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Screengrab by Various Today in Nerve's film blog: Holiday special - 35 people, places and movies we're thankful for.
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I care too much about stars these days. I hate that I am fixated on Tom Cruise's love life. It makes me sick that I can't take my eyes off Britney Spears' swelling midsection, as it incubates whatever Kevin Federline put there. (Seriously, how much seed does that dude need to spread?) Will Demi marry Ashton? I've spent an inordinate amount of time discussing this with my similarly stunted friends, along with Cameron Diaz's skin, Katie Holmes' oral herpes, Catherine Zeta-Jones' cellulite, and whether Jennifer Aniston is still smoking cigarettes. She's no gym rat, so how did Julia lose the weight? It's difficult to know. When did anorexia become viral, and how can I catch a little of what Lindsay and Nicky have? I recently lamented aloud that I spend about $150 a month on Us Weekly, People and Star, money that really should go to a hungry baby in Africa.
"Too bad they can't eat your magazines," my friend said, without looking up from my spent InStyle.
Indeed.
But creepy, stupid Michael Jackson fucking breaks my heart. Don't get me wrong: if he did what too many kids say he did, he should be locked up, possibly for good. And I do believe even the most mendacious of Jackson's accusers — the guy has a sick thing for boys. But as I watched that Martin Bashir documentary, the one in which Jackson admitted sharing a bed with a preteen boy, I felt the same horror you feel when you spot a committed jumper on the perch of a high-rise. Oh, no, I thought. Here we go.
It wasn't just the way Jackson naïvely aired his ignorant proclivities. He laced the documentary with clues about the fetid childhood that hatched his current self: a man-child monstrosity, so repulsive no grown-up wants to play with him anymore. He never cultivated the omnipresent Hollywood entourage. He doesn't even have one passionate fag hag, unless you count Elizabeth Taylor or LaToya, and I do not. The last time he hung around a bunch of guys, he was a boy himself. And these guys, to whom he was related, saw nothing wrong with having sex with delirious groupies next to a child.
But Michael Jackson did find sanctuary in his self-made sanctuary. And he did make friends: boys who cuddled and confided in him, who were allowed to run wild around Neverland in their tighty-whities, drunk on wine and parentlessness. And here's where I depart from the standard accusations of pedophilia. I don't think that's only what he is, necessarily, all laws aside. I mean, I don't see him in
Michael Jackson is almost like a perverted Catholic priest.
the same vein as the schoolyard pariah who delivers your mail by day and patrols the park for stray kids to snatch and bugger by night. He is not the mild-mannered neighbor who helps you assemble your barbecue and later cruises the internet 'til dawn, collecting sick pictures of tortured babies so he can rub one off before retiring. He doesn't swap tapes with his online paedo-buddies, or troll Cambodian beaches for feral, tragic children, trading pennies for head.
There is no duality to Michael Jackson. He doesn't veer between two lives, desperately trying to hide his actions. He is, by turns, deeply ashamed of and terrifyingly delighted with his deeds.
Michael Jackson is almost like a perverted Catholic priest, isolated in a mysterious profession that appeals to the aggressively narcissistic and psychologically stunted. Like those guilty priests, he has messianic tendencies, and he revels in leading herds of awestruck followers in his wake. But, most importantly, Michael Jackson does not think he did anything wrong. This is what makes him not just a danger to society, but the tragic product of a very specific one, honed by the brutalities of indescribable fame and a hugely dysfunctional family.
His participation in the Bashir documentary was not just sheer stupidity on his part — and don't forget, he is a seriously uneducated, ignorant superstar — but rather a public admission. He told the world what he likes to do, and he told the world that he deeply believed there was nothing wrong with what he liked to do. And that's where he departs from the priests with whom he shares his monstrous bent, because no one is like Michael Jackson.
You must have a hole in your soul to end up in a California docket, children pointing their fingers in your mangled face. But if Michael Jackson goes down, I will be sad. Not just because he will likely die in prison, but because everyone who had a hand in making him gets to walk into the sunshine, into their cars (no doubt birthday gifts from Michael Jackson) and drive back to their homes (purchased on the back of Michael Jackson's talent), where they'll get into their beds and sleep like the children Michael Jackson has chronically lamented he never was.
Here's what should happen: Michael Jackson should be kept away from children forever. Rehabilitation is not an option. Putting him in prison serves no one. He should be allowed to work and to produce music with other adults — the proceeds
Here's who should not walk away unscathed.
going to victims of abuse, including, perhaps, some of his own. He should live out the rest of his miserable life in a place that is not Neverland, and not Hollywood. Perhaps Germany. I hear he's still big there.
Here's who should not walk away unscathed: his monster of a father, for starters, who beat the ugly into Michael Jackson and handed him the talent to hate himself. His placid, vapid mother, who polished him off with a dose of dumb obedience. LaToya, who just bugs the shit out of me. (Janet, I don't mind, actually; she was the baby, and therefore the recipient of the residual shame and abuse that hangs like pixie dust over the whole damn clan.) His yucky brothers, who were old enough to know that fucking groupies in the bed next to their baby brother was wrong on every level. Every parent who dropped off, or rather pimped out, their kid at Neverland, secretly hoping that their hungover offspring would emerge clutching big fat checks in their tiny little hands. Every employee at Neverland who allegedly witnessed Michael Jackson groping or fellating little kids and kept silent in hopes of cashing in with a tell-all. And both women who acted as breed mares for money, who handed Jackson the beard of fatherhood. They should go too, all of them.
I hate all their faces, and yet it's Michael who Dorian Gray-ed the legacy of growing up Jackson all over his freaky, iconic face. Michael Jackson may lie, and maybe he's lied all along, but his face does not.
I hate myself a little, too, for my expensive interest in the lives of mostly damaged people I know nothing about, and people with whom I would never want to be friends.
I know a woman whose father — a man I liked immensely — molested her when she was a kid. When she finally told everyone, her family sought industrial-sized therapy, and there was a measure of healing. A few years ago, he got cancer. We watched as tumors crept over his face, caving in the façade of someone who deeply hated himself. To me, it made sense that a child molester would be stricken this way, and I was pitiless about his passing.
But I am full of pity for Michael Jackson. Every time I hear his beautiful music — which was the soundtrack to my own crummy childhood — I can barely remember how much joy it gave me. Now, every song sounds like an elegy, and instead of dancing, I almost feel like crying.
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Lisa Gabriele is the author of Tempting Faith DiNapoli. Her second
novel, The Almost Archer Sisters, will be published in the fall 2008.
She lives in Toronto.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
