Tuesday, June 30, 2009
The Captain and the Angel: Titans, Time-Delimited
This isn’t timely - and that’s timely. The news is saturated with timeliness. It’s all over the headlines, the in-depth reporting, human interest, media & entertainment. MJ is dead; repetitive reportage incessantly reaffirms it. The MoTown Kid, the Thrilla in Vanilla, the Prince of Pop and the Agamemnon of Alleged Molestation - Jacko the Great is gone.
Gone is Jacko the Great, and I’m reminded of the chant from the “Simpsons,” “Great meaning large or immense; we use it in the pejorative sense.” Yes, it’s cruel to malign the dead, but let’s face it, the universe is crying out its eyes for a man whose last important creative act was in 1985, and whose last act of any real significance was to sell off his private zoo and settle some child-abuse claims with strict out-of-court confidentiality. Oh, and retracting from auction the life-sized mannequin of himself dressed as the Michael Keaton Batman, that was big too. Since the morning that I began to write this, I’ve been subjected to non-stop retrospectives and appreciations.
And by a snap of fate’s ironic fingers, this enormous personality, who undoubtedly impacted popular culture as much or more than anyone else at the height of his career more than thirty years ago, passed from us in his beloved solitude on the very same day as another icon also slipped away - a very different person on a very different arc, and one whose loss I find more significant. Farrah Fawcett is gone now, too. Doesn’t anybody care?
MJ came to our attention as a tiny child endowed by his creator with immeasurable talent. A voice like ghee, a smile that outshone the sun, and hipswinging steps that showed the American Bandstand crowd what dance could truly be. The songs were pure gold, catchy and unforgettable; his fraternal backup was tight and stylish, and the whole package did for pop what the Beatles had done for rock & roll - lifted it from a commercial medium to something pure and powerful, almost sublime. And still commercial, of course. That kid was a diamond mine. He even appeared in cartoon form from 1971 to 1973, as he himself was far too busy recreating a musical genre to dally with rank in-bass animation and the entertainment appetites he himself had created.
MJ was more and more efficiently commoditized by and through his own hit singles, even before his voice broke and his manhood was upon him. His brothers knew it, and their disenchantment with their relegation to also-sang status echoed that of the children of Jacob and Leah, who verily sold Joseph into slavery out of jealousy for his being the favorite. And I’m not so naive as to imagine that he, a 12-year-old boy just gearing up for his bar mitzvah, was remotely involved in the decisions regarding the prostitution of his talents. But once he aged into professional emancipation, the albums and dance steps and groundbreaking use of video that were developed under his creative direction were indisputably works of genius. Not really my cup of genius tea, but great tunes, great steps, and a huge impact on popular culture. The moonwalk? Him The return of the fedora? Him. Breakdancing zombies and asymmetrical glove-usage? Him and him again.
Real impact on real people and their real lives? Let’s be honest: slim to none. Some may have been inspired to pursue dance or singing because of his inspiration; if any of them took it seriously, it seems likely that most of them would have been turned on by somebody else had MJ not come along. And since 1985, has he really done anything worth remembering? I mean, other than the kids in his bed, the thing with the chimp, the Brooke Shields thing, the Lisa Marie thing, the Neverland zoo-musement park fiasco… Oh yes, and the plastic surgeons’ disaster area that was once his face. He wore a mask in public. He dangled his infant off a high balcony. Basically, he lived a madman’s life, the Phantom of the Opera out and above-ground. He bought and then licensed out the work of the Beatles, forever diluting the impact of the entire catalog. And even for all that those songs were worth, he still managed to die $400 million in debt - debts to regular people that are likely to be paid off pennies-on-the-dollar. If you want to talk about MJ’s legacy, you might start talking to some of those folk.
Summing up Michael Jackson’s career path, then, from my perspective: prodigy, prolific, profligate, perverse. His last meaningful contribution to culture was in 1985 (and no, I don’t count Bad *or* Captain EO as “meaningful contributions” to anything.) And I have to be frank: I appreciate the things he did well, but I hardly consider him to be a seminal social figure. Nonetheless, his shriving put West LA in gridlock, and fawning memorials have monopolized print and broadcast media. I’m sorry, the public outpouring of emotion just seems disproportionate to me.
