Reflections on the Man in the Mirror

Two nights ago I was watching an old film, “Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker”.   I remember enjoying it when I was a massive Michael Jackson fan as a child (when he was considered cool and not weird, at least not really weird), but couldn’t for the life of me, remembered what the film was like.   It was, in fact, pretty hilarious; following the interesting wordless biopic at the beginning of the film, the film jumps into a full-blown adventure!   For those who don’t like “spoilers” skip the next paragraph, but I wouldn’t say that “spoilers” is an appropriate way of describing revealing this plot!

Michael and three kids (who else?) are playing with a “soccer” in a park with a dog.   The dog runs away with the deflated ball and goes missing, Michael Jackson goes looking for the dog with the kids, at which point they come across a “evil” businessman called “Mr Big” who is trying to close all the world’s playgrounds in order to sell products to children, after all “a young customer is a loyal customer”.   “That’s terrible”, Michael comments. Quite.   Unfortunately, Mr Big is difficult to stop and is determined to kill MJ and all his friends, who know too much, with the use of his heavily armed SWAT team!   Cue a great adventure where Michael must transform into all manner of different machines, in order to survive and save the world’s children!

Ridiculous plot aside, there were some cool bits in the film; for instance, during the “Smooth Criminal” video, where MJ crushes a cue ball in his hands and blows the dust into the face of someone.  Here’s a taster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex30DYwQlHU.   However, in my opinion, probably the most interesting aspect to the film is what we can draw from what the man himself was like, the greatest pop musician of the last century.

One constant theme in the film, was Michael’s constant stream of transformations.   He is at various points in the film, a child, a rabbit (which he calls “Spike”), a policeman, a car, an android and an airship.   It is hard not to think of the plastic surgery he had on his nose.   The first time Jackson had plastic surgery, however, was entirely necessary, as he broke his nose during a complex dance routine in ’79 and then had to have further treatment due to pyrotechnics setting fire to his hair during the filming of a Pepsi advert (this fire would also be the beginning of Michael Jackson’s addiction to painkillers, which ultimately resulted in his death).   Despite MJ’s protestations, it seems beyond reasonable doubt that he had further unnecessary plastic surgery following this and his face didn’t just “change with time”.   But what was the reason behind this addiction?   From analysing the evidence it seems to be escapism.   Michael Jackson lived in a media bubble for almost his entire life, so it’s not surprising that the fantasy of speeding away on a motorcycle from the autograph-hunting masses was appealing.   The depiction of the autograph hunters in the film was quite surprising given Jackson’s relationship with his fans and the fact that they were dehumanised into devilish clay models seems to indicate a strong resentment.   Note also the video for the song “Leave me alone”, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJvfnQ_E7uw, and the way that Jackson disappears from the public eye completely soon after releasing “Bad” and becomes increasingly reclusive and you get the picture of a man who wants to escape the whirlwind he started spinning from the age of 8.

The other predictably major theme in Moonwalker was his relationship with children.   There was nothing really suspect or impure in the film and yet there is clearly enough the willingness to engage exclusively on a personal level with the young.   The adults of the film are either subordinates, obsessive greedy demon-people or sadistic villains who like nothing more than to hit and kill children for financial profit.   I wonder sometimes whether this was reflective of his relationship with other adults too.   He had been stuck in the middle of a cut-throat industry his entire life, where people profit from sexing things up and being dishonest.   His relationship with his father was an unhealthy one.   Moreover, he was exposed to all kinds of sexual immorality from a relatively early age by his older brothers.   It is not surprising that he shunned the adult world and yearned for a more innocent way of life; the life before he was famous and the one he was robbed of: the life of a child.   Having not grown up around other kids, he never learned about how childhood often holds the same evils as adulthood (no, I do not subscribe to the ludicrous Romantic child youth is innocence theory).   However, relative to adults, children are honest and straight-forward, their motives are often laid clear, which must have been refreshing for a man surrounded by people pretending to care, but really trying to line their own pockets.   Therefore, was it surprising that he only sought significant relationships with children?

There are a few things I should clear up: I do not believe Jackson was guilty of molesting children; in the age of cynicism and where we can check internet histories etc, this can be cleared up by the fact that he wasn’t found guilty.   Heck! The children even admitted that they’d been forced to lie to court after the verdict was delivered!   MJ admitted to sharing a bed with children, but he didn’t understand that this was wrong, because he segregated himself from society.   You might ask, how do we know that he didn’t equally know molestation was wrong, but it seems out of character to me, given his exposure to a very sexual world and been married twice.   The main assumption for his sexual activity with children seems to come from our very Freudian outlook of the world, the idea that everyone needs a sexual outlook.   How about this theory though: Michael Jackson was asexual?   Before you accuse me of making things up, let me just clarify what this is: an asexual is an individual who does not have strong sexual feelings towards either gender, there is a website about the forgotten minority here: http://www.asexuality.org/home/overview.html.   This is less sensational than the whole paedophilia story, but who will that bother?   The media, for one, and the family’s who were trying to make a lot of money from MJ’s bizarre way of life second.

While we’re on the subject of malignant rumours, it seems highly unlikely he bleached his skin; it is reported that his skin depigmentation was caused by vitiligo and lupus, a fact confirmed by his brothers who in interviews have supported this by affirming that as Michael was growing up his skin was “blotchy” and required make-up to hide this.

Overall, I believe that Michael Jackson was a gentle and good man, he used his influence to help others and heal the world.   He did not use his vast wealth wisely, but his heart was good and he used it to write some of the best pop-music ever written.   However, he is also a troubled man, one damaged by his relationship with his father and a foray into the adult world before he had even started to grow up.   As a result he hid in his Neverland ranch and his reality gradually became more and more diverse from that of the rest of the world.   I believe we need to stop judging the man by our standards, because Jackson wasn’t normal.   He was special, but we corrupted him and now we have lost him, but I still have my precious childhood memories with his music right in the background.

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