What was that all about?

THE DAYS BETWEEN Aug. 31 and Sept. 6 1997 have been characterized in Britain as the occasion of a national nervous breakdown. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a Parisian underpass during the small hours of a Saturday morning initiated a week of emotion, delusion, recrimination, mourning on a mass scale, and constitutional near-crisis. Normal life was suspended, thousands took to the streets, and Queen Elizabeth II was faced for the first time in her 45-year reign with a possibly terminal public relations problem.

Is it possible that such a paroxysm of collective feeling could produce no changes, leave no marks at all? It certainly appears that way.

Stephen Frears’s excellent new film, ‘‘The Queen,’’ which opens in Boston on Friday, takes all of this as its theme. Michael Sheen plays the boyish, ingratiating Tony Blair, then in the first freshness of his premiership, keenly brokering between the isolated royal family and their increasingly disgruntled subjects. Helen Mirren plays Elizabeth II, and she deserves an Oscar: Across large rooms and Scottish heaths Her Majesty goes, in skirts of tweed, her corgis tumbling before her, with a wide, splendid, thick-ankled stomp that expresses both the supernatural gravity of her office and the dowdy stoicism with which she endures it. Here, one feels, is the woman described by her biographer Ben Pimlott as having dutifully spent her entire adult life in ‘‘an ethnic minority of one.’’

How could such a person be expected to deal with a tearaway narcissist like Diana, slumming in the people’s love, or with the insurrection of soft-centeredness that followed her death? Diana with her public weepings and her train of New Age apothecaries, her extensive narrative of victimhood and her talent-her gift-for creating and distributing emotion. Castellated in protocol, the royals were only going to get it wrong.

But if the Windsors were bungling their PR, the nation as a whole was careering through its own errors-of proportion, even of taste. For Londoners (as I was then) the strangeness of that week is not easily forgotten. ‘‘It was clear from the Monday onwards,’’ Sir Paul Condon, head of the Metropolitan Police, told royal biographer Robert Lacey, ‘‘that some people were reacting quite irrationally.’’

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On the ground, oddly, it felt like history. Away from Westminster Abbey spread the thronged and flower-smothered streets and squares, and more distantly the camped-out royal parks. The heart of London was a dreamy carnival of grief, a mass vigil-early autumnal by day, candlelit by night-that milled and muttered around the seats of power. Bobbies lifted children over barriers to lay their tributes, while out of view, in the back streets, crouched the armored backup and the riot vans. ‘‘Diana-Your blood is on their hands,’’ read one card left at the gates of Buckingham Palace; ‘‘Princess now a goddess, remembered eternally,’’ another.

Meanwhile, suddenly very un-divine, the monarch and her family huddled-first at Balmoral, their castle in Scotland, and then in a florally sealed Buckingham Palace-under a sort of emotional siege. What on earth was going on out there?

Ted Hughes, from his unique vantage as the poet laureate, diagnosed a late outbreak of Mariolatry-the adoration of the Virgin Mother whose traces were buried in the historical spine of once-Catholic England. ‘‘Holy Tragedy and Loss/ Make the many One./ Mankind is a crowned, Holy/ Mother and her Son,’’ he wrote in the commemorative ‘‘6 September 1997.’’

Nearer-sighted media commentators blamed celebrification, Oprah-fication, the mob appetites of a culture deranged by Me-Me-Me. The crowd sleeping out on Pall Mall, meanwhile, was satisfied that it was simply paying its respects to one of the greatest, kindest, and most beautiful women of the age, and that a little show of feeling from the Palace was no more than its due.

Few things are more complex than a national mood, and this weird, sentimental urgency in the September air had its own delicate provenance. British popular culture, to begin with, had taken a definitive turn in the early ‘90s away from complexity, anxiety, ideology, and towards large-scale gratification and feel-good nationalism. The biggest band in the country was Oasis, and their hedonistic anthems were bellowed out in pubs and Tube stations, and at football matches; ringing, empty signifiers of rock ‘n’ roll communion.

