This Is It
Directed by Kenny Ortega
The Michael Jackson concert-rehearsal movie This Is It features, as is the wont of such works of worship, testimonials to the wonders of the person whom the testifiers all call MJ. They talk of MJ's modesty and his perfectionism and his genius. The musicians and dancers who are hired to perform with MJ in the series of 50 concerts he was preparing at the time of his death in June weep with wonder and awe at being in his presence. They've been watching him since he was eight, or were singing his songs in choir when they were eight.
The question that is neither asked nor answered is this: If any of them had a son who was eight, would they conceivably permit that child to spend a millisecond alone with the King of Pop?
One prays not--but of course, many parents did acquiesce in MJ's sleepovers with their male children, more than I suspect we will ever know. In the course of more than two decades during which he lay next to prepubescent boys at night--"sharing a bed," he once said, is "the most loving thing you can do with someone"--two families were subsequently involved in legal action against MJ, one in a civil case leading to a cash settlement reportedly in excess of $20 million and the other in a criminal trial that ended in his acquittal by a jury of Californians who were, one hopes, not his peers.
His untimely demise at the age
of 50 led to the only possible resuscitation of his career, a posthumous one. A still-living Michael Jackson could never have emerged from the shadows cast by his behavior, consistent in every particular with every pedophile's solipsistic conviction that his imperishable hunger to vampirize the innocence of children is nothing less than the highest form of love.
Add to that the bizarre efforts to amend and alter his own appearance, which had turned him into a kind of sideshow attraction of a human being, and you have a man for whom the fatal ingestion of a coma-inducing sleeping draught was the first smart career move in the quarter-century since he established a new standard for worldwide stardom with the release of Thriller.
This Is It, an assemblage of footage from rehearsals for concerts Jackson was to perform in London this fall, is part of that posthumous resuscitation. It's not a movie, it's not a concert, it's not a documentary, it's not really much of anything except an intermittently interesting portrait of how an overproduced pop event is created.
The movie posits the notion that these concerts were going to smash all records, put him back on top, show people things they had never seen before. But it wouldn't have. There's no there there. The MJ we see in nearly every frame of This Is It has no presence. He floats, wraith-like, through the film, and the director, Kenny Ortega, attempts to make him seem more substantial by offering subtitles of nearly every sentence MJ speaks.
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