The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (81 page)

The further innuendo points to Jackson’s ability to romantically thrill Ray:

In his minimovie version of “Thriller” (which was nominated for an Oscar in the short film category), Jackson extends its range of meaning and expands its spectrum of signifiers, with the result that he expresses some of his views about human nature. First, Jackson represents the horror of evil as both an external event embodied in transhuman creatures and as an internal experience embodied in human creatures. Even more pointedly, the terrain of evil embodiment is the self, which has grave consequences for the human being, especially in altered behavior, attitudes, and physiological appearance. It is a totalizing process that affects, even infects, the whole human organism. In the movie, Jackson’s turn from magnanimous protector to malicious pursuer indicates the dialectical tension of good and evil that defines the human predicament and illumines the difficult context of choice between moral opposites, particularly when they are embedded in the same human being.

For Jackson’s “Thriller,” human identity is an imperfect, messy amalgam of good and evil, of
humanitas
and
animalis
, of oppositional tendencies that inhabit the same psychic, spiritual, and biological space. A full comprehension of the social practices, personal habits, and cultural behavior manifested in acts of goodness must be chastened by an awareness of the potential for wrong and harm. Likewise, the judgment of the expression of evil social practices, personal habits, and cultural behavior must be tempered by the recognition of the human possibilities to do good acts and to generate productive lifestyles. In short, there are discernible traces of religious conceptions of human nature and identity in Jackson’s video version of “Thriller” that acknowledge the limits of human capacities for good and also acknowledge an awareness of the human capability to do harm. It is not altogether unlike the view of human nature that informed Reinhold Niebuhr’s political realism and influenced the thought of Martin Luther King Jr.
²⁰

Furthermore, in “Thriller” Jackson has, at least inadvertently, raised the issue of marginality, difference, and otherness in much the same way that he indirectly precipitates conversations about such topics in real life (especially because of his alleged multiple cosmetic surgeries). The werewolf signifies the Embodied Other, the spectacle of a difference so gross that it evokes responses of fear, terror, or horror in gasping onlookers. Some may view this as a proleptic revelation of Jackson’s own existential grappling with his Otherness, to be subsequently revealed in the “horrifying” spectacle of Jackson’s transformation of his own face.

On the matter of his plastic surgery, Jackson complains that as he went from a “cute,” chubby-faced kid to a lean young man, “the press started accusing me of surgically altering my appearance, beyond the nose job I freely admitted I had” (p. 229). Jackson denies having his cheeks altered, his lips thinned, or his skin peeled. In exasperation, he asks rhetorically, “What does my face have to do with my music or my dancing?” (p. 230). Apparently Jackson fails to understand that, as a cultural icon, the seeming de-Africanization of his face and the Europeanization of his image reflect a wrestling with profound questions of identity and selfimage that influence the way his artistic achievements are perceived. In any regard, the werewolf character, although a highly stylized signifier rooted in Jackson’s fantasy life, communicates the aesthetic dissonance, social terror, and personal repulsion that may result from (racial, sexual) forms of otherness and difference.

That the site of otherness would be the body (versus the mind, for example, in forms of madness) speaks volumes of the African American confrontation with debilitating forms and uses of embodiment. The socially, morally, and economically repugnant uses of African-American embodiment, rooted in the commodification of the black body, began under slavocracy in American culture. The black body was articulated as the primal other, the form of difference par excellence. Such uses of the black body were repudiated in African-American religious practices, which redeemed the use of the body by employing it in rites of sanctification, rituals of purification, and acts of celebration. Jackson’s expression of religious joy through his celebrative dance routines captures at least one pole of the redemptive use of the black body articulated in black religious practices.

In “Thriller” Jackson has managed, in his own peculiar and idiosyncratic manner, to encapsulate and represent certain of his views about evil and about human nature and human identity. Jackson as werewolf indicates the possibility of the radical instability of human nature and reflects the underlining of absolute distinctions between good and evil. The werewolf indicates the possibility of human beings embodying radical forms of evil and inflicting evil on other human beings, whether psychologically or in empirical events of social malevolence. The werewolf also indicates the Other, whose very embodiment occasions fear in those he or she encounters.

