This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  4

  When I was nine, I saved up for my first biography, a pulpy, mass-market life of Michael Jackson, the kind with scratchy paper and those cold, thick-paged pictures in the middle. I didn’t own Thriller. I didn’t need to own Thriller—Thriller was circulating in the water supply—but I wanted that book.

  For a while it became a part of my body. I carried it around, slept with it, and spent afternoons cradling it on the couch. I studied Michael’s modest upbringing, homing in on the first appearance and acknowledgment of his talent. I thrilled to the timeline of its development—from the moment it was discovered, then discovered again, then once again, until it made its way to me. I sought out the story, hoping in some sense to organize the energy irradiating my television screen.

  Because despite being an enormously gifted and dexterous vocalist, Michael was first and then foremost a visual phenomenon: See how young he is! Look at those little feet go! And with his brothers, the way talent separates itself! And now see how handsome! How lithe and graceful and literally sparkling!

  Michael was a dancer, sure, but more than that a mover. For what would become the biggest performance of his life, the 1983 Motown 25th Anniversary concert, Jackson chose to lip-synch to “Billie Jean.” I became a student of his charisma that night, convinced there might be some kind of proof for the exchange of energy between his body and mine. For me the charge of his performances always carried a postscript to self—not to get myself famous or become rich enough to keep a baby chimp, but to learn, literally and otherwise, how to move.

  Movie is the shorthand that preceded talkie. But it’s the latter term that faded away. It’s the movement that sets the form apart (Action!), and the beauty of bright, moving bodies that transfixes. In that sense, Michael was a movie star in the same way Elvis was a movie star even before he shook his business in Blue Hawaii. They were basically made for motion pictures. If anything, Elvis’s acting career, in neutering and homogenizing him, subtracted from his movie-star-ness. Eventually he reclaimed it with a musical TV special, during the taping of which he famously ejaculated in his pants; even little Elvis died for us. Michael insisted on calling his videos “short films,” and the producers of the Academy Awards, who included him in their 2010 “In Memoriam” montage, apparently agreed.

  On a Saturday morning a year or so after reading the Michael Jackson biography, I settled in front of the TV, fast-forwarding through the commercials with my remote arm raised up high. Devoted to keeping my moves current, every Friday I set the VCR to tape Friday Night Videos, which aired well past my bedtime. The show often had guest hosts; on the weekend in question it was a tiny woman in welding shades, Yoko Ono, and her sweet-faced son.

  They were there to mark the fifth anniversary of the death of her husband, John. His story, sketched out in brief, evocative strokes, shook me to the bottom of my pink flannel jam-jams. I watched the “Imagine” video over and over, contrasting it with the footage of a younger John in pageboy caps and Pierre Cardin suits, the black-and-white Beatles taking over the world. And that was pretty much it. From that moment in 1985 until the year punk broke, I rode out an especially barren period in popular music on a strict diet of John Lennon’s Beatles, supplemented—sometimes even surpassed—by every band bio, memoir, and history I could get my hands on. And I did have to lay actual hands on them, back when mining data was a more physical ordeal.

  What John Lennon introduced me to, together with the great pleasure of his music, was the culturally engraved narrative of tragic greatness. Where Michael Jackson was at an apex, still walking on the moon, Lennon’s death had completed his story. That particular combination of greatness and tragedy punched out a ten-thousand-piece puzzle inside me. His life seemed to me thrillingly, ineluctably merged with his art, and his murder an act against that art so total and devastating it could hardly be fathomed, and never at length.

  5

  My only clear and openly publicized objective for the future, from the time I began to consider it, was to get myself to New York. At sixteen I rode a Greyhound into Manhattan with the rest of my drama class, where the objective crystallized into a many-pointed ache. We visited the Actors Studio and bought fake IDs in Times Square; I finagled permission to stake out the Letterman show. It was as I thought—the city where you made yourself happen—and I swore I’d be back. A dedicated drama geek, I quelled private ambitions to act with a steady course of magical thinking, frustrating my teacher more than once by auditioning and then ditching on the callback. I thought I was battling the Canadian impulse against distinction, the mortification of wanting something too much.

  It took me several years and one disastrous monologue from Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean to understand that being temperamentally unsuited to acting didn’t mean I couldn’t find a way to perform. Though all of my daydreams were about standing in front of people and holding their attention somehow—emoting, dancing, yodeling—I lacked the wiring to connect a growing shyness in the world with my inner showbiz slave. If every fantasy musical sequence in every teen movie ever is correct, the specific quality of that longing is a condition of being a modern teenager. In many ways high school is just Hollywood without money: we make stars and audiences of each other. We watch each other all day and, if it can be arranged, all night too. We learn how to behave and what we’re drawn to, the people with presence. I made studies of the kids around me, drawn almost gravitationally toward those who held my attention. I longed to observe my classmates undetected but refused to wear my glasses. With their faces softened I couldn’t tell who was looking back.

