This Is It! (2009)
Or...Is This It?
It took me about twenty minutes before I asked the question.
Take nothing away from the King of Pop, he truly was unique, a marvel, an enigma. Here he is simply a ghostly shadow of his former self. If anything, he may well become a cautionary tale told to children boldly aspiring headlong into celebrity about the dangers of fame. To my surprise, where I was expecting fireworks and at least some annoyance at personally missing out, I was on the contrary, feeling quite smug that I hadn't forked out for tickets to his shows after all. Not so much for the fact that he would obviously be unable to even attend, much less perform in them, but more that the man, the myth, the King, had really been dead long before the night he finally shrugged off this mortal coil.
Like a macabre circus freak show, the film highlighted just how much Jackson had sunk before his passing. Clearly, aside from milking the very last out of Jackson financially, this film attempts to cast him in the glow of genius. An artist with a natural flair for his vision, an unequalled work ethic, a determined and focused performer. What we actually see is a bag of halloween bones, loosely held together with horse tranquilizers, threatening to collapse in a heap before our very eyes.
Death isn't funny and I don't mean to make light of what we see. I am spending my time watching it after all, and the simple fact that Jackson is not here to defend his decisions here is no excuse to refrain from highlighting them. And there are many.
Not least to say that the message at the very start of the film says 'For the Fans'. There is a good reason for this. Jackson fans are the most vocal, vociferous and loyal bunch known to music. Addtionally, you might say they are also the most naive and in the nicest possible way, more than a little bit bonkers. So dedicating the film to the fans is an obvious, if not very smart, move. If only because this gives every other person watching that never put on a glove or tried to moonwalk the opportunity to scratch their heads, quizzically.
I find myself trying to find something positive to say about the film and am, honestly, at a loss. If anything, it truly captures the essence of what it must have felt like to be Jackson at the time. Fragile and coddled, when he opens his mouth, everybody shuts up. What comes across is not a feeling of respect for the man from the people around him, but more a sense of how difficult it must have been to work with him. This may have been because he was so focused, so driven and intuitive. It also could have been because he was Michael Jackson, and dammit, they needed the work.
The film opens with some of the lead dancers talking directly to camera, telling the viewer just what working with Jackson means to them. What an inspiration he has been to them. How he has tranformed their lives. There is a positivity throughout the film that simply does not ring true in the way Ortega goes about his business of wishful deity creation. Some of the dancers seem to genuinely mean what they say and I'm sure their feelings are true, in that gushing showbiz kind of way. The same way that Jackson expresses his love for his brothers and his parents at the end of one of his sets. Like the show itself, the entire event both on the stage and off it seems fake, contrived and ever so slightly insidious.
Like all things in Jackson's later years, from the perspective of an outsider, his entire life seems to seamlessly blend into performance. Even away from the camera, his world was as bizarre as any of us can imagine life being. Take him onto a stage and there was little difference. In this day and age, you do have to ask if this was really what it took to be the King of Pop. Were the sacrifices he made in his personal life worth an early death, for the sake of an unimaginably stratospheric career? Or was it the person that created the monster? There are as many hugely successful artists that deal with fame far better than Jackson could ever have dreamed of doing, so it does beg the question of whether Jackson was a misunderstood genius, or simply, singing 'ABC' in the right place at the right time, and everything else was just his demons.
Maybe we will never know, as anyone who claims to understand the circus that was Michael Jackson, will probably only tell you for a fee, and even then you will most likely get the Hollywood version. Not the real one. Unfortunately, the legacy we are left with here is woefully inadequate of a life that was, by any opinion, extraordinary.
