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For more than a decade, starting in 1986 when she was only 20, Janet Jackson demonstrated that there was money to be made as the kinder, gentler, slower, fatter Jackson. In a series of hit singles and videos, Janet made millions by aping every move of her big brother’s career. When Michael affected military costume in his public appearances, Janet wore epaulets in Rhythm Nation. When Michael hung out with "old Hollywood" celebrities like Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor, Janet recruited legends like Cab Calloway, Cyd Charisse, and the Nicholas Brothers for Alright. When Michael preached tolerance in Black and White, Janet denounced abusive boyfriends in Nasty Boys. Eight years younger than her brother, chubby Janet looked older, weighed down by big hair, big shoulders, butt-covering sweaters, and other accoutrements of the "large" woman. A detuned, distaff Michael, she carefully managed to remove anything that was edgy, exciting, perverse, or dangerous from her brother’s act.
For all these reasons, Janet’s performance in the video Scream (1995), in which she proved she could be as big a bitch as her brother, came as a revelation. Slimmed down, poured into black latex jeans, with glowing skin, and shot in a special process that made her appear six feet tall, Janet looked to be indestructible, a bitch goddess from outer space who could tromp right through the ruins of her hopelessly self-indulgent brother’s career and pick up where the Gloved One left off. Alas, it was not to be. As her latest video, commemorating her 1998 Velvet Rope tour, demonstrates, Janet has no intention of working up a sweat without Michael to push her. Although she continues to mimic her brother, Janet is about as exciting as a glass of warm milk in Velvet Rope. Even the Rope Burn number, when she unbuttons her blouse to expose a well-filled wonder bra and performs a PG-13 lap dance on an obliging stooge, is painfully bland.1
Michael, of course, is going nowhere. Although he has performed overseas in the wake of the boy-love scandals in 1995 that left his superstar status in shambles, he has done little since.2 Not only have we lost the most exciting screen dancer since Fred Astaire, but his sister, who showed such promise, has reverted to form.
As it stands, Michael’s video career is spread across four video collections: Moonwalker, Michael’s Greatest Hits Volume 1, Michael’s Greatest Hits Volume 2, and Dangerous: The Short Films. Watching them, one has to wade through some of the most pretentious and self-indulgent dreck ever seen in order to get to some of the best dancing ever put on film.
Few showbiz careers are as strange as Michael Jackson’s, fortunately. After years as a child star, he reinvented himself several times. In the video collections, we can see him go from a simpering, squeaky, Bee Gee3 wannabe disco dud into a magically self-defining superstar. Michael’s disco videos are amazingly bad, though what’s truly amazing is that he would let anyone see them again. In Rock With You, he looks like a human disco ball, wearing a "mirror suit" and bouncing awkwardly to the rhythm while a bright green light shines behind him. In Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, which was a big hit, he attempts a few, self-conscious dance steps, with a "look at me, aren’t I funny" expression all over his face. Both videos are excruciatingly painful to watch.4
Yet less than a year later we get Billie Jean, followed quickly by first Beat It and then Thriller, surely the three most famous videos ever made, and, given the near-moribund status of that medium, perhaps the three most famous that ever will be made. Billie Jean first introduced us to Michael the Chaplinesque outsider, at once perfectly vulnerable and incredibly gifted, dazzling us with the wonderful fluidity and definition of his moves. Billie Jean is Michael’s best-known and most coherent video, as well as almost certainly the only hit song about a paternity suit. Why anyone would get upset about a threatened paternity suit if it wasn’t true is anyone’s guess, but somehow Michael manages to create a nightmare world that gives significant expression to his own fears about adulthood, sexuality, and women. If Billie Jean isn’t his girl, why doesn’t he just walk away? What exactly happened for 40 days and 40 nights? Why does he get in bed with her? If it’s not Billie Jean in the bed, who is it? In the omnipresent confusion of Billie Jean Michael is most himself, appearing and disappearing at will yet unable to escape.
Beat It, heavily influenced by West Side Story, introduces us to Michael’s fascination with the ghetto, which he probably first saw from the back seat of a limo. Except for the multi-ethnic makeup of the gangs, Beat It looks quite authentic, though I doubt if modern-day thugs bother with ritualistic knife duels. Shooting your rivals in the back is so much easier.
