an it that should have been

I was conflicted to say the least when Michael Jackson “died.” I put that in quotes because now it looks like he was killed, but at the time we were led to believe that he’d just expired from some vague, self-destructive accumulation of behaviors. The media jolted into its predictable cycles of speculation, footage loops and computer graphics. So all I knew was that the King of Pop was gone on the eve of his career-climaxing show-to-end-all-shows, and the message I kept getting and the feeling I couldn’t shake was that he’d brought it on himself and it was all just a pathetic end to a remarkable, fraught career.

As much as I respected his music, his dancing and his showmanship, I was mostly angry at the superstar industrial complex of which he was as much a creator as a victim. I couldn’t abide his Peter Pan fetish and I couldn’t excuse his inability to see bright lines where kids and intimacy were concerned. His infinite appetite for attention and love and adulation felt unhealthy, and the armies of manic, weeping girls and boys who fed his ego made me queasy.

Then (last night) I saw This Is It, the posthumous documentary about the preparation for the London swan song shows that were going to happen under the same name. I’m really glad I did, because I feel like I now have a far more truthful take on Jackson and the tragedy of his premature death.

 Of course this was made by his friend and producer Kenny Ortega so it’s clearly an affectionate and protective portrait. But there’s no special effects here. Nobody reanimated MJ with CGI. The King of Pop knocks nearly every song we see out of the park (and we see mostly full runs of songs), often over multiple rehearsals, without the cover-fire of the full show happening around him. Though it’s all rehearsal, it’s one of the most honest performance films I’ve seen, and over two hours of watching Michael really work, his death became about a hundred times harder to take or make sense of.

As thin and surgically transmogrified as he was, Jackson is an imposing presence on the rehearsal stage. Ortega shows us a glimpse of the massive audition that picked the show’s eleven dancers, and yet when they start running routines, these super-humans all trail in Jackson’s wake. He’s better at fifty than they are at 20, and it’s a stunner to realize that most of the moves they’re doing are original Jackson creations, whether new or 30 years old. Jackson also man-handles the band. At first he sounds a little spaced out, but there are many moments when his directions are spot on and sometimes go above the head of his own band leader. MJ knows his cues and knows when, as he puts it, to sizzle.

Last point: the world is full of great concert films but this is a great rehearsal film, and that makes it an important music documentary. Seeing the pieces of a show broken down into their component parts is all too rare, and it’s enriching. Show biz (especially MJ’s mega-sized school of show biz) is obsessed with that Oz factor. You get only the polished, digitally enhanced production, which buries the real folks making music under layers of artifice. There’s nothing wrong with the show, but I think it’s more inspiring to see major artists getting there and hearing what they sound like when it’s just them and the music. And because there are generally only two cameras trained on him during his takes of the songs, the editor has no choice but to linger on shots, where had there been a concert film, we would have been slingshotted around the hall every two seconds. We actually get to see Picasso paint here.  

So This Is It reminded me when I most needed to be reminded that Michael Jackson was an extraordinary musician and dancer. I’m really glad to be able to remember him that way. Such is the power of film.

Comments

[Betty]

Beautifully written! The 2nd paragraph articulates so well the mixed feelings so many of us have had about Jackson, and the last paragraph, how we want to remember him. Thanks for taking the time to write this.

[Paul S]

Thanks for that critique, Craig. I posted it to my Facebook page, too.