“Are You Scared Yet?”
How Michael Jackson Altered the Sensations of Racism, Part 2
It’s hard to convey now, nearly 40 years later, what a phenomenon Michael Jackson’s Thriller video was back in the 1980s. It’s one of those rare works of art that seems to permeate every aspect of the culture at large, from playgrounds to corporate boardrooms. It’s a well-crafted film, to be sure. (One indication of the critical respect it has garnered is that Thriller is the only music video to be preserved in the National Film Registry, an archive administered by the Library of Congress.) But Thriller is much more than a well-made artifact. It also touched something deep in the American psyche. The public simply couldn’t get enough of it, and white Americans were particularly fixated on it.
At the time of Thriller’s release, MTV was the place where music videos were disseminated to most Americans, and its business model was built on “narrow-casting” to young white viewers — specifically, suburban teenagers with access to cable TV and enough money in their pockets to buy albums. MTV was so focused on this target audience that, before the January 1983 release of Jackson’s Billie Jean video, they played very few videos by black artists. MTV’s Mark Goodman explained their policies this way: “We have to try and do what we think not only New York and Los Angeles will appreciate, but also Poughkeepsie or … some town in the Midwest that would be scared to death by Prince.” Or as critic Steven Levy put it in a 1983 Rolling Stone article, MTV was afraid of alienating “white kids in the suburbs, who, according to research, didn’t like black people or their music.” These assumptions about what white teenagers would like to see and hear (and purchase) in effect banned black artists from MTV.
The success of Jackson’s Billie Jean video in early 1983 proved MTV’s market researchers wrong and opened the door for other black artists, including Prince. But even Billie Jean didn’t prepare MTV for what was to come a few months later. Thriller was a cultural tsunami. At the time of Thriller’s release in December 1983, MTV considered a video to be in heavy rotation if they played it four times per day. Public demand pushed MTV to play Thriller twice per hour. This is even more extraordinary when you consider that Thriller is almost 14 minutes long. So at its peak, Thriller occupied nearly half of MTV’s total airtime, with young white Americans compulsively watching it over and over again.
So what was it, precisely, that viewers found so compelling?
To understand this phenomenon, it’s important to realize that Jackson’s emergence in the late 1970s and early 80s as a teen idol offered an evocative new view of black male sexuality, one that millions of white Americans found appealing. However, there persisted the age-old narrative of black men as sexual predators, a narrative that has shaped the American cultural and political landscape for centuries, as detailed in Part 1. This created an odd kind of double vision where these two competing images — Jackson as naive teen heartthrob and Jackson as sexual predator — existed side by side in uneasy tension.
This tension lies at the heart of Thriller. Jackson first appears in the video as a sweet-faced teenage boy out on a date, but he soon turns into a horrifying monster. And then he repeatedly oscillates between the two: innocent, monster, innocent, monster. In this way, Jackson used his art to explore and work through the cultural conflicts surrounding him in a way that strongly resonated with MTV’s audience. Thriller struck a chord deep in the collective unconscious — a chord that vibrated with all the urgency of ancient fears and newly awakened desires — and white viewers especially were mesmerized.
It’s a Thriller
According to John Landis, the director of Thriller, the project began when Jackson called him, told him he had seen his film An American Werewolf in London, and said, “I want to turn into a monster. Can I do that?” Surprisingly, Jackson didn’t seem to like horror movies. As Landis told reporter Marc Lee, “He hadn’t seen many horror films: he was scared of that stuff.” Jackson himself confirmed this in a 1999 interview with Alex Colletti for MTV:
Jackson: I met John [Landis] right before doing Thriller. I called him on the phone … and I told him what I wanted to do and what the concept was. And we came together and we wrote it, the two of us.…
Colletti: Were you a fan of horror movies?
Jackson: Believe it or not, I’m afraid to watch scary movies. Honestly, I don’t quite like to watch them very much. I never thought I’d be involved in making that sort of thing, but I am.
So Jackson wasn’t inspired to make Thriller by a love of horror films. Nor was he guided by “a belief in the occult,” as his famous disclaimer at the beginning of the film makes clear. Instead, something compelled him to make a scary movie despite his reluctance and even distaste for “that sort of thing.” Importantly, his motivation seems to have been a desire “to turn into a monster” on screen.
Rick Baker, the innovative makeup artist behind American Werewolf and Thriller, as well as Star Wars, Men in Black, and many other films, confirmed this in a 2003 interview with archivist Stephen Abramson. Abramson noted that American Werewolf pioneered “revolutionary makeup” that allowed the shift from human form into a monster to appear “live, in front of the camera, without cuts.” The audience is therefore able to witness the transformation from man to beast. Baker told Abramson that was part of Landis’ original vision for the film: “He said … I want to do a transformation scene in a way that’s never been done before.” Baker went on to say, “Michael Jackson loved American Werewolf and wanted to do a similar thing. So he hired John.… He wanted an American Werewolf kind of transformation.”