Like all of Michael’s compositions, the lyrics of Beat It don’t amount to much. It’s the rhythmic line that counts. Yet we get a reasonably believable picture of what it’s like to be a nice kid in a not-nice environment, where, unfortunately, the bad guys can’t be taught that dancing is cooler than violence. Beat It reflects Jackson’s ambivalent fascination with aggression and anti-social behavior — surely the strutting gang-lords are supposed to be cool, although Michael is the coolest one of all — and his frequent hostility toward the audience — in one extreme close-up he all but spits on the camera.
Beat It was fiercely authentic; Billie Jean was brilliantly artificial. Jackson’s fascination with artificiality, and his hostility toward women, are both on display in Thriller, though often in an unattractive manner. Thriller is bogged down by a great deal of "film within a film" padding, a clear attempt to create the world’s greatest video without bothering about much choreography. We begin with Michael and a girl (Ola Ray) strolling through a park, looking like an Ebony photo spread from the fifties, with Michael coyly remarking that he isn’t like the other boys. We’re invited to assume that this is a reference to his less-than-masculine image, but we quickly see what he really means when he changes into a sort of werecat,5 a very nonthreatening transformation. This is followed by another transformation: what we saw was only a movie, being watched by eighties Michael and his date. As they walk home, Michael sings "Thriller" to tease the girl for her willingness to believe in monsters.
But as the two pass a graveyard, it becomes clear that what just happened on the screen is mild compared to real life. A new set of gross-out ghouls is brewing whose lips drip thick black bile and whose rotting flesh falls from their bones. When the filthy horde corners the pair, Michael again turns into a monster, a sort of beanpole Frankenstein, and he leads the crew in a delirious freak dance, full of flailing arms and robotic twists and jerks. The sequence is shot so dark that it is often difficult to distinguish Michael from the other dancers, a pattern that appears frequently in his work.6 Virtually all performers obsess over their appearance; whether any have carried this obsession as far as Michael Jackson is debatable. Yet over and over again he hides himself in his videos, obscuring or throwing away many of his best moves.
When the dance is done, Thriller has a few more twists, none of which have much impact. As the monsters close in on Michael’s date, she suddenly awakens in his arms. So it was all a dream after all! Then, at the conclusion, Michael’s head twists around and he grins demonically. No, he’s really a monster!
Thriller, the video and the album, was such a huge hit in 1984 that Michael seemed to be on the verge of absorbing the entire entertainment industry. A special videotape, The Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, was rushed on the market, essentially tripling the amount of padding wrapped around an already padded video. Viewers unwise enough to watch the tape undoubtedly got enough of director John Landis7 to last them the rest of their lives.
After Thriller, Michael didn’t get back in the studio and in front of the camera for several years, making the Martin Scorsese-directed Bad in 1987. Bad is probably the most straightforward video Michael ever did. A black-leather, bull-necked Michael leads his gang on a romp through the New York subway system while he threatens us with extreme punishment for some unspecified offence. The gang looks threatening, but doesn’t engage in anything worse than turnstile hopping. Bad is very reminiscent of Beat It, except that Michael has promoted himself from scared outsider to gang leader, Bad moves along at an entertaining clip, with virtually no modulation in tone. The video’s only real weakness is that, no matter how hard he tries, Michael just can’t convince us that he really is "bad."8
In 1989 Jackson made Moonwalker, his sole feature-length film. Moonwalker is barely professional, featuring Michael running around a lot and "helping" kids.9 The sole highlight is the Smooth Criminal dance number, which occurs near the end of the film in a multi-racial gambling/dance hall cum brothel.10 Wearing both a white suit and white spats, Jackson leads a chorus of thirties-style gangsters and whores through an extended dance sequence that, unlike his videos, relies very little on jump cuts to establish a visual rhythm. For the first time Jackson begins to exploit extensively the remarkable flexibility in his shoulders, which seemingly allows him to twist in his skin (or at least his shirt) like a cat.