  When I think of this I think of Luke, the enigmatic power forward I followed around until he gave in. If Luke felt like a flesh-and-blood star, I had chosen better than I knew. Older, a diffident hockey player with a brother in the NHL, he was the first one to put me on his knee and get me onto both of mine. The last time I saw him he was naked and rampaging through a party-ruined backyard—the way all of those nights ended. But there was something new and unpleasant in the slant of the evening, something precipitous. The outdoor lights were blinding, whiting out the faces that weren’t cast into shadow. We crashed into each other helplessly, as though the years of studying and negotiating these same bodies had finally driven us mad. As though suddenly aware of having stayed too long and clutched too many red plastic cups at the carnival. His antics were getting darker and more dangerous; there was a new viciousness in the way Luke hurled his body around. I can see his Vitruvian silhouette cut out by the floodlights. I hadn’t yet graduated but high school was clearly over. He was shaking both fists above his head and roaring when I turned to a friend, chilled, and said I didn’t think he’d make it to twenty-one.

  In fact he got to twenty-eight. From what I understand, he had fallen into the traps set by his beauty, which was extreme. Modeling, bodybuilding, and the attendant obsessions and excesses. He always told people he’d go young, we all remember that now. I saw him in a dream the night I heard, clearer than I had in a decade. He pulled me into the center of a party to slow dance, but his phone kept interrupting with text messages written in coded gibberish. Soon he slipped out of my arms and walked out the door, the exact walk I didn’t know I remembered so well. I followed him one more time and found him running toward a pier. I’d just started to make up some ground when I saw him skitter off the platform and hit the water with a smack. A few days later I was told it was suicide, but no one knows for sure, or wants to say.

  6

  Jack Warner, the head of Warner Bros. studio, did not take the news of James Dean’s death well. He had placed a sizable bet on Rebel Without a Cause, which was weeks away from its release, and the star had made a sucker of him. “Nobody will come to see a corpse!” Warner scoffed. Well, isn’t it pretty to think so.

  Times were changing; even the experts were still figuring out this new medium’s special dispensations. It had not yet become as clear as it would in the wake of Dean’s death that part of th
e pull of the movies was the way that they intertwined heavenly visions of human life with the suggestion of death and resurrection. Quentin Tarantino makes indelible use of this interplay in Inglourious Basterds, when a woman is revived moments after her death—on a disintegrating screen and then an undulating veil of smoke—to deliver a vow of vengeance. Although the movies would seem to provide a modern platform for the work of Greek tragedy, it’s probably not a coincidence that we began to lose touch with the conditions of death and loss just as a potent medium and its proofs of immortality came into view.

  We don’t really favor body viewings in this country. There seems to be some class snobbery in it, as if only religious peasants could be into something so earthy. Our leaders no longer lie in state in the traditional sense; their caskets are covered in flags or smothered in lilies and laurel. (Ironically, the ever-present photographic threat may have much to do with that; it seems telling that most of us still agree that recorded pictures of a corpse are disrespectful, if not sacrilegious.) Call me a Catholic peasant, but I think there is something to the viewing ritual: in our private lives it reminds us of the limits of our bodies and confirms a loss that can otherwise seem unfathomable; with public figures it provides essential evidence that even the great and powerful must die. Today we watch the big funerals on television or online as spectacles, performing our responses to performed death in real time. Perhaps the closest we get to a culturally bound reckoning with mortality is the way we study the final scenes of a star’s life, as though they might yield the abiding secret—again, a secret embedded inside the moving image—of how a human being can be here one second and gone the next.

  Needless to say, the kids went a little crazy for Rebel Without a Cause, and Jack Warner was obliged to eat his stubby tie. Since Dean and Rebel it has become something of a tradition that a posthumous artifact be delivered as part of the celebrity mourning ritual. As news carries ever quicker and video clips stream ever faster, that ritual begins in the seconds after a death announcement hits the Internet. Instead of waiting six weeks to watch a final film (although we still do that too), a kind of impromptu farewell performance is cobbled from 911 recordings, often pathetic final public appearances, B-roll of a body being wheeled from a building (the footage of Marilyn Monroe blanketed over on a stretcher and the peeks into the room where she died is a point of origin for this kind of thing), surreptitious morgue snaps, autopsy reports, and bleary security clips (Diana on a haunting loop, forever passing through that revolving door).

  With someone like Whitney Houston, a pop superstar who slipped away in the bathtub of a Beverly Hills hotel in February of 2012, there is a sudden rush to return the artist to her prime. Alongside the tawdry police-blotter gawking, people share YouTube clips of old performances and iTunes explodes with sales. Within a day of Houston’s death publicists were circulating bulletins about the cash crop already being planted on her grave. “She died young, tragically, and mysteriously,” one blared, “the three hallmarks of a value investment.”

