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The Three Stations of the Cross in Michael Jackson's Calvary
First station of the cross: things. The holy horror of things. An entire apparatus of masks, breastplates, umbrellas, nomadic objects, an entire bubble at once suffocating and over-oxygenated, cloistered and overexposed, operating like a greenhouse and preserving him from the great contamination of things. Not only, as has been said, was it viruses, germs, and bacteria. But life itself as a germ. The living as a bacterium. Matter, objects, and the very air he breathed as soon as he ventured beyond his dear Neverland became a source of infection, pestilence, a macabre obsession -- a school for cadavers. The dandies were like that. I mean the great dandies. The founders of the tradition. Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly. Beau Brummel. Wilde and his Dorian Gray. Red heels to dance on top of a world of vapors and humors. Makeup and artifices to escape the De Profudis of a definitively parasitic abyss. Not to mention Baudelaire who based the principle of his aesthetic, his ethics, and his politics on his disgust with nature and its monstrous proliferations. Michael Jackson was their heir. Michael Jackson, with his vinyl, latex, his mausoleum of a house, his prophylactic terrors and also of course his entrechats of a dance genius, besieged by light on every side, was the last of these great dandies. Add the morbid care that he apparently gave to his body. The hyperbaric chamber where he tirelessly prepared himself for some kind of funereal ritual. He didn't die from a drug overdose; he died because of his desire not only to invent a vaccine against life, but also to want to inoculate himself with it.
Second station: others. Others, truly. No longer things, but humans. Their contact. Their malignant and repugnant proximity. The very presence of others, of their odor, their instantly searching gaze, experienced as an offense, a threat, the source and cause of all violence -- and from which he was only protected by the smoked lenses of his glasses. Hell? Yes, hell. A Sartrean Jackson this time. Or even a Cathar. A Jackson not the least of whose paradoxes was the moment he wrote "We Are the World," the moment where, in other words, he popularizes what must be called the contemporary humanitarian while viewing humanity as a fiasco, men as cankers and their company as a necessary evil, an obligatory compromise, a degrading accommodation that an artist can only begrudgingly make. This reincarnation of Peter Pan sincerely thought, for example, that children were made without anyone touching. This incomplete adult feeds the mad dream -- and, in a certain way, fulfilled it -- of having his own sons without contact, and almost without a mother. This misanthrope, this mutant, was one of the last modern humans to believe -- and to live -- the ancient theorems of the inconvenience of being born. Generation, corruption... Desire without concupiscence... Which, at the very least, shows the absurdity of the witch trials conducted against him the last ten years of his life which were like an endless persecution. Michael Jackson did not want to be a child; he wanted to be a saint. Or an angel. And angels, as we know, don't have a sex. Or only have one in the imagination of the perverted who project onto them their own fantasies.
And finally: himself. His own body and his own face, seen as even greater threats, sites of every danger, the intimate yet merciless enemy that would take a lifetime to subdue or annihilate. There again the singular adventure of Michael Jackson is misread; the mad metamorphosis that he impressed on his face and the repeated plastic surgeries that he inflicted on himself over the course of his life are utterly misunderstood if reduced to a matter of pigmentology -- race, anti-race, self-hate, malaise, unease in his own skin, this reason or that. Look at his photos. Look at this epidermis essentially becoming whiter and whiter, almost like living limestone. Notice this nose reduced to almost nothing, these lips eaten away from the inside, these narrowed cheekbones like those of a Jivaro mask or a Giacometti rendering. Look closely at these dwindled features, this shrinking skin, these eyes that only seem to sit in his skull like a ring on a skeleton's finger. Consider this reduction -- a philosopher would say this epochè -- of a face reduced to its simplest inexpression, having become its own double. Isn't the face the very signature of the human? Its truth? The way that it exhibits and expresses itself? The sign of everyone's singularity, of their priceless uniqueness? Of course. It is always that, a face. And that's why this third chapter, this way of torturing, mortifying, profaning, and ultimately of erasing his own face should be read as the last station of a long and terrible Calvary. Because, having reached that stage, when you have decided to escape the reign of things, and to leave the ranks of humans, and then to become a human without a face, you don't really have too many choices left. Either you reinvent what is considered human, become truly trans-human, and create a genetically modified organism, a GMO. Or you die.
Translated from French by Sara Phenix.
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This piece is pure speculation, BUT you cannot ignore the way Jackson disfigured himself. Many wealthy, successful people have lived similar lifestyles, but how many of them deliberately disfgured themselves the way he did? You only had to look at his face to know there was somethings seriously wrong going on behind that face....
I don't see what Michael Jackson did, as so weird. He just visibly did what we all do and hide and fear, which is the stages of death.
Life is full of apparatuses of Masks - for example most of us hide behind masks, all our life, trying to act normal, be part of a group, and never accepting who we really are.
As for Michael Jackson, wanting to be a Saint, most of humanity does that. Admiring the Pope, Mother Teresa, Priest, Rev. Ministers and Rabbis. Those that do their Gods work. Again, how is that different from what we all do and hide and subscribe to wanting to be.
Asthetics is human, why else to some of us cut our hair, look tanned, loose weight, have clean homes, wear nice clothes, and subscribe to all things age defying. Asthetics.
Michael played out that which most humans, or dare I say, most of us in the Wester Civilization play out, in our own hyperbaric chambers of daily social life.
Michael might have erased his face, but really, by the time any of us reach Ninty-Nine and at the last stages of death, we don't look the same as we did when were 55 - face erased.
So, I don't see what Michael Jackson did, as so weird or different from Any of us. We just saw what he did, while we still cover and masks ourselves up.
