Bad enough you are a Prince whose meandering Mother gets killed
in a Parisian car crash in the company of a man from another
country and religion. But now, ten years later, to have the wreck a
subject of a televised documentary featuring graphic footage of
Princess Diana in her dying moments, well, Princes William and
Charles are said to be furious at the prospect.
True, Channel 4 had offered the Princes a private showing of the
documentary before airing, and a Royal spokesperson says, “This is
the last thing they would want…they’d rather no one mentioned her
death.” (Not likely, since the tenth anniversary of her demise is
being observed around the world.) Channel 4 says some of the images
would be obscured and nothing likely to distress relatives will be
shown. But the presence of the dying scene has been the chief
pre-broadcast talking point.
Which raises the point: how much of thanatopsis moments should
be shown? Where is the limit? Where does news veer into unfair
sensationalism? Has the rise of the Internet and occasional
on-camera beheadings performed by fanatics “pushed the envelope,”
as journalism would say? We mentioned “unfair.” Can you be unfair
to a corpse in work?
Yes. Photographers know this. Sensate ones are well aware of the
unfairness of their position in the presence of violent death and
dismemberment. In September of 1959 a Braniff Electra en route from
Houston to Dallas came apart near the Texas town of Buffalo, the
first of several models of its ilk to come apart due to whirling
motion in its outer engine nacelles. Twenty-eight passengers and
six crew died in the Buffalo disaster. My station sent a film crew
there and one returned with footage that would turn the stomach of
a civilized person. Many of the victims had been hurled from the
wreckage at altitude and had fallen to earth. Many fell into a
grove of trees and the descent through the branches dismembered
them, rendering long strings of human parts. Our cameraman had for
some reason filmed many of these dismembered elongated corpses. He
had figured, of course, that none of this footage would be used in
the final air product. But I questioned him on his having done it
at all.
It was more than a matter of taste. It was also a question of
fairness. Was it fair to take this advantage of those poor people,
deceased though they were? This was not war, in which the intended
product is corpses. This was an accident, and there’d be another
like it involving a Northwest Airlines Electra over Tell City,
Indiana, in six months.
I didn’t think at the time and don’t now, after years of
reflection, that the filmer knew what I meant in dressing him down.
But I would like to think that many, if not most, professional
cameramen grasp my meaning: there is something unfair in using a
privileged position to take advantage of death, even with, or more
especially with, the knowledge that what is being captured can
never be used.
This touches only slightly the subject of a dead or dying
Princess and her sons, but it is tangent. I don’t need to see the
Paris accident footage. Been there before.
