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...A WASTED LIFE  |
He spent all his adult life
searching for his childhood
of TheColumnists.com
On a cold and blustery day in early November, my wife and I found ourselves in Phoenix, Ariz., looking for something to do on an unpromising afternoon and wound up at a multiplex cinema watching "This Is It!," the assemblage of rehearsal footage from what would have been Michael Jackson's great comeback concert.
If you have not seen that extraordinary film, you have missed a rare opportunity to learn exactly why you should be glad Jackson was the "king of pop" and you weren't.
It provides a depressing glimpse into the cloistered world of a mighty pop music star so suffocated by his own complex image that death often probably seemed like a tempting relief from all the hassle and pain.
Jackson couldn't sleep much unless he was loaded with painkillers and other varieties of dope. When he finally loaded up just a bit too much, he went to sleep at last--and never woke up.
As I write my way through the almost endless list of obituary notices for celebrities who died in 2009, the final notice for Michael Jackson seems the perfect coda for the whole disheartening exerecise. I believe he symbolized the awful thing we have created in American society--a celebrity-soaked culture that incessantly builds up mighty pop stars and then wallows in the emotional climax when each one of them invariably crashes and burns in full public view.
The pattern certainly was set when Elvis Presley died. Elvis had grown fat and was no longer able to do anything he once did well. His movie career was over and his recording career was beginning to be more about remaking old hits than coming up with new ones. It was time for him to go.
As usual in the pop world, Elvis had a doctor or two who would give him whatever he thought he needed to stay high. He kept at it untl he finally overdosed and became part of pop music history. Michael Jackson's death was merely a remake of the Elvis goodbye. And, like Elvis, Jackson began to sell recordings again by the bushel once he died. He ended up being the top-selling recording artist of 2009, followed closely by The Beatles, an act that's now 50 percent dead.
You see enough of Michael Jackson's life in "This Is It!" to form the conclusion I formed long ago: Jackson's was a wasted life, no matter how profound an influence you think he had on the pop music world, no matter how many good deeds he sandwiched in between his more colorful escapades.
I've read and seen enough of Michael Jackson's life to believe he was a major case of profound arrested development. His rather nasty father pushed him out into the pop spotlight along with his older brothers in order to squeeze as much money as he could out of the kid. Michael's exceptional talent flowered early and helped make him a willing agent to his own destructon.
I've seen it many, many times as a monitor of the entertainment world who has met and observed most of the major child stars from the 1960s on. For every Ron Howard, there are 10-15 Gary Colemans who never grow up and live off their juvenile reputations. As much as I admire Jodie Foster for keeping her head on straight, I think she was exposed to too much sexual knowledge as a kid, which may account for her decision to pursue life as a lesbian.
Michael Jackson was so successful so young that he had riches beyond measure and used all that money in a vain attempt to keep searching for the childhood he never had. He built a Neverland as a refuge from the real world he didn't seem to ever fit into. Though he was married a couple of times and fathered children, the likelihood is he never really grew out of the "you show me yours and I'll show you mine" stage of sexual behavior.
But if you look at the skills he developed as a singer and as a dancer, it hurts to think of the barren venues he chose for the use of those talents. After "The Wiz," he should have become a major movie star with leading roles in musicals for stage and screen being written for him. Instead, he stayed in the confined world of music videos, even after making probably the greatest music video of all time, "Thriller."
His personal troubles with child molestation issues chilled even his advancing as a pop star. He was in serious danger of becoming the male Greta Garbo, a great star best known for not doing anything in public except trying to avoid photographers.
I have every reason to believe Michael Jackson was essentially a good person whose key problem was his juvenility. We can see enough in "This Is It!" to know that Michael was still capable of making the right decisons about how to present himself on a concert stage. But the edited footage also makes it clear that he still had way too many people trying to re-shape him in their own image.
Michael Jackson was indeed the "king of pop" for a certain era. But he was a victim of a society that tires quickly of its kings and sooner or later wishes they all would die and stop cluttering up the landscape while their successors are coming to the top.
It may be a long, long time before anybody can realistically assess his lasting value to the pop music scene. In the meantime, all the people who helped push him to the edge of the cliff are still making money out of his precipitous fall.
©2010 by Ron Miller. The photo is a staff artist's version of a standard wire photo. This column first posted Jan. 11, 2010.
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