Some people really hate the Spice Girls. I’m not one of them.
We can’t really talk about Spice World without talking about the Spice Girls, in general, and why everybody seems to love and hate them.
Since “Wannabe” first topped the charts in 1996, the public attitude toward the Spice Girls has whipped back and forth between love and rejection faster than Willow Smith’s hair (because remember when that was a thing? This is a timely pop music joke). Some people see the Spice Girls as champions of female empowerment, and others as mindless actors in a consumerist pantomime of feminism. Like most artifacts of pop culture feminism, the Spice Girls presented an image that was neither perfectly laudable nor perfectly awful and shaming – they gave us a sincere attempt at female empowerment that wasn’t entirely free from the culture they lived in.
It’s hard to remember, because they looked so old when we were twelve, but the Spice Girls were a group of very young women (aged 18-22, when the band first formed) who wanted to be professional entertainers and answered a casting call beginning with the words, “R. U. 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance?” This is not an auspicious beginning for ground-shaking social and political work.
If you’re curious, or hungry to hear all the details of how terrible the pressure-cooker of fame really feels when the whole world is calling you fat, the one-hour documentary, Spice Girls: Giving You Everything, includes footage of the shockingly young, shockingly ordinary-looking Spices auditioning and rehearsing their first songs. It also includes some fairly well-spoken and introspective reflections on what it was like to live in the whirlwind of temporary Spice fame, and stories that should put to rest the idea that these women were mindlessly doing whatever a man said to do.
It isn’t hard to attack them; if I were a baby feminist scholar in undergrad, still getting used to my claws, the Spice Girls would make for some easy, delicious prey. They dress really sexy; they’ve each been reduced to a single personality trait; one of them is supposed to be childlike and that’s kind of creepy; the Black one is “scary” and that feels weird; the band was forged in the fires of consumerism, and that seems pretty evil to me – I’m licking my chops just thinking about it, but wait!
To paraphrase Camille Hayes, let’s remember that not everyone has a degree in Sociology and Gender Studies. Some people are just doing their best on their own, and, rather than demonizing them for not doing well enough, let’s at least acknowledge that we’re on the same team.
Considering that they were a bunch of 20-year-olds in a manufactured pop band, the Spice Girls did a pretty good job of carrying the feminist flag. They didn’t say or do anything radical and challenging; they didn’t provide stunning new insights into gender equality. The explicit message they preached (to their core audience of tween-aged girls) was that friendship is important, and so is self-expression, and girls are just as good as boys. That’s not earth-shattering stuff, but they also modelled through their behaviour that women can be confident and ambitious – outspoken, funny, loud, accomplished – and still receive mainstream acceptance.
The Spice Girls were competent performers who made decisions that they believed would further their careers. Were they perfect? No. Is it important to discuss the ways that Spice feminism falls short, in order to shed light on larger cultural and societal problems? Yes. But they were rowing in the same direction as the rest of us, even if their strokes weren’t especially powerful, so let’s all just ease up a bit, yeah?
The Part Where I Actually Talk About The Movie
Okay, right. So, there was a movie. Spice World was filmed at the height of the band’s popularity in 1997, and released five months before Geri Halliwell announced she was leaving the group. As of this writing, it enjoys as 29 percent Fresh Rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film follows the Spice Girls’ fictionalized Spice adventures as they tour in a massive, double-decker Spice bus and learn lessons about the importance of friendship, etc, etc. The adventures range from the commonplace (going to a fancy party) to the outlandish (making first contact with aliens), and the whole thing is wrapped in a framing story about movie executives pitching the worst, most random, half-assed tie-in movie ever (i.e., the movie we’re watching). Add to that roughly a million cameos from other celebrities, a whole bunch of singing, and a villain who makes cryptic pronouncements under the soft cloak of darkness, and you have not yet begun to imagine all of the nonsense packed into this film.
I don’t know why so many people hate it.
It’s bad, but it’s purposely bad – it’s a campy, ironic comedy that makes fun of the idea of the Spice Girls as a manufactured, highly commercialized product. It sells the central Spice Girl fantasy – that being a pop star means hanging out with your very best friends and occasionally rehearsing in between wacky adventures – and it includes a fake Spice Girl origin story – that they began as best friends who spontaneously formed a band one day – but it also addresses many of the criticisms people had of the band in a tongue-in-cheek way. It’s actually kind of smart.
For example, one of the (valid) criticisms people have made of the Spice Girls is that, by reducing each member to a single personality trait or caricature, the band is participating in an ugly interaction of consumerism and patriarchy in which women are a commodity that comes in five types. Spice World is full of scenes that make fun of these simplified personas and highlight the fact that these women are actually whole human beings. They talk about things that have nothing to do with their Spice personalities, like chess, and manta rays; they do unflattering impressions of each other performing their Spice personalities; and they complain that everyone stereotypes them while (deliberately and obviously) acting out the stereotypes in question.
They also drive a bus over a model bridge and sleep in a haunted mansion. It’s not The Color Purple. But the movie is self-aware enough, and self-reflexive enough, that it ends up being a fun, playful story that ultimately resists the idea that there are Five Types of Women defined by specific traits.
It’s also a mainstream movie aimed at young girls where the heroes are all women who make their own decisions and who are way more concerned with their careers, their friendships, and chasing their dreams than they are with meeting some boys. In fact, the topic of boys comes up very rarely in Spice World, as though it’s possible for a woman to get through the day without raising the subject at all.
There’s this scene early on in the film, where the Spice Girls are meeting with fans, and they decide to ditch the planned trip on the Spice bus and run off to make their own fun. Mel B. says, “When I say go, we go,” and then they sprint away from the bus, dragging ten-year-old girls behind them, into adventure and freedom and Doing Your Own Thing and other big movie clichés – and maybe I’m getting soft in my old age, but I can think of worse heroes for those girls to have.
Spice World isn’t going on my imaginary shelf of Greatest Movies, but it captures a really interesting moment in pop culture history, and an interesting look at feminist ideals, as filtered through and expressed by mainstream entertainers.
Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer and couch potato who yells about TV and movies on her blog.