John Heron Project

Somewhere, someone who never cared for her in better days is masturbating right now over a recent picture of Jade Goody, the woman as glowing mannequin-saint; willowy and graceful, not emaciated; luminous and iridescent, not papery.

Somewhere else, a young woman is dying. Hollowed out, eternally tired, in pain. This is not about her, not really. I can’t really imagine that she even more than half-understands the thing that has been created around her.

The story is telling itself in dozens of places. Even choosing to ignore it completely is to have an opinion on it.

People have died in public before; people have even died slowly in public before. But no one has died quite like this. No one has, in the process of dying, become a fiction.

Now. There’s this thing we do when someone we loved has just died, or maybe when we’re dying ourselves, where we tell everyone that someone has died, or that we’re dying. As if we’re all horribly offended that the rest of the world doesn’t share in our grief. It can’t, of course. If we felt all the grief in the world all the time, we’d all collapse under the weight of it. But what are we going to do? We can’t help ourselves. Grief makes us all a little bit selfish.

The process of one otherwise ordinary young woman’s public dying is about the farthest you can extend that urge. Maybe the madness over Princess Diana (God, was it twelve years ago?) was more wide-ranging, more ubiquitous, more powerful and engaging. But it wasn’t a story the way that Jade’s dying is. Diana’s death was sudden, and the way she lived and died was by the standards of this decade unmediated. Unscripted.

There’s something terribly pagan about what has happened to Jade Goody. I mean, we have elevated — and by “we”, I mean we — have through the very fact of having an opinion elevated her to this almost numinous sort of state. To a sort of tarnished low-taste divinity.

Like a pagan goddess, this media construct we that can’t help hearing about has been elevated from human form into an image. Like a pagan goddess, she has her stories, and some of those stories are very human, and they don’t always do her credit: in them she is tearful, prejudiced, selfish. And like a pagan goddess, she does not care if we worship her. She is still there. The real woman might find the idea of someone masturbating over the image of her dying and in a wedding dress grotesque, but that’s the cost of creating this whole thing. And besides, our putative self-abuser isn’t masturbating over her, he — or she, let’s be equal ops about this — is in love with the image, the story.

The whole pagan goddess analogy breaks down. A media construct is a temporary thing. The real woman’s going to die, and real people are going to live through real grief — and don’t go, oh but she’s awful, ask yourself instead why you think that, how you know her outside of the media construct, because of course you don’t — but the effigy is going to have a different lifespan. The story’s going to have epilogues, at first at the same rate as the story of the dying, and then diminishing. And then there won’t be anything, and that silly, flawed goddess will be gone. While I expect that people will actually cry for the media construct, she’ll pass out of our collective memory, and only those who knew and loved and grieved for that real woman from whom the construct was made will be left.

[Edit: I cut the article down at Graham's suggestion. I think it reads a little better now.]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Britain, Film and TV, Fragments, Reviews and Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.