To
make his documentary, Living With Michael
Jackson, British journalist Martin Bashir interviewed Jackson over the
course of about eight months and edited together a disturbing
portrait of a very strange and very lonely and disturbed
individual. Friday, Jackson accused Bashir of doing a hatchet
job on him, but I'm not sure I agree. I thought the most
disturbing elements of the documentary were contextual: Jackson
himself, in his own words, describing or defending bizarre
behavior. I did not sense any trick edits designed to color
Jackson's statements, but merely an open forum for Jackson to
speak his mind. And speak it he did, revealing a pathetic and
lonely existence of a man who rides his own Ferris wheel alone,
spends weeks in Las Vegas holed up in seven suites at the Four
Seasons (at $10,00 per night) for apparently no reason other
than to go shopping for Faberge eggs and wander the halls in the
wee hours in a senior citizen's motorized runabout.
Jackson seemed wholly disconnected from any sense of reality, a
man completely out of touch with the audience he presumes to
entertain. I find it unlikely the man I saw babbling
semi-coherently and yoo-hooing through shopping malls could ever
again speak to young America the way Jay-Z, Smashing Pumpkins or
The Dixie Chicks can. The film explained, for me, the titanic
failure of Jackson's latest effort, Invincible, a failure
Jackson blames on Sony Records chief Tommy Mottola, whom Jackson
improbably accused of racism (Jackson, who has twice married
white women and who seems intent on fathering white children,
playing the race card being his most bizarre public spectacle
yet. Mottola was, famously, married to his protégé, Mariah
Carrey). This guy is so far out of touch with pop America and
pop music that he's practically in orbit. At 44 this year, and
still gaining altitude, it seems unlikely Jackson will ever
again write a substantial album that makes any kind of impact at
all on our collective consciousness.
His move, I would suggest, should be to turn to Clive Davis, the
guru genius of J Records, and relinquish the creative control he
has accrued over the years since The Wiz soundtrack and his best
work, his efforts with the legendary Quincy Jones (and Rod
Temperton, the wholly unsung hero of Jackson's career; the
former Heatwave frontman who wrote much of Thriller, including
the title track, The Girl Is Mine, Pretty Young Thing, Rock With
You, and most other well-known Jackson hits that Jackson himself
did not write). At some point, both Jones and Temperton became
expendable in Jackson's eyes, as Jackson, apparently, sought
more and more glory solely for himself and insisted on doing his
own writing and producing. The consequent downward spiral of his
career matches exactly the increase in creative control of his
music projects.
Jackson's ego, by this visual record, seems wildly out of
control, which is to be expected, I suppose. Fame can have a
terrible effect on stable people, and Jackson, by all accounts
(including his own) has had nothing remotely like a stable
upbringing. In the documentary, Jackson seems wholly addicted to
the rush of screaming fans. Despite claims to the contrary and
pleas for privacy, Jackson apparently goes out of his way to
seek these fans out, becoming giddy, as Bashir described it,
with an almost childlike manic sugar rush as his bodyguards
swarm to protect him from a rushing, maddened throng (losing his
own children in the rush; the guards and Michael himself seemed
preoccupied with Michael, while Bashir, a reporter, grabbed
Jackson's young children and pursued Jackson's entourage).
Jackson's frequently manic behavior (in full Bette Davis mode,
Jackson agitatedly tried to feed his new baby, Prince Michael II
(his first born being Prince Michael I) while defensively
stammering how his dangling the child over a fourth floor Berlin
balcony was “an act of innocence” and a favor to his fans)
suggests to me that he has not, in fact, beaten his addiction to
pain killers. Jackson began taking pain killers back in the
1980's after he was injured during the taping of a Pepsi
commercial. During the early 90's firestorm triggered by a young
boy's accusation of sexual molestation, Jackson conveniently
retreated to Europe to seek treatment for an addiction to
prescription drugs. Speculation held that Jackson had, in fact,
gone to Europe to have further plastic surgery done to change
the look of his genitals and other areas described in the boy's
affidavit. While in Europe, Jackson hid out at the home of pop
legend Elton John, who, years later, told Barbara Walters he did
not agree with Jackson's having paid off the boy's family (to
the tune of a reported $20 million). Said John, “If it were me,
and I was innocent, I'd have spent my last dime before I'd have
settled.”
Jackson's erratic and manic highs and lows, caught in Bashir's
lens, suggests he is still an addict. A fame addict to be sure,
an affection (if not intimacy) addict most certainly. But he
also appears to be a drug addict. He behaves like a drug addict.
He certainly looks like a drug addict. With every frame of
Living With Michael Jackson, Peter Pan cries desperately for
help. The loudest and most shockingly obvious of those cries was
Jackson's defending his practice of spending the night with
prepubescent boys.
"The one thing you can't do with Michael is a beauty shot,
because that shot simply just doesn't exist anymore,” Brittan
Stone, photo editor at the celebrity magazine Us, said. “I don't
think you can put Michael Jackson's face on the full-page of a
magazine.... I think the flaws in his face become a little too
evident, a little too frightening. It becomes like a medical
study.”
