When I was growing up in the 1980s Michael
Jackson was still considered the King of Pop but the older he got the more pop
culture, particularly on Late Night, began to poke at the oddities in his
character. Some of it might look in hindsight like the fact that they were
being homophobic about Jackson's frequently effeminate and increasingly
eccentric behavior.
That changed by the mid-1990s as the
allegations around him began to become more audible By 1995 Saturday Night
Live had taken the gloves on and not just the one Jackson was famous for.
In an opening sketch Patrick Stewart played an advisor of trying to retool
Jackson's image under the code name 'Operation Pedophile Not' which even by the
standards of that show was incredibly cutting.
I was never a fan of pop music at any time
in my life and I wasn't really that aware of music culture. But even then it
was becoming clear to me that Michael Jackson was covering something. I
remember the infamous kiss between him and Lisa Marie Presley at the VMAs when
their engagement had been announced. I'm not sure I knew the meaning of the
term 'marriage of convenience' at fifteen but I was pretty sure this marriage
was being staged – and not just to cover any possibility that Jackson might
just be gay.
Throughout the rest of the 1990s as Jackson
became more known for his scandals and less for his music late night began to
savage him. I remember an animated sketch on SNL by Robert Smigel where Jackson
was walking to a courthouse and someone left a child on a window. Jackson
caught the odor of it like it was a pie and like Yogi Bear in a Hanna Barbera
cartoon starting to float towards it. It got darker from there. Mad TV, which was for a brief time
positioning itself as a rival to SNL was even more savage towards him,
though it occasionally touched at the darker sides of his nature. They once did
a sketch where he was painted as a serial killer, deciding to kill off other
pop stars to revitalize his image in music – and by implication, distract from
the scandals.
By the 2000s no one in Hollywood was blind
to who Jackson was anymore. There are too many comedians who I can use examples
of this but I'm going to give two of the very best standups of all time in two
of their most iconic HBO scandals.
The first is Robin Williams in Live On
Broadway which was filmed in the spring of 2002. One of Williams' opening
bits was nearly four minutes in which he absolutely tore Jackson a new one:
Michael's screaming racism. Honey you got a
pick a race first.
(After the laughter)
Girl, you gotta pick a gender, too. You
were Diana Ross, now you've just left it all behind!
But Michael you're just surgically
enhanced, and you've spent more money then the Vatican so let's just being
quiet.
Then he came in for the kill:
If you go to Neverland, it says "You
must be this high to ride Michael'.
That got the biggest laugh and groan
combination to that point and after that Williams acknowledged:
At this point the lawyers for HBO, are
going "Fuck" (and
he mimed writing a check)
That was one of the funniest sequences in
standup comedy I'd seen to that point even from Williams (and it only got
better from there). The following year on his equally celebrated Never
Scared special Chris Rock went in even harder and with even more rage:
"Michael went crazy. Another kid! I
thought it was Groundhog Day!
What I think was the best part of this
routine and arguably one of the high points in Rock's career is when he
discussed an interview Jackson had done on 60 Minutes earlier.
"Ed Bradley tried to make Michael
Jackson look like a mammal. He gave Michael the easiest GED questions in the
world and Michael could not pass the test.
(Doing Bradley impression) Michael, do
you think its normal for a 45 year old man to sleep in a bed with a thirteen
year old boy?"
(Rock does a very MJ like expression)
"Yes!"
Rock as Bradley: "All right, I'll
rephrase. Michael would you allow your son to sleep in a bed with a man who's
been accused of pedophilia?"
Rock as Jackson: "Yes!"
(Back to normal)
Ed Bradley looked at him like he wanted to
say: N---er, you crazy?"
Obvious mere transcription can't do justice
to Rock's work in this routine and indeed the rest of it, you really need to
see it for yourself.
By that point even Law & Order had
gotten into the act. To be very clear they were incredibly indirect. Their
stand-in for Michael Jackson was a thirty-ish former child star who was white.