In his song and video “Bad,” Jackson turns to more familiar cultural and social territory, as he examines the terms of existence for those who must straddle barriers between two worlds divided by race and class. Jackson searingly probes the complexities of making judgments about moral issues generated in the urban inner city. “Bad” is a takeoff on the Edmund Perry story.
²¹
Edmund Perry was a brilliant Harlem youth who graduated with honors from Phillips Exeter Academy, a prestigious prep school in New Hampshire, and was awarded a full scholarship to Stanford University. Ten days after his graduation, while back home in Harlem, he was killed on New York City’s Upper West Side by a white policeman, Lee Van Houten, who claimed that Perry and his brother Jonah had viciously beaten him during a robbery attempt. Perry’s story is told in a controversial book,
Best Intentions
, by Robert Sam Anson.
²²

“Bad” opens with a full camera view of Duxston prep school, couched in winter snow and obvious opulence, supported by ominous strains of music. As with “Thriller,” the serenity and wholesome environment masks the potential for evil that lurks within, as Hitchcock’s proverbial clean suburban landscape conceals the absurdity underneath. We then see the empty hallways and neat stairways of Duxston, followed by a full-face shot of Jackson slowly raising his head from a bowed position, indicating that the story and world we will see are his. The camera breaks to students running down the stairs and halls of Duxston, exulting in glee over the apparent winter break. Jackson is seen running down the hall and
being stopped by a white male student who says that he wants to tell Darryl (Jackson’s character) that he has done a good job this term, that he has worked hard, and that he is proud of Darryl. Darryl thanks him, after which the white student says, “High five, man. Take care.” Darryl exchanges the high five gesture with the white student, and other students are shown running out of school.

The next scene switches to Jackson riding on the train, viewing the world outside his window. The camera pans back to a full view of the aisle and seats, showing Darryl talking to a white schoolmate while other white schoolmates make a mess of the train. To the left corner of the camera, and the train, sits a student of Latino descent with an open book, unsmilingly surveying the scene of recreative havoc created by the white students and glancing toward Darryl as he continues his conversation with the white student.

The scene dissolves, and Darryl and the Latino student are now the focus of the camera, with a mostly deserted background, indicating the passage of time. The Latino student begins to look at Darryl, peering at him as Darryl now sits alone. Over the loudspeaker, the announcer declares that the next station is Grand Central Terminal, the final stop of the train. The camera then pans in to a full-faced shot of the Latino student directing a piercing smirk and cutting glance at Darryl, who is foregrounded in a visually blurred manner while strains of troubling music insinuate themselves in the background. Darryl looks at the Latino student and gives a tentative smile that tests the tension of their nonverbal exchange, then looks away. The two of them, along with the few other passengers, get off the train.

The next scene shows a crowded subway, as the camera pans down a row of riding passengers: first a middle-aged black woman with her eyes closed after an apparently hard day of work; a pensive white woman; an elderly couple who look to be slightly worried; a young black woman looking down; a stern white woman blankly staring forward, the perfect exemplar of a person dulled by mindnumbing, alienated work in a Marxist vision; and finally the Latino student with Darryl next to him, both of their heads involuntarily shaking to the rhythm of the subway’s movement.

The Latino student turns to Darryl, and as the camera focuses on Darryl’s face, the Latino student asks him, “How many guys proud of you?” Darryl quietly counts with his lips and, without looking at the Latino student, says, “Three.” With an ironic smile, the Latino student holds up four fingers and says, “Shoot, four guys proud of me!” Darryl looks at him and they smile, both recognizing that it is a source of perennial surprise to their fellow white students that they are able to excel at school. This is a subtle but powerful critique by Jackson of white liberalism, which has the power to stigmatize and punish with its often unconscious condescension even as it intends to single out and celebrate. This form of critique, of course, is linked to potent traditions of African-American religious and cultural criticism developed over centuries of protest against injustice and struggle for freedom.

