The Scintillating Premise
When news first broke that legendary biographer Tom Bower was training his investigative sights on the celebri-couple to end all celebri-couples, expectations were high. The ultimate embodiment of Brand Britannia synthesizing fashion, sports, and wholesome family values into a multibillion-dollar global empire, Posh and Becks have spent over two decades serving up their own highly-calculated version of events. So the promise of an explosive, no-holds-barred dissection of the House of Gucci-esque skeletons in their Beirut-chic closets was an undeniably juicy premise for inquiring minds.
Bower’s media machete seemed well-sharpened too, as a quick thumb through the excerpted “highlights” liberally dished by rags on both sides of the Atlantic revealed: lurid tales of Becks’ sexual indiscretions and party-boy apres-pitch antics, blow-by-blows of Posh’s desperate bids to reignite her pop career, and deliciously dishy insider exposes on their roller-coaster romance pushed to the brink by stress, jealousy and dueling egomanias. The ultimate heat-seeking missile poised to obliterate the facade of the Beckhams’ tirelessly groomed PR masquerade, Bower’s The House of Beckham was poised to be the stuff of tabloid-editors’ wildest fever dreams.
Unfortunately…
Behind the Velvet Rope: Access Denied?
For a tome that promises to finally peel back the veneer to reveal the unvarnished truth, Bower’s access to principals ends up feeling oddly…peripheral. While the author does indeed marshal a veritable regiment of staffers, acquaintances and hangers-on through which to assemble his narrative line, the Beckhams themselves remain oddly shapeless ciphers lost amidst the salacious cavalcade of headline-grabbing Moments.
To his credit, Bower doesn’t lack for salient, conversation-shaping context that contours the forces and ambitions defining his subjects’ respective rises. We get potted biographies detailing the Spice Girls’ genesis as girl power avatars, and Beckham’s evolution from the English Jackie Robinson-esque pioneer who ushered in a new metro age of male celebrities celebrated for tabloid indulgences and endorsement deals as much as on-field performances. Their fated intersection and Victoria’s reputed chutzpah in corralling the budding superstar athlete into her ornamented orbit are traced compellingly as well.
But somewhere along the line, as the Beckhams became more stratospheric and powerful, it seems Bower lost a clear line of insight into them as human beings. Despite boldly dubbing his narrative “shocking,” The House of Beckham is curiously short on fresh or incisive takes on their psychologies, motivations and interior complexities. Aside from Victoria coming across as a sort of grotesquely thirsty, grasping diva and Beckham as…well, sort of a clueless lug who’s just happy to get his end away every now and then, they remain flat character types rather than the vibrantly realized, larger-than-life personalities one might expect.
Star Watchers: Where’s the Sizzle?
Is this a failing on Bower’s part as a storyteller able to bring his subjects to vivid life? Or simply just the reality that no level of access and sourcing could ever transcend the alienating funhouse mirror of celeb-reality that the Beckhams have erected around themselves through decades of cynically manipulative publicity mastering? It’s a question that hovers over every page.
The fundamental frustration lies in Bower’s seeming inability to truly make hay out of all the prurient factoids and embarrassing revelations his sources have provided about their real Sex Lives after those saccharine photoshoots. Yes, Victoria gets depicted as a neurotic control-freak prone to operatic hysterics over her husband’s fecklessness, while his antics establish him as an all-too predictable embodiment of the lie-back-and-think-of-England jock cliche. But none of the sweaty specifics Bower deliciously dangles in front of our baying tabloid ids ever resonate with the visceral punch they should.
Take, for example, the much-ballyhooed chapter of The House of Beckham covering David’s affair with his Barcelona assistant Rebecca Loos. Based on the pre-release publicity bombardment and the tantalizing hints of lurid text message recreations, one expected something approaching a neo-Aristotelian catharsis of voyeuristic titillation. Yet what we get instead is a strangely demure, almost puritanical account with all the bump-and-grind details elided in favor of blasé psychologizing along the lines of “theirs was just a simply physical connection without deeper romantic meaning.” Well…duh?
That same curiously anemic approach dogs just about every other “explosive” dishing of the cracks in the Beckhams’ marital facade, up to and including the cringe-inducing excerpts from David’s leaked email correspondence that precipitated a cascading PR firestorm. Shorn of their original raw candor and simply dutifully recounted, they come across more as disjointed musings from a petulant frat-bro being forced to take the office’s mandatory annual ethics course. Ho and indeed hum.
Paparazzi, Park the Lenz! The Visual Blind Spot
But perhaps an even more baffling quality of Bower’s The House of Beckham is how utterly unstaked in the uniquely modern visual dimension of their celebrity his portrayal of the Beckhams remains. These are two people who have architected their entire astronomic brand equity around an array of indelible iconographic imagery – from their lavish wedding portraiture and award-show appearances, to those umpteen magazine cover prom-poses and internationally-viral advertising campaigns.
