Stanley Cavell meets Michael Jackson

Through Fred Astaire.  I had read Cavell’s musings on Fred Astaire in his latest book of essays, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005) and I also knew, implicitly, that Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson were more than acquaintances, though how much more I didn’t know then, nor do I really know now.

Where one is likely to find out such information (about the intimacies that Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson did or did not share) without rummaging through the world of tabloid gossip I know not. The interest I have in them here is somewhat scholarly, if only because I have taken an interest not only in how Cavell talks about Fred Astaire (in an academic, that is, formal aesthetic, vein) but, by extension, how he might help us in talking about Michael Jackson and then, more specifically, Michael Jackson’s anger.  I want to read anger into a particular music video of his, Smooth Criminal (1987), and then to assess the cultural worth of that anger.  Part of my argument will be contingent on seeing the video and deciding, for yourself, that it is at least plausible that Michael Jackson is angry.  The afforded “intuition” then would require suitable “tuitions” (to use a familiar Cavellian refrain).  Providing the reader with just such tuitions is what I seek to do here. 

Margo Jefferson, in her admirable study of the man entitled On Michael Jackson (2006), allots brief but prescient space to the issue of Michael Jackson’s anger, straying from standard victimary critiques that work rather cynically to commercialize our sympathies and rebrand Michael Jackson not as a cultural master, but as something much less formidable (like a deeply misunderstood child molester). Obviously we can take Michael Jackson’s anger as derivative of feeling misunderstood. But the heart of the matter is more expressly stated here by Jefferson:

Celebrity demands a certain degree of hypocrisy from all performers. The persona can’t possibly square with the private life. But it’s much freakier for kids. Some of their fans are old enough to be their parents or grandparents …
We’ve all heard the explanations for why Michael is at ease only when he is with children. His reasons make a kind of psychological sense. Children are open and unpredictable. Children are creative and playful. Children are true innocents. Children give joy and want joy in return. Children ask nothing of you but love and protection. You can capture your lost childhood in the company of children.

Michael never admits that he is angry as well as lonely and sad. And yet, what better reproach to all grown-ups—family, siblings, fans—than to have nothing to do with them except as businesspeople you can hire and fire. Or as wives you can marry and divorce. Or as surrogate mothers you can pay and dismiss.

Here Michael Jackson’s melancholia arises in his disappointment and even horror at the behaviour of those (in an ideal world) he is supposed to trust, e.g., a fan truly old enough to be his father or grandfather. Michael Jackson’s biological father, an instrumental force in his son’s success, is a pertinent point of departure in assessing Michael Jackson’s anger—even if Joseph Jackson’s legacy in his son’s life requires (at best) “negotiation.” I do not plan to go into such negotiation here except to note that even if Michael Jackson were unwilling to carry out such negotiation (i.e., between acknowledgement of and aversion to his father), certainly others are willing to do so in his place as some measure of sustained cultural engagement and effort in understanding the man (i.e., Michael Jackson).

Nor do I plan to say that all attempts at understanding this aspect of Michael Jackson’s life are insincere or even unfruitful; only that the bulk of such discussion is taken up as a means of avoiding an issue which does not originate in Michael Jackson’s biography alone. That is, if Michael Jackson has (or has no) reason to be angry, the surrounding cultural currents worth analyzing might be farther away from Michael Jackson’s immediate life story. The issue of Michael Jackson’s anger, that is, might take root more meaningfully when juxtaposed against a backdrop of black-white relations in America. In such a sense, Jackson is merely a cultural lightning rod—as if cultural negotiations are working out their kinks through him.

In thinking about what Cavell takes Fred Astaire to be doing through dance in The Band Wagon (1953), and in taking Smooth Criminal to be a sincere cultural response to that film, we can begin to sketch out more meaningfully the macroscopic cultural resentments and forces at work in our discussions of Michael Jackson—avoiding the pitfalls of an easy victimary narrative of Jackson on the one hand and/or the rash and hasty persecution of him on the other.

Because, in both scenarios, Michael Jackson is guilty—that is victimized. Standard victimary critiques are unhelpful in assessing Michael Jackson’s cultural legacy. Where Jackson’s “guilt” is assumed apriori (i.e., where we think of him as a perverted child molester), he earns either our sympathy or our scorn. In the latter case, our scorn is necessary for the sake of doling out “appropriate” criminal punishment.  In the former case (i.e., where Jackson is allotted compassion for a missed childhood), the enormity of his cultural achievement is downplayed, even if in “good conscience.”

Before getting to Cavell’s analysis of Astaire, it is useful at this point to distinguish between two types of guilt in context of American race-relations and, even more specifically, in regards to lynching. Though I am talking about Jackson’s achievements/shortcomings against an American cultural narrative that cannot afford to ignore issues of race, I am less emphatically suggesting that Michael Jackson’s brutal treatment at the hands of an American mass media/audience is merely an extension or a postmodern example of “traditional” nineteenth century lynching.