Let’s turn to Farrah.
I was in jr high school when she came on the scene, all nipples and dentition. No one knew who she was. With those cascades of hair and that spray-on maillot, she galvanized attention like no one else in my young life ever had. I didn’t own the poster but I had a picture of it from a magazine and familiarized myself with it down to the individual pixel.
Did it change the way America, or anybody, saw or did anything? No. It was just a pretty face on a hot bod. In those days of detente and stagflation, that sufficed.
Later that same year, I think, she began a single season of appearances on Charlie’s Angels, the television equivalent of a hollow easter bunny - cheap, sweet, pretty and empty. The girls - not women, certainly - feathered their hair and gesticulated with their revolvers; they kicked down doors in skin-tight jeans and concluded each episode moistly lounging in languorous poses. They struck no cognizable blow for women’s rights, law enforcement, racial harmony or political comity. Chix with gunz, that was all. And that was enough to render Farrah Fawcett the symbol of an era which was essentially, effectively, an era of unadulterated symbolism.
She lasted one year as an angel and then moved on. She married the Bionic Dude, creating the decade’s iconic couple. Then she went on David Letterman’s show (the old one, two shows ago) and created the enduring image of the snowblind starlet, so wasted that you almost forgot she was pretty. She brought nothing but sparkle to the table, and after a few years, the sparkle sort of faded and blew away. Farrah had found her place as a cultural footnote. The angel was grounded.
This would have been a good time for her to fade into obscurity like so many other pan-flashers. Farrah complied with our expectations in this regard, at least at first. She did the ordinary starlet things - divorced the bionic captain, started going out with that dude from Paper Moon, was in Cannonball Run.... Time passed. Farrah, such as she was, endured - and we, having moved on, let her.
Domestic violence wasn’t really part of the picture here. When you thought of Farrah, you thought of that smile and those nipples, not spousal abuse and wifebeating. At least, not till she appeared in The Burning Bed, portraying a woman who got beaten and returned the favor. It wasn’t glamorous or sexy - really, it was nauseating, violent and brutal and terribly sad. It was hard to watch and even harder to forget. With one very gutsy career move, Farrah the Grinning Nipple had turned into Farrah the Female Fist. It was a role she returned to in Extremities, off-Broadway and then on film. She took a role opposite Robert Duvall in a movie about the intersection of holiness and humanity in a cruel harsh world. These were not softball shake-your-can kinds of parts. It took chutzpah to look so physically bad in appearance after appearance.
Then of course, she took ill. No, she didn’t take a whole apothecary of drugs and wind up unconscious on her floor; she just got cancer. Bad cancer. The kind of cancer about which even sensitive people need to think twice before discussing. She struggled for recovery, or even remission, but at the same time, struggled for dignity as a patient when her private medical records were divulged to the media. She even took the amazingly brave step of running a sting: When she got diagnosed with a recurrence of her cancer, she told no one. Can you imagine getting that news and telling nobody? She steeled herself against her own mortality and fear and kept this awful news to herself, only to see it broadcast and reported anyway. Obviously there was a leak at the hospital, and she took steps to staunch it with unprecedented patient privacy legislation that has already put privacy-thieves in jail many times over. She fought, even as she was in battle for her life against anal cancer, to protect herself and her family and other patients with their own privacy concerns, against the dehumanizing hunger of big media.
She died in the presence of loved ones. Her passing was a seismic blip in the media earthquake about Michael Jackson’s demise. Farrah, who went from being “just a pretty face/+” to gun-toting angel to media joke to outspoken advocate against violence against women, and for patient privacy, and for the honest truth of just being sick, and for making something important of your life after already having achieved success and fame for making nothing of her life, is dead and almost unmourned. Michael Jackson, who was herded through the talent mill, milked of his last creative drop by 1989, and then lived a life of bizarre antisocial megalomania, cannot be mourned enough. Something seems wrong. Captain EO has long since been demoted, in my book. And the angel has actually taken wings.
Goodbye, Michael. Goodbye, Farrah. May you both rest peacefully, and bring joy and meaning to our lives in death as you did in life. But Michael, I’m going to ignore the past thirty years. And Farrah, I’m going to concentrate on the past twenty.
