In Which We've Been Struck By A Smooth Criminal

Through the Looking Glass

by JACOB SUGARMAN

What Michael Jackson has achieved is a tribute to 20 years of hard work, energy and a tireless dedication. (His) success is an American dream come true.

Such was Ronald Reagan’s message to the public during Jackson's visit to the White House in 1984 — a fitting tribute to our country’s most spectacularly decadent entertainer from a president who presided over arguably the most decadent eight years in our nation’s history.

Yet judging from the orgy of sorrow that has enveloped the country since the singer's death, Reagan’s words might just as easily serve as his eulogy. Together we’ve chosen to celebrate his musical achievements unabashedly rather than confront his lunacy of the past 20 years.

What we're loath to admit is that his weirdness was essential to his appeal. Much as we’d like to compartmentalize the billboard-topping hits from his disturbing, private behavior, the two are inextricably braided into Jackson’s personal narrative. To try and understand the man who would be king, one need look no further than the 1988 film, Moonwalker, a work of meta-fiction that offers its viewer a window into the mind of its star and a prescient glimpse of his psychological collapse.

Penned by Jackson with the aid of David Newman and released in conjunction with the debut of his album, Bad, Moonwalker is part acid-infused autobiography, part paranoiac science fiction of Philip K. Dickian proportions. We open with Jackson performing the song, “Man in the Mirror,” to crowds of adoring fans, the film subtly announcing itself as a form of self-portrait. What follows is a kaleidoscopic collection of images from Jackson's youth displayed on 60's and 70's style TV sets, the suggestion being that the Jackson 5 were beamed into the American conscience via satellite.

But peel away its glitzy presentation and your left with a montage that presents Jackson's childhood as a fragmented, televised event. Chief among these clips is a video of young Michael eulogizing his pet rodent in a performance of "Ben." In a recent interview with Details, Producer Quincy Jones notes that he gave Jackson the song, "She's Out of My Life," because he: "just wanted to hear him deal with a romantic relationship with a human being rather than a rat...I wanted to hear him get in touch with a real human relationship."

Jackson's quasi-autobiographical feature suggests that Jones' wish may have gone unfulfilled. After a brief detour through the hits of Thriller, the director lands his camera on Michael’s inimitable leather boots. But these shoes belong instead to Brandon Quintin Adams, who’s credited in the movie as "Zeke 'Baby Bad' Michael." Zeke's footwear, in turn, cues a shot by shot remake of the music video for “Bad” with children cast in the rolls of each dancer.

With the benefit of hindsight, this seems like a transparent expression of Jackson’s desire to recapture the youth he never really had. And because show business is the only universe he has ever known, even his wish fulfillment fantasies assume the shape of a music video.

If the re-imagined video, “Badder,” foreshadows the more insidious manifestations of Jackson’s Peter Pan syndrome, then the music videos for “Speed Demon” and “Leave Me Alone,” both stitched into Moonwalker’s larger narrative, suggest he may have suffered from a pronounced form of persecution complex.

In the former, a collection of fiendish, claymation journalists, paparazzi and autograph-seeking fans chase Jackson from the real-life streets and highways of Los Angeles to a cartoon desert landscape. There he finds a few moments peace dancing with his costume cum alter ego, 'Spike,' a motorcycle-riding rabbit, only to have a police officer ticket him for dancing in a no moonwalking zone.

While the initial impulse may be to dismiss the video as pure kitsch, it’s revealing to watch Jackson eschew the real for the imagined, particularly in lieu of his self-exile to the phantasmagoric Neverland ranch. Equally significant is his willingness to radically transform his appearance to escape the dogged scrutiny of his fans, only to have that transformation take on a life of its own. Is this an instance of Jackson’s art imitating life or vice versa?

This sense of doggedness is actualized in the video for “Leave Me Alone” as a group of menacing hounds dressed like button men from a 40’s-style gangster movie chase the singer across the Neverland theme park and the singer’s imagination. It’s dark inside Michael’s head; think Dante meets Monty Python.

After riding his rollercoaster car through a set of gnashing teeth, Jackson enters a universe of carnival barkers, wild animals, fractured images of Elizabeth Taylor as well as the bones of the Elephant Man, with whom he also shares a few dance moves. It’s unclear whether Jackson is poking fun at the media’s fascination with his strange proclivities or embracing his newly forged identity as a social outcast and grotesque. Over the course of the ride, he splashes his viewers with newspaper headlines both real and imagined—“Michael’s Cosmetic Nose Surgery,” “Michael Confides to Pet Chimp,” “Michael Weds Alien.”

The video ends as the Neverland ranch collapses in a heap, the singer emerging from his slumber like the hero from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, freeing himself from the Lilliputians visible only to his mind’s eye. Midway through, the film abruptly shifts from personal videology to narrative fiction, perhaps belying its star’s own conflation of fantasy with reality.

Like the music videos that precede it, the defining mood in this segment of “Moonwalker” is paranoia. In its very first scene, Jackson exits his brownstone apartment to a hail of machine gun fire from a futuristic, para-military outfit. Why? Because Jackson and pre-adolescent 'Katie' (Kellie Parker) have stumbled upon ‘Mr. Big’s’ (Joe Pesci) plot to hook the world’s youth on drugs. Where to begin? There’s the Lewis Carroll-like sequence in which Jackson and his ward (?) enter the haunted woods. It’s uncertain whether the viewer is meant to view Jackson as this story’s ‘Alice’ or a strange creature from Wonderland, but either way, he’s managed to find his way down the rabbit hole.

Then there’s the villain, Mr. Big, whose violent tendencies towards children might reflect Jackson’s own feelings about his tyrannical father, Joe — the same man who when asked by a CNN reporter how he and his family were dealing with Michael's death, tenderly replied: "we just lost the biggest superstar in the world." Perhaps most telling, though, are the ways in which Michael’s body mutates to escape and ultimately vanquish his pursuers.

Jackson transforms into his very own autobat —a flying space ship that destroys Mr. Big’s army in a blaze of fire. Watching his features assume a metallic glow, his kinky hair straightening in a pool of mercury, you can almost see the synthetic creature into which he’d metamorphose.

As cultural artifacts like this film reveal, the seeds of Jackson's self-destruction were sewn long ago; his passing was simply the final headline in a life turned spectacle and the realization of our celebrity-obsessed culture’s basest, most voyeuristic desires.

For all intents and purposes, the music star whose fedora and sparkling glove helped launch Music Television in the 1980s has been dead now for some time. But as we pore over his public and private history, let’s try to remember that the pop God on display in Moonwalker and the mere mortal recently laid to rest were one and the same. 

Jacob Sugarman is a contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about Robert Mitchum.

"Remember the Time" — Michael Jackson (mp3)

"I Just Can't Stop Loving You" — Michael Jackson (mp3)

"The Girl Is Mine" — Michael Jackson (mp3)

 

In Which We Mourn A King