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In 1991 Jackson brought back John Landis to direct his most elaborate video of all, Black and White. In the grand tradition of all-star, super-duper spectaculars, Black and White is a frequent disappointment. Like Thriller, the video employs a series of frames to create the sorts of transformations and shifts of reality that Jackson is so fond of. We begin with Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin using a guitar to blast his Dad, Cheers barfly Norm Peterson (George Wendt), to Africa, where we see Michael leading a bunch of black warriors in a dance. Michael and the warriors leap from Africa into a recording studio, and then Michael makes another leap, into the Wild West, to dance with Indians. He makes his way around the globe in this manner, most interestingly with an "Indian" Indian, a beautiful female dancer whose crisp, graceful movements fit very well with Michael’s own. For a few magical seconds, it almost appears that Michael is going to interact with a woman, but then he flees to Russia, joining a chorus of high-kicking Cossacks. The song "Black and White" is pleasant enough, a sort of Stevie Wonder-style plea for tolerance draped over a Michael Jackson beat, but at this point we get a macho Michael, striding through flame and defying the Ku Klux Klan. The sequence ends with Michael standing on the Statue of Liberty and denouncing unknown individuals who are "kicking dirt in my face." This hostility to people who betray and abuse him, supposedly directed at his father, is another perennial theme in Michael’s work.
After this we get a once-famous morphing sequence, showing that we are all one, which cost serious bucks in 1991 but was old hat a few years later. Then we get another cut, to "reality," showing us the filming of what we just saw, a beautiful young black girl being congratulated on her performance by tubby John Landis, whose success has clearly gone to his waist as well as his head. The camera catches Michael wandering off by himself, and then we see Michael change into a black panther, slinking out of the studio and into the ghetto.
The first half of Black and White appears to have been intended as the "White" half, the wholesome, socially acceptable Michael, while the second half is the "Black," antisocial Michael. Supposedly, this sequence created a storm of controversy, and was withdrawn from the broadcast version of the video. Whether there was really that much controversy is questionable — Jackson enjoyed being thought of as controversial even when he wasn’t.
The sequence encourages us to believe that we’re going to see "pure" Michael, Michael dancing in the street with no guest stars, no sets, no back up, even no music. In fact, we get so many special effects — amplified sound, camera tricks, fog machines, etc. — that the air of authenticity is lost entirely. Worse, much of Michael’s dancing here is aimless, formless scampering, widely at variance with the remarkable precision that characterizes most of his work. What we do get is a lot of crotch grabbing. Jackson was already famous for this in live performances, but he hadn’t used it much on the screen until now. Jackson clearly had a need to do things he wasn’t supposed to do. In a number of his videos he ostentatiously wipes his nose on his sleeve, hardly either an aesthetic or an erotic gesture. This sort of behavior is what the Greeks liked to call "breaking the proscenium" — reminding the audience that what they’re watching is unreal. By engaging in taboo behavior, the actor reminds us that we’re seeing a real person, not a character in a play.
Taboo behavior, of course, has long been a part of rock and roll, starting with Elvis’s pelvis, running through the Rolling Stones’ bad-boy posturing and Jim Morrison’s southern exposure.16 Jackson’s leading competitors in the eighties, Madonna and Prince, had acts that were considerably raunchier than Michael’s. By acting up, Michael is telling his parents that they can’t tell him what to do, telling the audience that he doesn’t give a shit and also giving them a thrill.
But if you don’t like crotch grabbing, there isn’t a lot to like in the second half of Black and White. Michael trashes a car that’s painted with racist slogans, throws the steering wheel through a window that says "KKK Rules" (when was the last time you saw that downtown?), throws a trashcan through a store window, runs away and struts and poses over a fog machine. Later, he tears open his shirt, to reveal a chest only a chickenhawk could love, and splashes in a puddle.
Jackson followed the omniracial Black and White with the Afrocentric Remember the Time, set in an all-black Egypt (all-black except for Michael, of course, who at this stage of his career was starting to look a lot like Katherine Hepburn).17 Michael’s fascination with "old Hollywood" (old white Hollywood) opened him up to a lot of criticism from the black community, and in Remember the Time he seems to have gone out of his way to make the video, if not himself, as black as possible. The video is rife with black royalty, including Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson. In place of the skinny, white, uptown babe in The Way You Make Me Feel, we get supermodel Iman. She’s not exactly downtown, but she’s quite dark and, at this stage of her career at least, could match knockers with Lara Croft.
