IN THE NEWS
A Diana from the other side
VISA RAVINDRAN
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Controversial reality star Jade Goody died as she had lived: in the glare of spotlight. Was her courtship of the media in her last months transparency or theatre?
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Photos: AFP
A Short but eventful life: Jade Goody was attention-seeking till the end.
The great debate about press freedom versus the right to personal privacy has been forced into the forefront once more by recent events like Jade Goody’s illness and death before television cameras and the Austrian trial of Elizabeth Fritzi’s father, who continuously raped his daughter and fathered several children by her.
Claudia Branton-Ortner, Austrian Law Minister, has said Fritzi’s case has prompted a review of the laws that have allowed Elizabeth to be identified while her father has a form of state protection. Florian Kettle of Falter calls this the result of “a culture of bureaucracy that confuses transparency with theatre”, while Kate Connolly, one of the two British journalists present throughout the trial, wonders whether Victorian protection laws were breached.
Live coverage
Jade Cerissa Lorraine Goody’s funeral on April 4 was a very public one with fans present and full live coverage by the media. Her friends denied the possibility but huge screens were erected outside the church to enable those outside to watch, making it a public event. In death, as in life, Jade was controversial, attention-seeking and in the public glare of the arc lights. Was it the wish of a dying mother to provide her young children with adequate resources that prompted her to court the media or a clever strategy to prolong her 15 minutes of fame? But whichever side one takes there is no denying that she has raised awareness about cervical cancer and the importance of early detection.
In Jade’s case, there is no question of intrusion by the media (Joe Brazier, though, did request media to respect his young sons’ privacy) but it raised questions about why viewers wanted to pay to see such morbid stuff. One blogger —Daniel Finkelstein — suggests that one of the things viewers are paying for is the ability to gossip about stars, marvel at their clothes and laugh at their choice of partners. Added to which is the attention-compelling nature of tears and terminal cancer and the sympathy generated for a person fighting great odds bravely.
In an interview to the Sun in February Jade admitted that she was doing it for the money but “not to buy flash cars and big houses. It’s for my sons’ future if I’m not there.” (She had thoughtfully arranged for them to holiday in Australia with their father Joe Brazier, away from the glare of her funeral). “I don’t want my sons to have the same miserable, drug-blighted, poverty-stricken childhood that I did.”
The product of a failed marriage between an uncaring father — a heroin addict who died in a KFC outlet at age 42 — and a crack-addicted, one-handed (the result of a motor-cycle accident) lesbian mother who abused her daughter but had to be cared for by her, Jade was denounced for her loudness, lack of talent and large size and called ‘a pig’ by the same tabloids that later greeted her as heroic in suffering. Underneath all this was the throbbing pulse of fear, writes Lucy Morgan in The Guardian. “Because despite the supposed democratisation of television the truly uneducated, those marked by true poverty and deprivation, rarely appear in our light entertainment schedules. And suddenly there was Jade, an unapologetic and unadorned symbol of all sorts of uncomfortable traits that we choose to face through the occasional well-chosen documentary… What the media reaction showed was how far we had yet to travel down the road towards social equality.” For this neglected segment, Jade was “a peer and not an affront.”
Psychoanalysis
At another level, she herself was seen as “a compelling presence: natural, guileless, open, funny and charismatic with a domestic, down-market version of star quality.” There was no exploitation of the media, according to others, and the Media replaced a social network that did not exist to support her through her pain and suffering from cancer.
Madeleine Bunting wrote that media coverage of “the redemption of a dying mother taps into the wider anxiety about the world we are all leaving behind.” She quotes a psychoanalyst and author of Bodies, Susie Orbach, suggesting that through Goody’s dying we are grieving for the death of a fantasy world.
Bunting quotes another psychoanalyst, Andrew Samuels too, who says Goody is offering a kind of consolation in bewildering times: “We might as well be wandering on King Lear’s heath: there is such a huge diffused anxiety: patients talk about walking through a door into a room that has no floor. People fear the structure of their lives falling apart,” he says, quoting Freud about the death instinct expressing itself in aggressiveness but also seeking to assuage anxiety, answer unanswerable questions like recovering from economic uncertainty, the effects of climate change and so on...
And Jade could joke that someone ought to send her a wreath in the shape of a Marmite bottle because you either loved her or hated her. Was that a death-be-not-proud-moment?
Reverend Stewart Hartley, vicar of St. James’s Church, Bermondsey, said he had spoken to several people who knew Jade and she was a local girl who had made the best of life and, of course, at the end, has been an inspiration to people. Several girls had told him they had gone to have tests done because Jade told them to.
Simon Hughes, Liberal Democrat M.P. for North Southwark and Bermondsey, who was among those paying their last respects, is reported to have said that he intended to speak to Jade’s family about a lasting monument. Funeral candles bearing the legend “Jade: an ordinary woman, an extraordinary life” were being sold to raise money for cancer research.
Just an uneducated dental nurse who thought Rio de Janeiro was a person but who contributed columns to Now magazine till May 2006; who, in June of the same year, launched her own perfume, which was taken off the shelves by the Perfume Shop when her racist comments in the “Big Brother” show against Shilpa Shetty blew up. “Is East Angular abroad?” she is supposed to have asked and her malapropisms found affectionate remembrance in the wreaths on the Rolls Royce hearse that carried her plain white coffin to its destination.
A handbag, a high-heeled shoe and a Marmite jar: all made of flowers sat on the car’s roof adding the wry humour that marked even some of the most solemn moments of a short but eventful life, peoples’ reactions also reflecting the idea that this was another Diana but ‘from the wrong side of the tracks.”
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