Dialogue: Dead have no image control

By SANDY BURGHAM

Rifling through my dresser recently I found one of those items of clothing one never wears yet can't bear to throw out.

It's a T-shirt, given to me by a friend, carrying a cheery and eerie photo of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, holding hands walking through clouds, both sporting large angel wings.

While I admit to enjoying the cynicism and irreverence of this snapshot from heaven, I have never had the guts to actually wear it for fear of public abuse or getting mysteriously struck by a freak lightning bolt.

I put it in the same category as the Elvis car air freshener that hangs over my husband's rear vision mirror. Shameless and tasteless commercialising of the dead, which at some stage we have all participated in. Diana has joined Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean on the Boulevard of Dreams line-up in becoming one of the most famous dead commercial properties of recent times.

I have always wondered just how pleased this dream team would have been had they known their lives would go on years after their death.

Maybe they would indeed be delighted, since showbiz is all about having fame and fans for the longest period. But contemplate the thought of your public profile being owned one day by someone else or, indeed, a corporation.

The presentation of your image and publication of private matters would eventually be controlled by people you hardly knew in your lifetime.

Public adoration after one's death sounds flattering but can so easily spread to epidemic use of one's image in compromising ways that would make one spin in one's grave.

Elvis may have left the building but scores of skydivers in his mirror image parachute into Vegas and various air shows with regularity. Hardly a man of impeccable taste - but would he have approved?

Or, indeed, Marilyn. Would she be delighted that reprinted images of her dead body on the morgue slab are available for public consumption?

James Dean may be pleased that his legend outlasted his brief movie career, but would he really want his face on an ashtray, being stubbed on at regular intervals?

As we gobble up the tackiest Diana souvenir ever, as announced on the cover of a magazine recently, we wonder who is to blame for the disrespect of those who have gone to the other side.

It is easy to blame families like Diana's. Her opportunistic brother wasted no time in opening his photo albums, her home and her private family memories to a still-grieving public. It's easy to blame ourselves, who have never stopped participating in the game of Diana.

However, while it's easy to lay blame on the media, the paparazzi, her family and ourselves, it was Diana who created her destiny.

If you live by the sword, you die by the sword, and it's a given that you will keep living on by the sword. Thus we still remain the doting audience that she courted through the media.

But what of those innocently drawn into posthumous commercialism, a game that acknowledges no grounds of inappropriateness?

Even the Virgin Mary hasn't escaped. At home we have coffee mugs and eggcups with the image of Our Lady staring back at us.

And scanning though a retail catalogue stuffed into my letterbox recently I was disturbed to find among the books slashed in price the haunting face of murdered teenager Kirsty Bentley smiling out at me from a cover.

It wasn't so much that the personal account was compiled and published after her death (at least it was by her mother, who probably found the experience cathartic).

I was most saddened to note that the story of a girl whose life ended with such devastating tragedy so quickly found its way to the discount shelf just like everything else. A large "20% off" flash was urging us to read all about it for an all-time low price of $19.99.

It seemed so inappropriate to see such a poignant memoir sitting next to a cookbook and an account of our beleaguered Warriors.

In the harsh reality of a world where commercialism blurs with personal tragedy, it's about what items move short-term. I am hoping the Kirsty book got snapped up at $19.99, to save her smiling image the final indignity of life after death at the "all stock must go" table.