I was only a Michael Jackson fan of the third rank. Too young to have known him in his Jackson Five days, I glommed on when Thriller was released in 1982. I was 8 years old then, and his music was geared precisely to my sensibility. Despite my descent into a lifetime of fandom, I never owned either of the famous Jackson jackets, though I did have a white, spangled glove. I never saw him in concert, but I spent an inordinate amount of time conquering his videogame, Moonwalker. And on a spring day in 1992, I sat through the movie Captain EO four times.
In 1986, Disney jumped on the Jackson bandwagon and commissioned that 17-minute film. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, it starred Jackson as a deep-space freedom fighter, a musical amalgam of Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. Shot in 3-D for a reported $30 million, it played in Epcot Center’s Future World pavilion for eight years.
Like most of Jackson’s career, Captain EO was a transparently commercial construct, combining elements of the biggest grossing movie of all time (Star Wars) and the best selling album (Thriller). Captain EO’s spaceship was home to a rag-tag crew of creatures and robots directly descended from George Lucas’s Creature Cantina. (No surprise, since Lucas produced the movie.) When EO’s ship lands on a dark planet the gang encounters an evil queen. She arrests them and has them slated for execution. But then Captain EO sings, and with the power of his voice transforms the queen’s guard into backup dancers. Finally the queen herself (played by Anjelica Huston) is transformed into a beautiful and peace-loving princess. However absurd it may sound on paper, in execution Captain EO was ten times sillier.
Yet it was irresistible. After seeing it the first time, I laughed at how ridiculous it was. But the tunes were catchy, and you don’t see movies in 3 D every day. So I decided to duck back in to see it again. On second viewing, Captain EO‘s flaws became campy fun. An hour later I was filing out of Disney’s Imagination Theater for the fourth time, convinced that I had seen a minor masterpiece.
A lot of Jackson’s work was like that. He didn’t write his own music, and his songs are essentially meaningless. Beat it-Just beat it-No one wants to be defeated is as far from Cole Porter as it gets. Jackson’s voice, while interesting, wasn’t exceptional.
But he was a great dancer, the Fred Astaire of his generation. His lines were breathtakingly fluid and clean. Furthermore, he was an entertainer par excellence, his performances part concert, part vaudeville act, part stage show. Nearly every criticism of Jackson the artist is deserved. Yet he was enormously enjoyable to watch.
It was this cotton-candy aspect that first made Jackson so popular. Eventually, though, his popularity itself became the main attraction. Thriller sold more albums than any record ever made, and still sells 100,000 or so discs a year. The videos Jackson shot for it set a technical standard for the nascent form and were directly responsible for the success of MTV. They helped shape the cable industry and resurrected the career of Vincent Price.
For a while, Jackson was the most famous person on the planet. He was everywhere from videogames to lunchboxes to action figures; at Buckingham Palace and the White House. He was big in Germany and Australia and Uzbekistan. He remains the only man measurable with the yardstick we use for Elvis.
If you want to get a sense of Jackson’s reach, there’s a small universe of couples who stage elaborately choreographed versions of the “Thriller” number as the first dance at their weddings. You can look it up.
There’s something ghastly about it all, but something glorious, too. Because if you’re going to have globalized, mass-market entertainments, they might as well be genuinely enjoyable. Watch the video for “Smooth Criminal,” in which Jackson spins and dance-fights his way around a ’30s speakeasy and try not to smile. It’s Singin’ in the Rain for 3 billion people.
Mind you, there’s no getting around the craziness. If even a tenth of the stories about Jackson were true, he was catastrophically weird. He had a pet chimp named Bubbles. He wore masks in public during most of his later years, the consequence of having overdosed on cosmetic surgery two decades before it was fashionable. He was uncomfortably obsessed with his own lost childhood, not to mention children. Fame warps; absolute fame warps absolutely.
In the end, Jackson’s cultural footprint was wider than it was deep. It’s not a criticism to suggest that 30 years from now people won’t look to him the way we still look to Sinatra, Elvis, or the Beatles. Because of this, enjoying Michael Jackson was maybe a little safer, in the way that momentary pleasures are. Even if, for some of us, that moment lasted for a very long time.
JONATHAN V. LAST