Certainly forces accentuating the horror of that particular practice are out of commission now (or were, during Jackson’s lifetime). Yet the idea of lynching as “scapegoating” suits my purposes.  Which is to say that if we insist on highlighting the veritable overlap between the nineteenth century lynch phenomena and Michael Jackson’s unending ability to land himself at the centre of one scandal after another, we must also recognize that the victimization of Michael Jackson occurred in far less an arbitrary fashion than that of his predecessors. 

That is, it does not exactly follow that the media/celebrity status foisted upon Michael Jackson was carried out on a whim.  On the contrary, Michael Jackson was less “lynched” than afforded the same sort of celebrity scrutiny familiar to all of America’s superstars.  If we cannot say, for example, that a celebrity like Brad Pitt finds himself on the tail-end of a narrative that begins with lynching, than why ought we to say anything of the sort about Michael Jackson?  Is the celebrity status afforded him somehow more perverse or deadly because of his skin colour? 

John Pittman, in writing about Nietzschean ressentiment, applies the famous German’s discussion to nineteenth century lynch laws. Pittman tells us that where Nietzsche’s traditional account of ressentiment describes either the ascetic’s rage turned inward, or a slave revolt directed outward against a perceived “master race,”—lynching – in contradistinction – requires focusing the mob’s collective wrath away from both the perceived “slaves” in the exchange (who Pittman reminds us are the lynchers themselves, and not, say, black people) and their masters (those further along in an established social hierarchy marked by “undirected social forces [of] modernization, industrialization … [and] wage labor”).

What distinguishes lynch mobs from traditional “slave revolts” is that the collective rage is neither directed inward against the self nor outward against perceived oppressors, but rather onto a “vulnerable individual, a member of the social stratum distinct from both that of the slave-subjects themselves and from their masters.”

Hence why an appeal to cultural “lynching” in the case of Michael Jackson might be misplaced. Even if we take him to be scapegoated, his example is far less horrifying than, say, previous historical examples where the collective wrath coalesced around a person who previously lacked any significance. And though there is a disturbing arbitrary element to the criminal fixation on Michael Jackson, I do want to suggest that Michael Jackson is, indeed, “guilty,” though of another sort of transgression, i.e., a cultural sort.  That is, Michael Jackson did not find himself in the central agon because the fates turned on him; rather, he dared to occupy it, both a source of pride and resentment (for us and him).  Where Pittman’s analysis takes hold for us, then, is in his phrasing that

[t]he institution of lynch law had a mechanism of self-justification … This manifest form [of ressentiment] expressed the fears and anxieties of the lynch party that in the third period faced a population of recently liberated ex-slaves.  This population, reduced to peonage and a second slavery after the collapse of Reconstruction, represented a deep structural challenge to the security of the white wage worker … In addition, then, to the structural-economic danger that the ex-slave population posed for the white masses, they represented a further threat not to the their economic well-being but to the very paternalist ideology of white womanhood that constituted part of the imaginary identity of interests shoring up the deeply divided white community itself… [This] brought with it the implicit recognition that consensual sexual activity between members of distinct racial groups implied the basic equality of all humans as such. 

Striving for equality, then, could only be a source of pride for those Americans who valued its achievement as congruent with “structural-economic” advancement; yet redefining the economic status quo necessarily calls into question the cultural status quo;  the “sexual” consideration noted above is simply the most explicit in aligning economic equality with racial equality.  It is not simply that all whites are out to punish blacks for such transgression—merely that such transgression undermines or redefines what it means to be “white” in the first place. 

This may be uncontroversial to some; but to others, if a black man and a white man suddenly earn the same amount, or have a similar claim to significance, suddenly little else (other than skin colour) differentiates one from the other.  To those who view themselves as citizens in America in contradistinction to blacks, the racial divide needs be more than superficial.  So the pride felt at a black man’s success in America is necessarily tempered by the resentment which threatens those citizens suddenly at a loss for identity.

Yet it is too crude simply to suggest that Michael Jackson was the helpless victim of other people’s resentment.  By assuming the cultural centre as he did, he too was capable of lashing out.  As Eric Gans notes, the shortcoming of Nietzsche’s take on ressenitment is in his assumption that the “Christian priests,” who turn the unassuming mob’s attention toward the inherently superior “noble pagan warrior,” are motivated by the “sterile hatred” to which the “noble pagan warrior” himself is oblivious.  In this incomplete picture of ressentiment, the noble warrior himself is never motivated by his hatred, say, of those he subjugates. 

