantastical refusal of both empirical and traditional values, nudge us toward this paradox.
By positioning Diana’s story within an emergent structure of popular republican feeling, the film is freed from the narrowing constraints of personal history. For Siegfried Kracauer, biography was the ultimate “neo-bourgeois art form”, a mode of escapist literature which constrained social life within reductive discourses of individualism. Only a few exceptions could reveal “the life of the historical individual… not a means to evade an understanding of our situation; rather… only to reveal that situation.”[2] Which type of biography is Spencer? Despite its personal focus, the film is more interested in carving out the lines of political and familial conflict than it is in the authenticity of Diana Spencer’s life story. Simultaneously wary and celebratory of biographical limitation, Larraín tweaks the conventions of the genre, ironising idealist conceptions of history through scenes that explore how intensity of feeling can appear like depth of action. This depiction of feelings as historical events finds its moment of perfect expression in scenes where Diana imagines herself as haunted by, and later re-incarnated as, the ghost of Anne Boleyn. Match-cutting between close-ups of the executed queen of England and the queen of hearts, Diana sprints down the ancient royal staircases in a Tudor dress and gable hood, but in the next shot she’s back in her wellingtons, peacoat and pearls – a sloane ranger infused with the spirit of history.
[1] Howe, D. (1997). After Diana: the movement of millions had been gathering pace and strength long before Diana’s death. It tore the veil from the face of “official” Britain. New Statesman (1996), 126(4351)
[2] Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Biography as an Art Form of the New Bourgeoisie (1930)”. Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries, edited by Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2017, pg. 110
Georgie Carr is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers.