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Popular Icons and Contemporary Memory: An Apology, Year 2001 Marguerite Helmers continued . . .
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In the study of the contemporary cultural icon, authorship and audience are the same. The limits of reader-response theory, in which the reader writes the text in front of her, are reached when the reader is able to absorb the actions of the icon and imitate the copy that has been promulgated by the press. As readers of contemporary cultural icons, we construct our own stories, as well as their morals and their meanings. We author role models for ourselves by instantiating the intertextual references of the icons or by absorbing the meaning of the icon through conventional devotional processes. Since the car accident that killed Diana in Paris in 1997, no photograph of her can be neutral. They are all affected by the memory of the accident: paparazzi pursued Diana and Dodi al Fayed at high speeds through the midnight streets. The American and British public fed on new images of Diana in order to construct its fantasies of the fairy tale princess. In viewing the photograph, then, are we complicit in the actions of the paparazzi? Have we killed Diana by our relentless need for new photographs? Jill Chancey comments that "The paparazzo functions as the audience's virtual voyeur; instead of actually lurking about in the hedgerows, the viewer can live vicariously through the lens of a 'royal-chaser,' as they are often called" (167). She cites Susan Sontag's insight that photography is a violation that "turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed" (Sontag 14). "The implicit message is that women such as Diana Spencer and Marilyn Monroe must be accessible to the male gaze," writes Susan Hubert (132). These contemporary culture icons are inseparable from image. Their role as icon, however, retains a similar sense of the icon of the Orthodox Church, while also owing its longevity in the West to Protestant visual piety. Mass produced images designed for religious instruction can be classified as either didactic or devotional, writes David Morgan (9). In the last two centuries, mechanical reproduction has aided the distribution of devotional imagery to the pious: "Believers have enshrined inexpensive copies of commercial religious art and treated them reverentially in domestic piety and public worship" (Morgan 7). Within this broad setting, then, historical and biographical persons are reduced to personas, hypostases in the vocabulary of the Eastern church, easily fictionalizable characters who occupy central roles on ongoing narratives. They may be interpreted according to the semiotic codes that they represent, regardless of whether, in "life" they actually perform the actions attributed to them for the motives that are attributed to them. Since Diana met the codes of the male gaze (tall, thin, blonde) but was also accessible to the female gaze (princess, mother, bulimic) we can see that we, as spectators, end up in much the same position as Lollie McClain:
—Marguerite Helmers 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | Notes | Works Cited
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