Since Michael Jackson Died 15 Years Ago Today, So We're Rerunning this piece on Moonwalker
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie, and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
And I recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.
I wrote about how I revered Allen as a neurotic little Jewish boy trying to figure out his place in the world and how his movies and books irrevocably shaped and molded my sense of humor.
I also wrote about how I would not be able to read and write about Allen’s book myself because my once-fierce emotional connection with the author and his world would make confronting the full extent of his current awfulness too painful to bear.
A commenter got very annoyed with me writing that I would have a hard time writing about Allen going forward due to the enormous emotional baggage I would bring to the endeavor.
They seemed to think that I was making a broad, concrete declaration that, going forth, I would never write about anyone who was problematic, or terrible, or accused of doing horrible things. They furthermore seemed to think that if I did write about troubled, problematic figures, I would consequently be morally and professionally obligated to mention all of those horrible things they did and said for the sake of not being a terrible hypocrite in expressing sadness, disappointment, and alienation about a cultural figure I once venerated and now despise.
This commenter went all in on the slippery slope argument; how could I say that I wouldn’t want to write about new Woody Allen movies or books for personal, emotional reasons and then write about The Beatles without mentioning John Lennon’s abuse of his first wife? Wouldn’t that make me a hypocrite? And what if someone chose something problematic for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0? Wouldn’t that put me in some weird, uncomfortable predicament?
The answer to those questions is that we, as human beings, figure shit out as we go along. I have no hard and fast rules on what I will write about and what I won’t. I deal with these issues on a case-by-case and day by day basis.
So when a patron suggested Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker for this column I only hesitated a little before deciding to do it. I grew up looking up to Michael Jackson as literally the greatest and most successful entertainer of all time. Thriller was one of the first albums I owned as eight year old boy. It’s quite good! It’s better than good! It’s fucking Thriller, man, the gold standard of success and excellence.
The one upside to being in Moonwalker was that Joe Pesci got to keep his natural hairstyle.
But I never identified with Jackson the way I did with Allen. I felt like I knew Allen through his art and his movies. Part of what makes Jackson so fascinating and frustrating is that he seems fundamentally unknowable, to himself and to the world at large. That ultimately proved true of Allen as well, but he tricked the world into thinking that they were seeing his true self when it was always just a brilliant disguise.
Moonwalker has no interest in revealing the real Michael Jackson. It subscribes to the notion that Jackson is such a radiant creature of God that if you were to stare directly at him, you would be blinded by his sheer, overpowering magnificence, the way you would be if you glared directly into the sun.
Jackson’s 92-minute, 22 million-dollar 1988 ego trip Moonwalker prefers to gaze in awe at what was then the hottest entertainer on the planet from a worshipful distance.
What do you do for a follow-up when you’ve made the most successful album of all time? Any goddamn thing you want, of course. The big problem with 1987’s Bad, of course, is that it is not Thriller. That’s true of every other album as well. There can only be one biggest album of all time, and it sure doesn’t look like anyone is going to top Thriller any time soon on that front. But not being Thriller affected Bad more than any other album in history.
Moonwalker opens with an appropriately stadium-sized exercise in fawning hagiography, with Jackson performing “Man in the Mirror” in front of tens of thousands of adoring worshippers with lighters and looks of religious devotion.
Some fans faint. Others boast looks of transcendent spiritual ecstasy as Jackson waxes introspective before 60,000 fans. In a telling bit of myth-making, the image of Jackson onstage is intercut with footage of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, JFK, and RFK before MJ ends the opening song in a signature stance: head tilted upward in defiant pride, arms held out in what can only be deemed a Jesus pose.
Thriller made Jackson the biggest star in the world. Can you even imagine how lonely that must be? How scary? How unbelievably overwhelming! Can you even imagine what that must have been like?
Moonwalker is consequently a vanity project that is fundamentally concerned with the bifurcated nature of fame in general and Michael Jackson’s unique brand of celebrity in particular. It’s the work of a man in profound pain who nevertheless felt the need to not just entertain but be the greatest entertainer the world has ever known.
We’re then treated to a clip-filled, partially animated retrospective that begins with The Jackson 5 and follows Jackson's career up to his then-current album Bad. The retrospective illustrates how Jackson came to be the world’s greatest showman.
Alas, like the shots of fans fainting with delight at Jackson’s shows that open Moonwalker, fans who paid 20 dollars for this videocassette didn’t need this rundown of Jackson’s many, many hits because they knew damn well who Jackson was.
It sure could feel like everyone in the world wanted to be Michael Jackson in the Thriller/Bad phase of his life and career. Who wouldn’t want to be world-famous, beloved, and at the very apex of your field?
Moonwalker suggests that during this same time period, Michael Jackson wanted to be anyone or anything else. In Moonwalker, Jackson is alternately a child, a claymation rabbit, a claymation Sylvester Stallone, a claymation Tina Turner, a car, a killer robot, and a spaceship. Anything to avoid the pain of being Michael Jackson.
The retrospective is followed by “Badder”, a cutesy riff on the “Bad” video where Jackson’s place is taken by pint-sized actor-dancer Brandon Adams (People Under the Stairs) in a shot-by-shot parody that veers occasionally into “Weird Al” Yankovic territory.
With his record company’s help, Jackson is reborn as an adorable child untainted by the trauma and abuse that marked the entertainer’s own famously miserable childhood.
