days of wine and boys
Music: De/Vision: Fantasyland
Monday marked a profound Oedipal moment scripted by none other than Walt Disney himself: Peter Pan was spared from his fate with the Evil Step Mother (his "brother" the boy who accused Jackson of molestation) and allowed to fly back to Neverland. Found not guilty by a jury of his fans peers, Jackson must now contend with the immense debt he has amassed defending his paraphillic desires.
In speaking casually to others about the resolution to this fascinating study of mass repression, I often encountered remarks like, "they didn't prove he was a pedophile" or "he lives in another reality than the rest of us." The latter recognition of multiple realities is both true and, of course, ideologically motivated: were Jackson devoid of phallic attribution, were he a woman, he would have been convicted. Perhaps the most cunning aspect of his defense is his characterization as a "boy trapped in a man's body," a hallmark of emasculation without castration. Indeed, it was the threat of the castrating mother, the "hysteric" on the stand who chided the jury, that seems to have spared the King of Pop. Michael Jackson is a paraphillic obessional neurotic par excellence!. In (hyper)reality, neurotics win over hysterics most of the time (unless, of course, the neurotic is a woman, like Cruella Deville or Maleficent).
Of course, I think it's entirely possible Wacko Jacko didn't jack this particular young man, and perhaps he is justifiably innocent of the legal charges against him in this particular case. We do know, however, that he evinces all the hallmarks of paraphilia or sexual perversion: Jackson harbors fantasies that involve nonhuman sexual objects (e.g., strange fashions) and non-consenting partners (e.g., 12 year old boys). It has been argued his strange and weird attachments to objects and children in the popular imaginary was a calculated move; but why? Perhaps to create the situation of the third hallmark of sexual perversion: humiliation. Indeed, one need only look at Jackson's catalog since the mid-1990s to discover being punished, humiliated, and persecuted by "the mass media" or wicked lady-lovers is a favorite fantasy.
Recently Court TV aired a "documentary" titled The Mind of Michael Jackson that I watched while holed-up in the Austin Motel ("so close yet so far out!"). The show fairly convincingly demonstrates how Jackson's profile fits, almost exactly, that of a pedophile (hard childhood; strong identification with young boys; urges to give young boys the love that he never received; abusive childhood; creating conditions to lure children; and so on). I found the opening sequence perhaps the most disturbing: a image of Jackson's white washed face is shown, and then slowly the eyes cross, the nose moves to the left, the mouth travels toward the eyes, all to a creepy, calliope-esque soundtrack. It is a fitting visual representative anecdote of the damage the show causes to Jackson's "public image."
But I suppose that is just it: Jackson has no private world, it's almost entirely surface and public. The more deeply he embeds himself in his fantasyland ranch, the more public his paraphillic impulses become. Does he live, as many defenders claim, in his "own reality?" Is it possible that sleeping with boys did not involve sexual encounter? Yes, it is possible. But not probable. If Jackson was not a pedophile in the early 1990s, he certainly has become one since.
Jackson's "reality" is the one that we-the neurons and gaze-points of the popular imaginary--helped to create; we give the freakish their own world, as both a gift and prison. We don't have to tempt the impossible to satiate our own secret paraphillic desire: Michael Jackson, like Marilyn Mason, can do it for us. It's kind of like the Laff Box, a contraption that generates canned laughter for sit-com programs. Many people think canned laughter is designed to get the home-viewer to laugh as a kind of stimulus. But this is not how the Laff Box really works, nor is this its function. As Zizek argues somewhere (I think in The Sublime Object of Ideology), the Laff Box is designed to laugh for the viewer, so that the viewer does not have to labor.
Michael Jackson, like the Priesthood, functions similarly.