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(1958–2009). American singer and actor.
There were early signs of Jackson's interest
in the fantastic: his willingness to sing the theme song to the
revenge-of-the-intelligent-rats epic, Ben, and his engaging performance
as the Scarecrow in an all-black film version of The Wizard of Oz that
might have been charming had anyone other than Diana Ross been cast as the
lead. But the indisputable turning point came with his breakthrough video Thriller.
Drawing upon the best talent available, including film director John LANDIS and
actor Vincent PRICE—Jackson
crafted a fast-moving but bizarre narrative that defied interpretation: first,
while Jackson and his girl friend are walking down a lonely road at night,
Jackson turns into a werewolf and threatens the girl; then, that event is
revealed as a scene in a horror film Jackson and the girl are watching, which
Jackson enjoys but which causes the displeased girl to walk out of the theatre;
in the city street outside, Jackson and the girl are surrounded by an army of
zombies straight out of George ROMERO's Night of the Living Dead (1968),
and Jackson turns into a threatening zombie as well; then, all that is revealed
as the girl's nightmare, though a final green glint in Jackson's eyes as he
looks at the screen indicates that he is in fact some type of unearthly being. All
of this is puzzling to say the least, but the film does convey that Jackson
loved horror movies, and that he felt a stronger connection to the superficial
wickedness of the genre than to its underlying sentimentality.
Jackson's
other ventures into "long-form" video—Captain Eo, Moonwalker,
and Ghosts—never duplicated the success of Thriller. The least
problematic of these, Captain Eo (a three-dimensional short film shown
only at Disney amusement parks), is best described as a bad, ten-minute parody
of Star Wars, with Jackson as a spaceship captain beset by cute robots
and a menacing, Medusa-like alien, followed by a entertaining five-minute music
video. Moonwalker and Ghosts are lengthier and more disquieting.
Both cast Jackson as an heroic figure—respectively, a wanderer who becomes a
Transformer-like warrior and the misfit leader of a band of gleeful
ghouls—admired by young children of various races; both are essentially series
of episodes presenting crowds of people gazing in awe at Jackson as he sings
and dances amidst dazzling special effects; both show Jackson first dying, then
being gloriously and triumphantly born again. Obviously, these films suggest a
tendency towards juvenile self-celebration—as is also suggested by the
ill-conceived short film Jackson made to promote his 1995 album HIStory:
Past, Present, and Future, which features Jackson as a general who
liberates an East European country and is wildly cheered by immense crowds as a
gigantic statue of Jackson is unveiled, making a viewer positively long for
some redeeming sign of deprecating self-humor, like a pigeon who flies over the
statue and poops on it, that never appears. Yet in Ghosts, by
simultaneously casting himself as the elderly white man who hurls insults at
the young eccentric, Jackson contrastingly indicated that an element of
self-loathing was creeping into his psyche, which perhaps developed as he
observed his immense global popularity continuing to diminish. As explorations
of his troubled life continue, these will endure only as films to analyze, not as
films to enjoy.
For those not interested in placing Jackson
on the psychologist's couch, there is better entertainment available in his true
videos, since these are less obtrusively revelatory. Several of them are
fantasies, like "Remember the Time," depicting Jackson as a magician
entertaining an Egyptian pharaoh (played by Eddie
MURPHY) and enticing his wife,
and "Earth Song," where a world ravaged by pollution is miraculously
restored to its natural beauty by a mighty healing wind. And "Black or
White" is truly extraordinary: Jackson dances with people from all over
the world, stands atop New York's Statue of Liberty in an amalgamated world
city including London's Big Ben and Paris's Eiffel Tower, and finally cedes the
stage to a series of men and women of different nationalities successively
"morphed" into each other. While there is power in its argument for
unity among all types of people, the video did suggest that Jackson dangerously
desired to be all things to all people, to appeal to everyone and offend no one,
an inclination that can have no good results.
As a fortuitous antidote to these gooey
embraces of the entire human race, Jackson at other times lashed out at the
world like an angry child, aiming biting invective at various critics.
"Leave Me Alone" (an episode from Moonwalker often shown
separately as a video) takes Jackson on an amusement-park ride past various
fantastic images, with scenes that visualized tabloid news reports to complement
the song's denunciation of the media. And "Scream," his hostile
commentary on the widespread allegations of child molestation, placed Jackson
and his sister Janet on a stark, black-and-white spaceship, where he morphs at
times into Janet, appears as a head in a glass chamber in scenes that recall
William Cameron MENZIES's Invaders from Mars, plays a computer game
resembling Pong with Janet, knocks down vases in a zero-gravity shooting
gallery, and stands on the walls and ceilings mouthing the bitter lyrics—all in
all, a powerful depiction of exiles increasingly going crazy from boredom and
loneliness.
It would seem, then, that Jackson's videos
employed the imagery of fantasy to express his identification with the world,
and employed the imagery of science fiction to express his estrangement from
the world—revealing that, whatever foibles he displayed in his personal life,
Jackson was an intelligent and perceptive artist. Further revelations may come
from the anticipated release of scores of unheard Jackson songs, though one
hopes that no one attempts to create accompanying videos using craftily edited
or computer-altered footage. The man deserves to rest in peace.
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