participate in society, be a monke
My ardor for BIG WEIRD POP MESS meant that the millisecond after I saw the trailer for Better Man—that's the Robbie Williams-as-monkey biopic, if you've been living under a rock, or also if you've been living a completely normal life in a house or apartment—I was locked in. A movie about a British pop star...who failed to break big in the United States...and who is portrayed via a CGI monkey...take my money. JK, I'm an AMC A-Lister, they have already taken my money.
BIG WEIRD POP MESS. It's why I am alive. It's, to quote Infinite Jest, my raisin-debt. I hate when pop plays it safe, which made the 2010s kind of a miserable decade for me, but thank god the 2020s are shaping up to have some pizzazz. I will always choose deranged, balls-to-the-wall pop over "sophisticated" or "tasteful" pop. This means it will always be Artpop over Born this Way and Reputation over folklore; this means I was one of the dozens of people on the planet to enjoy the television show The Idol and also one of the dozens of people on the planet disappointed by the news that a Fergie-less Black Eyed Peas have just canceled their Vegas residency. (If Taboo has zero fans, I have died.)
Better Man is a movie made for me, Molly Mary O'Brien, specifically. I saw it opening day, Christmas Day, in sunny Los Angeles. I had a blast. The big musical numbers were a visual feast—rollicking, even. The "Rock DJ" scene was better than any musical number in Wicked. Low bar to clear, but it generally helps if you can see the bodies of the people who are dancing on screen.
The virtual monkey looked awesome. Apparently Michael Gracey tapped Weta Digital, aka the company that did all the monkeys in the latest Planet of the Apes series, to do the VFX. If you are wondering whether anyone acknowledges Robbie Williams's being a monkey within the movie: no, they don't. At one point, his girlfriend calls him an animal, because his drug problem is out of control. That's pretty much the extent of it. Have you ever seen a monkey doing coke? It is disturbing! And probably a more effective "say no to drugs" portrayal than anything I encountered as an upstanding member of my middle school's S.T.O.P. organization—that would be Students Together On Prevention, an off-brand D.A.R.E. whose entire membership went on to do at least a little bit of drugs.
Better Man bombed and the most resounding 'criticism' I have heard about it is "who the fuck is Robbie Williams." This has turned into a funny little meme, though one that threatens to strain British-American relations at a time when we're already arguing about who likes "Mr. Brightside" more. Robbie Williams never replicated his massive home country fame in the United States, but I...I did know who Robbie Williams was. My hometown pop station (WXXX FM, aka ninety fiiiiiive, tripleee EEEXXX) played "Angels," which peaked at 53 on the Hot 100, pretty consistently. I knew the song well, even if I might have grouped it with Elton John's "Candle In the Wind / Goodbye England's Rose" as "somber piano ballads by British men that are either explicitly about Princess Diana or sound like they plausibly could be about Princess Diana."
A good biopic, in my opinion, should leave you with questions and curiosity about its subject. I listened to an illegal amount of Ray Charles after I saw Ray. I followed up Baz Luhrmann's Elvis with a suite of actual Elvis movies that had me rolling on the floor laughing. (If you haven't seen at least the signature tune from the 1967 film Clambake, in which Elvis sings and plays guitar in front of an array of rotisserie chickens, stop and do that right now and then come back.) And The Doors got me to stop hating The Doors for at least 141 minutes. A biopic should start the conversation about an artist, not end it!
So I get a little sad when the main takeaway from Better Man is "lol why did anyone make a movie about this guy." Well, why did they? In the movie, Robbie yearns to play a show at Knebworth. What is Knebworth?? An American like myself might think it is a type of tea sandwich, or a BBC show about an unorthodox detective, but it's actually a park—the grounds of an enormous country house. And Knebworth can fit a lot of people in it. It's quite a bit larger than a stadium. Taylor Swift played three nights at MetLife Stadium on the Eras Tour and set a stadium record for biggest three-day attendance, and that was 217,635 people. Robbie Williams played three nights at Knebworth and 750,000 people went. Big field. Big field, big pop star.
What's fascinating about Knebworth is that after Robbie Williams played there in 2003, there simply haven't been that many other solo shows on the venue's docket ever since. There were a handful of heavy metal festivals, a single show by Red Hot Chili Peppers that drew 80,000 people, and two Liam Gallagher shows a couple years ago drawing 100k each. (The Oasis reunion proves it: Apes Together Strong.) That's it. It's 2025 now and you could argue Robbie Williams was the last, biggest solo male musician in that big ass field. His show there is legendary. And unlike the deeply gooberish movie Bohemian Rhapsody, which depicted Queen's pivotal Live Aid set in an unsettling 1:1 reality ratio, Better Man shows Knebworth as a (literally) apeshit battle royale between Williams's CGI monkey and a bunch of CGI monkey shadow selves. Everyone's fighting in the mud like it's the Battle of the Bastards. It's weird and awesome. And the monkey still wears a comic-accurate black dress shirt and white tie.
Do you see the vision? Are you picking up what I'm putting down? I know there are bigger fish to fry right now than trying to convince you to care about the answer to the question "what if Harry Styles morphed into Matty Healy, but in the 1990s, but also he's a monkey?" But this to me is the kind of BIG WEIRD POP MESS we're going to have to fight for in the age of slop. Big Culture wants everything to be so literal and so relatable because that's how they can sell you the most stuff. That's how they keep you stocked up with lip liner and reusable water bottles. I don't think Better Man wants to sell you any stuff. It just wants to...entertain you...
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