MICHAEL JACKSON’S THIS IS IT: POST-MODERNISM CUBED

(notes toward the essay nobody’s written yet…) As a ginormous crossover pop star, Michael Jackson embodied the era’s cosmic mismatch of outsized talent and crashingly banal taste, the black Barbra Streisand. Tipped just a few degrees in the right direction and he could have been a colossus, a black answer to the Beatles, the great R&B steamroller mashing together a huge range of ideas, grooves and attitudes.
As it was, MJ took his heavy ID with child star Elizabeth Taylor way too literally, converted to the church of plastic surgery, and rode his biggest waves of fame on albums of bizarrely detailed camp. Like Mark Knopfler on guitar, you couldn’t argue with his instrument(s), but you sure wanted Quincy Jones to hold out for better material. But even if MJ’s records didn’t snatch you up, his weirdness had a life of its own, and sometimes noshed on the rest of his persona for breakfast (see Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson).
MJ’s greatest hat trick may have been how his many, confounding contradictions skidded straight past irony. His rubbery body dissembled beneath the grimmest expressions. His lack of humor about himself was matched only by his utterly literal sense of his own celebrity, and lack of distance from his Disney-fied persona. Here was a freakish original who wallowed in cliche. A better dancer than singer, better singer than writer, better performer than choreographer, MJ was a great post-modernist in search of a frame, any kind of frame, here, how about horror films? Detective movies? Deeply felt yet astonishingly synthetic romance? Slammin’. Make you believe anything, and laugh all the way back home to his Elephant Man remains.
You could defend his singing, and most rock critics twisted into pretzel justifying his overwrought “hoo”s and falsetto flips, although very few of them served an expressive ideal. How could someone with such a natural feel for the blues and its rich varients descend so far into a Lemon Sisters holiday special? At last, the blues yearned for Vegas, as if that had been its sole purpose all along.
Watching THIS IS IT with my two young boys brought to mind LET IT BE, that other backstage film minus the payoff that hides gold in rehearsals. How odd that with both projects the leaders choose a doomed project, shoot every last damned sequence fondly hoping some spontaneous gesture will bail them out, for a comeback that never quite happens. THIS IS IT makes LET IT BE look triumphant: that rooftop sequence has only grown in stature; Michael’s movie ends just as his company preps for London, and dies with an offscreen phone call.
MJ’s narcissism, the beating heart of all his best sequences, makes Madonna look like a piker. At its best, his ego had a blissful transcendence: when you fog up your mirror with your own breath, your reflection is dazzling. Especially when he’s stealing Sting’s schtick and saving the planet (“Earth Song”), it’s all about how without MJ the planet might die. (Let’s hope he didn’t die in vain.) How can you resist such schtick: MJ lecturing God, taking the old coot down a peg (at one point, he says “I’m really into trees”). Even in death, MJ’s self-indulgence has a riotous, unearthly calm.
By now we shouldn’t be surprised. Elvis wanted to be Dean Martin, MJ wanted to be a cross between Walt Disney and Bojangles.
And it’s all in that familiar parade of songs, which carry the weight of classics without the emotional heat: he’s breezy yet dark, campy yet sinister, astonishing yet creepy, charismatic yet peurile, earnest yet smug. His body defies both physics and string theory as his race/gender/class neuroses wash over you like locusts. He lingers with baroque finesse over lines that grow more meaningless with every pause, and holds pauses beyond the excrutiating and then pulls everything back again into a tight rhythmic knot.
If you never saw him dance through an entire breathtakingly complicated show, you can almost watch THIS IS IT with the sound down — he only sings at half volume half the time to save his pipes, and the cameras catch a reverence towards the dance and everything it can express at the expense of Michael contempt for his own dancers — the distance between him and his players is palpable, almost more discomforting than his distance from himself… When they gather in front of the stage to watch him solo, it’s almost required viewing both for their adoration and his private little pulpit: this is what he lives for, not to impress millions, but to ladle new layers of envy onto his minions, the best gypsies in the world, and make them squeal with glee as he humbles all their precious training. In waterfall testimonials from musicians, dancers that frame the movie, you catch yourself enjoying how the best players and heffers in all of showbiz shoulder the most demanding gig in showbiz, and still GENUFLECT. One player even proclaims Michael “humble,” which is the way all truly meek celebrities insist their employees speak about them in their multi-million dollar “making of” outtakes.
Michael’s idea of throwing a diva’s tantrum about his earpiece is to yell “It’s like someone’s jammed their hand down my ear canal, and I’m saying this with love, L-O-V-E…” That’s Michael, the agelessly innocent predator, the malevolent victim, the figure who commands yet resents fame, lacks inward questioning if only because there are no innards there. He makes George W. Bush seem curious.
And finally, he’s a ghost, not just because he died but because his comeback was doomed for a long time, and this project was born of insupportable debt and Public Relations nightmare. Poor MJ: it’s the end of the Sleepover Era.
He could never fulfill his childhood promise because he could never remain a child, and his Faustian bargain was that he would remain essentially a child but die a creepy old man of prescription drugs at 50. And the aftertaste of his gauche funeral wold be the sight of his own children getting shoved up into the microphones to speak homage to their “Daddy.”
It’s like MJ lived life in a bad Stephen King novel, where nobody understood him and nobody left him alone and he couldn’t help but keep creating new jackpots for himself to dance his way out of. THIS IS IT has literal facies and abstract dread, it’s post-modernism cubed, the giant anti-climax of a greatest hits comeback that dies at its own birthing, and even ardent followers never even get the satisfaction of seeing him moonwalk in his jammies.