Thriller by Michael Jackson


Listening to this in 2006 creates a lot of cognitive dissonance. First of all, it's nice to hear some actual funk on this record, which moved Jackson one step further into pop from his best album, the almost all funk Off the Wall. There's a freshness and bounce to these songs, a sense of fun, that's all but lacking in modern pop, obsessed as it is with laughably over-serious porno style sexuality. (For another post: but why must all modern sexuality in the media be a variation on the porgnographic or the stripper; are all our modern celebrities masters of the lap dance, the strip tease, and the come-hither flared nostrils look?)

But here, as I said, it's light for the most part. Bille Jean is the dark exception. But it's a great song, with complex cast of characters and an interesting story to tell. Furthermore, it's a sonic masterpiece. The brooding bass, stabbing synthesizer, and Jackson's heavily mannered vocals create a pretty unique mood, somewhere between paranoia and dread.

But there's inevitably a sense of loss which accompanies all Jackson's good early work. Perhaps only someone as miserably disturbed and fully isolated as Jackson could come alive with joy, at at least the put-on of joy, in a performance, play acting at being happy, just as happy people play at being sad and serious. Jackson's real charade is that he was ever allowed to feel the emotions he claims to feel in these joyous songs.

Looking at his already slightly altered face on the cover of Thriller stings like a rebuke. To myself, my childhood, my culture, and this whole modern world. The assault he made on himself feels like a judgement to me, on judgement on us. Feel for one moment the sense of spiritual vacuity and emotional stuntedness that surrounds us, the fake gestures of sexuality that take on the aspects of pornography (ie, sex that only wants to sell you something), and the fear and anxiety that seems to rule over all our lives, and it's not hard to look at Michael Jackson's mutilated face and think you're looking in a mirror for Western culture. My face there, in his, and so is yours.

Superman Returns


There is another interesting post to be made on the pop-mythology in movies like this, and the fact that I feel a bit chagrined that stories such as Atlas, Prometheus, and even the Gospels are mined to lend this story a feeling of significance and unearned pathos. It's not the echoing and repetition of mythology I find annoying, just the implicit notion that a story like this can only have meaning if it makes its allusions as broad and obvious as possible, which is to say as an allegory. Which is also to say these modern comic book films lack any real purpose of their own, any real conviction in their own stories or characters. Superman doesn't need Jesus to be a moving or interesting story. And frankly, the constant recourse to classical texts that that the audience doesn't know anyway (and has literally explained to them in the film) merely serves to point out the poverty of the crap we're being spoonfed by the movies these days. Some people may find it refreshing that pop-art condescends to inform and make relevant the founding myths of Western culture, but for me it simply reveals how bereft we really are of any meaning our art anymore. If can't find the heroic around us, here and now, Jesus and Prometheus lose their power to truly mean something (sorry for the vagueness, but I'm rushing here) because they are detached from real experience. The crucifixion is merely bloody entertainment if you don't know what suffering means. It's all a hall of mirrors leading back to our continual modern self-regard, shedding the last bit of light left, as it continues to grow darker all around us.

But I digress! All I really wanted to say: Never did I think I would miss Christopher Reeves and Margot Kidder so much. Reeves knew how to play Clarke Kent in a way that emphasizes his utter dorkiness, so much so that the contrast, within himself, that Superman represents has a rare sort of pathos that this new film misses all together. Who is Clarke Kent this time? Just a hunk in glasses. What a shame.