Jason Cowley asks who is responsible for Michael Jackson's peculiar tragedy
It is often said that Labour's general election manifesto of 1983 was the longest suicide note in history. Well, I have recently read a longer suicide note - and it is not written in any conventional sense of the word; in fact, it is not written in words at all, but in the cuts and changes that innumerable surgeons' scalpels have made to the face of Michael Jackson, perhaps the unhappiest man in the world.
In Othello, Brabantio asks Desdemona, his daughter, what caused her to fall in love with the warrior Moor, Iago's "old black ram". Her answer is startling. "I saw Othello's visage in his mind," she says, which is a paradoxical way of saying that her desire does not derive simply from passionate need - because, in Othello's outward aspect, she perceives the quality of his mind. So if the face is a text on which is written the secrets of the soul, as Shakespeare would have us believe, then Michael Jackson's once handsome face tells a story of a peculiarly American tragedy, and of a suffering too great for any man to bear. But perhaps the greatest tragedy of all is that no one seems to find Jackson - pop's fallen angel - tragic any more. Rather, he has become a grotesque, a figure of fun, a specimen for display, the contemporary equivalent of the bearded lady or the fairground freak - another celebrity victim whose absurdity and physical oddity console us, the tyrannical majority, in our very ordinariness, in our conceited belief that the handmaidens of fame and money are invariably hardship and misery.
A month or so before Christmas, I was browsing a magazine rack when the woman next to me began shrieking to her friend. She sounded genuinely frightened. "Look at this: isn't it horrible? He looks like the Elephant Man." What could she have been talking about? I followed the line of her vision until my eye rested on the front cover of Hello! magazine, on which Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor were huddled together like two rare and exotic animals captured from the African interior.
It had been a long time since I'd seen a picture of Jackson, and there was indeed something deeply disturbing about the way he looked - haunted, vulnerable, absent. Here was a man, you sensed, who had spent too long in front of the hard white lights of celebrity photographers, who no longer saw himself as others did. For Michael Jackson is an extreme victim of the cult of self-watchfulness, which is increasingly becoming one of the curses of our age.
After dramatically winning the final Test of the recent series in Pakistan, for instance, the England cricket team promptly, predictably, invited the Sky cameras into the dressing room to record their alcohol-free celebrations. There was a poignant moment when Nasser Hussain, the exhausted England captain, withdrew to sit alone in the shady privacy of a quiet corner. As he began removing his pads, he was gripped with emotion, resting his head in his hands. But he was not allowed even this moment of self-reflection. The cameras swiftly closed in on him, and Hussain, aware that he was being filmed, promptly kicked off his pads and rejoined his team-mates.
This moment, however trivial, is entirely in keeping with the way in which we have become enthralled by the technologised image. Barriers between the private and public spheres have been allowed to collapse in on themselves, too. Nothing is real, it seems, unless it has first been filmed or recorded. So sports stars invite cameras into the dressing room to record candidly what happens off the pitch as well as on it. Celebrities invite photographers into their homes to display the private splendour in which they live. (How long before they will pay to be photographed in the soiled glamour of "reality poses" - while washing up, say, or being on the loo, or collecting the milk from the doorstep while wearing a dressing gown? After all, Cherie Blair got there first on that one, when she was photographed in blanched dishevelment on the morning after the night before of Labour's landslide election victory.)
It goes on. So-called ordinary people increasingly record their wedding day (and other events) on camcorder, perhaps to prove that the day was real, that it really happened. Tourists wander through foreign cities filming every moment of every step as they peer through the distorting lens of a digital camera. No doubt, we all interrupted our Christmas family gatherings to take photographic representations of our festive fun. And, in Japan, one of the surprise bestsellers of recent years was a book of impromptu photographic self- portraits, taken with a Polaroid camera by a young, ordinary Japanese girl called Hiromix. The snapshots - of Hiromix out shopping, eating her breakfast, or drinking with friends in a bar - inspired an imitative cult of self among young Japanese women, many of whom now spend every waking hour photographing themselves in the nothingmuchness of their daily routines.
