all by 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 could have permitted himself
to perceive his ego as old enough to “come out.” He remained an imaginary Peter
Pan, delusionally perceiving himself that he was as young as the boys he
molested as a pedophile. According, it is likely that he never thought as their
sleep-overs with their masturbatory interludes as pedophilic behavior, since he
was still convinced that he was just a boy, doing what boys normally do,
bonding and in the process discovering themselves. Never allowed to be a
“normal” boy, he mentally determined to become one for his entire life.
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 to sleep. Was he afraid of death or afraid of life?
Los Angeles, November 22, 2009
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November
2009).
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