Smooth Criminal tails off without coming to any real climax, a common pattern in Jackson’s choreography. At the approach of some vaguely fascist bad guys, Michael picks up a tommy gun and shoots out the skylight of the building. (Why this is a good idea isn’t clear.) Then he runs away. In the video version of Moonwalker, Jackson tacks on an exciting concert version of John Lennon’s "Come Together" (from the Beatles’ Abbey Road). While Jackson’s other videos also contain concert performances, none are nearly as focused and energetic as this piece, featuring a strutting, sneering Michael in his Mick Jagger mode.11 The little kids that Michael "saved" in Moonwalker are supposedly brought along to see the performance. Why Jackson thought Lennon’s song, built largely around a thunderous double entendre (Come together! Get it?), was appropriate for kids is unclear.12
In 1989 Jackson also made The Way You Make Me Feel, in connection with his Dangerous album and tour. This is Jackson’s worst "serious" video, a "serious" Jackson video being one in which he does some real dancing. Apparently made to show that Michael likes girls, it ends up by proving just the opposite. The film opens with Michael’s dream girl (Tatiana Thumbtzen) improbably strutting through the ’hood in a skin-tight micro-mini and four-inch heels.13 The soundtrack at first is quite funny — the voices of older black men engaged in easy badinage: "You don’t understand women. You lack that kind of knowledge." Soon, however, Michael appears on the scene. To give voice to the tender passion within him, he hoots, screeches, and sneers at the girl, pumping his pelvis crudely in a "Oh, yeah, I want to fuck you, bitch" manner.
This goes on for the rest of the video, except for a brief dance sequence featuring Michael and a group of young male dancers.14 The dance is shot in silhouette, with a real MTV-style backdrop, water exploding from a broken fire hydrant in a fan, illuminated by blinding, blue-white light. Despite the promising set-up, the dance itself is quite short and uninspired, culminating in some truly awful floorwork — the guys lie down and hump the ground.15
NEXT: Michael flees to Russia, joining a chorus of high-kicking Cossacks
NOTES
1. Of course, if you like the old Janet, this is the video for you, a well-produced, well-shot, and well-recorded "greatest hits" performance at Madison Square Garden that runs for almost two hours.
2. His 1998 short film Ghosts, scripted by Stephen King, did not win much publicity, and is not available on video in the U.S. Reportedly, he is working on a new album.
3. The Bee Gees guaranteed themselves a certain measure of immortality by laying down the main tracks for John Travolta’s mega, mega-hit Saturday Night Fever (1977). They still turn up on PBS from time to time during pledge week, which is an excellent argument for getting government the hell out of broadcasting.
4. Of course, this is only my opinion. Both songs were on Jackson’s breakthrough solo album Off the Wall, which made him an adult star. Off the Wall went platinum shortly after its release, and eventually sold about 12 million copies, a figure that looks small only in comparison to the numbers generated by Thriller (45 million) and Bad (24 million).
5. This transformation clearly draws from the fifties kitsch classic I Was a Teen-Age Werewolf, starring a very young Michael Landon. Cats are an obvious obsession with Jackson, appearing in Billie Jean, Thriller, Smooth Criminal, and Black and White, among others. Jackson turns into a cat several times in his videos.
6. In Smooth Criminal Jackson does many of his best moves in long shot, often with other dancers passing in front of him. In Bad, his black-leather outfit almost disappears against the backdrop of the other dancers.
7. Landis is cited in a number of standard dictionaries in the definitions of both "bore" and "egomaniac."
8. In addition, the synthesizer solo in the middle of Bad is no match for Van Halen’s riff in Beat It.
9. Jackson also appeared in The Wiz (1978) as a teenager. The Wiz was an all-black remake of The Wizard of Oz, with Diana Ross as Dorothy and Michael as the Scarecrow. The enormous success of Saturday Night Fever and Grease convinced moviemakers that rock musicals couldn’t miss. The result was The Wiz, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band (starring the Bee Gees), Xanadu, and Can’t Stop the Music, some of the biggest box-office bombs ever made.
10. There seems to be no relationship between this number and the rest of the film. The lyrics to Smooth Criminal, consisting largely of the repetition of the words "Are you okay, Annie?," don’t help.
11. The difference between Jackson and Jagger is that Michael can dance the way Mick wishes he could.
12. His nipple-baring, pelvis-pumping performance is hardly G-rated either.
13. Her figure suggests one of Tom Wolfe’s "boys with breasts." Her measurements, one guesses, are about 32-20-30.
14. He doesn’t dance with the girl, of course.
15. Jackson’s floorwork is always terrible, for some reason, but this is grotesque.
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