What all this means, however, is that we seldom allow ourselves to be at ease, even in our own homes. As a result, we are burdened by a dreadful self-reflexiveness: constantly watching ourselves being watched. And Michael Jackson, it seems to me, has spent longer than most in a condition of acute self-watchfulness; it is not hard to imagine him alone at home in a huge, echoing room filled with nothing but mirrors, which enable him, at any given moment, to inspect his profile from every possible angle, looking out for this bump and that irregularity. And as he sees thrown back at him nothing but the images of his own impossible desires, Jackson has become very much a man of our times - perhaps the defining presence of our age of ultra-celebrity and incessant money chatter.
It wasn't always like this. After Jackson emerged, in the Seventies, from the wreckage of the Jackson Five (the boy band he formed with his brothers), he became a talented solo star in his own right with a fabulously successful album, Off the Wall. He was a lithe, afro'd, fresh-faced sensation, thrillingly handsome and perhaps the best mover and dancer in the world of pop. Listening again to the uninhibited delight and relentless beat of those early records, it is often impossible to suppress the urge to get up and dance.
But the warning signs were already there. Jackson began speaking in interviews of his admiration for the beauty of Diana Ross and, ominously, of his reported desire actually to look like her. When he re-emerged, at the beginning of the Eighties, with the album Thriller - which became the most successful in pop history, selling more than 40 million copies worldwide - his appearance had changed significantly: his nose was more sculpted, his cheekbones higher and his lips seemed thinner. But no one watching the video of his number one single "Billy Jean" - in which a black-suited Jackson walks along the smoky night-time streets of Manhattan, his every footstep turning the sidewalk to gold - could deny that the plastic surgeons had performed a strange alchemy of their own - he looked devastatingly attractive, and there was a new, strutting sexual energy about him. He would never look so good again.
In fact, Jackson had reached the beginning of his own end, as it were: the man-boy, it seemed, did not want to grow up after all, and was about to enter the long twilight of his "Wacko Jacko" phase, in which much of his time would be spent in the company of children, and several llamas, in the affluent seclusion of his Neverland mansion (modelled on Peter Pan's Never Never Land), where he lost himself in his own fantasy world of never-ending delight. On those occasions when he reappeared in public - to promote one of his records or to help sell Pepsi-Cola (it was during the filming of one Pepsi ad that his hair was accidentally set alight) - his appearance would invariably have changed again: his nose would be thinner still, the cartilage filed down to a precipitous ridge, his eyelids tattooed, his cheekbones remodelled or, most worryingly, his skin would be fairer.
Jackson has always insisted that the changes in his skin colour are the result not of cosmetic surgery, but of a rare dermatological disease. That may be so, but what cannot be denied is that, long ago, Jackson's face became his own canvas on which to create an idealised self-image, an image of endlessly elusive self-perfection. In time, he began to look like no one else on earth, certainly like no other African American. Soon he did not even look like Michael Jackson any more, not in any recognisable sense of the proud, confident man he had once been. But what did he look like? A monster? The Elephant Man? It's too painful to say.
As I thought more about that Hello! photograph, I realised there was something in the image of Jackson's vulnerability which recalled a famous picture of J D Salinger that was splashed across the New York Post in 1988, after a reporter, accompanied by a paparazzo, had surprised the reclusive writer outside his house in New Hampshire. The American novelist Don DeLillo was inspired to write Mao II, his novel about celebrity paranoia, after seeing this photograph of Salinger, in which the aged writer had appeared so bewildered and isolated. "For the editor to send these two men to New Hampshire was a little like ordering an execution," DeLillo said. "And when you look at the face of the man being photographed, it's not a great leap of imagination to think that he's just been shot."
To adapt DeLillo, when you look at the face of the man photographed for the cover of Hello!, it is not a great leap of imagination to think that he has been . . . well, not shot exactly, but that he is in the process of shooting himself, only he cannot pull the trigger. Which means he is suspended in a kind of perpetual longing for death. How else to explain what Jackson has done to himself over the years, the changes made to his face? And how else to explain what he must feel when he wakes suddenly one morning and looks at his own reflection, only to discover that he no longer recognises the man in the mirror (the title of one his own songs); that, like Keats's Moneta, "deathwards progressing/To no death was that visage".
First published 29 January 2001
Michael Jackson
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