The Way You Make Me Feel

In the 1980s, everything was so big. I was pretty small, and since
it was hard to tell what size things really were, I always assumed the
myth of Michael Jackson was part hype. When he later went his own way,
so to speak, I easily went mine, despite the misty lavender MJ pin I’d
worn on my jean jacket and kept in my jewelry box. When he died, I was
sad but undisturbed. We had the recordings; we didn’t need the (shell
of the) man. Soon another announcement came out: a posthumous Michael
Jackson movie, shot in the weeks before his death as he prepared for
his final tour, called This Is It. On a talk show, the
director, Kenny Ortega, explained the decision to release the
unauthorized footage: “This movie is going to revive Michael Jackson’s
reputation forever.”

At the same time, Seattle Art Museum was feverishly pitching an
unauthorized, posthumous, behind-the-scenes, man-behind-the-myth art
“event” of its own (This Is It was a movie “event,” not a
movie). The museum’s home page showed a breathless Flash animation
advertising a dead star: Michelangelo. The coming show—which
opened October 28, 13 days before This Is It hit
theaters—would reveal things about Michelangelo you never knew,
things even he didn’t want you to see. He famously burned his sketches,
but here would be a dozen that escaped the flames. Looking at these
would be the opposite of laying eyes on Michelangelo’s most celebrated
works—the hard, cold marbles; the paintings way, way up on that
ceiling—those 16th-century equivalents of MJ’s perfect, produced
recordings. This was Michelangelo in rehearsal. And because this is the
museum world rather than the movie world, they called it
Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings for the Sistine Chapel
and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti, using 16 words when
three would have done. This is it.

Fast-forward to the week after Michelangelo Public and
Private opens. A tour guide is leading a group of teenagers into
the exhibition. “This is really the best part, so I like to start
here,” she says, stopping in a doorway and pointing. The students all
follow her finger.

It directs them to a blown-up photograph of the Sistine ceiling
plastered to the wall. This is glorified Sistine Chapel wallpaper.
Everybody is hushed as they approach and study it. It already has a
small crowd of people standing before it; the rest of the show is
emptier. Somehow, in its attempt to deliver the raw stuff behind the
name, Michelangelo Public and Private managed only to
reinscribe that Michelangelo is and has always been (even during his
life), in fact, very famous. The little drawings bring a few lovely
moments, but the loveliness is drowned out by other artists’ tributes
and decorative objects and documentation: the giant slice of wallpaper,
a 19th-century print reproduction of the Sistine ceiling mounted on the
surface of a table, a miniature replica of David (with an
angrier face) made in 1873 (15 replicas of which the museum had made
for circulation around the city for photo opportunities). All the tour
guide did was genuflect in the direction she was pointed: at the
fame.

Weeks later, I went to see This Is It. This was long after
the very special, limited two-week run the producers originally
announced, but the movie was still playing, as though somebody had
forgotten to take it away. Days before, MTV purchased the rights to
play it in 2011 on regular old cable. The early manufactured scarcity
of the movie “event” had already evaporated; there were only 11 of us
in the theater.

But five minutes in, I knew. This movie was the rare glimpse I’d
been promised. The goods. It.

There are three kinds of footage in This Is It. Ortega
distilled the 111-minute movie down from 80 hours of material:
making-of, including interviews with the dancers; mini-movies, shot to
be broadcast as part of the concert (50 sold-out dates were scheduled
at London’s O2 Arena over nine months); and what Ortega calls “the
miracle footage.”

The quintessential “miracle footage”: MJ alone, onstage, under the
lights, rehearsing “Billie Jean.” You don’t see MJ the accused, MJ the
plastic-surgery victim, MJ the fashion plate, MJ the historical figure,
MJ the alien, MJ the chum of Liz Taylor, MJ the owner of Bubbles the
chimp, MJ the balcony dangler, MJ the baby of the Jackson 5, MJ the
cryogenics believer, MJ the 50-year-old, MJ on death’s
doorstep—you almost don’t see MJ at all. You see a man moving in
a way that no other man has ever quite moved before. Every part of his
body goes its own way, fast and fluid, connected to every minute layer
of music, as he sings. He is the music.

“At least we got a feel for it,” he demurs softly after finishing
“Billie Jean.” But down in front of the stage, his 20-year-old backup
dancers are going crazy. They see what we see: Michael Jackson was a
genius. Even at 50. Even emaciated and freakish and high as hell and
about to die. It’s hard to imagine that anyone has ever had a more
complex, intuitive sense of rhythm. He was not, as I’d assumed, a small
figure hooked up to the prostheses of a 1980s-size production
mechanism; he was a performance giant. It’s not that he values
innovation over repetition; he’s an artist of his era, and he wants
much of the music to be “just like the recording, just like the
recording,” he tells the band. But he was also art embodied. The death
of his body is sadder than ever. It is miracle footage.