‘This Is It’ and reflections on the work of Michael Jackson.
Originally published at Cheryl Katz. Please leave any comments there.
Something that not too many people know about me is that I’m a big Michael Jackson fan. Big. I can’t commit to using superlatives, because I am sure there are bigger and more obsessed fans than I am. Suffice to say that I don’t talk about it a lot, and even with Ben I approach it with a level of self-effacement, because if I’m making fun of myself then his (and other people’s) dismissiveness isn’t as personal.
Nonetheless, I bought a ticket to see This Is It when they became available, and have been really looking forward to it. As the movie was starting I had a little kick in the stomach from the realization that it would be over, the same way I do on birthday mornings and other big days - the anxiously anticipated magic has finally arrived, and every passing second brings the end of it a little closer!
Here’s the thing.
To see Michael Jackson in concert was on my short list of things to one day do, and even before he died I saw that likelihood as very small. This movie is the closest I’d ever get to that. I don’t imagine this is much like a typical concert experience. Frankly it was eerie because of the finality of it, and how not final the show really was at the time of Michael’s death. People were so grateful for their chance to be part of his show, and the unstated weight of the moment was that this great moment, the pinnacle of many lives, just never got to happen.
This film felt like something I shouldn’t get to see. I’d almost certainly never have seen it if MJ were still alive. It had the feeling of watching a magician perform his tricks in slow motion, somehow cheating and analyzing the sleight of hand. And yet even viewing the rehearsals, the concert show as a work in progress, and getting a vague feel of just how it came to be that ideas were born in Michael Jackson’s head and were transformed into the huge strokes painted on a concert stage - even in the midst of this, the magic of Michael Jackson himself continued, strung between the moments, and never was trapped or explained.
I saw the magician practically dissecting his tricks, and while on one hand I feel I understand them better now, on the other hand I am certain that I completely don’t. It’s the same way with understanding atoms. Electrons rotate around the protons and neutrons. This I understand. WHY? HOW? No matter how minute the explanations get, there’s still a tiny jump you can’t explain - why are protons positive and electrons negative? HOW can subatomic particles have a charge? - something that boils down to, “Well, that’s just how it is.” And it’s the foundation for everything that physically exists.
I think what astounded me most about this film is that MJ was an amazing performer, the culmination of an entire lifetime as a working performer; and while his talent was innate and based on intuition, there were several moments featured in the film that demonstrated he could also take that intuition and communicate it in practical terms who didn’t see or hear what he saw intuitively. He understood his talent. During an intro to “The Way You Make Me Feel,” he points out that a short silent break needs to be longer than a pause. He doesn’t specify how long, but he explains that they need to leave the silence for a bit, “let it simmer” in his own words, and that the impact is greater when the music resumes afterward. A second moment like this happens during “Earth Song” when a bulldozer rolls up onto the stage and clanks its blade down. Michael instructs that, “it will have more value” if the bulldozer clomps to a rest, a pause intensifies the gravity of the statement of that noise, and the delicate piano ending picks up a few seconds later. (Thanks, Jeffrey, for reminding me of that part.)
“Earth Song” actually was one moment whose enormity brought tears into my eyes was when a little girl about Sami’s age lays down to sleep (in a film projected during the rehearsal) in a rain forest filled with flowers and butterflies, and wakes up to find it destroyed, burning, a bulldozer about to run her and the last living plant down. It asks, what are we leaving our children? I cry because I see Sami in that child’s place, and I cry because that imagery was so succinct, so enormous, the finely honed point where music, film and ideas come together to be communicated. The visual, communicative economy of that imagery was incredible - a craft combining message and media perfectly in a way that I have rarely seen.
Michael Jackson took these disparate media - dance, film, music - and used them to elevate pop music to something you had to pay attention to. Well, probably created “pop” music out of a world where music was segregated by genre. How can you not pay attention to the one thing that *everyone* is paying attention to? He used those media to speak in a unique vocabulary. This was apparent even in the original Thriller video - that’s what the big deal was in 1983, and that’s what the big deal was in This Is It.