As the Latino student prepares to leave his stop on the subway, he gives Darryl a soul brother handshake and says, “Be the man.” Darryl responds to him, “Be
the man.” The significance here is that the high five of the white student earlier is juxtaposed against the soul handclasp of the Latino student. The high five, in this case, is a stylized, fashionable handshake that signifies an ephemeral, external code of relationship between Darryl and the white student. Although the white student is expressing attempted camaraderie and friendship, the high five is more a testament of the cultural distance between them than an acknowledgment of their bonds of social intimacy.

The Latino student’s soul handclasp, however, is a meaningful, internal code of unspoken solidarity generated out of common circumstances of victimization and objectification. Furthermore, the Latino student’s parting exhortation to Darryl to “be the man” is a culturally encoded signifier that subverts the usual semantic meaning of the term and counsels a steadfast resolve to remain strong and rooted in one’s own cultural identity while achieving success at “the man’s” (white man’s) institution.

The next scene shows a row of dilapidated, boarded-up brownstones in Harlem and a row of men standing around twenty-gallon oil drums, warming themselves over the fires they have started within, not an inappropriate metaphor for the condition of black men in contemporary American culture. As Darryl walks down the street a black man hollers at him, “Yo. Yo, blood. Yo.” When Darryl does not answer him (perhaps because he knows that what the man wants he cannot give, or that what he wants he should not have), the man shrugs him off with hand gestures that say, “Forget it.”

As Darryl continues to amble down the street, three other “brothers” catch sight of him, and one of them declares, as he hugs Darryl, “The Black is back. Yo. Black is back, my man,” and the other two fellows joyfully greet him. After this, Darryl goes up into his apartment telling the “fellas” that he’ll be down later. After Darryl goes into his apartment and reads a note of welcome from his mother who has to work late, until seven, he finds a window and looks out over the material morass and spiritual squalor that litter his neighborhood, a Harlem gutted by social misery and urban stench. The next scene shows Darryl and his three friends in the hallways of a building engaging in harmless chitchat and ribbing, as one of his friends inquires about Darryl’s major. When Darryl responds that he is in high school, which requires no major, the friend asks, “Then what’s your minor?” All of them, including Darryl, have a good laugh. Not so funny later on, and indicative of the trouble to come, is when Darryl is asked if the “white boys” at his school wear “turtle shells.” “That’s tortoise shells,” Darryl replies. There is icy silence in the room, thick with resentment over Darryl’s benignly intentioned correction.

After the leader of the group indicates that it is time to “go” (i.e., engage in petty criminal behavior), the scene changes to a street corner, where a man with a cane is transacting a drug sale with another man. After the man with the cane completes the sale, Darryl and his friends are seen leaning against a car, regarding him with a cautious silence. The man pulls back his jacket to reveal a revolver and asks if they are looking for somebody. The fellas, getting the message, depart.

Later, back in a building, the leader declares to Darryl, “Hunts up. Hunts up, homeboy. There are victims out there waitin’ for us.” Darryl utters a defiant question—“ What?”—that rebuts the leader’s criminal intentions. The leader declares, “‘What?’ Shit! Homeboy ain’t home. Naw, see he up at Dunesbury playin’ tennis with his turtle shells.” Thus the struggle to maintain one’s integrity and to construct a stable identity as a member of the underclass in the inner-city community surfaces. Jackson’s video focuses sharply on the central problems of defining identity and examining the moral character of decisions that take account of the social and economic forces that form the background against which these choices must be made. Darryl responds to the leader, “Back off.” After a rough verbal encounter, the leader grabs Darryl and says, “Yo man, what’s wrong? Are you bad? Or is that what they teach you up at that sissy school of yours: how to forget who your friends are? Well let me tell you somethin’, I don’t care what they teach you up there. You either down or you ain’t down. So the question is, are you bad or what?” The basis of their past relationship is shattered, and Darryl must renegotiate the terms of his relationship to his “in-group” if any form of that relationship is to survive.