But the investigation began with him holding a child over a balcony, continued
with him having an ice cream van where someone picked up young boys for him and
made it very clear the parents were complicit in letting their son be molesting
by this superior star and accepted a payout. And by that time if you ended up
on Law & Order you were front page news.
As the 2000s continued it wasn't clear if
Jackson was ever going to go to prison but the general consensus from Hollywood
was that the jokes they were doing was the absolute minimum that he
deserved. For all we know he might well
have ended up at least in court.
Then he died in 2009. And the narrative
began to change around him almost immediately.
In hindsight the first sign got as to how
Jackson's horrors were being pushed aside came during Season 3 of Glee when
an entire episode was devoted to his music. The fact that a group of high
school agent students were celebrating Jackson unironically struck me as
questionable but I let it go.
Over the last decade there has been a sense
of accountability in regard to so many of the great figures of our time and
their horrible behavior, particularly in Hollywood. Not all of this is in
regard to the 2016 election; there were signs of that accounting going on
particularly when everything involving Bill Cosby became public starting around
2014.
Ever since both the left and Hollywood in
particularly have been engaging in this kind of moral reckoning for so many of
the biggest sacred cows, not just in Hollywood but in the world overall. Some
of it, I will grant you, is long overdue; for more than I'd like; much is more
about the left's deciding to constantly move to Overton Window so that
something that was acceptable even last week is unacceptable today. But I don't
want to just focus on that part yet and instead focus on pop culture.
During the last several years I've watched
more than my share of documentaries on cable, particularly about notable
figures in entertainment and sports. Many of them have enlightened me on tragic
parts of our culture that I was unaware of. For the purposes of this article I
want to only focus on prominent African-Americans.
I've seen Omit The Logic which makes
it all too clear what a genius Richard Pryor was as a comic, the demons he
fought his entire life and never truly beat and what an impossible man he was.
I saw the story of Rick James, how his addiction to cocaine was horrible, how
he was clearly sexually abusive and the reason he ended up in prison for
assault. I saw Pariah: The Story of Sonny Liston arguably one of the
greatest boxers of all time and who was viewed by society as a monster and bad
man, not entirely inaccurately. And I saw W. Kamau Bell's incredible miniseries
We Need To Talk About Cosby which made it very clear all of the good
things he did for African-Americans and minorities, how significant and an
entertainer he was and the imprint he made in pop culture while simultaneously
showing how at every stage in his public life he was a rapist and sexual
predator..
All of these documentaries and countless
more are raw insights into people who most charitably can be called
'complicated'. It takes what is rare among people who makes these films: a
utilitarian look at its subjects, arguing they did horrible things that has to
be weighed against what they meant to many people in their public lives. Many of them aren't easy watches but I'd argue
their necessary ones.
All of them aired, I should mentioned,
aired on Showtime, which has always been outstanding when it comes to
documentaries. And they aired one on
Michael Jackson too. It celebrated the 40th anniversary of Thriller.
Now I'm not saying that this isn't a very
good documentary. If you want details on what is considered to this date the
greatest music album of all time, Thriller40 is great. What strikes me
as very strange is the tone. All of the
documentaries on Showtime have generally been no holds barred looks at the real
life struggles of celebrities. In addition to the ones I've mentioned there was
on Whitney Houston and the tragedies that befell her that is not only honest
but more willing to look all the real triumphs and how they never were enough
to overcome her demons. It debuted 2018 six years after Houston's overdose.
Thriller 40 first aired nearly fourteen years after
Jackson died – and by contrast everybody in that film who's still alive has
nothing but good things to say about him. Theirs none of the honesty that I see
in so many of the films I mentioned above about the flaws in Jackson's
character, which in many ways were worse than the ones above.
And this has been the rule rather than
exception when it comes to anything involving Jackon even after nearly twenty
years. We've already had a Broadway musical about him and this week we're
getting a biopic that is one of the most anticipated films of 2026. And it's
that part that I find the most troubling.
