Social Performance and its Interpretation
On footage of Diana and Dodi at the Ritz hotel shortly before the crash, it was said that “she laughed and smiled like the old Diana, and for a moment it was difficult to believe that she had been dead for ten years. Dodi’s body language was solicitous and attentive, slipping an arm round her waist and looking like the cat that got the cream” [Hamilton, A].
Ironically, this interest in social performance both as presented in evidence in the case and as enacted behaviour in the courtroom created a reckoning between the higher symbolism of the Inquest and the proliferation of localised, fragmented narrative viewpoints which are a frequent feature of commentaries on figures such as Howsam and Loughrey. Indeed, much media commentary on the Inquest relied on foregrounding forms of social performance in partial and subjective readings, despite such ways of reading being condemned when presented by other observers – the Loughreys, the Howsams, etc . On the one hand media accounts of the ‘backstage’ significance of private lives and the intimate details of the Princess’s personal relationships attested to the revelation of truths in the proceedings; yet on the other media condemnation – or at least, not so gentle ridicule – of those members of the public audience who saw themselves as personally invested in the case emphasised their mis-reading of their own status. Such a contradiction highlights the significance of the interpretation of social performance in both spaces.
At one point in the proceedings, Mohammed Al-Fayed’s spokesperson, Katherine Witty, was reprimanded by the Coroner for disrespectful behaviour after the Jury complained of her laughter in the courtroom, apparently in mocking condemnation of the evidence of the police officer who was on the stand at the time. This reprimand symbolised for certain commentators the chief corrupting drive behind the whole Inquest, a bare-faced attempt by Al-Fayed to make the facts bend to his analysis. This became the dominant reading of Witty’s laugh in subsequent media coverage, as characterised in Andrew Pierce’s Daily Telegraph column which attacked Witty for her activities as Al-Fayed’s PR, describing how she was “publicly rebuked by Lord Justice Scott Baker, the Coroner for “inappropriate behaviour” as she smirked during Michael Mansfield’s cross-examination of a witness. Nice”. Pierce also asked and answered his own question “just how much money does it take to make you speak the unspeakable?” [Pierce] My own reading of this incident, from a seat in the public gallery, was that Witty had responded to a member of one of the legal teams who had sneezed in an accidentally comical manner. Witty’s helpless fit of giggles at this was of the order of a kid in a school assembly who knows they should be quiet and desperately wants to but who cannot – inappropriate, yes, disrespectful, perhaps, but certainly not aimed at mocking the evidence of the witness on the stand. However, for me to present a reading of such social performance as substantive evidence of meaning and as contradicting the claims made both for it and for the typicality of the Al-Fayed camp’s attitude is, perhaps, to enter the realms of delusion which Loughrey et al are accused of. The informality of my presence in the Courtroom means that I am only able to register and to offer a local, fragmented and partial version of the events. Yet, if such a localised reading of an incident as contrary to the official interpretation of the significance, or of the wider mediated symbolic narrative into which it is interpolated, speaks of anything substantial, it is surely of the existence of a host of unmediated interpretations of events which resonate outside of the courtroom, establishing fragmentary and ‘minor’ narratives beyond the grand narrative of truth or conspiracy. And, indeed, media concern with the public audience at the Diana Inquest clearly foregrounds anxieties about this narrative proliferation, focusing on the unreliability of such public interest in the events as evidenced by the unreliability – the eccentricity – of the regular attendees.