The idea that Michael Jackson worked actively to “subjugate” anyone seems misplaced as well. Yet to assume the cultural centre as convincingly as he did required him to be, at least at the outset, as scandalized as anyone else on the periphery.  Certainly the fact that he was black, and hence restricted from the centre in a certain way, only added to his resentment.  Yet anyone, black or white, watching Michael Jackson climb to the stratospheric heights he did as an entertainer was destined to feel a mix of both pride and scorn.   

Pride in the sense that Jackson was clearly the (only) one to take up a cultural legacy left to him by Fred Astaire. Resentment in that by being a black man, Michael Jackson inadvertently challenged that status quo, thereby requiring the necessary acknowledgment on his part of his own mortality. Michael Jackson, that is, had to acknowledge that he was indeed “made” in the national crucible outside of which his afforded opportunity to transgress in the first place would have been impossible.  (Such sentiment, no doubt, could have only been a source of scandal to Michael Jackson as well.) 

Whether Michael Jackson succeeded of his own accord or magically benefitted from certain prevailing cultural trends is a tricky and cumbersome issue. What I am interested in is the nature of the dialogue between Jackson at the centre and the adorning public at the periphery, a dialogue we can take as beginning with the achievements of Fred Astaire and the reality of cultural forces that he benefited from and, subsequently, the acknowledgement he was able to afford to the conditions surrounding his culture because of it.

Let us turn to Stanley Cavell’s discussion of Fred Astaire, which appears in the first and third chapters of his most recent book of essays called Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (2005). The book’s title – taken from Nietzsche’s preface to Human, All Too Human – is an allusion to the “philosopher of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow” upon whom, Cavell reminds us, a “knowledge of the conditions of culture” is contingent. Cavell’s central purpose in the book (and indeed, throughout his writing career) is to make a case for what he calls “the ordinary,” those moments of subjective experience to which we find ourselves “dead.”

Cavell equates this “deadness” to Emerson’s notion of “conformity” from which Cavell calls on the philosopher to liberate us. According to Cavell, two philosophical attempts at addressing the ordinary – that is, at making what we take the ordinary to be – are taken up by ordinary language philosophers like Austin and Wittgenstein (in something of a “analytical” philosophical register) on the one hand, while a similar burden is taken up by others, like Emerson (in a more “Continental” register if you will), writing in the tradition of thinkers like Kant and Montaigne.

In nominating a rather trivial Fred Astaire routine to be “something out of the ordinary,” Cavell does adorn Astaire (in a certain sense) with the title of philosopher. In awakening us to the ordinary the way he does through dance, that is, Fred Astaire is creating the cultural space for a certain type of dialogue to happen. Coupled with the authority and stature that only a man of his talents could carry, Fred Astaire presents us with an opportunity to consider what is at stake in a seemingly trivial dance routine featured for no more than ten minutes in the opening scenes of a 1950s American musical comedy. Fred Astaire – as a man blessed with the talents and abilities to warrant the title of a cultural master (if less a fully formed “philosopher for the day after tomorrow”) – has Cavell points us to this moment of significance:

Let’s begin uncontroversially. From a baggage cart to a gate, the camera leads the man [Fred Astaire] down the length of a train platform in one continuous shot; at the end of the singing, the camera stops as he does and then, as it were, watches him leave through the gate; we then cut to a view from within the station and see the man continue his walk toward us, humming the same tune, then pause, and shift nervously, as if expecting someone …
Overall it seems as nearly uneventful as a photographed song can be. Astaire had begun singing with a little self-conscious laugh, magnified by its producing a palpable cloud of cigarette smoke. It is a self-reflexive response to the fact that in him thinking is about to become singing.

What Cavell notes is that in this sequence, no one notices Astaire. This is surely a necessary convention for any musical comedy, i.e., that the protagonist can sing privately if required and, moreover, that the viewing audience is made privy to that “privacy.” Cavell reads this as Tony Hunter (Astaire) attempting to “find his feet,” neither walking nor dancing but occupying an intermediate zone in which “narratively, he is hoping to cheer himself, letting his body … tell him what his emotion is.”

The cause of his melancholy is never explicitly disclosed. Rather, the film suggests that Tony Hunter is lamenting his ignoble return to the New York stage after his career in Hollywood has turned sour. It is not simply that he cannot praise another but that he himself feels unworthy of praise. He begins his journey to reclaim his right not only to be praised but to find someone or something worthy of praising—which is, in a sense, to search for inspiration – precisely – to find one’s feet (again).

We may be tempted to equate Tony Hunter’s sentiment here with something or someone we have known or experienced in the past. But separated as we are from him by the screen, we also understand that we are in no position to offer solace. We must trust Hunter to find his own way. The magic is in seeing/discovering in the world of film the instant at which Astaire truly does find his feet.

Then why dance? Is a Fred Astaire or Michael Jackson proto-walk a search for the ordinary? If so, then what need have we for extraordinary dance (or language) in the first place?