When he leaves the studio where “Badder” is filmed, little Michael becomes big Michael all over again as he is chased through a Hollywood studio soundstage by Claymation fans before he evades the masses by transforming into a speed-obsessed claymation rabbit.
This live-action/Claymation sequence, set to the forgettable Bad album track “Speed Demon,” finds our shape-shifting star morphing from a sassy rabbit into Sylvester Stallone, Tina Turner, and Pee-Wee Herman.
Will Vinton was riding high when Moonwalker was made, thanks to the incredible popularity of the California raisins commercials, and “Speed Demon” proves a remarkable showcase for his gifts.
The character design in “Speed Demon” is impressively hideous and broadly satirical in a way that suggests Ralph Bakshi as much as Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In Jackson’s world, the good and innocent are forever beset by the ugly, vulgar, criminal, and cruel.
The next video, “Leave Me Alone,” another audacious exercise in unconventional animation, finds Jackson trying to elude the dogged forces of tabloids that transformed his personal life into a never-ending circus sideshow, with Jackson as the ringleader and main attraction.
Directed by “As She Was” animator Jim Blashfield using the same techniques as his classic Talking Heads video, “Leave Me Alone” is a powerful, poignant illustration of just how good a Michael Jackson video can be if it’s not fifty-two minutes long and features him turning into a killer Transformer for no discernible reason.
The award-winning video is full of haunting and unforgettable imagery like Jackson dancing alongside the Elephant Man’s bones with a ball and chain on one of his legs. It’s a striking bit of iconography rich with metaphorical and allegorical resonance, as Jackson spent his glorious and tragic career weighed down by trauma, racism, self-loathing, addiction, compulsions, and the impossible price of fame.
Unfortunately, “Leave Me Alone” is followed by “Smooth Criminal,” a fifty-two-minute video in which Michael Jackson turns into a killer Transformer for no discernible reason.
We open in a sunny childhood utopia of sunny skies, flowers blowing blissfully in the breeze and dogs and kids frolicking. Michael is romping about joyously with children who are clearly not related to him, yet worship him as a god when the dog gets lost.
Looking for the adorable pooch, Jackson finds himself in an underground dystopia where evil kingpin Mr. Big (Joe Pesci) is conveniently laying out his evil plans for the benefit of his mean-looking dogs, monologuing cheerfully, “Okay, let’s see: Europe, Asia, I got Miami, I got cocaine, I got crack. I got Los Angeles. I got San Francisco. I got heroin. I got speed. You guys gotta get the middle of this country. Get in the middle of the country, stop those kids from praying in school. First. I want you to hang around the playgrounds, hang out in the schoolyards. You gotta remember, a younger customer always turns into a loyal customer. Every kid in the whole world will take drugs because of me! I want everyone to know! Everybody!”
I could be wrong, but I believe he’s supposed to be the bad guy. Then henchmen machine gun Michael’s apartment in a scene of shockingly gratuitous violence before he wishes upon a falling star and turns into a car. Then, in the only goddamn part of this interminable sequence that adds anything but length to this bizarre project, Jackson shows off his patented Anti-Gravity Lean in the 1930s-styled “Smooth Criminal” video.
Then Jackson wishes on another falling star and turns into a giant robot. A motherfucking giant robot exactly like a Transformer, but off-brand and probably more expensive. Why? I have absolutely no idea! But he starts shooting all the bad guys with his guns and weapons, and then he turns into a spaceship and flies away, leaving the children sad because they worship him, holding him in even higher esteem than he holds himself.
The visual style of “Smooth Criminal” can best be described as incoherent. It occupies a strange time warp universe where the Hollywood glamour of the 1930s coexists uneasily with Brazil-style futurism and great globs of music video-style German Expressionism.
“Smooth Criminal” is such a bizarre fever dream that when Michael Jackson’s otherworldly savior of childhood innocence and nemesis of evildoers and drug pushers everywhere inexplicably turns into an off-brand Transformer, it doesn’t seem that much crazier than what came before it.
With Moonwalker, Jackson had an opportunity to make a statement. He had the leverage to do whatever the hell he wanted and he chose to make an incoherent student film where he turns into a killer robot, blasts the bad guys, then flies to outer space, but comes back for the sake of the children who look to him as a friend but also a savior.
That’s the story Jackson wanted to tell. That’s how he wanted to use his extraordinary power.
Pretty sure he stole this move, and several more, from Corey Feldman.
It’s a testament to what an insane proposition this really is that at no point in the fifty two minute science fiction wish fulfillment Christ fantasy devoted to fleshing out “Smooth Criminal” do we ever learn who Annie is or if she’s okay.
Is Annie okay? Is she okay, this Annie? I have no idea.
We end with Jackson, once again in human superstar form, performing an eminently acceptable cover of The Beatles’ “Come Together” onstage. It’s a delightfully ironic choice of cover, considering that Moonwalker’s defining characteristic is that it does not hold together at all. Instead of coming together to create something greater than its collective parts, Moonwalker wastes time on self-indulgent nonsense that drags down the many elements of this package that are legitimately brilliant, like the “Leave Me Alone” video.
The lingering specter of the sexual abuse charges against Jackson and his death from an overdose make this fawning depiction of Jackson as a champion and friend of children and a fierce foe of drugs even more complicated and sad, but even without the darkness of Jackson’s scandals, this would still represent a stumbling and fascinatingly uneven exercise in myth-making from a man at the top of the world who was about to experience a very steep, very long fall from grace.
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