Absolutely mind-blowing. And great. And very French.
Wish you had come to Nightcharm first with this.
-- JC
This Article blows something - but it sure ain't the mind.....
Looks like lots of Hot Air.
Wow, what a ridiculous article!
Yeah, I'm with you.
Not since Norman Mailer's speculations, on almost any subject, has Metaphysical Clap-Trap been so ardently exercised. Or, perhaps, even,Jacques Derrida at his most poetic and opaque, when deploying that summa of humane letters, 'Deconstruction'. Ah! The satisfactions of banal rhetoric infused with the intellectual bloat that Mr. Levy is famous for, or is the characterization, more aptly, infamous? Mr. Levy is a brilliant practitioner of the art of self promotion, just as Michael was, but the salient difference being, that Michael possessed a singular talent, a genius, that out-shown his status, as argued by Mr. Levy, as 'sacred monster'. Michael as inheritor of the mantle of the 'Dandy' in all his decadent, ruinous splendor; the central literary conceit to reify Michael's status as the Anti-Christ: the Stations of the Cross. Bravo!
You had me at "Not since Norman Mailer..." banal rhetoric and intellectual bloat...
thank you, StephenKMack, thank you!
jade7243,
Thank you for your gracious comment.
Best regards,
StephenKMack
Brilliant. You didn't mention Des Esseintes in *A Rebours*, but I was thinking of this and it's much in the same tradition.
Does anyone have a link to the original French article? Because it probably reads much better in French.
I very much doubt M. Levi is jumping on any bandwagons. It sounds more like a philosopher reacting to a public event by. . . . philosophizing.
"...in the imagination of the perverted who project onto them their own fantasies."
Exactly!
"...the singular adventure of Michael Jackson is misread;"
...by many, but also, within the errant analysis resides elements of truth. There may be truth in Mr. Levy's analysis concerning Mr. Jackson's face, but Mr. Levi excludes all other things except his analysis, and in so doing seemingly misses his own point. It was Michael Jackson who bore the cross of his life...as it is for each of us. His life consisted of those people and those things and he may resemble other people of note, but as it is for each of us, he was singular in his expression of his potential. Distorted, flawed, beautiful, talented, burdened...free, so it is for every you and every me. No one is making Mr. Jackson into a saint (at least I am not). It was the very fact he was human that made him special. His talent was a reflection of human excellence, of human creativity, of human passion born of love. One could feel a Michael Jackson song. He did his job, he bore his cross, he left his gift, and now...he is gone too soon as a living organism, but he carries on as a loving spirit...forevermore...no more crosses to bear, no more worries, fears, pain, or despair...free to roam, free to not care. For Mr. Jackson, the stuff of humans and things is neither here nor there.
"but Mr. Lévy excludes "
I thought some of your recent articles about the Iran elections were very well written, but after reading this I'm wondering what the NSFW you're smoking.
This was interesting except I sorta just don't care...
Cheap speculation filled with three dollar words adds up to cheap speculation from nobodies who want to bask, however far away, in Michael's glow. People with nothing to say need to say nothing.
I agree with Mr. Levi.
I'll add that we're all outsiders here; everything is speculation. But the mystery of Jackson's life cries for speculation, so perhaps the gods will forgive us all our theories.
Mine has to do with that infernal Pepsi commercial and 3rd degree burns on the scalp. Remember, he was merely human then: an abused kid, brought up too soon in a hothouse of celebrity, insular, confused, with all kinds of issues. But then you add a painful scalp injury, with exploitative doctors rushing to the mix, pushing their drugs and surgeries, and you have a kid, grown but still a kid, ever more drawn towards the kinds of unwise, bizarre choices that only a lost little kid would make. Love the Nutcracker Suite, love Peter Pan? Doctor says, I can make you look like a nutcracker or like that boy in the fairy tale.
It seems to me that Michael Jackson turned his back on the human to become a character in a story. And as we age, we all know that doesn't work out. In his case, the face caved in and the heart stopped.
To those who are commenting that Michael Jackson was an artist and so mere human categories don't apply, okay. But it's possible to be an artist and make poor choices in one's art, one's life, or both. Jackson's face was the shocking and sad testimony to such choices. In the end, we're all just human, and all fall down.
I though the interpretation was intriguing. My most pronounced memory of him will be a Geraldo interview. I could not stop focusing on his upper lip wich look so artificial and wooden like a marionette. All I could think of is what is Michael Jackson seeing in the mirror that makes him think this looks good?
His music and talent were lost on me (not that I didn't think he had it, it just wasn't my cup of tea). I was also annoyed with the constant reminder of how much celebrity worship is a cancer on our media. Sure there's room for entertainment news, but the current non-stop Michael coverage is disheartening.
He was a curiosity, but he wasn't interesting in the least. His music was canned, his face was plastic, he never said anything enlightening or profound. He was a shell painted in lurid colors. His career was based on morrbid fascination. I'm a fan of strange, but you have to be pretty cool to pull it off. MJ never did. He was always uncool, like he was trying too hard but didn't get it.
And in a hundred years, will be people be dancing to the constipated groans of philosophers, or the syncopated beats of musical geniuses?
Are people still “dancing" to Enrico Caruso’s songs?, a musical "genius" from 1909? (one hundred years ago)****** the "constipated" writings of philosophers are still relevant (after thousands of years) ****Pop culture icons***are not “delicate geniuses”.
I'm sorry, I would love to comment on this article except I got lost in all the obscure references and $12 words.
It made me look up entrechats!
You're not French, are you?
French translations aren't bad.
Try German translations into English for a real adventure.
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