I’m hoping this is the most expedient place to begin talking about the Billie Jean video, released in 1983, the one in which, incidentally, Michael Jackson does a fair bit of walking and where the focus routinely squares on his feet. Though everything he comes in contact with glows a phosphorescent white, only when Michael Jackson’s shoes (which he shines with a tiger-striped rag) hit the pavement are we suddenly anxious to see if the world will keep step with him, effectively mirroring the anxiety that resides in Cavell when he notes Astaire’s both singing-and-not-singing, his neither dance-nor-walk (which elicits in Cavell “a sense of emotional hovering, not so much a feeling of suspense as one of being in suspension”).

We ask ourselves of Michael Jackson just as Cavell did of Fred Astaire: will he find his feet? And while Cavell takes Astaire to be clearly ‘not-walking,’ we cannot say that Michael Jackson is doing anything but walking in the Billie Jean video. We could take this to signify that Astaire, at the end of his career, is looking to see if the world will accommodate him, if he is (still) worthy of the world’s attention. Michael Jackson, on the other hand, at the beginning of his, could only be doing something on the reverse end of the performative spectrum in wondering if the world is worth engaging with—which is to say that we are hoping he will accommodate us.

Before going further, I should pause to consider whether we ought to read the Billie Jean music video as a rejoinder to Fred Astaire. We might begin more fruitfully by asking ourselves why we shouldn’t consider Billie Jean this way. Two immediate reasons come to mind. First, Michael Jackson has confessed that the entire concept/art-direction/design of both the sets and “story” were out of his hands; hence it becomes difficult to read into the video any sort of personal statement or conviction of his. Second, because it is ultimately Smooth Criminal I want to say something about (i.e., in its engagement with The Band Wagon), I need not concern myself with something that came before, as if doing otherwise would assume some sort of narrative continuity between music videos and, furthermore, that Michael Jackson (or his art director) planned them that way.

How do I proceed? I can say that whatever design concept was eventually employed, it certainly drew from the song—say, from what its lyrics were saying. Michael Jackson mentions a “kid,” though in the video there is neither a kid, nor a woman named Billie Jean. So what do we have? We have a Michael Jackson who is, in the first part of the video, somewhat forlorn and weary, perhaps, with false accusations made against him.

On his tail, of course, is the cause of his discontent—a reporter, who inflates the worth of those accusations until they become something that he (Michael Jackson) must live with. If he is to find his feet once more, he must do so not by eradicating the inflated language that surround him, but in spite of it—say, beside or around it. When he finally does begin his dance, in the round, his face betrays a grave sense of concentration. Something is on his mind. It could be that he is forced to dance under the billboards of beauty queens (he is literally adjacent to them). What he is skeptical of is the notion that his art can reign in the perfect conditions in which he can continue to thrive. The world offers him no such guarantee. Is this worthy of anger? If finding one’s feet entails some measure of returning words back to their original habitat, of turning dance against the demand to dance, the line to be drawn is between yet-to-be acknowledged private expression and public approval.

How do we go on in a world that refuses to praise us, or, perhaps worse, praises us in the wrong way (that is, over-praises us)? The grave question for any black performer remains: am I changing the world or simply going along with it? If one insists on turning our words against our words (i.e., overcoming conformity), the question which follows somewhere down the line for the popular (African) American performer is: am I expressing ingratitude toward my country?

Americans, Cavell notes, “come from a country in which an artist’s lethal treatment is more apt to be achieved through indifference, or perhaps through an underestimation masked by over-advertising and hyper-praise.” Praise, that is, does not ultimately guarantee one’s legacy. At the time this video was shot, Michael Jackson’s cultural worth to the society that bred him was no longer in doubt. He had been a star for the better part of twenty years and was old enough to know that any legacy worth cultivating could only be marked against his ability to transform his cultural landscape rather than merely conform to it. This comes at a price. It wasn’t enough for him simply to perform. He, like Fred Astaire before him, had to assert his right – in this case not to praise – but to create meaningful culture, which means asserting the possibility of abandoning it altogether.

The reporter grabs the tiger-striped shoeshine rag in Billie Jean.

Fred Astaire picks up the tiger-striped rag in The Band Wagon.

Perhaps the above images are not enough to tie what Michael Jackson is doing in the time before Smooth Criminal to what Fred Astaire is doing in the time before Billie Jean—if only because to be aware of the commercial realities surrounding any such production is to know that often, what is considered “good” is whatever “sells.”  The anxiety, then, is in understanding that by carrying on a discussion within/about an industry that seeks to manufacture taste, nothing meaningful can be said about the artistic or ethical sentiment motivating the popular work of art.

Yet the above images may be enough for our purposes if only because to avoid talking about Billie Jean and Smooth Criminal against the popular culture that came before it would be to suggest that The Band Wagon had nothing at all to do with even the most superficial (say prop and costume) choices of these two music videos. Even if we refuse to say such a thing, is it then acceptable to move from a superficial consideration of stage props to the profound consideration of intentions—artistic or otherwise?

