Michael Jackson: A Life in Film, Part Two

Dangerous

The first video from this album was "Black or White," Jackson's most controversial video and, to date, his last masterpiece. Basically: George Wendt tells Macaulay Culkin to turn his music ("that noise") down; Culkin turns it up so loud that Wendt gets blown to Africa, where he sees tribesmen stalking prey before they dance with Michael, and as they start to run across the "desert," it's revealed to be a soundstage; similar line-blurrings occur as Jackson dances in the style and environs of Hindi, Russian, Native American and assorted other peoples, singing about his defiance of racism (or vogueing while Culkin lip synchs a rap about prejudice). Then begins the famous morphing sequence — men and women of all colors seamlessly melt, one at a time, into men and women of all colors. The video shoot wraps, we crane across the set — and there's a black panther. We follow it outside and it transforms into Jackson — at least it didn't turn into a super-robot — who proceeds to give one of his most sexual-to-the-point-of-masturbatory dances while smashing up cars and storefronts. He then transforms back into the big cat, and our frame of reference pulls back until we see the proscenium of a cartoon TV; Bart Simpson has been watching all this, and Homer tells him to turn it down before clicking the TV off. (Did you forget about that part?)

You can construct some interesting stuff out of this: Jackson believes in the purity of children, and so perhaps Wendt's exile at the hands of the sage Culkin is a result of his dismissal of rock as "that noise," rather than as a great multicultural polyglot, and so he's sent to go see the roots of the music firsthand. There's also Jackson's color-blind lyrics — "It don't matter if you're black or white" — and its literal blending of all races and genders.

Curiously, however, Jackson will offer up the following lyric on his next album:

Jew me, sue me
Everybody do me
Kick me, kike me
Don't you black or white me

Now, there are enough meanings to go around besides the one that suggests Jackson is trying to refute the message of "Black or White" … except what else do you make of the video's display of Jackson engaging in destructive rage as soon as the shoot wraps? One version of "Black or White" (not the broadcast premiere and not the version on the HIStory tapes) has racist graffiti CGI'd onto the car that gets destroyed — "Hitler Lives," "No More Wetbacks" — but that seems like a world-class dodge, a retroactive excuse. I mean, I dunno, is there any historical context for a black panther to want to preserve racial identity instead of pretending it doesn't exist? This isn't the only possible interpretation of the video; in fact, what's great about "Black and White" is how many readings it supports.

Dangerous doesn't offer much else by the way of classic videos. The levity and tricksterism is back on "Remember the Time," directed by John Singleton, in which Jackson plays a fakir that seduces Nefertiti (Iman) right in front of her pharaoh (Eddie Murphy) and can turn into a pile of dust in order to beat a hasty retreat; "Jam," with Michael Jordan, Heavy D and Kris Kross, also keeps spirits light, and is really the only other child-oriented video from the album outside of "Heal the World," a somewhat torpid social-consciousness affair.

But there are a lot of adult-oriented videos gleaned from the album: "In the Closet" is a bump-'n-grind with Naomi Campbell (and it's Princess Stephanie reading the somewhat bawdy woman's part, FYI); "Give In to Me" is another highly sexually aggressive power seduction, showcased in a concert-style video featuring Slash that's interspersed with a lot of tightly-framed couples' faces; "Who Is It," directed by David Fincher, is about Jackson finding out his lady friend is a high-priced call girl. These feature Jackson at perhaps his most mature in terms of adult interpersonal relationship.

After Dangerous was released, however, the ruinous child-molestation allegations emerged, and Jackson also entered his first marriage. Jackson began to talk publicly about his childhood, or, more specifically, his lack thereof; the externalities of Jackson's life had never come to a head like this before, and Jackson chose to address them directly with his next album. Included on the collection Dangerous: The Short Films is a brief bit with Jackson sitting down at a piano and starting to sing his Jackson 5 hit "I'll Be There;" he's joined, "Unforgettable"-style, by the younger Jackson. Like Orpheus, Jackson never gets a good look at his younger self, who walks and sings behind him … but the younger Jackson disappears anyway. It's a touching moment, and is perhaps Jackson's best attempt to express to others the fracture in his life that came from becoming a megastar before he was 10.

