Mutating a Better Man: Robbie Williams, Technology Spectacle and the Posthuman Celebrity

This project explores Better Man (2024. dir. Michael Gracey), a fantastical biopic about British pop icon Robbie Williams, as a site of celebrity mutation, where fame, memory, and media technologies collide to produce a hybridised, posthuman persona. While ostensibly a narrative of personal transformation and redemption, the film employs digital body doubles, deepfake-style visual effects, and musical re-imaginings to depict Williams not merely as a historical subject, but as a mutable media artefact who is reshaped by fame, scandal, fandom, and algorithm. Positioned at the intersection of self-fictionalisation and technological spectacle, Better Man reconfigures the celebrity biopic through the logics of mutation: a body remade by drugs, trauma, addiction, and fame, but also by cinematic fantasy, virtual editing, and public rebranding. By examining the visual and thematic construction of Williams as a cyborg-like figure; part memory, part machine, part myth, this article situates Better Man within broader conversations about digital immortality, synthetic performance, and the collapsing boundaries between the ’original’ and its augmented reproductions, producing a mutation. Drawing on theories of the posthuman, digital affect, and celebrity studies, the article argues that Williams’ mediated self is no longer singular, but a generative, ever-mutating archive of identities, which is filtered through the lenses of pop music, mental illness, masculinity, and the commodification of personal struggle. In doing so, Better Man redefines the music biopic not as a celebration of artistic legacy, but as an unstable mutation of fame itself.