Cavell provides some guidance here, appealing to the later Wittgenstein’s version of the ordinary, though at the expense of the Anglo-analytical tradition that seeks to house the ordinary meaning of words comfortably within the fixed rules of ordinary language games. (Cavell finds that “what is called pragmatism so often strikes [him] as an intimate negation of Emersonianism.”) That is, the subjective world must constantly be taken up and expressed through ordinary gestures, events and language, and no guarantee exists that language is simply out there waiting to mesh with experience. It falls on the artist, in conjunction with the critic, to “mine the earth” (as Thoreau does at Walden), not necessarily by fashioning new words and concepts but by “turning our words against our words,” unleashing their resonance and giving birth to the extraordinary from the seeds of the ordinary.

I have rather assumed, more or less without argument … that Kant’s location of the aesthetic judgment, as claiming to record the presence of pleasure without a concept, makes room for a particular form of criticism, one capable of supplying the concepts which, after the fact of pleasure, articulate the grounds of this experience in particular objects. The work of such criticism is to reveal its object as having yet to achieve its due effect. Something there, despite being fully open to the senses, has been missed. I … claim that while it is not a fact that the Astaire routine is trivial, the sequence can be seen to be about triviality; and to show that will require showing how its pleasure derives from its location of formal conditions of its art.

Overcoming conformity is not to take pleasure once again in the ordinary (say, in the ordinariness of a language game), but to be awake to the ordinary, to language and its games and the conditions which elicit its successful operation, marking both a departure and a return. This is obviously to teeter on the brink of cultural collapse, or at least, to acknowledge the potential of such collapse. To transcend worldly prejudices requires knowing what it is made up of not only naturally, but culturally as well—the sort of burden, incidentally, that Cavell says Nietzsche places on “the philosopher of the day after tomorrow,” upon whom a mastery of the “conditions of culture” is contingent.

To set the stage then for what I want to say about Michael Jackson and Smooth Criminal requires watching the second of Cavell’s two Fred Astaire sequences which, very conveniently, appears as an appropriately redacted clip here:

Furthermore, our discussion also requires distinguishing between what Cavell calls the “dance of praise” from a “dance of madness.” The demarcation is to be located, if the reader/viewer has not surmised already, at approximately 2:38 of the above clip, when Astaire begins his frenetic refrain: “I gotta shine on my shoes, I gotta shine on my shoes, I gotta shine on my shoes…”

Isolating praise from madness may not be so easy or visibly apparent; but certainly we notice a change in Tony Hunter’s mood, even if characterized ostensibly through a change in tempo. For Cavell, reading frenzy as following praise saves the integrity of this performance. While it is understandable how the display of a white man receiving a shoeshine from a black man could signify the appropriation of the latter’s abilities or talents by the former, this exchange ought not to signify the collapse of the cultural scene to a point where neither the shoeshine man nor the performer can go on. The point is rather to resolve the issue at hand, which requires acknowledging what is at stake for both men.

Astaire’s dance of praise is itself to be understood specifically as about this painful and potentially deadly irony of the white praise of a black culture whose very terms of praise it has appropriated, even climactically about being brushed with madness in one’s participation in it. A dance of praise which incorporates a dance of madness may be expected to have something to teach about both dance and praise.

The ramifications of this ordinary sequence on an extraordinary narrative, of black-white relations in America, of appropriation and victimhood, and of resolving differences is not made in haste by Cavell, which is to say it is not really made at all. The point here is that culture may draw from legislation designed to stymie the moral hypocrisy latent in our everyday relations to one another. But change in our interpersonal relations requires mutual acts of negotiation, recognition, and acknowledgment, which is less a claim to knowledge than “an interpretation of it” the sort of interpretation that requires branding the cultural void or emptiness (however (in)appropriately), acknowledging the limits of language (or dance).

That is, by recognizing what you and I equally do not know, we learn not to overcome our doubts but to live with them mutually. This requires negotiation; yet Cavell elsewhere notes that no one can legislate this (though movies can showcase this). That Fred Astaire “asserts the right to praise” can be taken as brazen, but his actions do not so much silence the black shoeshine man as initiate a conversation. Their relationship may not, as of yet, be entirely symmetrical; but the possibility for redress is created, though something of the piece’s integrity is evident in the way it chooses to end:

[There] is—if again perhaps only after the fact, but then traumatically—a moment of sharp and unexpected poignancy. It is entirely derived from the recognition that, after what these two have accomplished together, the black man is left on his knees, having returned the hat and whisked the white man’s suit and accepted a handshake and a tip from him as he leaves to cash in on his comeback?

