Carr, J. (1998, January 23). Sunny ‘Spice World’ is a triumph of marketing. Boston Globe, p. D5.

OVERVIEW

(Directed by Bob Spiers. Starring the Spice Girls—Melanie, Emma, Melanie, Geraldine, and Victoria—along with Richard Grant, Alan Cumming, George Wendt, Claire Rushback, Roger Moore, Meat Loaf, Naoko Mori, Richard O’Brien, Barry Humphries, and Mark McKinney. Rated: PG for some vulgarity, brief nudity, and language.)

In late 1997 and early 1998, the Spice Girls, despite their detractors, were riding the peak of their popularity. And to boost the sales of their CD, "Spiceworld," they put out a movie of the same name, which can be seen as a 93-minute music video.

The script was written by Kim Fuller, brother of their fired manager (Geraldine "Ginger Spice" Halliwell managed them for a few months before leaving.)

The video follows the Spice Girls around London in their Union Jack covered, double-decker bus. On-stage they are besieged by a group of semi-nude boy toys. They struggle against oppressive media types in cartoon form. They uphold Girl Power by supporting a pregnant friend (Naoko Mori), and have nightmares of becoming pregnant themselves. "Baby Spice" Emma concludes she’d rather just order boys in, like pizza.

Celebrities Elton John, Bob Hoskins, and Meat Loaf make appearances. There are mysterious references from pre-Socratic philosophy, the Bhagavad-Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In these Jay Carr senses a "mythic significance...of the Spice Girls as merged personification of daughter, mother, lover, and earth goddess, inscrutably proceeding to Goethe’s Eternal Feminine, drawing us ever upward. Or not."

According to Carr:

...where most MTV consists of posed glumness, the five Spice Girls are resolutely upbeat and up-tempo. They embody just enough diversity and women’s empowerment message to slide around the oblivious slickness of their bubbly, synthetic glam routines and take the sting out of the fabricated quality of their singing—and now acting—even if they never quite make us forget they came together because they all answered the same promoter’s ad.

Today the line between marketing and entertainment has been blurred into invisibility, much like the line between movies and product placement. At any rate, "Spice World," their movie, is a triumph of packaging, if not filmmaking—proving that if you’re young enough and pretty enough, and project a sunny vibe, bad clothes can supply campy oomph to your act. Or, as Melanie Brown’s Scary Spice puts it: ‘Blah, blah, blah. Girl power. Feminism. You know what I mean?’

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION

1. Is this movie worth seeing or talking about?
2. Who is seeing this movie and why? What do they get out of it?
3. What age of boys and what age girls are attracted to the Spice Girls? What would each of these groups find appealing in these celebrities?
4. With what other groups can the Spice Girls be compared?
5. How should a movie like this be used or critiqued with young people?

IMPLICATIONS

• Anything popular with kids should be of interest to those who work with them.
• One of the goals of youth work is to get young people to appreciate the music others like and to critique their own favorite music. How can you do this?

Dean Borgman cCYS