  At the time of her death, Houston had a film awaiting release—a value investment, no doubt, but also an opportunity for her fans to mourn together. In the meantime, final images of her were made public even before she died—frantic paparazzi shots of Whitney Houston leaving last night’s party. Most felt like fragments: she appears disheveled, even a little wild, in a short black dress ruched to her body. Hair hangs in her face, and as always her gleaming skin appears to be a single high note away from breaking into one of her famous flop sweats. She is partially hidden by others or seems to be twisting away from the camera with bared teeth, yelling or having just yelled. Together the photos give the feeling of a predatory altercation in progress; this is a woman who couldn’t walk to her car without producing images out of a Picasso detail. Some were helpfully cropped to direct your attention to points of interest and together cataloged the scratches on her wrist, the liquid—blood? wine?—running down her leg, the distended belly in profile.

  They called her bloated, but we’ve all been watching Whitney Houston’s body for long enough to know that what little extra weight she has on her she carries up front. It’s kind of lovely, actually, and the most mortal hint of her most of us ever got. But in the same way that nothing illuminates the body’s divinity the way talent does, rarely does a body appear more wretched to us, more useless and husklike, than when that kind of talent is destroyed or disappears too soon. And so the sadistic theme of the past decade’s coverage of her life was fulfilled in the hours after those pictures were published: habeas Whitney.

  7

  It’s the television programs that drive home how we have come to crave these stories. Behind the Music, A&E Biography, and E! True Hollywood Story have broken the formula into beats and commercial breaks. Because the narrative arc is now paramount, A&E can get away with a one-hour “biography” of Amy Winehouse that contains fewer than six seconds of her actual music. These kinds of shows air with a persistence that would make a North Korean broadcaster proud. They also share a ruthless structural genius: unless its subject is already dead, each episode is understood to be an unresolved, changeable document—downfall, decay, and sudden or premature death are just a few edits and a rebroadcast away. Within days of Heath Ledger’s 2008 death we could watch his whole story play out, now new and improved with its “tragic” and, let’s face it, more satisfying final act.

  Because they are cheap and there are many hours to fill, you don’t have to be a lodestar of tragic greatness—a Whitney or a Michael—to get the treatment or have anything much to do with Hollywood to fuel a True Hollywood Story. Our appetite has grown deep and indiscriminate; the demand is too great to be met by the few brontosauric talents still roaming the landscape. It takes too long to invest in the real thing anyway: we lack the attention span required to sustain an artist’s forty-year career, and the market is no longer built for that kind of longevity. We rely on corporations to mass-farm artists seasonally and look to the story of Elvis wandering into Sun Records, Madonna at the Danceteria, or Michael Jackson being shepherded into the presence of Berry Gordy as relics of an almost adorably organic past.

  Instead faded teen idols, troubled B-listers, and reality stars like Anna Nicole Smith have become the tragic-star narrative’s bread and butter. On a twenty-four-hour news cycle, squeezing tragic ecstasy from these stories is a tall order even when our most cherished artists are the subjects. The substitutes get the same forensic treatment, but the results are that much grimmer. Within hours of child star Corey Haim’s death in early 2010, a popular entertainment site carried the banner headline “VIDEO: First look at home where Corey Haim died.” As though we had all been waiting for it. Another gossip site released the 911 call documenting the sudden death of Brittany Murphy in late 2009. For ten minutes, listeners are invited to imagine the actress’s lifeless body on the floor as her husband counts off chest compressions and her mother falls to animal keening. Many of the comments on the Murphy 911 call expressed bewilderment and self-disgust, as if those who clicked through had expected to hear something other than an audio recording of a young woman dying in her mother’s arms.

  Every few weeks now, it seems, this kind of thing hits a fresh apex. All along the collision of cravings for the “real” and its inverse—escape from reality—is breeding spiritual confusion, especially when it comes to the stories we tell about things that used to matter to us, that we used to do well. Instead of drawing collective succor from supernaturally gifted individuals, we’re left with sucking the private lives of lesser and no-talents dry, drifting that much further from a meaningful idea of what it means to die.

  8

  In October 2009, a young woman thrust a flyer into my midsection as I entered the midtown Manhattan theater where Michael Jackson’s This Is It was making its world premiere. I folded it into my bag and found a seat. In his live-from–Los Angeles introduction of the documentary, cobbled together after Jackson’s death from rehearsal footage, choreographer
Kenny Ortega called it “the last, sacred documentation of our leader and our friend.” When it was over, the dead man having danced and sung and issued dazed protestations of L-O-V-E for his long-suffering crew, I pulled out the densely printed piece of paper. It was an urgently worded warning about all of the things we weren’t going to see that night, things hidden “by those who are making a profit from the screening of this movie.” Michael was not well, the flyer said. Two color photos were offered as proof: 1997 Michael—athletic, vital, and sheathed in tailored lamé—and 2009 Michael, with his sunken chest and two red licorice strips for legs. His management was working him to death; it was Colonel Tom Parker all over again.

  The flyer only spelled out what we were all thinking; some of us were there specifically because of those thoughts. The hope, running beneath the surface of the average viewer’s mixture of conflicted penitence and morbid curiosity, was that this “sacred documentation” would retrofit some evidence of suffering, of ultimate sacrifice, to Michael Jackson’s story. Traditionally, the posthumous artifact completes the story of tragic greatness by allowing a star’s public to implicate and then exonerate themselves from responsibility for his or her death.