Spice Wrack

by Scotch

Here's what's so deeply disturbing about the Spice Girls: they're harbingers of a truly mind-wracking process of popular culture folding back onto itself. We're currently slogging through an age in which it has effectively become meaningless to accuse any performers in popular music of being "packaged by the media" or "manufactured by the record labels" or a combination of the two, simply because that describes just about everyone in the field. It's just not an insult anymore. The Spice Girls know this. They're sliding off the assembly line fully aware of what they are. They are unapologetically manufactured and commodified and marketed; that's their angle. They are packaged as being packaged. Pop culture used to rely on at least the packaged pretense of sincerity, the sort of dead horse U2 has been beating ever since ZooTV. But the Spice Girls have shattered that pretense, first with their album Spice, and now with their movie Spice World.

See, Spice World is not about the Spice Girls. The Spice Girls appear in the movie quite frequently, but they're just the supporting cast. The movie is really about the fame that surrounds them, the quality of being famous, the famousness, the thing that makes them what they are -- as though fame itself is a separate entity sort of omnisciently hovering over all the characters throughout the movie.

Dealing with fame really isn't anything new to pop music. One of the working titles of Spice World was It's Been a Hard 15 Minutes, which about says it all. There's a great moment in the movie when an obsessive videojournalist confronts the Girls' manager (Richard E. Grant, probably most memorable as the clanging-testicles guy in L.A. Story), demanding to film a documentary on them, claiming that he wants to "break through the showbiz facade and get to the truth!" What an odd statement. Because the showbiz facade is the truth.

But what's actually kind of impressive is that the Girls ridicule their own ridiculous fame, taking the pre-emptive approach and poking some relentless fun at themselves, effectively beating their critics to the punch.

Regarding their youthful beauty and shapeliness: near the beginning of the movie, in one of the dream sequences, the Girls ponder motherhood, imagining themselves in their mid-thirties, cooped up in some nasty white-trash suburban home with horrific wallpaper, barefoot and pregnant and ugly; with a chain-smoking Posh Spice in a Judy Garland getup croaking about how she put her kids in boarding school; and a bloated, red-eyed, makeup-less Sporty Spice puffing her way along on an exercise bike. Eerie.

Regarding their cutesy little Spice names and their interchangeable identities: in one of the many musical montages, they all try on each other's outfits and start impersonating one another with alarming skill. It actually took me a few minutes to realize that they were even imitating each other.

Regarding the well-orchestrated record label marketing machine behind the Spice Girls' success: throughout the movie, the Girls' manager is held in thrall by phone calls from his boss, a mysterious cat-stroking mogul known only as The Chief (Roger Moore, the man who put the jambon in James Bond), who periodically issues orders from on high while spouting cryptic Eastern philosophy, controlling the Spice business from afar.

Regarding the whole ridiculous "Spice Girls movie" thing: George Wendt plays a Hollywood producer who sees them on TV and immediately wants to make a Spice Girls movie, scoffing when his assistant (perennial sketch-comedy boy Mark McKinney) asks, "Yeah, but can they act?" Who cares if they can act, says Wendt; that's not the point.

And in a dream sequence that made my jaw hit the floor, the Girls anxiously imagine the eventual release of their second album: they cower before a looming powdered-wig judge who angrily pronounces them guilty of putting out a disappointing sophomore record, and he sentences them to an abysmal Billboard chart entry, followed by a rapid plunge into obscurity, followed by a lifetime of endless appearances on shitty talk shows talking about how famous they once were. I mean, how do you respond to that?

Those scenes are tremendously funny, that unique kind of funny that results from seeing people gleefully dispensing with pretense and exposing their own sad truths, a rather common form of modern humor. It's also rather ballsy (you will certainly never see Michael Jackson making fun of his surgical reshaping or his penchant for little boys), and indeed I marvel at the fact that the record company allowed those scenes to stay in the movie. But at the same time there's something vaguely clammy about the self-deprecating irony in Spice World. You're not sure whether the irony is meant as a sly wink or as a veil for the real thing. It's the difference between Dennis Miller saying "I could be wrong" and Kurt Cobain saying "I hate myself and I want to die." You wonder how people are going to watch this movie in ten years, when the Spice Girls will probably have faded into the washed-up obscurity they so astutely predicted.

If the movie could be said to have villains, they could possibly be the caricatured members of the British media, who are portrayed as bumbling money-grubbing egomaniacs constantly after some kind of Spice Scandal. Mercifully, the movie doesn't even try to attack the media from a serious standpoint: the Girls are stalked by a cartoonish covert sleaze reporter who pops up from beneath beds and emerges in scuba gear from the Thames (and who upon closer inspection is revealed to be none other than Richard O'Brien -- Riff-Raff from Rocky Horror). But the movie's real villain is the brevity and fickleness of fame, a villain who never quite catches up to the Spice Girls in the movie, but one who always lurks in the wings -- as when the Girls' manager wearily talks about it with his assistant in a bar, whereupon the camera cuts to another angle and we see that the bartender is in fact Elvis Costello.

The amount of washed-up celebrities who cameo in Spice World (Moore, Wendt, O'Brien, Bob Geldof, Bob Hoskins, Jennifer Saunders, and even Meat Loaf [who plays the Girls' bus driver, looking much more appropriate behind the wheel than he ever did on a stage]) is a testament to the problem of fame -- the fact that no matter how well-oiled a media machine may be, the control ultimately lies with the masses. Us. Yes, that means you. (Notably, barring an ill-timed blink, there's a cameo by Elton John, himself currently enjoying an upswing on the fame graph.)

And so by showing us all these casualties of fame, now reduced to self-parody in a cheesy self-referential movie starring five beautiful, stunningly shallow, unabashedly packaged pop starlets, the movie smugly slaps us with the idea that we are no more ridiculous than the Spice Girls themselves are. We made them famous. We made all these other ridiculous people famous and then turned elsewhere. We bought tickets to watch a movie with all these ridiculous people in it. We're enablers, basically. If the Spice Girls did not exist, it would be necessary to create them. Because the Spice Girls, in all their superficial splendour, are exactly what we deserve. How shamefully appropriate the movie's title suddenly seems.

Yo. I'll tell you what I want. What I really, really want. I want to say that I hated this movie. I want to sandblast this movie with an arctic blast of vituperative scorn. But I can't. I am weak. I am ashamed. It's not as bad as when I cried during Top Gun last year, but it's damn close. In the end, Spice World is the cinematic equivalent of a pop song -- short, shallow, easily-accessible, catchy (yes, catchy), and ultimately with about zero lasting merit. I laughed. I grooved. I felt entertained. But I am wracked with unimaginable amounts of self-loathing because of it.