Remember the Time is hardly more romantic than The Way You Make Me Feel. Michael spends most of his time kvetching about how his beloved abandoned him. But the dancing, what there is of it, is quite good, though Michael doesn’t get much help from the large, slow-moving, down-home chorus.18 Throughout the video, Michael looks like he’s working ten times harder than the rest of the dancers — and, of course, he’s doing all the singing too.
Michael stayed in the black groove with Jam, appearing with "the other Michael," Michael Jordan. Jam gives an interesting picture of the ghetto as a place of vacant lots, vacant buildings, and not quite vacant lives. Jam begins moodily, the camera following a basketball magically bouncing through the streets. We go inside a building where Michael, as usual, is bitching about something or other. The beat picks up when Michael Jordan appears, and Michael does some nice dancing in an empty room. He then joins Jordan for a little one on one. Since big Mike can’t dance, and little Mike can’t shoot, the results are fairly lame. Fortunately, a few more guest stars appear, rappers Heavy D (or heavy somebody) and the kids who wear their pants backwards,19 and we get some nice dancing from an uncredited ensemble of kids.20 The video has an unusually subtle ending, focusing on a round-faced black boy who clearly isn’t going to become either a famous basketball player or a famous rapper. What will become of him? Michael, modest for once, doesn’t say.
In the Closet, directed by bad-boy photographer Herb Ritts, is one of Michael’s most frustrating videos, half genius and half dreck. The video pairs Michael with model Naomi Campbell, a woman so beautiful that she’s almost worthy of kissing Michael’s feet. In the Closet strives for an obsessional, dreamlike ambience somewhat similar to Billie Jean, but it doesn’t work nearly as well as it should because Michael insists on putting himself at the center of the video instead of Naomi. He should be obsessed with her; instead, she’s obsessed with him.21
Campbell is so beautiful that it’s hard to imagine getting tired of looking at her, but shots of her squeezing Michael’s ass, worshiping at the shrine of his crotch, and endlessly rubbing her thighs in a pseudo-masturbatory frenzy eventually do the trick.22 Jackson further offends by supplying moist, smirky lyrics and sampling the earlier The Way You Make Me Feel.
Which is too bad, because there’s a lot to like in In the Closet. The video is shot in black and white tinted to brown and white, suggesting the old "rotogravure" process used by newspapers to print photo sections until the sixties.23 Michael looks quite smooth and Spanish in a pony tail, tight jeans and a sleeveless vee-neck tee, and the video is shot in a "hacienda" setting, with an intriguing chorus of Iberian dancers turning slowly in long, flowing white robes. The rhythm is supplied by a fascinating sequence of crashes, thuds, clicks, and shattered glass, and the final minute, with Michael dancing either in a doorway or against a whitewashed wall, is a wonderful exercise in Jacksonian minimalism, with infinite repetition giving rise to infinite variation. The video ends with Michael slamming the door in the audience’s face, surely the most heartfelt gesture in his entire œuvre.
In 1995 Jackson produced two videos, Scream and "Blood on the Dance Floor, and also gave an extended performance at the MTV Video Awards. The MTV performance begins with a reasonably interesting "Greatest Hits" medley, featuring a powdered, painted Michael, who was really getting into the lipstick thing by now. In the medley Jackson returned, as he always does, to "Billie Jean" for the real dancing, with "Slash" from Guns ’N Roses (you remember them, don’t you?) providing the beat. After a brief break, in which Jackson awkwardly dispenses showbiz inanities ("Slash! You’re beautiful"), we move to a deliciously minimalist rendition of Dangerous. Michael and a chorus of Vegas-style gangsters move through a hypnotic, robotic routine to a dance track that is little more than a series of thuds and crashes, while Michael recites the lyrics in an electronically distorted, barely intelligible monotone.24
Earlier in 1995, Michael made Scream with Janet, a remarkable look at superstar ennui. Janet and Michael hang out in a space ship that resembles a giant computer mouse. With all the world laid at their feet, they can think of nothing more to do than preen, play at meditation, and fight over the controls of banal video games. Janet does most of the proscenium breaking in this video — squeezing her tits, taking a piss (standing up), and giving us the finger. Jackson, who so often seems oblivious to his own excess, here dissects it.