… Astaire has shown the acknowledgment of his debt in a way that has required a lifetime of faithfulness to achieve. Nobody does what Astaire does better than Astaire does it. It is in its transcendent accomplishment that it claims the standing to pay homage to the transcendent accomplishment of black dancing. It hurts that his work changes nothing in the conditions of injustice under which the debt has been incurred. But what hurts unnecessarily, what contributes to a frenzy of hurt, a dance of frenzy, is the denial of the claim Astaire’s expression has achieved, the claim that the conditions of the dance are part of the dance, that the pain of this leave-taking haunts the pleasure of its accompaniment, that not to recognize the pain is to deny that it is a call for change, that the homage has itself constituted a step of change, in a world with such a problem in it.

That Astaire has earned the position he has, has established himself to have standing with the black shoeshine man (representative here of black America) could only come through gargantuan efforts and talents. The ethical work being done in this case is contingent on ability, on Astaire being the one on whom the future of black-white relations in America depends. Yet the claim to hero-worship is dissolved by the manner in which Astaire chooses to express his gratitude—not by acting/performing on stage, but by taking up his chance in an ordinary time and place (a nondescript arcade) that affords him the right amount reflection in which he must learn to find his feet.

Redemption may be waiting every time a curtain rises; but not every one of us will have the opportunity to play out our fantasies of acknowledgment at a privileged position onstage. True this “ordinary” moment is displayed to us through the “extraordinary” medium of film; but the fact that something so ordinary is worthy of our speculation at all is the unique aesthetic achievement of (American) cinema.

If Astaire has set-up the conditions for a future black dancer to take up his legacy, to begin the redress the shoeshine man could not – and if only one of gargantuan talents and abilities would suffice in commanding the same sort of standing as Astaire in popular imagination – it is difficult to think of another human being worthy of the task than Michael Jackson. Fred Astaire says as much in his hefty praise of Jackson, calling him “the greatest dancer of the century.”

Yet he also notes that Michael Jackson is “an angry dancer.” If Astaire leaves the opportunity for redress open, it is worth noting how or in what sense Michael Jackson takes up the call, and whether he affords anyone else the opportunity for redress. (It may be fitting indeed that a black man turned white has the last word on popular American dance.)

This may very well be why, to some, Michael Jackson’s existence is enough to warrant a type of prosecutorial “lynching,” betraying a need and desire to accommodate him in such a way which not only downplays the magnitude of his talents and achievements, but exacts revenge on him because of it. Compassion, in exchange for lynching, though seemingly less “vengeful,” is no less insidious. If Michael Jackson is guilty of transgressing a cultural status quo, it makes little sense to needlessly press him on the details of a crime much more easily accessible, say, to judicial prosecution—like the charge of paedophilia. Nor is it all that profitable to indulge in endless critiques that seek to mollify Jackson as an innocent victim of his own childhood celebrity and success. Yet how to make a case, then, that Jackson is guilty of another sort of crime—i.e., of assuming the cultural centre?

Looking at the texts Michael Jackson has left us (i.e., his music videos) is one way. In videos like Billie Jean, Thriller, and Beat It, for example, we notice each narrative working to a climax. The only video of this era that clearly opposes this trend is Smooth Criminal. This long video, which itself appears towards the end of an even longer production called Moonwalker – Michael Jackson’s own smorgasbord of variety performances minimally tied together by narrative, but released as a full-length motion picture – is itself a “frenzy” of sorts, in which Jackson seems to indulge in every imaginative whim and fancy over the course of the movie’s ninety-three minutes. 

Zeroing in our discussion, however, on the last segment, from which the Smooth Criminal video is extracted, we are made to understand, as soon as Michael Jackson arrives on the scene at Bar 30s, that his reputation precedes him.

Yet let us go back slightly and address the beginning of the video proper. 

We first see Jackson silhouetted at the far end of an alleyway; after adjusting his lapels and hat, we see him run toward us as he arrives at the night club entrance.  Three children peer over a fence at him. He opens the door and is blasted by a gust of wind. He stares it down, adjusts his fedora and enters.  The door closes behind him.

It is silent. He is eyed meticulously by several characters, including an Asian woman behind a fan, a man behind a green chemical tank, a man in the rafters, and two men who note to one another: “Watch him!” Michael swiftly makes for his weapon. The tension rises. Instead of pulling out a gun, a coin has appeared in his hand from, we can only assume, his right-hip pocket. He sends it sailing across the room with the flick of his thumb. The coin spins in the air, slicing it with a rhythmic pulse before flying into the slot of the jukebox. The jukebox activates; the music and dance are underway.

