aberrations of mourning
Music: Marconi Union: A Lost Connection (2008)
Much of the last couple of days has been spent in planes and automobiles, but that does not mean I have been able to escape the spectre of Michael Jackson, who seems to haunt every screen and speaker. Flying high above Oklahoma I was subjected to the Jackson's grunts for hundreds of miles as the passenger seated next to me reacquainted himself with Jackson's back catalog on his overly loud iPod (interspersed with screeches and kicks to the back of my seat by the misbehaving toddler behind me). Every airport cable television was airing tributes to Jackson's life and music. In the hotel room, cable new programs have been airing continuous coverage of Jackson's demise. ABC has been milking the Living with Michael Jackson docu, a humiliating and altogether bizarre series of interview with that shameless douchebag, Martin Bashir. If you are awake in America, you have been enjoined to mourn. MOURN, OR ELSE!
The mainstream media's maudlin machines have been reengaged, and we are implored toward melancholia (for as long as it sells eyeballs and music, commemorative disposables). Mourning has become a major business in the United States; the conditions of this possibility are the InterTubes and real-time broadcasting, avenues that both elongate the sense of the present and forestall the normal processes of letting-go and giving-up (that is, turning off). Mediated melancholia is an attempt to prolong mourning as long as possible, not simply for healing (which it does achieve) but perpetuating a sense of collective tragedy. Michael Jackson's death is a perfect, commodifyable event: we must mourn, but we cannot martyr.
Of anything I've read or seen, Roger Ebert's eulogistic observations in "The Boy Who Never Grew Up" is the most succinct and poignant explanation for why this mediated mourning is particularly successful at marshalling the melancholic subject. Ebert addresses the central element by offering a rationale for pedophilic desire: Jackson just wanted to be a kid. The issue with mourning Mike that makes it difficult to close up the wound and to let the love object die is the possibility Jackson fucked up/fucked with adolescent boys.
I remember loving Michael Jackson very much as an adolescent. I remember with vividness my favorite Easter: Peter Rabbit brought me a huge basket of peeps, Reese's peanut butter eggs, and a cassette of Michael Jackson's Thriller.
Jackson as been no stranger to the Rosechron because of his weirdness. As I wrote many years ago, his figure is the perfect blog material because so much of American culture is projected on to him---including adolescent sexuality. Yesterday listening to Bashir comment on his unethical, manipulative interviews with Jackson, I couldn't help but remember Zizek's observations about Jackson in an essay on "fantasy":
When a couple of years ago, the disclosure of Michael Jackson’s alleged ‘immoral’ private behavior (his sexual games with underage boys) dealt a blow to his innocent Peter Pan image, elevated beyond sexual and racial differences (or concerns), some penetrating commentators asked the obvious question: What’s all the fuss about? Wasn’t this so-called ‘dark side of Michael Jackson’ always here for us to see, in the video spots that accompanied his musical releases, which were saturated with ritualized violence and obscene sexualized gestures (blatantly so in the case of Thriller and Bad)? The Unconscious is outside, not hidden away in any unfathomable depths—or, to quote the X Files motto: ‘The truth is out there.
And it will be repressed, but not until the melancholic inability to mourn has done its (commercial) work. Not until the fantasy man/boy love has been enjoyed/denied, not until Jackson has been fully victimized himself. This aberration of mourning, with nods to Larry Rickels, must go on.