Celebrity Profiles

Geri Haliwell

Geri Halliwell emerges from a TV programme about her (Geri, Channel 4, 1999) as lonely, loveless, self obsessed, attention seeking and above all, despite her millions of pounds and massive fame, massively insecure. ‘There’s nothing there when the work stops. Every weekend I start crying. I just want some love in my life’ she tells the award-winning director, Molly Dineen.         

The day after Geri split from the Spice Girls last June she started to record a video diary but soon afterwards she came to the conclusion that she needed help. She turned to Dineen and allowed her full access to her life.

Dineen specializes in woman shows, operating the camera and asking the questions herself. In this case, she takes on the role of a quasi-analyst, debating Halliwell’s psychology with her as the global icon is picked to act as a UN ambassador and moves towards the release of her first single, the aptly named Look At Me.

Dineen had reservations about the project at first. She says ‘From the start I didn’t know what it was about. Geri would say ‘Its about ME!’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, And?’’. Slowly it emerged what Halliwell’s real purpose was. ‘My subjects often let me in because they are lonely or bored but noone before has ever said ‘I want here because I want you to be my friend’’.

The film shows her still desperately trying to impress her importance on her spanish mother, Anna, and craving a love that her parents were unable to supply. ‘At school plays I was always the bloody donkey, I was never Mary. That’s my motivation now’.

She also emerges as someone who has felt like an impostor, acting out false roles from long before she became a Spice Girl. She has said of her childhood that ‘I was always living in fantasy land’ and she tells Dineen that ‘Ginger was a character I brought to life. Now its a question of putting her to bed’.

As her interactions with Dineen illustrate, genuine emotional contact with anyone at all is prevented by the carapaces and masks of her invented personae. It seems that her bawdiness, bottom pinching and bravado as Ginger Spice was simply a pretend role.

Her main friends are people who are in her pay or professionally dependent on her, such as her accountant and Dineen. At the end of the programme she tells Dineen that the reason she let her film her life was ‘I was desperate for company’. The ‘three or four’ real friends from her childhood home in Watford are ‘too busy living their own lives’ to be able to join Halliwell in her peripatetic global pursuit of ever greater fame.

Her nuclear family  are her main companions but they are not impressed by the only way that she feels she can win love: her career. Here, truly, is a woman who has pursued fame in the hope that it will provide her with the love and sense of control that was missing in her childhood - her mother was too overloaded working as a cleaning lady.

But had Halliwell remained Geri, would she have been any worse off? The film suggests not. Here is someone who lives only for publicity, obsessed with which page newspaper articles about her appear on. Here she is visiting her new home in the country - a vast converted monastery - but with noone to share it. We see her rollerskating around it, a lonely litlle rich girl in a Walt Disney movie.

She tells Dineen that ‘when I was a little girl I didn’t have christmases or birthdays’ but buying presents for herself cannot make up for this.

Here also is the woman who invented the slogan Girl Power but who feels so out of control that she anxiously asks assistants if they have attached her ‘guardian angel’ lucky charm to her dress before performing. She makes ‘cosmic shopping lists’ of wishes she would like fulfilled, just as a little child would. It is Girl Powerlessness.

She is fluent in psychobabble yet does not visit proper therapists, enduring a rollercoaster of boom and bust hysteria and depression instead. She reads New Age therapy manuals, endlessly seeking self awareness but there is little insight into herself.

She buzzes like a fly trapped inside a window, trying to find a way past the window pane of her own narcissism. ‘I should feel I’m so lucky. I just want to be happy - what’s the matter with me?’ she asks, despairingly. You cannot but feel very sorry for her.

More than anything, The Spice Girls were made possible by TV. But it has led less to the realization of Halliwell’s creative potential than her most self destructive traits - attention seeking, low self esteem and role playing.

She emerges as a vulnerable person in need of structure and support. Lacking identity and self esteem, she is in grave danger of coming off the rails and far from having power, of being exploited.

When they launched The Spice Girls were always an appalling perversion of the feminist message, in the pursuit of profit and fame, not female emancipation. Not only could TV create the Spice Girls, now it can document the damaged personality that results.

The title of their first hit, Wannabee, endlessly recited the line ‘let me tell you what I want, what I really really want’ but somewhow, never got around to telling us what that was.

In fact, what they really really meant was that that the grass is always greener. They were promoting the disastrous falsehood that there was somebody they could be who would be better than being themselves. And of all of them, the one who felt this most strongly was Geri Halliwell.

‘I was the biggest wannabee. I wanted fame and fortune so bad I would have done anything’ she tells Molly Dineen.

Television is a highly sophisticated technology that often makes mediocre or even less than mediocre people seem talented. It can also make averagely attractive people look more beautiful than they are in real life. Having achieved all this, it can then proceed to document how deeply shallow and miserably lonely its creations are at risk of becoming.

The awful truth is that Advanced Capitalism wins every which way: it makes money out of success, it makes money out of personal misery and it cares not which.