It is worth noting here that there is also a coin in Billie Jean. A coin actually precedes Michael Jackson’s entrance into the video, so the coin, as a form of payment, comes before anything happens—as though for anything to happen requires a certain squaring away of debts.  So let’s read the coin –as a form of payment, i.e., the beginning of a transaction – as beginning in Billie Jean and ending in Smooth Criminal. Beginning (not ending) in Billie Jean because when Michael Jackson tosses the coin in this video, he initially misses the mark, and ending in Smooth Criminal because in this case, he all too sleekly nails it.

Yet we have to ask: what happens in Billie Jean when he does miss the mark? The video carries on, it seems, as it should. The coin, that is, despite clinking off the rim, eventually does find its way to the bottom of the cup, which subsequently lights up as does the homeless man to whom, ultimately, the coin is to go to. Yet Michael Jackson never touches the man’s body, so the only way that coin could get to him to effect the change it should is if it were eaten.

We could imagine the homeless man, as we often do, spending the coin on bread, in effect buying something to eat. Yet as a stand-in for the communion wafer (taken into the body as a sign of the body), a coin suddenly reduces the spiritual redemption of a man to something no longer spiritual/aesthetic but economic. Salvation comes not in the form of giving bread but in the giving of money, which is to say that one’s sustenance in this particular universe is based on money rather than food. We certainly don’t see the man eating, but his “recovery” translates into the donning of an exquisite white tuxedo, the sort one wears in times of celebration, when the feast is fat.

Is Michael Jackson pitying or praising this homeless man? Offering up a benediction, when one is not prompted to do so, and when the person in question is not asked to reply in return (or even aware of being given such an offering) suggests that the very man in question is, in some way, deserving of such acknowledgement, of some praise—before, say, Michael Jackson can go on—before he can begin the search to find his feet.

Why, then, is he depicted here as homeless, as on the opposite and unflattering end not of a life of fame, but of a life of dignity? We must remember that in this universe, dignity is tied to significance rather than (biological) sustenance. It is not bread that he must eat but bread that he must wear, i.e., that he must perform. The white attire and garb, in this instance donned by the man whom America has abandoned, is donned later by Michael Jackson in Smooth Criminal as an homage, of course, to Fred Astaire.

So then is it too much to say that the homeless man on the street here is Fred Astaire? Forcing the interpretive moment to such a stark and even unconventional crisis is not any less of a reason to make the claim I am making; on the contrary, that we often forget to consider Michael Jackson and his dance against his “popular” predecessor tells us, perhaps, that the road to immortality is indeed fraught with peril if and when the dancer once considered popular is replaced.

What token, that is, does the new popular dancer owe the old? That is, what gesture, made toward a predecessor, is registered at all in the arena of popular taste? If you answer by saying, “Hardly any!” acknowledging that such a gesture is destined to be lost, read as superfluous, and hence, unnecessary, then you are making the case, I feel, that this figure ought to be read as Fred Astaire, as precisely the popular figure abandoned by America, whose “lethal” treatment of its celebrities is clearly on the mind of Michael Jackson in this video.  Michael Jackson less pities this figure then salutes him, understanding perhaps that his own gesture shall be lost to the multitudes, to whom he, despite his sincere acknowledgement (and even redress), must undoubtedly answer to.

So while Michael Jackson, in Billie Jean, is veritably searching to “find his feet,” as though seeking to get some economic/cultural transaction underway, by the time of Smooth Criminal, he has all but found them. The question to be asked, then, is whether or not he has earned the right to end the transaction.

From the very beginning of Smooth Criminal, everyone in the club is aware that Michael Jackson is the master of dance, the one whom a gang of smooth criminals is to be weary of.  It is only upon his cue, for instance, that the music begins.  As the video progresses, showcasing dance sequences requiring greater complexity, rhythm, and choreography, we are never made to doubt Michael Jackson’s abilities at any part of the story.

In Thriller and Bad we are subject to his best dance after a very palpable physical transformation; we are made to wonder how/if he will go on. In Beat It we do not know how/if he will join the fight. In Billie Jean, Michael is melancholy. Yet in Smooth Criminal, Michael Jackson is dancing at his artistic peak. The look of grave concentration shown in the Billie Jean video has vanished. This video never questions or calls into doubt his mastery. We are to revel in awe as he moves fluidly through a warehouse filled with criminals. Never is Michael in any significant danger.

At one point he is egged on by a scary looking thug who busts a pool cue over his leg. Yet after crushing the thug’s cue ball with his bare hand, Michael spins up to him, blows the remainder of the ball into his face (now as powdered dust), and proceeds to spin away from him and up the stairs. The man is so mesmerized by Michael’s dance that he does not retaliate.

Later, a man with a dagger approaches Michael from behind. Without turning to face him, Michael pulls a revolver out of his vest pocket, points it backwards, and annihilates him.  Michael is all but invincible. 