He took a medium (dance) that isn’t popular in the mainstream way of popular music, and brought it into his music in a way that made it impossible to ignore. An entire stage full of dancers, featured in the first few minutes of the film, who cite Michael Jackson as their inspiration for aspiring to express themselves through dance. Imagine millions of people, across all ages, races, educational and cultural backgrounds, citing Mikhail Baryshnikov as the inspiration for their dreams; I find this laughable, a brilliant, improbable dream. His dance may be awesome, but his range of appeal is limited. Of course, the comparison of classical and popular art is a topic for another day. My point is that Michael Jackson made people care about dance, and made it an integral element of the “product” of Michael Jackson.
Talking about the film today briefly with my friend Jeffrey Paul Bobrick (you all should check him out - he’s a wonderful singer/songwriter based in NYC as well as my fellow MJ fan), he pointed out that if this film were about any other performer, it may well have been boring. I truthfully can’t think of a performer with the reputation for perfectionism that MJ had, or the unquantifiable thing I described above. I’m pretty sure this sort of film experience was uniquely positive because it was Michael Jackson. Because he was both human and superhuman; he moved his arms just like all the other dancers did, and yet when he did it it had something extra. But mostly I think that how MJ worked was a topic of intense fascination, as if, like above, we SHOULD have been able to identify what he did. That’s why The Making of Thriller video was the bestselling home video release of all time. It’s riveting not just to watch the end product of Michael Jackson - the work in progress is a spectacle all its own.
I was struck by how much, under stage lighting, you could see that his features, basic facial structure, were the same over the years. So much is made of the plastic surgery, the results of which were not insignificant, but I think many reports were exaggerated, just based now on having seen real, recent moving pictures of Michael Jackson. I was also struck by how human he was, under all the magic. He wasn’t shy about critiquing the work of others, but he wasn’t unkind. He didn’t appear to be self-aggrandizing at all, seemed to consider himself an element in the production in the same way that he viewed the other dancers and singers (even as he sort of meta-processed it all, and offered tweaks to improve things from his creative perspective.) He seemed to thoroughly enjoy the teamwork of it all, and the screen chemistry between MJ and any of the other players was intense; not just the women, as in “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” or “The Way You Make Me Feel,” but also the men as in “Beat It.”
Amid all this wonder about Jackson himself, I should leave out that what Kenny Ortega did in directing this film, constructed out of footage never shot nor intended for this purpose, is no small feat. Having produced some visual media myself, I can personally appreciate how hard it is to construct a meaningful piece even with footage one shot purposefully. How much harder must it be to go through some ungodly number of hours of tape looking for nothing specific - just stuff to use - cull it down and put it together to create a cohesive narrative? Cheers to the creativity, eye for great moments, and the talent and skill to put it together well.
But the filmmaking wasn’t what the movie was about, which is why I didn’t spend this whole post critiquing it. This Is It was a film about how the Michael Jackson operation was coming into focus. It’s been widely reported that he undertook the tour to show his children what he did for a living, since they have now come to an age where they can appreciate it. The film is a fortunate artifact of that undertaking, so that we unintended recipients can also understand “what he did” a little better.
I came out of the movie appreciating not only Michael Jackson’s work, but its relationship with the life he lived. Growing up in show business is not typical, but then he didn’t grow up to be a “typical” performer. It’s a very chicken-and-egg thing - he ended up in music and performance because he demonstrated talent early on, but then his talent was concentrated and developed by that lifetime spent rehearsing and learning from masters in the field, until he was one himself.
Ultimately I came out thinking, everyone has greatness in them. MJ had the fortune of a family already exploring music which made his greatness apparent. Many, many people don’t ever discover what it is about them that makes them truly shine. I believe it has to be true, we all have something to give.
So, I’ll never be a rock star, household name and multimillionaire who supports numerous charities with my name, star power or money. (Or maybe I could, but I’m not trying very hard.) What am I bringing to the great potluck of life? I think it would suffice to feed my family, raise a good kid and always know what to do with the leftovers, but I think I’m capable of more than that. I still have time to find out, though truth be told, I feel like I’m getting a little old.
Still, a lot of what I post about here, bound up in the minutiae of parenthood and housekeeping, is starting with myself to make changes that I think will improve the world. Starting with the “Man in the Mirror,” if you will. If I’ve taken one thing home from This Is It, it’s that life is so short. How will I spend my last day? I - anyone - can all start now to make it count.