The videos from his next album would be a lot of his worst attempts.

Have you seen my childhood?
I'm searching for the world that I come from
'Cause I've been looking around
In the lost and found of my heart
No one understands me
They view it as such strange eccentricities
'Cause I keep kidding around
Like a child, but pardon me

while he sits on a tree stump, hair falling Peter Pan-style over his face, while above him children in flying toy ships play sports and laugh together. You certainly can't get around how heartstring-tugging the song and video are, but they're likewise very obvious. And that's the heart of what's happening here. At one level, Jackson's too close to the material, or too traumatized by it, to give himself the necessary artistic distance to incorporate, for instance, the occasional metaphor or bit of imagery, either in the songs themselves or in the videos.

That makes him seem pompous, and the pomposity scales are tipped already by the $4 million video clip introducing HIStory that was developed to herald the arrival of the album; it's a video without original Jackson music in which the screaming denizens of some Eastern European country fall over themselves fainting when a gigantic statue of Jackson is unveiled. There's almost too much here to begin to get into; suffice it to say that the first thing the statue will make an English student think of is Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ozymandias."

It's not to say that HIStory and its subsequent remix album Blood on the Dance Floor offer no good videos; Lee's Brazil video is quite good, and "Earth Song" is fairly effective for a song and video with such a self-important name. The title track to Blood on the Dance Floor is another high-water mark for Jackson's sexual-aggressor persona; rarely has he had his hands on a woman's body as much in a video as he does here, even though the video and the song are more or less a wash.

But it's the re-emergence of the sexed-up Jackson that makes you realize his other significant persona is missing: the trickster Jackson is nowhere to be found here. In fact, that's very likely why HIStory got away from him. In all of his bemoanings for his lost childhood, Jackson has totally let his playfulness slip away from him here, leaving behind leaden ballads with rain-soaked videos like "Stranger in Moscow." He also goes through these videos without any sign of a cat, which he's always used to denote his virility, and even without a single trick ending. These are significant omissions because these elements have been fundamental to his last three albums' worth of videos, and that he eschewed them, perhaps even without knowing it, only raises the question of what the once-shrewd, once-lively Jackson may also have once known but has now forgotten.

Invincible

So what can be said about Jackson from the 25 years worth of videos he has acted in, produced and composed? The dichotomy between the artist and the CEO of a marketing empire is clear; "Bad" and "The Way You Make Me Feel" suggest a rift between the artist's desires and focus-group analyisis that may be at its most distant when considering the fiery bundle of mixed messages presented by "Black or White." Taken as a whole, his videos show his own creativity and his ability to attract both fresh and seasoned talent, but travesties like "Moonwalker" suggest that he needs rocksteady talent to break himself against. His mischievousness is part of his well-balanced personality and is perhaps a respite from colder realities; when forced to deal with those realities, he runs the risk of losing his nerve and, quite possibly, his capacity to really enjoy himself, which is fundamental to his ability to make great pop music.

In some regards, "You Rock My World," the first video from Invincible, is comforting. Though not a supernatural trickster, Jackson nevertheless plays a well-dressed joker who pals around with Chris Tucker in an attempt to steal Michael Madsen's girl. Jackson has re-established a sense of fun.

But he's also caught in a nostalgia/novelty loop; the track itself is uninventive, and touches like Marlon Brando's cameo add nothing. The video, directed by the rarely-interesting Paul Hunter — the debacle of his "Wild Wild West" video comes to mind — reinforces the idea that Jackson can't waste his time with middling talent.

Nothing crystallizes Jackson's genius like a brilliant video, and since his genius is in question now more than ever, the challenge is evident. A great album isn't necessary, and one great single isn't sufficient; the world at large won't really consider him "back" until he crafts his next great video. And if he never does, well, it's not as if his body of work is disgracefully insubstantial, but there's not a sense of him being finished yet. Just how the story of his life and career will go remains to be seen, but the overwhelming likelihood is that it will, in fact, be seen.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)