Jackson's denial of having had extensive plastic surgery stopped
Bashir in his tracks, and Bashir gave the pop icon ample
on-screen time to dig himself out of the hole he'd dug (and left
this stuff in, long pauses where Bashir lets Michael speak until
he exhausts himself. Bashir, in my view, giving Jackson every
opportunity to explain himself). But Jackson became agitated and
just kept digging, dismissing the issue of his children's
mothers, denying the surgery, and suggesting we are all,
somehow, demented for taking issue with his sleeping with
preadolescent boys. To be fair, Bashir, on the ABC news show
Primetime Live that followed the documentary, described Jackson
as, “not particularly sexual.” Jackson's own accounts of his
early sexual encounters (his brothers used to sneak groupies
into their hotel room, and once Tatum O'Neal tried,
unsuccessfully, to seduce him) suggests he is uneasy with
sexuality or sexual issues. I can buy that, that Jackson is
likely a sexually repressed guy, with a huge fear of intimacy,
likely brought on by his devoutly religious mother and his, by
all accounts, psychopathic and abusive father.
Nearly every photo I have ever seen of Joseph Jackson, Michael's
father, is a portrait of a rabid loon. A scowling, unhappy,
mean-looking selfish-sounding tyrant, Joseph Jackson is an
intimating figure who, by all accounts (even the nicest ones by
family spin guy Jermaine) ruled with an iron hand. If you
believe Jermaine, Joseph wasn't all that bad, but was firm and
heavy on the discipline. If you believe the dearly demented
LaToya, and I do, Joseph was a violent predator who likely
molested his own children, a scandal the family would stop at
nothing to repress. If true, that would go a long way to explain
LaToya's loopyness as well as Janet's irrational obsession with
sex. In interviews, Joseph Jackson, who looks and sounds like a
Gary Indiana steel mill version of Saddam, “I don't know nuthin'
'bout Michael... gurgitate (sp), but if he gurgitate (sic), he
gurgitate (sic) all the way to the bank.” If Michael was
physically, emotionally and even sexually abused as a child,
leading psychologists suggest he is a candidate for doing this
himself. But, he could also be pushed into the opposite
direction, into becoming precisely who he claims to be— a
repressed, asexual guy, emotionally arrested as a prepubescent—
the only people he fully trusts or cares to keep company with.
It is entirely possible nothing even remotely sexual transpires
in Jackson's room with those boys. Jackson, in his mind, could
still be eleven years old. At eleven, many of my friends bunked
out at one house or another, guys sleeping on the floor, on
sofas, on beds. Nothing even remotely sexual went on, and,
frankly, the issue never even came up. But, it is just as
possible that Michael falls in love with the boys or the boys
fall in love with him and, in the pre-dawn of their sexual
awakening, the boys are much more vulnerable to a weeping,
heartbroken Jackson who may cross the line between playmate and
predator. Whichever case it is, I am convinced, based on what I
have seen, that in Jackson's mind, at least, he has done no
harm.
The scariest part about the documentary, for me, was Jackson's
bald-faced lies. Most obviously the lie about his extensive and
terrible plastic surgery. Jackson, I am sorry to say, is a guy
who just lies. And this doesn't help him make his case for the
harmlessness of his communal bedding of preadolescents. Maybe he
has talked himself into believing whatever he is saying, but,
honestly, Bashir and, frankly, the world, had to be perplexed
over why Jackson would lie about things that are so obvious.
And, even if he was continuing to sleep with boys (nearly
exclusively boys and nearly exclusively white boys), why not at
least lie about that, falling on the sword for using poor
judgment and promising never to do it again, to the great relief
of parents worldwide whose kids are most certainly enamored of
this dysfunctional Pied Piper.
That Jackson lied about his net worth (he said he's worth over a
billion, he is in fact worth around $350 million and owes at
least $200 million of that to Sony), about his kid's mother (at
one point, he said Prince Michael II's mother was a woman he'd
been involved with and that he was keeping her identify secret
to protect her, at another he said she was a hired surrogate, a
black woman, though the baby is clearly very white), sends
chills down our spine when we are asked to believe him that
nothing untoward happens in his bedroom with these boys.
Meanwhile images of Jackson lovingly clasping a young boy's
hand, much more like a lover than a uncle, are flashed on the
screen, a faux-Michelangelo oil of a semi-nude Jackson being
attended by semi-nude cherubs hanging on the wall behind them.
This is creepy stuff. A freak show of hardly reducible
proportions.
By the time I was eleven years old, I was beginning to assert my
own identity and sexuality. I knew what homosexual behavior was,
and, emulating the homophobia common to those times, I'd have
likely become violent if a pasty grown man tried cuddling me. It
is inconceivable that I, at this young man's age, would have
even thought of spending the night in his bed, or have allowed
him to lovingly clasp my hand as I cuddled up against his
shoulder. That was an entirely creepy image, one that suggests
obvious and inappropriate behavior. And, rather than that
child's parents smiling approvingly, they should have been
calling the cops.
This documentary was doubtless intended as an image rehab for
Michael, in the wake of his dud album Invincible. Ironically, or
perhaps most tellingly, twenty seven million people watched the
documentary here in America (and millions more abroad), but only
two million people bought his last album. Which suggests
Jackson's true net worth, these days, is in freak of nature more
so than pop idol. Jackson's fall from grace is as precipitous as
the effect Bush's rhetoric has on the stock market. Jackson
intended to charm and to warm his image for us, but instead he
creeped us out. He is a creepy, lonely, lost guy. I have great
empathy for him, for what has brought him to this sad place in
his life. And for the sad fact that, like Elvis before him,
Jackson has grown too powerful and too isolated for anyone to
intercede and halt his spiral.
Christopher J. Priest
10 February 2003
editor@praisenet.org
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