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On one side: the Yanks, bothconfusedabout who Williams is and gleeful thatBetter Manisbellyfloppingat the box office.
All of this, of course, falls right into the pop stars pocket.
Hes a trickster sustained by both hate and admiration in equal measure.
Leaving would also set the foundation for the next breakneck chapter of Williamss career.
By the 2000s, Williams had become as fundamental to England as bad teeth and blinky awkwardness.
Yet despite his status overseas, Williamss many attempts to break Stateside have repeatedly fallen flat.
WhetherBetter Manfinally pulls it off is an open question.
.His Survival Arc
.
Williamss rise is a rare story of meritocracy at work.
But most of all, we love that there is nothing particularly transcendent or exceptional about Williams.
Hes an everyman with a semi-theatrical singing voice.
Williams gleefully forces our gaze upon him and his own try-hardness.
He is routinely cheeky.
Take, for instance, the time he shouted, Im rich beyond my wildest dreams!
at a press conference after his record-breaking 80 million signing with EMI in 2002.
His main function is to remind us that nothing including seriousness itself should be taken seriously.
Williams has always sourced his punch lines from a place of pain.
Williams brought to British music a self-revealing and revelatory confessional mode that is now ubiquitous.
Kids feel spoken to in a way theyve never before.
Teenagers yearn alongside him.
Divorced dads finally feel held.
Well paint by numbers, til something sticks, he sang alongside Kylie Minogue on Kids.
His commercial peak coincided with an upsurge in celebrity interest and devaluation.
When you become famous, people tend to stop feeling sorry for you.
Thats the case for everyone, except Williams.
AsBetter Manlays out, hes the performing monkey whose pain becomes our entertainment.
