Robbie Williams, ex of boyband Take-That, has been a prominent figure in popular entertainment for years. And yet, watching him interviewed recently on BBC’s Jonathan Ross show, I found myself experiencing a curious vacuum of personality: will the real Robbie Williams please stand up?
Of course, television chat shows are hardly the best forum for reality, but Robbies’ (clearly heavily edited) interview, and more generally his career as a public figure, put me in mind of Patrick Bateman from the Brett Easton Ellis novel American Psycho, especially the following quote:
“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman; some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable… I simply am not there.”
I am not suggesting that Robbie acts out Batemans psychotic excesses, and in any case the murders portrayed in the novel may be considered more as satirical literary devices; mental projections of a pathetically empty soul. But there is something striking about the identity of an entertainer as popular as Robbie being so hard to pin down, not so much through devious sociopathic manipulation, but simply for such an apparent absence of any discernible ‘core’ to grasp onto.
His musical career has seen Robbie constantly shape-shift through different identities, and he still does not appear to have settled on one that pleases him. Perhaps this lack of a solid nature is due to the roots of his career in a boyband. He is whatever you want him to be, he is a fantasy, a commercial product. But like any commercial product, he needs you to need him, or he becomes a discontinued line.
He has appeared as a Kiss-style rock star, as a big band crooner, a cowboy, an electro/dance star, and endless variations of rebel or sensitive poet. His fans would no doubt site this as evidence of a great performer, one able to adopt many identities, wear many masks, always the entertainer. But to me there seems to be no consistent development of a healthy personality, merely the constant need for novelty, for reinvention, to avoid the development of one solid, graspable ’self’.
This twisting and turning would seem to be present in his personal life as well. Until recently, Robbie has never been linked with a single partner for a great deal of time. Apparently he found the concept of monogamy difficult at the start of his present relationship. Here he is talking about it in a quote from a recent interview from GQ magazine-
“With this it was, ‘What am I going to be in this relationship? You mean I can’t go off and be impressive with women for 24 hours, make them fall in love with me and then disappear?”
Robbies’ musical career has seen many variations, but his latest single, Bodies is truly…odd. It’s the kind of song that trades off past glories- it’s hard to imagine any popular artist being permitted to produce anything so strange early in their career, but with Robbie still commanding a large and devoted fan base, he is in a position to write a song which features the line “Jesus didn’t die for you” sung repeatedly.
Lyrically, it’s a mess. It has the same emotional resonance as listening to a coke head forcibly sharing their philosophical meanderings with you at a 4am party.
“Love living like a deity
What a day, one day,
And your Jesus really died for me
I guess Jesus really tried for me”
But this lyrical pretension is carried along, as ever in Robbies’ career, by glutinous layers of glossy production and the sheer force of the entertainers persona. Frankly, unless he starts using his music to deny the holocaust, his dedicated fans seem to have the capacity to accept a fairly high degree of lyrical inanity.
The accompanying music video for the song is mostly fairly standard macho-persona stuff- Robbie racing a dirt bike through an American desert landscape that we recognise from a thousand movies. But what is notable about it is the appearance of Williams’ partner, American television actress Ayda Field. It is interesting that they have chosen to appear together in this video, since I suspect that a large component of Robbies’ success, again rooted in his boyband origins, is his presentation as an eligible bachelor.
Firstly, we see them racing together through the desert in a dune buggy. Although she arrives in effect to ’rescue’ him after his motorbike breaks down, he subsequently drives whilst she smiles, her hair blowing in the wind, happy simply to accompany this man on his journey through life.
At the climax of this scene we see the couple embracing and kissing as they drive. The view point is from the rear of the car, and the viewer becomes a third passenger in the relationship.
I found the composition of this scene reminiscent of the final moments of the video for Marilyn Mansons’ ‘Heart Shaped Glasses’, another music video also interesting for its depiction of the love triangle between a celebrity couple and the viewer/media eye.
Filmed after the break up of his marriage to burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, it features lengthy shots of Manson cavorting with new partner Evan Rachel Wood (the two have since broken up). It’s hard not to see it as a very public declaration of something like- ”I don’t want you anymore anyway, look what a fantastic time I am having with my new sexy young girlfriend”
At the climax of the video the couple kiss as their car bursts into flames and plunges off a cliff. Literally an on-screen car crash relationship.
The other main scene in Robbie’s video that depicts his relationship shows him and Ayda caressing whilst supposedly staring into a campfire. The illusion on film is that they are completely involved with each other, alone in a desert miles from any other human beings. But it’s actually as if they are staring into a mirror whilst doing this, particularly the half second where Ayda, a television actress by trade, stares directly into the camera. It’s the look of a woman who has secured a wealthy and successful man who many other women desire, and I suspect that in a sense, her gaze is aimed at these rejected women.
Its a bit like a moving painting. A work commissioned by the rich to demonstrate the power of their relationship to the world. To somehow make it even more “real” by its commitment to film.
This brings us to another comparison with American Psycho. In this scene from the movie, Patrick Bateman videotapes himself having sex with 2 prostitutes. He is more involved with his own self image than with his sexual partners, and we see him pointing to himself and flexing his biceps in the mirror.
It’s kind of funny, kind of ludicrous, the narcissists utter concern with external appearances and self image. And it’s also striking for, again, the love triangle of lovers and a camera. A sense that the recording of events, feelings, sensations, somehow makes them more ‘real’.
And perhaps we all live a little like this now, with this constant sense of self awareness, the constant need to validate ourselves through social media. As John Malkovich, playing film director F.W Murnau in the movie Shadow Of The Vampire says- “If it’s not in frame, it doesn’t exist”
Postscript- Although a spokesman has since claimed it was done ‘in a jocular manner’ i.e. it was a joke, I have just heard today that Robbie has proposed to Ayda on an Australian radio show. Immediately afterwards one of the hosts said- ”Thanks for doing it in front of us”
