Kenny Ortega | This Is It / 2009

ALL MY MYSELF

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kenny Ortega (director, with performer Michael Jackson) This Is It / 2009

 

Despite the obvious outcries by viewers and critics that This Is It does not portray a performance —indeed there is no audience other than the stage workers, waiting dancers, and others involved in the show—and that it is not even a film—having been intended as a personal documentation of the rehearsals—I found the work to be extremely watchable, if only because its focus, Michael Jackson is, metaphorically speaking, so "blurred out" that he creates an even greater mystery about him than the cause of his recent death.

 

    A boy (even at the age 50), yes, a sensational dancer (indeed, but not necessarily here: although many of his moves are quick and lithe, the overall choreography, particularly in the robot army number, is based more on fascistic-like marches rather than the smooth glide across space we usually associate with Jackson), a singer (true, but although we get various passages from his catalogue of "greats," for the most part the performer is not singing to his full capacity in an attempt to "save his voice"; at one point when he does begun to belt out a song, he interrupts, "Don't make me sing full out.")

     When he does speak, it is, for the most part, psychobabble about his caring for the earth—the worst number in the film is the unbearable "Earth Song"—a hand-joining pep talk with his talented dancers, musicians, and staff, and quiet mumblings when something goes amiss.

     The most insightful moments are when Jackson speaks of his art, of the necessity of waiting between beats, stepping at the right moment into the spotlight, pausing in a musical phrase, getting the precise beat of a song. If nothing else, it is clear that Jackson is a consummate showman.

     Yet we get little insight into the man, and only glimpses of what the final performance might have looked like. Certainly it would have been spectacular, but clearly, also, it might have revealed that the aging Michael was no longer at his top, and the directions in which his art was apparently taking him were distances from the Astaire-like perfections of "Thriller" or his famed "moon walk."

     I know I will be heckled, perhaps even hated by all those who love the "King of Pop," but I feel that Jackson's music was never his great contribution. Most of his best-known songs are repetitive ditties gaffed up by inward gulps of breath and sigh. He was a great dancer, a performer who knew up until the last day of his life how to move his lean body to convey a deeply asexual sexuality that made him into “something” for everybody to love. But This Is It, I am afraid, is not what it/he is or was.

    Who and what precisely Jackson was is, and probably always will be, open to question. Let’s face it, he was probably a gay man who never was allowed to perceive himself as old enough to come out. He remained a kind of Peter Pan, imagining himself perhaps as young as the boys he molested as a pedophile. But then perhaps he never thought as their sleep-overs, their masturbatory interludes as pedophilia, since he still thought of himself as an eternal boy. 

    If anything, the documentary further mystifies us in our search to find out who this "man in the mirror" was. Here he remains only a shadow of a shadow, and one wonders "Does he have any reality away from his audience?" One comes to see him, ultimately, as one of the loneliest beings in the universe, like a frightened child, demanding doctors be there every night to put him asleep. Was he afraid of death or afraid of life?

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2009).