A journalist should have an ear to the news, I was thinking Thursday, while riding an elevator downward. I had just been told twice in e-mail about the death of Michael Jackson.
Between my flat and the laundry room, I was told five more times. This, I reflected, would be a plausible definition of a news item: an event of interest to many. Some things, one must try to make interesting. Some things, one need not even try.
I would hope readers do not rely on me for expertise in pop culture: my information is at best second-hand. Of “Jacko” I have been only slightly aware, and that awareness mostly involuntary. For all I know, he lived a secret life as a learned commentator on Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, and did the star gig only to earn money. I doubt, however, that this was the case. On the other hand, I also doubt that “what you see is what you get,” in the strange performances I glimpsed in passing.
A much better-informed lady friend writes from Newfoundland: “It is hard to imagine anyone more satisfied and relieved at the death of Michael Jackson, than Michael Jackson. One hesitates to picture this sad, self-loathing surgical freak at age 70—one can only speculate a life of increasing isolation, delusion, and suppressed suffering.”
This is the impression I formed in those passing glimpses: of a musical performer of real ability, real gifts, and natural ambition, gone over to the “dark side” without the slightest self-understanding. His vanity—and we cannot dismiss vanity in a stage performer—was itself a strange and tortured thing.
The narcissism was perfectly obvious. And yet, as my correspondent suggests, it seemed to be a self-loathing narcissism. And it was deeply attractive, both to women and to men.
He had, to an extreme degree, and even before surgery and makeup, the androgynous quality that the media experts say goes over well on television; the quality that makes a face “fascinating” to both sexes—and, I speculate, triggers erotic responses in areas of the brain not usually tapped. In person, we can feel deeply uncomfortable with such characters. They become more compelling the more they are abstracted, through the near-but-far of stagecraft.
To a society like ours today, in which pornographic sexual suggestion is omnipresent through media, pop culture, and advertising, this androgynous quality has a peculiar power. The carrier is, as beautiful women used to be, at once both alluring and untouchable.
It is, if my reader will excuse a rather Catholic inference, a kind of pornographic surrogate for the ideal of chastity. Laugh, if you will: this ideal can have tremendous power within the human psyche, and can in itself be twisted into the strangest shapes.
So many pop stars would seem to have tapped these things—both the androgynous quality, and the rather dark toying with the ideal of chastity. Madonna is an example from the other (female) side. It is more than a sexual come-on. There is a mystery in it, that goes beyond the lubricious.
Thanks to the proximity granted by elevators, I found myself close up with a lady of early middle-age, who was distraught at Jackson’s passing. I thought at first she was dressed as a clown (as were many who turned out at the UCLA Medical Center), but no, she was costumed as a bicycle courier. Her grief appeared genuine: I was glad not to have made the flip remark then in my mind. The sufferings of other people are real, and the fact we ourselves put little value on what they have lost does not change their suffering.
Notwithstanding, how can anyone—a grown woman in this case—possibly have allowed herself to become so emotionally engaged with a screen image, as the crowds do now, as the crowds did for Diana?
The answer can only be that the image has power. Among people deprived of the sheet-anchor of religious faith, such images have an extraordinary power. And at the root, that power is self-destructive.
“All this sympathy for Jacko,” writes a more world-weary lady from Vancouver. “And who is mourning Farrah Fawcett, except poor, lonely Ryan O’Neal? Life is not fair, I tell you.”
But Farrah Fawcett was a normal person: a pin-up, a gorgeous red-blooded blond, free of sexual ambiguities. Corrupted, perhaps; but only by Hollywood. It is with relief that one turns to contemplating her.
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