To be clear this film only got greenlit
because of the Jackson Estate. Even then there are clearly limitations and the
movie (according to critics) only goes as far as the late 1980s. By any
definition we are getting the kind of biopic that so many critics despise as
essentially love letters with no portrait of the real artist. I don't have a
problem with many of them; I know that films like Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman
are the most idealized versions of Freddie Mercury and Elton John,
respectively but that didn't stop me from enjoying them.
I could not in good conscience do the same
for Michael for a very good reason: it makes it clear it has no
intention of telling the story that I really want to hear, the one that
Hollywood is more than capable of telling and has been willing to when they are
inclined. Peter Morgan has been more than willing to look behind the veil of
royalty and Prime ministers with no hold barred over twenty years, Ryan Murphy
was more than willing to look at a
realistic glare of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and George & Tammy made
no secrets of the real-life problems that drove both Tammy Wynette and George
Jones. It's not like Hollywood couldn't have done the same for Jackson if
they'd wanted to.
And as for not getting permission from the
estate…well, I'm pretty sure the once and current president didn't give his
blessing for The Apprentice last year and not only didn't that stop
Hollywood from doing it they were more than fine nominated Sebastian Stan as
Best Actor against Timothee Chalamet for playing Bob Dylan. And that dealt with him the 1970s; Jackson's real notoriety on the subject came
much later. Needless to say Jackson is dead and Hollywood only wishes POTUS
were.
I've written countless articles about
Hollywood's repeated hypocrisy when it comes to their own sins in the last
decade and will do so again because it is a gift that keeps on giving. Michael,
however, is the most public admission of their own hypocrisy because not
only does it show Hollywood backing away from a position it had during
Jackson's life – a position which was most likely correct, for the record – it
shows their complete willingness to engage in the cinematic whitewashing (play
on words not entirely unintended) of a man whose crimes are likely as bad as
the ones they've spent the last decade calling people out on. What makes it
worse exponentially is that it now seems every fan of Jackson sees no conflict
in going to see this film and their politics in everything else.
Because there absolutely should have been. The
fact that not only did Hollywood greenlight this picture but at no time thought
how this would make them look during everything that is going on with the
allegations from the Epstein files just as the most prominent example of
it. How can the industry as well as the
left who excoriates everything that involves the victims there in the same
breath have no problem anticipating going to see this film. At this point I
really think if there was a letter between the two men where Epstein told
Jackson: "Thanks for the great time this weekend," Jackson's fans
would shrug and say: "He must have liked his autographed copy of Thriller."
And to be clear that's just the most prominent
example. As we speak California is removing Cesar Chavez's names from
schools across the state because of the allegations of rape and assault by some
of his followers. I have no doubt the
most prominent voices cheering this on will be seen in photos at the Michael
premier and none of them will even blink at the contradiction. (Bill Maher,
I should mention, pointed out this glaring hypocrisy. I'm glad to know somebody
in Hollywood remembers the 1990s and 2000s.)
For me this is academic: I had no intention
of seeing this film even before I learned the synopsis. And unlike everyone
else on the left or in Hollywood I'm capable of separating the artist from the
art. If this film were just an example of that I might be able to forgive its
existence. But to not even deal even in a caption at the end of all of things
Jackson did in his life that were horrible simply out of respect to his
victims.
If nothing else Michael by its
existence stands as cinematic proof of Hollywood and the left's blatant
hypocrisy when it comes to being a moral authority on anything. It's one thing
to make statements of tolerance and inclusivity and be anything but towards
their enemies – that's not a flaw unique to anyone. But if you're going to make
a multi-million dollar biopic of a man that many of you who are still alive
justly mocked and privately condemned for the worst thing a person can do to a
child, you no longer have the authority to wear pins condemning the
administration on its policies, make public statements on anything political,
and certainly not call out anybody in your industry or anywhere at all on
behavior you consider immoral.
This isn't going to be enough to make me
hand in my glove but its another reason why I feel completely justified in
keeping them off when it comes to anything to say and do going forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment