Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I’ve heard very little of this beyond that it exists and apparently isn’t just a concert film or a set of music videos. There was a video game tie-in that was only based on one of the segments, which is about half of what I ever heard about this.

After watching the movie:

From debuting with the Jackson Five to taking “Bad” on a world tour, Michael Jackson has spent his entire life in the public eye. After a reinterpretation of the “Bad” music video entirely cast with children, Michael finds himself swarmed by fans on the studio lot, forced to put on a cartoon rabbit costume to escape them, which gives him the ability to morph himself and his bike into different appearances. Michael expresses a cynical relationship with the tabloid media through a photomontage music video parodying the sensational way every detail of his life is broadcast. Finally, we see a totally disconnected story of Michael and a gang of street kids taking on “Mr. Big”, a mob boss planning to get the whole world hooked on drugs from the schools up, armed with the kids’ pluck and Michael’s reluctance to use the full strength of his magical abilities.

This feels like it has two main parts, as the first several segments have varying degrees of connection to an arc about Michael Jackson’s relationship with his fame, but then after the “Leave Me Alone” music video, there’s no apparent connection to the lengthly “Smooth Criminal” segment.

“Man in the Mirror” and “Come Together” are just live performance music videos. There’s not a lot to comment on for me. “Man in the Mirror” is a widely known song with a positive message, though I feel like it’s an incomplete lesson. It’s about starting, not about how to continue once you’ve set on the path. But it’s not here in any narrative sense and seems like it’s to ease in the people who came for a Michael Jackson concert film. “Come Together” is narratively tied into the end of “Smooth Criminal”, but it’s another live performance only very loosely connected to anything.

The “retrospective” sequence recaps Jackson’s career so far as a medley of hit songs, or at least mostly hits. There was one I didn’t recognize at all, and one that I was aware of but never realized it was one of his. There are few musicians so prolific that they can have popular songs you don’t necessarily recognize as theirs while also knowing them well enough to connect them to most of their body of work. It’s not directly connected to anything, but it feels like the prologue to what comes next, and there’s the interesting choice to use claymation for some songs that I don’t think have music videos.

“Badder”, the “Bad” reimagining, is tough to make sense of why it exists. It’s fun to watch, especially where it takes advantage of the fact that the whole cast is made up of children, but it was only really when I got a sense of the thematic concept of the first half of the movie that I started to understand the decision. “Bad” as an album seems like a tipping point for Jackson’s fame and maybe he’s trying to illustrate his relative innocence at the time. But mostly it’s just really funny to watch these kids dance-fight.

“Speed Demon” is essentially another of Jackson’s hybrid short film/music videos. It’s bizarre, but also genius, to have this film that blends live action and claymation use live action footage of people wearing mascot heads of the clay figures for a lot of the wide shots. The whole thrust of this segment is Michael running from crazed fans and paparazzi, but also using his clay powers to mess with them along the way. It ends with an extended dance sequence just because a song isn’t long enough to showcase Jackson’s dancing I guess. This is at least better justified than the end of the extended “Black or White” film.

“Leave Me Alone” is more visually interesting than the concert videos, and also the inclusion of the song seems to make explicit what this half of the movie has been about, namely that Jackson is very distressed by the predatory nature of the industry surrounding his fame. I think the photomontage style was in fashion at the time, and this is relatively straightforward next to what other music videos were doing with it.

“Smooth Criminal” feels like a completely different movie. It’s a bit disorienting because it’s both broadly written (especially Mr. Big) and because it doesn’t have time to explain pretty much anything. Stuff is happening, deal with it. It has the tone of a kids’ adventure movie starring their friend Michael who makes everything more fun, and in a flashback he’s shown wearing a neat Mr. Rogers cardigan playing very wholesomely in a grassy field with them. Michael is a friend to all children, and Michael is magical. It’s been a long time since I thought about the purported Peter Pan complex of Jackson’s that went into the naming of his home Neverland, but it’s all a little uncomfortable in the context of knowing what we learned about him later.

Anyway, while Michael Jackson’s short film music videos are often strange and barely connected, this piece is bizarre in that it seems to be made to contain the 30s gangster club music video of the song “Smooth Criminal” and yet also the narrative doesn’t have much of anything to do with it and barely justifies its inclusion. After the first encounter with Mr. Big, Michael tells the kids to regroup at an abandoned club, but when he walks in, the story gets put on hold for the Smooth Criminal music video, which gives Mr. Big’s goons enough time to abduct one of the kids as a hostage for a final showdown. Also Michael can turn into a car and a giant robot that blows up goons by screaming his characteristic nonverbal vocalizations. It really goes off the deep end. It seems like the only thing that revealing his true power costs Michael is that he has to leave, but then he comes back to do an epilogue to lead into his live cover of “Come Together”.

My best understanding of what this movie is supposed to be about is that it’s Michael Jackson creating a feature length self-portrait. I don’t necessarily feel like I understand who he was better, but I do understand who he thought he was. It’s dreamlike and disorienting, but it’s cool to watch and full of great music that is justified to varying degrees.