by Syl Mortilla
In Wilson’s case, behaviours that would ostensibly be seen as bizarre by a prejudging public, include a sincere love for the US TV series about a heroic dolphin named Flipper – at which he would often cry; and his keeping of a menagerie of mechanical pets.
The essence of Michael’s philosophy is that a man such as Wilson’s father can only have become so cruel as a consequence of himself having suffered an abusive childhood. The term ‘abuse’, however, is vague and envelops a wide spectrum. What one child interprets as abuse may be very different to how another experiences it. After all, there were five members of the Jackson 5, yet none of them were as traumatised by the experience as much as Michael was. Which is why Michael’s philosophy was more concerned with pinpointing specific needs when helping to realise the potential of an individual.
In the lyrics for the Thriller album outtake, ‘Scared of the Moon’, Michael laments the repercussions of negative childhood experiences,
"The years go by swiftly /And soon childhood ends / But life is still fearful / When evening descends / But now there are others who sit in their room / And wait for the sunlight to brighten their gloom / Together they gather / Their lunacy shared / Not knowing just why they’re scared / Scared of the moon".
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Michael said - with utmost sincerity – that he was "Peter Pan in his heart."
Michael was a famously voracious reader, and within his vast library existed a number of J.M Barrie biographies. Michael evidently found affinity with the life story of the author of Peter Pan. The vast vacuum of self that resulted from such a uniquely peculiar upbringing as Michael’s became filled with the story of Barrie, his artistry, and the love he received from his fans, and later, children. The love his children provided is perhaps another reason why Michael rarely took to the stage during the latter decade of his life.
Michael’s gravitation towards the Peter Pan personality coincided chronologically with the self-motivation note he wrote to himself in which he decided to become a whole other person. Of course, this also coincided with Michael growing physically into an adult man. Perhaps this choice to inhabit Peter Pan was a subconscious longing to keep hold of the love he had experienced from the public as a child? The only love, apart from his mother, that he’d ever experienced.
Concurrently, this Peter Pan persona also contained the side-effect of being enigmatic – and gave him the option of testing conformity. It could also have been a subconscious attempt at self-sabotage, or a test of the loyalty of those around him.
In the footage of Michael eating candy floss in the dodgem, he is wearing one of the jackets used for ‘Jam’ on the Dangerous tour. The image is a fascinating juxtaposition that demonstrates the dichotomy between Michael the man-boy and Michael the man-performer.
This capacity for transformation can be seen during the Wembley Bad tour rendition of ‘Dirty Diana’. Watch - after a hunched, self-conscious walk through the dark towards centre-stage - how Michael spontaneously ignites into character with the activation of the spotlight as the first chord is struck. A particular persona possesses him.
Michael didn’t live long enough to fulfil his dream of becoming a movie star, what with each of his attempted excursions into the medium seemingly stymied in some way or another (the closest Michael got was with his insistence on referring to his music videos as ‘short films’, and - although was once nominated for an Academy Award, which he didn’t win - he did buy one in 1999 for a record $1.54 million).
However, one need only to recognise how easily they are moved by any of the many characters he embodied in his plethora of music videos to appreciate that Michael possessed and exuded the requisite charisma to be successful on celluloid. Furthermore, regardless of Michael’s lack of movie roles, one only needs to listen to his ability to evoke character through the power of his voice. As Michael said himself in his book, Dancing The Dream, “In infinite expressions I come and go." Michael was a great friend of the genius actor Marlon Brando – Brando’s final role before his death being his cameo in the ‘You Rock My World’ video. Brando provided Michael with acting lessons, perhaps in gratitude - what with Brando’s self-confessed preferred method for getting into shape for a movie role being to close the living room curtains and dance to Michael’s music.
Another entertainment figure that most wouldn’t imagine had a great deal in common with Michael, is Lou Reed - what with the differences in their respective artistic output. However, there is honour and understanding among artists, and there is an anecdote in which Reed becomes an unlikely defender of Michael.
The former Czech President, Václav Havel, had hosted Michael in Prague Castle during Michael’s stay in the Czech capital on the HIStory Tour, in 1996. Nine years later, during the 2005 trial, Havel and Lou Reed, who were great friends, conducted an onstage conversation at Prague’s Švandovo divadlo drama theatre. They only disagreed once all evening, and it was over Michael.
Havel had invited Michael to stay with him in 1996, because he was interested in him as a “civilisation phenomenon.” However, Havel moaned to the theatre audience that - instead of spending time with him discussing his cultural significance - Michael preferred to “go to the third courtyard and say hello to the children.” The audience laughed at Havel’s snide and insinuating dig at Michael. However, Lou Reed, annoyed at the audience’s reaction, then jumped to Michael’s defence, saying, “He’s a great singer, a great dancer, then there’s all this other stuff and people don’t pay attention… I think Michael Jackson is one of the greatest dancers in the world … the Fred Astaire of our generation.”
“I recognise his skills, but I’m not a fan,” Havel responded.
