Autumnal
I imagined I’d write a few words about second chances, late blooming, the sixth decade. This isn’t that. This got enmeshed with Princess Diana’s faux bio pic, Spencer, which debuted on 2021 at The Venice Film Festival. According to the director, Pablo Larraín and the star Kristen Stewart, the film was supposed to be an homage. They said, they’d hoped to capture Diana’s “undeniable, penetrating energy” and the way she “[stuck]out as a sparkly house on fire.” The director mentioned he wanted “to make a movie my mother would like.” To make Pablo’s mother happy, Diana tells her maid she’s going to masturbate and breaks a string of pearls into a soup bowl, then eats the pearls with the soup. This havocked my personal idea of homage. But I could see how it might fit in with late blooming because Princess Diana, who bloomed early and died at 36, would have had been in her sixth decade, when the movie was shot., if she’s had the chance. Spencer, could have been a leaving-your-sixth-decade birthday gift. But whatever. I cannot imagine Diana in her sixties, which she would be this year had she lived. I still have that picture of her wearing black, waltzing with John Travolta, who has aged badly BTW, forever pasted on the inside of my eyelids. Still, I might make a case for my venture as a few words about film, if not the autumnal flowering the “People’s Princess” didn’t have. Diana did have chances, though. She had a chance to stumble around in a world full of wankers, a chance to vomit herself skinny, a chance to wander in glacial stone castles while her husband took phone calls from his mistress. I hate explanations, so I won’t put one here but let me say, just for me, death by paparazzi would have been a relief, unless as the internet whispers, she was murdered. In which case I’d linger as she has, a “sparkly” ghost shadowing my creepy ex-family and their apologists until the end of time.
Demise is not for
everyone. Some of us, dead
are ever present
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and five chapbooks. Find her work in Terrain, Tab, Rattle, About Place, Swimm, and a selection ( which she updates sporadically)at her website www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com