By the end of the video, Michael has unequivocally taken up the centre. He has won the admiration of the criminals once antagonistic to him, and they proceed to join him in dance; but there remain those still immune to his power. As Mr. Big’s (Joe Pesci’s) goons infiltrate the nightclub/warehouse and surround Michael, he responds not by dancing out of harm’s way, but by, quite dramatically, taking aim and blasting away those on the periphery with his Tommy gun (the most explicit rendering of his rage to date). He proceeds to run out of Club 30s and the video (the song and dance portion anyhow) ends.

The sloppiness of this final sequence—as a veritable stand-in for another sort of deus ex machina lacking in a hastily conceived gangster narrative—may undermine any attempt at heaping or reading this act of transgression as being truly pregnant with any sort of significance. The noted Euripidean convention, usually involving a ghost or spirit descending from the heavens, implies that sometimes, the horizontal plane of human resentments can only be untangled by otherworldly forces. Perhaps it is worth speculating that surrounded such as he is, Michael Jackson, in the spirit of a deity, could have spirited himself off or away from trouble. (The other option would have been, perhaps, to fall through a trap door.)

But forgoing any sort of vertical transcendence, Michael Jackson instead makes his “peace” in the real-world not by proffering up the possibility for reconciliation but by lashing out or back. Reading such drive (to violent and monstrous ends) may require an implicit understanding that in having effectively collapsed the scene to its primitive and even barbaric foundations in an earlier sequence (one that requires interpretation of the sort more penetrating than that found in my commemorative issue of Rolling Stone which somewhat blithely dismisses the sequence as “interpretive dance” (we all know it is interpretive—the question is: interpretive of what?)), Michael has risen out of it only to discover the world is largely the same. 

Though it is difficult to assess, narratively speaking, what motivated this flagrant stoppage of video and sudden line of demarcation, if one is suddenly compelled to divide the video in two, to the time before the interlude and to the time after, the question of the nature of the transformation that occurs in the interim arises. What is plainly apparent is that no significant transformation occurs.  In his two other long music videos, Bad and Thriller, the line of demarcation between music and silence effectively marks a significant (i.e., visibly apparent) physical transformation and seems, even, to prompt reconciliation. Yet when the music resumes in Smooth Criminal, Michael Jackson is his same old self—in same attire, armed with the same moves, dancing to the same tune.

Michael firing his Tommy gun

Michael exiting Club 30s

Michael Jackson has left the building

In this case, Michael Jackson is clearly uninterested in transcendence. The question, then, of who is justified in rage – those who intrude upon the scene at the periphery or the man at the centre – is a worthy moral question. In order to avoid violence, some measure of dialogue between centre and periphery is necessary. In Eric Gans’ centre-periphery heuristic, those worthy of both our cultural admiration and scorn are placed within the central agon, which seems to situate everyone in an adversarial and hostile position to a singular centre.  Yet Gans notes that such a societal mechanism guarantees not the dissolution of culture but its generation through deferral. Indeed, what Gans takes pains to remind us is that ressentiment is not to be quashed, but rather “recycled … into productive activity.” 

Michael Jackson, then, in sublimating his colossal anger/ressentiment into colossal efforts of song and dance was no doubt subject to equally colossal forces of resentment levelled at him from the periphery. Redefining the status quo as he did, could he have avoided his fate through a simple act of acknowledgement? Certainly his desire, right to the end, to love the world and not hate it (despite being crucified), was an act of acknowledging it in a certain way—that is, forgoing knowledge of the world for the sake of surviving it, understanding one’s limitations in face of cultural forces to great for any individual to overturn in a single lifetime. Michael Jackson spent his life adding significantly to an ongoing cultural dialogue of black-white relations in America; in such terms ought the true value of his legacy to be assessed.

Yet there are those in America who largely uninterested in such conversation, especially when a black man at the centre seems to be dictating the terms of the negotiation. For this, Michael Jackson must pay a price. To say he is effectively lynched in Smooth Criminal – i.e., is subject to needlessly hostile forces from the periphery – would be to ignore the fact that Michael Jackson escapes the spectre of imminent violence. Yet in life, certainly for Michael Jackson, escape from overtly dangerous resentments was not always forthcoming.  It is certainly not expedient in the real world to express one’s frustrations by pulling out a Tommy gun. 

Yet a crude “lynching” analysis creates victims and aggressors, winners and losers out of what is fundamentally a negotiation between two mutually relevant and competing parties, the most salient features of which are quickly lost in the race to the moral high ground. I wrote this piece not strictly to condemn those who would prosecute Michael Jackson, but to shed light on why he may have been scapegoated in the first place thereby buttressing the cultural dialogue his existence has fostered. Certainly Michael Jackson redefined or called into question the sort of cultural power an American black male was allowed to wield. Even if he cannot be thought of as a traditional lynch victim, the concept of “lynching” may be useful in understanding what was at stake in Michael Jackson’s tumultuous existence in American popular imagination.