Fanatical Apathy

F.A. TV Review: This Way to the Egress

"Excessive media attention continues to destroy what's left of Michael Jackson. Film at eleven!"

27 million Americans tuned in to watch last night's Michael Jackson documentary, and I was one of 'em. The numbers aren't as impressive as Britain's (half the nation watched), but it's pretty impressive. We still love our freak shows, but (as the popularity of reality television proves) our high moral standards demand that the anomalies be self-inflicted. Unfortunately, after settling in for a good evening's gawk I was treated to a media spectacle that made Michael seem almost rational by comparison.

Well, almost. Before I go on, I oughta point out that Jacko is obviously crazier than a sack of spider monkeys. He's a walking passion play, a police sketch artist's composite of what our culture's obsessions with youth, beauty, and fame might look like if given a (somewhat) human face. He's easily our finest Loony Millionaire since Howard Hughes, and he grants access!

[Photo: Michael Jackson, stumping even the
greatest minds in the comic captioning business.]

But about midway through the program I detected the distinct aroma of ludicrous self-importance and personal puffery coming off of interviewer Martin Bashir. What's a journalist to do when his subject cheerfully reveals every quirk and eccentricity in the first five minutes of an interview? An unschooled viewer might assume that all Jackson really needed was a camera and enough rope!

This is when Bashir went into a desperately weird PI mode, turning the camera on himself and stomping around like a Nabokovian antihero. We were treated to long monologues about the difficulty of his task and moody shots of Bashir staring at the sea and contemplating how he was ever going to confront Jackson one last time about his plastic surgery (the answer, it turned out, was something like, "Um, so, one last time, have you had plastic surgery?").

I suppose it is problematic when you've got a subject who is so devastatingly transparent and all of your "revelations" have already been covered by every news outlet in the world. So perhaps Bashir can be forgiven for some of his odd behavior. But it was odd.

Example: The Germany trip is a disaster. Jackson dangles his baby from the balcony, nearly chokes said dangler while neurotically feeding it the next day, and then ambles off to get his other kids killed at the zoo. All of this had been reported previously.

Then Bashir's voiceover cuts in and direly intones that the Tragedies of Germany were not over for the King of Pop. He would suffer one more abject humiliation...

Cut to the "Let's Honor Michael Jackson Awards" or some such nonsense. The ceremony's in German, Jackson can't tell when he's being introduced, and he ALMOST ENTERS BEFORE HIS CUE. Fortunately, he ducks behind a set piece and kinda crawls awkwardly out of the way.

Now, anyone who's been part of a live event before knows that this kind of thing happens all the time, and there's not a performer out there who hasn't blown an entrance a couple of times. Jackson in that moment didn't seem especially freaky, he just did what I and thousands of other performers would've done. But Bashir would not leave Germany without an Exclusive, so his increasingly melodramatic voice went on and on about the DEGRADATION, the HUMILIATION, and the BIZARRE way that Michael shrugged it off later. Sifting through my own backstage memories (like "The Tale of the Pants, the Embarrassingly Spilled Drink, and the Overly Warm Hair Dryer" - a classic!), I gave silent thanks that none of them were narrated by Martin Bashir. I'd have committed myself to a middle income nuthouse long ago.

Then, of course, there was ABC's "rebranding" of the British program: Barbara Walters solemnly providing encapsulations and previews (in English) of what Bashir had already encapsulated and previewed (in English). She could not have been less useful had she been reading the closed-captioning aloud along with the program. And THEN there was the continual misconduct of the paparazzi, which made me, a lifelong gun opponent, start thinking that some judicious hunting might thin out the herd and benefit everyone...

I couldn't watch the "Primetime Live" special that followed, though apparently 23.5 million Americans were made of stronger stuff. Suffice to say that the opening, featured Chief Inspector Bashir receiving his prize: being interviewed. By now he was in high moral dudgeon, implying that Something Ought To Be Done, and very evidently in desperate need of a crisis counselor after spending eight months with a famous loony.

I turned it off. It was too much. We only tuned in to laugh at the freak, and I ended up overwhelmed with contempt for the callous cruelty and petty ambition of all mankind. And where's the fun in that?

Posted by Adam Felber at February 7, 2003 02:14 PM