“He wasn’t in my castle,” retorted Reed, eliciting a far bigger laugh than Havel had managed to muster with his lazy cynicism.
Havel had hosted Michael, then harboured his bullying anecdote for nine years before this event. It took a creative and non-judgmental mind such as Lou Reed’s to see beyond the painfully superficial perspective of the Czech President. It’s yet another example of treating Michael as a pariah because of his differences; of cynics abusing their positions and Michael’s vulnerabilities to intensify his insecurities for their own gain; of referring to encounters with him as “meeting the freak,” as the slavish, fat cat employers referred to their starving and emaciated employee (another of the insults revealed for all to see in the email correspondence produced as evidence in the AEG trial). Their employee – a man that co-owned the most valuable music catalogue on the planet, who was now somehow in a position in which he was frantically desperate to be capable of earning enough money to put a roof over his children’s heads. A man that was doing this by spreading his message; a message that demanded the world prioritise a universal love and respect for children and childhood.
During ‘I'll Be There’, over decades of performing it live, Michael was the man that cried nightly tears in front of millions and millions of people - tears pricked, he conceded, as a consequence of being overwhelmed by thoughts of the plight of suffering children. ‘I’ll Be There’ is an anthem for the bereft – for anyone plaintive for anyone missed. It is just one of the three concert mainstays that survived the forty years since the Jackson 5 era, and the only one given the honour of being played at full-length. The sentiment it carries of erstwhile or elsewhere loved ones nevertheless being present wherever love is found, is a powerful and healing one.
Due to its presence on a posthumous poster, there is one quote from Michael that has become particularly prominent. It encapsulates his philosophy, one borne of hard-earned wisdom,
“If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.”
This common-sense creed formed the crux of the theme of his speech at the 2001 Oxford Address, which Michael gave to promote his Heal The Kids initiative,
“Friends, the foundation of all human knowledge, the beginning of human consciousne
ss must be that each and every one of us is an object of love… before you know if you have red hair or brown… before you know if you are black or white… before you know what religion you are a part of… you have to know that you are loved.”
Michael was the man that, after seeing starving children on television, wrote ‘Be Not Always’, with its lyrics, "Faces - did you see their faces? / Did they touch you? / Have you felt such pain?" Before then organising, writing and recording the biggest selling charity single of all time, in an effort to fund aid for these faces. He was the man that dedicated his Bad tour Yokohama performance of ‘I Just Can't Stop Loving You’ to the murdered boy, Yoshiaki Hagiwara. Michael was the man who, suffocating in an opiate-driven oblivion towards the end of his life, remained adamant in his intention to build the world’s biggest children's hospital.
Childhood is a period of utopia perpetually repeated for all time, just by differing people. It is a phase of existence content in its inherent disregard of the differences between people, even that of language. This utopia is what people attempt to recreate through the retrograde reach that is the recreational use of opiate drugs. Michael included.
In the lyrics to ‘A Place With No Name’, Michael sings about finding what he “can fix”, before discovering a “place where no people have pain” in which “kids are playin’... and no-one’s in fear.” The broken-down car depicted in ‘A Place With No Name’ is a far cry from the funk vehicle imagined in 1987’s ‘Speed Demon’, in which Michael sings, "Speed Demon, you're the very same one who said the future's in your hands, the life you save could be your own."
It is nothing less than a criminal tragedy that Michael was coerced into such extremes of escapism as opiate abuse – primarily as a consequence of the spiritual pillaging wreaked upon his home and solace, Neverland.
Michael was, of course, in many ways an enigma. But the beauty of an enigma is in its openness to interpretation: if no-one knows the secret, it becomes a mirror; a reflection of the perceiver’s desires. Construing Michael is akin to assembling a huge jigsaw whilst holding a limited amount of pieces. It’s your own perception that completes the image. Except, with our enigma, we also had evidence. Evidence that he was generous to a fault, and obsessed with the notion of using his fame to promote a message of peace.
Michael was both as emotionally charged, yet as carefully crafted as a poem. He was the puppet Pinocchio that eventually realised his dream of becoming a flesh-and-bone human boy. He was the lonely man paradoxically cheered by billions. The only time Michael wasn’t alone was when he was in the company of those people he trusted: children of his age - people on the cusp of pubescence – merely three of whom, out of the thousands that visited Neverland, became corrupted by the greed of adults, and abetted his betrayal. It was hardly surprising Michael was wary of adults, though nevertheless, time after time one hears recollections of visitors to Neverland that recall Michael’s parting words being, “come back any time.” He was a desperately lonely man caught in the purgatory of public perception. It’s a cruel world-view that denies another person like-minded friends. Inhumane, in fact.