It was the genius of New Labor-with its fuzzwords of ‘‘hope’’ and ‘‘change’’ swimming through the pleasure-centers-to tap into this new craze for mass positivity. ‘‘Things Can Only Get Better’’-that had been the theme tune of the Labor campaign, a sugary slice of clubland pop by an act called D:Ream, played over and over to the crowd that waited for Tony Blair after his party landslided to victory in the Mayday election, just four months before Diana’s death.

And who, in this great supercession of Tory England, could be bigger targets than the bejewelled magna-frump on the throne and her awful family-around whom all the stuffiness and emotional austerity of the universally derided ‘‘Establishment’’ seemed to condense in gelid layers of obsequious regard?

In the grumblings of the crowd at the Palace gates about ‘‘coldness’’ and ‘‘the old guard’’-and indeed in Tony Blair’s jackpot memorialization of Diana as ‘‘the People’s Princess’’-could be heard the distant view-halloo of that most precious of English bloodsports: class war. The fox had broken cover; the royals had exposed themselves in all their snooty out-of-touchness; and the hunt was on.

‘‘Your People Are Suffering-Speak To Us Ma’am’’ implored the tabloid The Daily Mirror, with a notable blend of cravenness and menace. The Queen’s press secretary sued for mercy: ‘‘The queen has asked me to say that the royal family have been hurt by suggestions that they are indifferent to the country’s sorrow at the tragic death of the Princess of Wales.’’ No good: not enough. This crowd wanted tears, howls, the trappings and the suits of woe, not Prince Philip poking sniffily at a mound of wreaths.

And it got what it wanted, after a fashion. On Thursday a flag at half-mast appeared over Buckingham Palace. On Friday morning the senior Windsors-the Firm, as Diana called them-emerged from the gates, nodded, did a glum walkabout. Nobody shouted at them. That evening the Queen made a live televised broadcast in which she spoke ‘‘from the heart’’ of her grief. By Saturday, the day of the funeral, it was all over. Even the fiery eulogy delivered in Westminster Abbey by Diana’s brother Charles-with its thrilling hint that the young princes William and Harry might have to be kidnapped to save them from a life ‘‘immersed by duty and tradition’’-was subsumed into the heavyweight pageantry of the hour. The rolling gun-carriage bearing the coffin, the split-second martial timing: It was hard to beat.

. . .

Did the monarchy totter, in the days between the death of Diana and her funeral? It stumbled. The vein of royalism in the English character runs deeper than events, deeper than moods. As the radical essayist Tom Nairn put it in 1988, the Windsors-though apparently drained of all mystique-still operate in Britain as ‘‘an interface between two worlds, the mundane one and some vaster national-spiritual sphere associated with mass adulation, the past, the State and familial morality.’’ Royalism, argued Nairn, unlike the fads and freaks of celebrity-worship, provides the nation with ‘‘an apparently inexhaustible electrical charge.’’

Set against this steady, subterranean voltage, the temporary power surge of Di-mania would soon blow its fuse. Elizabeth II would progress safely to her Golden Jubilee, and Charles would marry Camilla-the ‘‘other woman’’ in his marriage to Diana-to general shrugs. Overstating it perhaps a touch, the writer Robert Harris observed in 2002 that ‘‘Not since Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929 has a prominent public figure been so comprehensively airbrushed out of a nation’s public life.’’

Thousands still loyally troop out to Althorp House, the Spencers’ stately home where she is buried, and where her brother Charles presides over exhibitions of her clothes, tours of her bedroom, and a gift shop. But plans for a 10-million-pound 3-acre garden in her honor near her residence at Kensington Palace were scrapped after protests from locals. A Princess Diana Memorial Fountain was finally opened in Hyde Park in 2004. Some sort of hologram or son et lumiere might have been more appropriate: Her legacy, in retrospect, is a trick of the light.

James Parker, a freelance writer in Brookline, writes the Cultural Studies column for Ideas. Email cultural.studies@globe.com.