Diana's Death into Her Car is a Befitting Coffin for Her

 Rushdie's essay "Crash" is a response to Princess Diana's tragic death. He focuses on contemporary culture "in which the intensity of our gaze upon celebrity turns the famous into commodities… that has often proved powerful enough to destroy them" ( Rushdie, 138). And on the case of Princess Diana's destruction that is the fatal car crash, Mercedes becomes a befitting coffin for her body. 

Rushdie begins his essay by giving the reference of J. G. Ballard's novel "Crash" and it's movie adaptation by Cronenberg with the same name. The story of this novel or movie was about symphorophilia; specifically car-crash sexual fetishism and it "caused howls from the censorship lobby" (Rushdie, 138) and was labelled as pornographic. The irony is, the same themes and ideas were present behind the car accident that killed Princess Diana, Dodi al-Fayed, and their drunken driver. Thus Rushdie thinks the story of Princess Diana is not a "fairytale", it has a direct link to the story of the novel. 

In our consumer culture, the automobile has always been eroticized and glamorized and represented as the symbol of power and freedom, as the glittering mechanical mistress who is seductive and attention grabber. Diana becomes an object of global fascination and obsessional documentation in the mass media since her dating with Prince Charles. Her popularity was so much that by December 1981, the Queen of England had to call a meeting with press members to ask them to give the pregnant princess some privacy and also the press coverage of her marriage and death received more columns than World War II. Billions of people loved to watch her daily life affairs yet only a tiny percentage of viewers saw the woman and even fewer knew her intimately. "The camera, as a reporter, captures the news and delivers it to our door and, in more adoring mode, often looks upon beautiful women and offers them up for our delight" (Rushdie, 138) and it is the photograph that is considered as evidence to provide a view of someone's personal life to feel as if we know the person on the frame intimately. Susan Sontag thinks, taking a photograph of someone is a kind of violence that "turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed" (Sontag, 10). In the age of fame for their economical gain, the paparazzi started to capture voyeuristically on our behalf the famous "shy Di look" or "unguarded" moment of Diana and turned her into commodities. But the brutal truth is, she never wanted "to give the photographer's power over her to be merely their (our) object" ( Rushdie, 140) yet she was "repeatedly subjected to the unwelcome attentions of a persistent suitor (the Camera) until a dashing, glamorous knight (riding his Automobile) sweeps her away" ( Rushdie, 139) and using the concept of Baudrillard's simulacrum, we can see the image or simulacrum of "hyper real" Diana that the media has created. That's why, at first Diana has been represented to the tabloid press as "bad girl/whore" and later after her death as "fairytale princess". This gave her privilege to be "skillful at constructing the images of herself she wanted people to see" (Rushdie, 140). 

On August 31, 1997 Diana and her lover Dodi died in a car crash in the Pont De I ‘Alma tunnel in Paris when they were intending to go to Dodi’s apartment and a swarm of paparazzi on motorcycle began to follow her. Diana’s death focuses on the stars attempt to assert her subject position and her ultimately lethal rejection of the idea that she is no more than an object for consumption. Diana in the moment of her death saw “the phallic lenses advancing upon her, snapping, snapping… she died in a sublimated sexual assault” (Rushdie, 139). But the irony of her death is she was not in the driver seat and her death was necessary to the Windsor as she was the traitor to the throne not only by divorcing Charles but by Loving Dodi Fayed, a middle east Muslim with darker skin. 

Rushdie has successfully pointed out that how a commodity (star/Diana) is dying into another commodity (car) and how Ballard's novel brings “theses two powerful erotic fetishes the automobile and star in an act of sexual violence (a car crash) created an effect so shocking as to be thought obscene” (Rushdie, 138).