No-one is suggesting that there wasn’t something unique about Michael’s relationship with children. But in lieu of any evidence of wrongdoing, a person’s perspective on Michael is entirely a reflection of what the observer wants to see. Perception is a reflection. Baseless hate or unfounded nastiness is merely a projection of one’s own insecurity. And in the absence of one shred; one atom; one iota of evidence - in spite of the rape of Neverland, and in the unanimous affirmation of his innocence by a jury - there is not a single reason to suspect Michael as having been anything other than a naive and lonely man taken advantage of by greed. Unless that is what you perversely choose to believe. Michael was the Rorschach Test personified. Any paedophilic monster construed can only be one purposefully selected by an observer actively opting to be ignorant of an indisputable fact - a fact forever petrified into history - that through the outcome of a trial that ultimately killed him, Michael’s personal ideology was completely vindicated. He was entirely absolved of any wrongdoing whatsoever concerning illegal behaviour involving children.
Other than Karen Faye, perhaps the other colleague Michael spent most of his time with was his vocal trainer, Seth Riggs, who said,
"I spent thirty-two years with Michael...I vocalised him two hours a day, six days a week. Number one - he was a very sweet man, he was an honest man, and he was not the kind of man who would molest children. That I can promise you. But he loved everyone and he really in many ways spent a lot of money to help other people in need. And I watched him do it. Time after time - again, people that needed help desperately. And who would show up? Michael, with his cheque book. Nobody knows that, they only think about the crazy things that would cause some sort of sensation. But Michael had a heart of gold."
Michael had the financial freedom to revisit the “lost and found” of his childhood on an unprecedented scale: an eccentricity that was seized upon by a cynical society. Yet, most people ‘infantilise’ themselves to a certain extent – and in the same way Michael noted the hypocrisy of the universal acceptance of Caucasian attempts to change their skin colour to fit in with societal aspirations, it should further be noted how the infantilisation of adults is also done on a mass daily basis for similar reasons. Clothes departments of supermarkets, for example, are stocked to the brim with adult nightwear adorned with images of Disney characters: a chance for people to buy into rose-tinted nostalgia, in an attempt to temporarily export themselves back to a time and place where they possessed a kingdom of imagination within which they could find refuge. The commodification and sexualisation of nostalgia is the cynical prostitution of beautiful efforts borne by the fundamental innocence of humanity. (Nostalgia is big business – just ask the Estate.)
Michael fell victim to his naivety of the perception of his philosophies by the outside world. Michael indicated jealousy as a premium motivational reason for acts of ‘evil’. Jealous people - people unable to comprehend that sometimes the view of the mountain itself is as beautiful as the view from its summit. Indeed, one may very well argue that the very existence of the mass misunderstanding of Michael’s ideology, is due to a deep-seated envy of his precious capacity for being able to see through the eyes of a child; and of his capability to harness this gift for his art and success.
Or perhaps – as demonstrated by those in charge at AEG Live during their ultimately lethal whipping of Michael to perform for This Is It – it is that when a majority are hell-bent on getting what they desire, mass psychopathy ensues, and Lord help anyone standing in their way. The global media opprobrium heaped upon Michael during and since the molestation allegations is further testament to this phenomenon. Bringing Michael down sold newspapers – and to hell with the effect such treacherous slander might have on such a sensitive soul.
Two examples of Michael’s imploring the world to see his perspective on his associating with children can be found on the Invincible album. One of these is in ‘The Lost Children’ – a cry for everyone to try and rediscover their inner child – where he sings, “I see the door simply wide open / Where no-one can find me,” and another in ‘Speechless’- a song written whilst watching children at play – in which Michael croons, “When I’m with you I am in the light / Where I cannot be found.”
People are extra-performative with those they trust. With their children, especially. Michael had voluntarily adopted the mantle as the father of all the world’s children – both those of a young chronological age, and those adults – the “lost” ones – who are so often the people that remain devoted to his mission. Those people that in front of whom, he could perform without the worry of them being prejudice: the ones he surrounded himself with. Michael understood that children innately amplify experiences – of fear; of rage; of the messages contained within a concert; of love. And he lived and breathed this knowledge, along with the responsibility of it, as he delivered his messag
e.
Michael’s efforts to maintain his natural character were under perpetual bombardment from those who simply did not possess either the intellectual or emotional capacity to understand him. These attacks – like a storm battering a rock - inevitably, as they would anyone, weathered him. The spray that spat from the media tempest inflicted pain like water torture. Yet regardless, he strived to preserve and express that congenital core of purity.
And this ‘weathering’ is not merely a metaphor – the attacks physically shaped him. It was this bullying that initially motivated the plastic surgery Michael would ultimately become a poster boy for. Ironically – though very much in keeping with the idea of the entity Michael being a microcosm of the entirety of humanity – plastic surgery has now become an accepted daily feature of our postmodern world. As the man himself said, “plastic surgery wasn’t invented for Michael Jackson” – and the sheer hypocrisy of - not only his peers in that Mecca of perceived self-rectification known as Hollywood - but also of any single person that endeavours to artificially alter their appearance to assuage their insecurities: be that breast implantation, teeth-whitening or photoshopped pictures – proves him absolutely right.