Victoria in particular owes her very identity as a household name and entrepreneurial force to the laser-guided manipulation of her public image’s every aspect. Yet there is scant insight offered into the machinations, artistry and specific intentionality behind the boundless mythmaking. Who are the marketing Mandalas like Peter Savic, Fabien Baron, Raphael Redant or Mario Sorrenti who have sculpted her iconology over the decades? What creative visions and practical infrastructures facilitated the hypermanicured look that defined her throughout each iteration?
Instead of taking us deep into Wardrobe’s sacred inner sanctum for a rarified glimpse at some of the inspirations and stylistic detailing that’s gone into cementing Victoria’s unique vibeology, Bower is disinterested. His reductive framing treats her fashion endeavors as an expensive folly cushioned by Brand Beckham’s cash reserves – and that’s about it. He misses a golden opportunity to perhaps locate the root source of her enduring mystique for so many fans and followers. A critique of a celebrated visual artist should not entirely disregard their artistry, no?
Blinded by the Whitelights: Missing the Meteoric Modernism
What’s most vexing about Bower’s curiously incurious lack of analytical depth when it comes to the Beckhams is how it causes him to miss what may be their most pivotal role in the culture. With their savvy fusion of old-world British propriety and forward-facing pan-global fabulosity, Posh and Becks arguably served as the prototypical avatar couple that helped catalyze the 21st Century’s shuddering metamorphosis into a visual cyberculture defined by hypermediated identities, personal branding and virtual ubiquity.
Perhaps because he is an older journalist who rose through the ranks of television news in the pre-digital era, Bower overlooks just how unprecedented they were in riding the early internet wave of Star-is-Bored online voyeurism and commodifying their very existence into a postmodern video installation encompassing the stadiums, magazines, red carpets and social feeds of the world.
While Bower is eager to cite their endorsements and business endeavors as rapacious money-grubbing, there is little appreciation for the pioneering sense of innovation, aesthetic daring and zeitgeist symbiosis that informed, say, some of their wrier viral moments. Who can say what the first forays into unboxing influencer content or finstas might have resembled if not for their proto-model of a multimedia domestic portrait exhibition of a posh lifestyle consumed globally and cross-promoted endlessly in a new-frontiers Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts?
What’s Your Point? The Lack of Larger Meaning
These critiques may sound harsh, but they point to a deeper deficit in Bower’s treatise that keeps it from being the resonant record of our modern condition it could have been. And that’s his general failure to draw out any larger metaphysical or socio-cultural implications from the life stories he so diligently researched and gossip-compiled. What are we to glean about the corrosive dynamics of vapid, all-consuming ambition laid out here? About the false idols we’ve allowed celebrities to become, and the price paid by their humanity? About class and gender frictions in late-capitalist society writ large?
Ultimately, Bower leaves readers without a coherent big-picture framework to extrapolate outwards from, aside from a sort of generalized exasperation that our attention was so rapt for so long with two charisma-free opportunists from Essex. If so, there are more concise and meaningful ways to communicate such a takeaway than by assembling an overgrown 400-page magnum opus out of glorified potboiler tropes and salacious-yet-underwhelming gossip tidbits. As an artifact of our times, “The House of Beckham” feels rather akin to a collection of tawdry receipts in search of a grand unifying novel to contextualize them all.
Don’t Stay Home(r) for This
Bower has certainly established himself as a prolific and probing biographer over his career. But even giving him the obligatory cred as a venerable old school of journalism, this feels like a rare misfire when it comes to delivering the goods we’ve been teased with. For all the sensationalistic hype around its publicity blitzkrieg promising to pull back the red velvet curtain on two dubiously self-created modern monarchs, The House of Beckham comes up feeling awfully anti-climactic.
Tabloid readers seeking a schadenfreudelicious guilty-pleasure hate-read to indulge in some vicarious vengeance upon the rich, famous and perpetually overexposed may find their thirst somewhat unslaked here. Sociologists and pop culture anthropologists hoping for a nuanced and richly-informed window into the vapidity of personal branding and neopian simulacra-construction that defines our age aren’t going to find too much of that trenchant insight either.
In the end, what we’re left with falls somewhere into a vast middle-ground of meh—neither as comprehensively eviscerating as the marketing let us believe nor imbued with enough empathetic dimension to offer a truly intimate reappraisal of two pop personalities who’ve become synonymous with empty celebrity for empty celebrity’s sake. For that unsatisfying straddle and lack of a truly piquant or provocative central thesis, The House of Beckham rates as a disappointing near-miss—a less explosive expose than random clearinghouse of second-hand dish that doesn’t quite justify its prurient packaging.