Blood on the Dance Floor is Jackson’s last video to date. It’s an intriguing change of pace. For once in his life, Michael has a peer group, the denizens of disco hell, where paranoia is the only wisdom and not being cool the only sin. Michael is so powdered and painted in this one that he’s starting to look 18th century. In his red leather jeans and red satin shirt Michael is the coolest of the cool, but once more he’s trapped, in a world where the broads are out to get you. The point of view for the lyrics of "Blood on the Dance Floor" switches back and forth throughout the song. Half the time Michael is the gloating observer — "She got your baby, it happened fast. If you could only erase the past" — and half the time the hapless victim.
At this writing, Jackson is reported to be working on a new album, but whether anything comes of this remains to be seen. He is also planning to appear at several charity concerts. A year ago he was reported to be considering an investment in a theme park owned by a South Korean company that manufactures children’s underwear (and, as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up).
AFTERWORDS
All of the Michael Jackson videos available contain a great deal of dreck. If you have two VCRs, or a dual-deck VCR, you can make yourself a "Michael Jackson’s Greatest Hits" tape without all the self-congratulatory pap, filler, and plain bad taste that Jackson insists on inflicting on his fans. The sound is quite good on these videos, so you really ought to have a hi-fi setup that runs through your stereo. If you’ve advanced to a DVD player, you can skip from track to track more easily, as the Jackson videos become available in that format.
There is a great deal of uncollected Michael Jackson still out there. His latest short film, Ghosts, which contains two dance numbers (and which I haven’t seen), is not available on video in the U.S.25 In the mid-eighties Michael did a 15-minute 3-D film for Walt Disney (Captain Eo, directed by George Lucas), which played exclusively at Disneyland and Disney World. The Bad video is taken from a 17-minute film, also called Bad, directed by Martin Scorsese. In addition to numerous television appearances, Jackson must have hundreds, if not thousands of hours of himself in concert. Whether any of this material ever gets released depends on a mixture of marketing strategy and superstar caprice.
Understandably, the web sites dedicated to Michael range from the worshipful to the malign. If you’re interested in the former, try www.mjifc.com/. If the latter, www.laughnet.net/archive/jokes/jackson.htm. If you go both ways, try www.shady-acres.com/michaeljackson/ (not all the links on this site work, but it’s the best way to reach Michael’s Latvian Fan Club). If you visit www.virginrecords.com/janetjackson/, Janet Jackson will share her deepest thoughts and emotions with you. Unfortunately, they’re not very interesting.
NOTES
16. Jim Morrison, lead singer for The Doors, liked to expose himself on stage. Oliver Stone’s film, The Doors, is actually as pretentious as The Doors themselves, which took some doing. If you’ve always suspected that "the sixties" weren’t all that hot, this film should help confirm your beliefs.
17. Remember the Time promoted the questionable idea that the ancient Egyptians were an all-black civilization.
18. The women in particular seem to have been selected more on the basis of cup size than turnout.
19. Kriss-Kross, maybe?
20. In the "Making of Jam" sequence, we see a white kid dancing in front of Jackson go into an elegant flurry of steps, clearly upstaging the star. Jackson then grabs the kid by the collar and drags him off camera in a funny, "This is my video, white boy" gesture that recalls the time a frustrated Diana Ross dragged a teen-age Michael out of her way during a seventies Motown TV special.
21. In the "Making of In the Closet" clips that precede the actual video, we see Michael, hands on hips, flouncing around like a pansy choreographer in a Mel Brooks film.
22. She’s also stuck with idiot lyrics like "In your presence, I am so humble."
23. Thus the line in Irving Berlin’s song "The Easter Parade" — "You’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure."
24. The lyrics to "Dangerous" were originally written by Alan Jay Lerner (lyricist for My Fair Lady) for the "Girl Hunt" parody jazz ballet starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse, featured in the film The Bandwagon (1951). Though you’d never guess it from Jackson’s version, the lyrics were intended as a parody of the two-fisted detective fiction of Mickey Spillane, whose Mike Hammer put the fear of god into Commies, queers, and ball-busting broads in the early fifties. Spillane made so much money off books like I the Jury, My Gun Is Quick, and One Lonely Night that he gave up writing for a decade. Mike Hammer has appeared in the movies and on TV numerous times, while Mickey picked up pocket change in the "Tastes Great! Less Filling!" beer ads for Miller Lite.
25. Of course, if you’re a real Michael fan, you bought a copy in the non-U.S. "PAL" format, and either had it converted to VHS or bought a PAL player.
August 1999 | Issue 25
Copyright © 1999 by Alan Vanneman
ACCESS: As the author kindly explains, most of what’s mentioned here is available on video, with the exception of Ghosts. Jackson fanatics will want to consider emigrating to Europe or Asia for that one.
ALSO: More music
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