ABSTRACT
Elsewhere in his book-length meditation on David Beckham Ellis Cashmore (2002: 191) offers remarkable utterances from two people. A teenage Morrissey scrawled in his notebook: ‘I’m sick of being the undiscovered genius, I want fame NOW not when I’m dead’. More recently Posh Spice announced she wanted to be ‘as famous as Persil Automatic’. As with previous readings of space, place, adornment and clothing, this is a literate and informed reading which is ripped straight from the front pages of today’s newspapers.
Manchester United fans often chant (to the tune of José Fernandez Diaz’s Guantanamera): ‘One David Beckham. There’s only one David Beckham.’ Actually, there are two: the flesh-and-blood father with a fondness for cars, decorously pale looks and fine soccer skills; and the icon, the celebrity, the commodity, the Beckham that exists independently of time and space and resides in the imaginations of countless acolytes. For women, he’s le beau idéal, a figure on whom fantasies are spun; for men, he’s a colossus standing astride all dominions of sport, commanding their admiration, affection and devotion. He’s become a global phenomenon, a towering presence, not only in football but in all of popular culture. The Beckham phenomenon is so perfectly congruent with our times, it could have been created. Actually, it was. This book is about how.
Clichés that would normally seem crass feel oddly appropriate: A-list celeb, gay icon, rich-and-famous. Somehow, they all fit. But, of course, Beckham is not just a footballer. He is the sports celebrity par excellence. Whichever way you hold him to the light, Beckham is an extraordinary being, a rare thing, a total one-off. He’s everywhere, in newspapers, television, the internet, on countless posters that decorate young people’s bedroom walls.
He attracts accolades like a magnet attracts iron filings. He’s Britain’s best-dressed male, according to GQ magazine, and was only edged out of the number one position as ‘sexiest man’ by Robbie Williams in Heat’s poll. In the 2002 ‘Young rich’ lists of two national newspapers, he came fifth. BBC Sports Personality of 2001, World Footballer of the Year runner-up. His fans are from all over the world, and they include the kind of passionate gay following that most athletes might find awkward. Some reckon he and his wife have wandered into the emotional territory once occupied so serenely by Princess Diana. They have certainly commanded the attention of the paparazzi in much the way Diana did.
Yet, when you think about it, what does he do? Lead armies into battle, discover cures for diseases, perform miracles? He plays football, primarily. Auxiliary activities include buying lots of extravagantly expensive cars and clothes, being a doting father, accompanying his wife to glittery premières, appearing in ads and, well, that’s about it. Yet Beckham has given the sports pages, the tabloids, the internet websites and the television networks more stories than they can ever wish for. Has he disclosed his political views, his stance on any great global cause, his personal habits even? Of course not. So, why is he exalted to the point where you can almost imagine his being beatified? The answer is not because he is a good footballer. (I repeat this in case his fans mistake it for a typo.) It’s because he’s a product that we all consume. We’re part of a generation of emotionally expressive, self-aware, brand-conscious, label-observant, New-Man attentive, gossip-hungry, celebrity worshippers. We, the fans, the television viewers, the writers, the audience, make Beckham Beckham. We’ve become an unpaid backing choir for his aria, and one that can stop singing any time we like. The moment we do, Beckham turns back into a footballer.
This book is a departure from the usual sports biography. It’s neither an extravaganza, celebrating the wonderful and unique gifts of its subject, nor a piercing insight into the subject’s personal life. It certainly isn’t a muck-raking exercise, dishing the dirt on private secrets that have previously escaped the public’s attention. But, it is about Beckham. It starts from the premiss that there is more than one way to understand somebody. Looking inside them, trying to disclose their inner core, their intimate character, their true personality, is only one means of discovery. Another is to look outside them. This is my approach. To understand Beckham in this way requires looking not so much at him or his unique talent, but at the culture of which he has become an important part.
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The central conceit of Paul Verhoeven’s film Total Recall – based on Philip K. Dick’s short story ‘We can remember it for you wholesale’ – is that consumers don’t actually need to visit places or do things when they can instead have embolisms planted in their memories, providing them with cheaper and safer ways of realizing all their ambitions. In the plot, Doug Quaid is a working class nobody who aspires to go to Mars, but can’t afford it. Instead, he opts for the experience of visiting Mars, which is delivered straight into his memory in less time than it takes to get a tooth filled. The story is predicated on the same reasoning that takes people to Tampa’s Bush Gardens rather than the Serengeti, to Alton Towers where the rides are advertised as terrifying but no one comes to harm, and on packaged adventure holidays where the risks are minimal. In other words, we want to experience rather than do. It makes us privy to a province we secretly aspire to, but have no realistic chance of reaching.
The excitement, love, glamour and intrigue proposed not by Beckham but by the narratives drawn about his life reflect more about contemporary culture than about the player himself. They tell us that we now have a generation hooked on the irrational pleasures of celebrity watching or, more accurately, celebrity fantasizing. People dream about becoming fabulously wealthy and globally famous, but they have no effective means of achieving these dreams. Their orientation, like that of all good consumers, is to carry on dreaming. This includes watching TV shows that dangle tantalizing carrots, buying lottery tickets, and following the pursuits of others who are already fabulously wealthy and globally famous. In short, consuming. This is why we’re guided to celebrities, why the media produce more of them, and why the market commodifies them. Consumption is the new phoney egalitarianism in which anybody can be somebody. The danger is that the fickle and expendable hopes of consumers rest less on aspiration and ambition, more on the presence of others. These others embody the elusive, yet yearned for, properties that the consumer can never possess, but can still experience endlessly through the likes of Beckham.
This sounds a dispiriting way to end a book on one of the most attractive and glamorous celebrities to have emerged in recent times, particularly as he excites high emotions in consumers. He can make them feel good, perhaps even great. Of course, his ability to do this rests on the fact that they lack alternative ways of feeling good. This is a harsh, though not unfair, assessment of Beckham’s wide constituency of fans. And that includes Us. Are we sad? Maybe. Are we powerless? Probably. Do we use our imaginations? Definitely.
Beckham has no magical powers. He can’t levitate or take flight. He can’t win wars, save the planet, or end famine. He can’t change water into wine, heal the sick, or communicate telepathically. He plays football. Yet he seems to glide so high that it sometimes seems as if he can do anything he turns his mind to. That we can have spun such an extraordinary aura around such an ordinary person is testimony to our inventiveness. It’s also testimony to a culture that values a restricted idea of the good life, one that includes the kind of romance and glamour so often set before us but rarely within our grasp. Yet, we go on chasing destinies that will forever elude us, slaloming between the real world and the parallel one where They live so exuberantly. This is the world where David Beckham looms large. here may be two worlds, but this is a single culture. It’s a culture that nurtures, maintains and protects our right to be consumers.
(Cashmore 2002: 4–5, 194–5) What's Next?Read Chris Rojek Celebrity (2001) London: Reaktion.
