July 12, 2006
Andrew O'Hagan on Michael Jackson
When asked recently to list my favorite London Review of Books contributors, I immediately named Andrew O'Hagan, thinking of this essay on surveillance technology (full article available only to subscribers). Lately he has maintained a low profile in the paper, perhaps because he was putting the finishing touches on Be Near Me (Faber & Faber), a novel due to be published in the UK next month. But I just read, in the current issue, a review-essay about Michael Jackson, which is as entertaining as O'Hagan's best work. There is a very alluring (to me) LRB style—wearing one's intelligence very lightly, as if thinking out loud—and this essay, like the work of Jenny Diski, Adam Phillips, et al, exemplifies it perfectly. Three brief excerpts:
What explains Jackson’s journey from cute little black boy with immense talent and optimism to a mutilated gender fiasco who busies himself impersonating Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8? Jackson is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us laugh, but he might also frighten us into recognising the excesses we demand of those we choose to entertain us.
Later:
We could . . . suggest that our tabloid media have a paedophile element to their subconscious, a child-abusing energy at the heart of their own anger. The British tabloid newspapers demonstrate this every day, with their talk of ‘our tots’ and their enthusiastic ‘revelations’ about suspected child abusers and child murderers. You can’t read the British papers without feeling polluted, not only by the stories but by the degree to which the writers and editors of those stories appear to want them to be true, even before the evidence has proved it. Beyond this, a carnival of sensationalism vies with a deadly prurience, matched by a creepy populist appeal to the ‘common decency’ of the mob. You feel that the hacks are getting off on the horrors they ascribe, getting high on the pseudo-democratic vengeance their stories might excite
And:
What is it about fame that can make people unbearable to themselves? In the right conditions—the wrong conditions—a dreamy and over-watched person of sizeable talent can turn steadily into a tragic being, as vulnerable to the psychically destructive forces of the age as the great heroines of the 19th-century novel or the doomed figures of Romantic opera. Moral captives such as Emma Bovary and Tess Durbeyfield have destruction written into their code of happiness, as does Cio-Cio-San or Verdi’s Desdemona, suffocated by bad men or bourgeois custom but most effectively by a public (an audience) that loves to be complicit in the undoing of women and the aestheticising of their pain. Once you get to Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe or Billie Holiday or Lena Zavaroni, the thrill has become a fetish, and you can see how self-change and death-throes have become in a rather naked way the bigger part of their performance. Michael Jackson has all of that by rote . . .