Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Decompressing from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is almost exactly like decompressing from a deep sea dive, in the sense that you need to do it gradually, or it could kill you. So, to prevent the nitrogen from exploding out of my body (or something, this metaphor is kind of getting away from me) I watched the very British Victoria Beckham: Coming to America. Before you ask, yes, you can watch it too, assuming NBC didn’t just black out the online video in anticipation of Thursday’s special rebroadcast.

The Beckhams are, of course, one of the most famous celebrity couples on Earth. David is, as you may have heard, a famous football soccer player, as renowned for his skill on a direct kick as he is for his godly good looks. Victoria is Posh Spice, and no, I’m not sure how she landed him. Something about managerial skills, I think. In Britain, their every hairstyle, move, and meal is chronicled by the press. Imagine Earth’s blinding sun. That’s David and Victoria Beckham in Britain. Now imagine our sun as an insignificant dot seen from halfway across the galaxy, and you’ve got Posh and Becks in America.

Imagine the overwhelming brilliance of Earth’s sun again. That’s soccer in Britain. They invented the game there and called it football, the game in which players hit a ball primarily with their feet. Again, mentally journey halfway across the galaxy, actually, all the way across the galaxy, and you’ve got soccer in America. We call it soccer because we already have a sport named football, a game in which the players’ feet never touch the ball.

Please stick with my galaxy metaphor for one more sentence, because that’s the name of the American team that bought David Beckham: the L. A. Galaxy. For those of you interested, yes, Beckham did play in the Galaxy’s exhibition match against Chelsea, stepping onto his still injured ankle for some perfunctory performance during the last fifteen minutes of the game. His passes, for what it’s worth, were noticeably crisper and quicker than anything his teammates, currently the second worst team in the MLS, had to offer.

The Galaxy signed Beckham for a small fortune. This is the man whom the MLS hopes will tip soccer into mainstream American sports. It is therefore in the MLS’s best interest to generate as much buzz off this deal as possible. The stadium that hosted Beckham’s debut game was abuzz with celebrities like Eva Longoria, Katie Holmes, Drew Carey, and Arnold Schwarchenegger, and it had the star-studded hum of a movie premiere. ESPN employed a dedicated Beckham Cam—and actually called it that—to periodically feed us video of Beckham on the sidelines, as if he were news footage of a swelling, splitting volcano on the verge of eruption.

This is how you get Victoria Beckham: Coming to America. I sat and watched the whole thing, and I just don’t know what to make of it. Is it trying to make us sympathize with the Beckham family’s (very easy) transition to the States? Is it trying to portray Victoria Beckham as the British Paris Hilton? Forty-three minutes of footage later, I simply do not know. When viewing potential homes in Beverly Hills, Posh dismissed one gorgeous mansion for its huge sliding glass doors, which led to an almost immediate drop off of a sheer cliff. She loved the view, she said, but it was quite clearly too dangerous for her children. I found her obvious concern refreshing, but stopped short of empathizing. How do you identify with a woman who’s going mansion shopping?

Throughout the special, Posh displays a wry sense of humor and a kind of celebrity self-awareness. Lounging by her pool in one early segment, she sarcastically muses, “Is this what Paris Hilton does all day?” A meeting between her and celebrity blogger Perez Hilton is surprisingly cordial. At one point in their conversation she deadpans, “I must never be seen to laugh, smile, or eat.”

Juxtapose this with the easy visual: that with her slick blonde hair, scrawny frame, and enormous sunglasses, she does evoke The Bad Paris (The Good Paris is the one where an adorable rat cooks gourmet meals). The special goes out of its way to generate situations reminiscent of Hilton’s The Simple Life. Posh’s behind-the-scenes comments into an interview camera are full of telltale disruptions in the flow of speech that reek of editing for maximum stupidity. Likewise, Posh at the DMV is squeezed for every strained, fish out of water moment it can offer, but you can’t help feeling like she’s simply playing to the camera. It’s not as if a woman of her fame and fortune needs to drive herself, anyway. The meeting with Perez was no doubt arranged with the expectation of fireworks between the two strangers. In the special’s most contrived segment, Posh “decides” to evade the paparazzi by way of The Parent Trap. She purchases a blow-up doll from a sex shop, has her makeup artists turn it into her clone (interestingly, could also be a clone of Paris Hilton or Anna Nicole Smith), and lastly, gets it driven around town to distract the press. The whole thing is ludicrous, and if you listen closely to how she describes the plan, you can’t help but feel that she’s been put up to this by the producers.

I am forced to conclude, to my surprise, that Victoria Beckham is not an idiot. As David Beckham’s business manager, life partner, and handler, she is in all likelihood a very capable woman. I find it very odd that Coming to America, which is supposed to introduce Posh and Becks to the country, chose to vacillate schizophrenically between sympathy and mockery. The special was like a dinner made of cotton candy; it looked appetizing at first, but dissolved to nothing really fast and left me totally unfulfilled. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not going out of my way to defend Victoria Beckham so much as to criticize a television opportunity that was very, very poorly handled. Let’s hope this isn’t a bad omen for the MLS.