Abramson then asked about the unusual narrative structure of Thriller, with Jackson turning into both a werewolf and a zombie over the course of the film — an unexpected combination:
Was it determined that we want to have a transformation on camera á la American Werewolf but we also want to have zombies, so we need to figure out a story that does that? Or did the story come first?
Baker responded, “No, the story really didn’t come first. The thing that came first was that Michael wanted to do a transformation.” Because the transformation would occur on screen, the audience would vividly witness that shift from cute young black man to predatory monster. And as Baker repeatedly emphasized, that was precisely what Jackson wanted his audience to experience.
Thriller opens with a distant shot of a 1950s convertible running out of gas on a deserted country road. Crickets chirp in the background. In the next scene, the camera is closer in and we see a young couple in the car. Interestingly, their faces register as “black” but their clothes register as “white” — and not just white but a 1950s vision of whiteness before integration and the Civil Rights movement.
The girl on screen gives Jackson’s character, significantly named “Michael,” a knowing look. Teenagers running out of gas on a date is a familiar trope in American pop culture: generally, it’s a ploy the boy uses to initiate a sexual encounter. The girl seems thoroughly versed in this kind of sexual subterfuge, so she assumes Michael has illicit intentions. He therefore finds himself under suspicion, and the first words of dialogue we hear in the film are Michael insisting on his sexual innocence: “Honestly, we’re out of gas!”
The girl then gives him a come-hither look and asks in a sultry voice, “So, what are we going to do now?” He looks at her with an arched eyebrow, and we as an audience are encouraged to ponder that question also. What are they going to do now? Will they kiss? Will they make out? Will they have sex? The film then cuts to the young couple walking along the road. The scene begins with a shot of her saddle oxfords and his penny loafers, then pans up to include her poodle skirt and his letterman jacket, emphasizing the innocence of the situation. It soon becomes clear that a sexual encounter did not occur. She apologizes for suspecting him, and then Michael asks her to “be my girl,” giving her a ring and shifting this from a narrative of illicit sex to a proper courtship.
The focus of these opening scenes, therefore, is on Michael’s sexuality — specifically, on whether or not he is sexually innocent. It’s a question that dogged Jackson throughout his career, from the 12-year-old singing “Who’s Loving You” with an uncanny knowingness, to the perplexing teenage sex symbol who appeared both exuberantly embodied on stage yet painfully shy off stage, to the adult object of paternity claims and molestation allegations. This ongoing question of Jackson’s sexual innocence lies at the heart of Thriller. Is the Michael character we see in the opening scenes a scheming seducer or merely a victim of circumstances?
By the end of this opening section, it seems obvious that Michael is a rather strait-laced young man who wants to do the right thing as defined in conventional ways. But then everything shifts, and those initial impressions are called into question. Michael speaks that famous line, “I’m not like other guys,” as a haunting melody swells in the background. A full moon appears from behind a cloud, and a metamorphosis begins: fangs appear, and slitty yellow eyes. Michael tells his girlfriend, “Go away!” in a last-ditch effort to protect her from himself, but as the transformation progresses he loses all humanity. His cheekbones and brow line swell and protrude, and hair sprouts from his face. His hands deform as claws emerge from his fingertips. His ears lengthen and whiskers appear as he begins to howl like a beast.
His girlfriend screams and then runs through the woods as she tries to escape him, but he gives chase and attacks her. She falls to the ground and stares up at him with wide frightened eyes as he looms over her, his blackened face and hands moving closer, fangs and claws threatening her like knives. It feels like we are witnessing a rape scene. He is not innocent. He is a beast and guilty of monstrous things. Michael has become a Willie Horton-type figure before our very eyes.
But suddenly the scene shifts once more. In a move that’s fascinating both psychologically and cinematographically, we as an audience abruptly find ourselves in a movie theater watching a mostly white audience react in horror to the images we’ve been witnessing. (Interestingly, there’s a man in the lower right corner who looks suspiciously like John Landis.) A 1980s version of Michael and his unnamed girlfriend are in the audience as well, watching their 1950s counterparts on screen. Significantly, the only person in the theater who doesn’t appear frightened by the movie is Michael, who grins mischievously while eating his popcorn. (It’s an interesting moment: Michael Jackson’s grinning face surrounded by a crowd of horrified white people, and a few horrified black viewers as well. In many ways, this tableau seems emblematic of his later career.)
We can’t see the images on screen but we can hear threatening sounds — lots of growling and slashing noises — and we see Michael’s girlfriend clinging to him as the monster roars and his victim screams. Suddenly, we hear white-sounding voices shout from the screen, “Sheriff, he’s over here!” and “God, look at that thing!” Michael’s smile broadens. His girlfriend wants to leave, telling him, “I can’t watch,” which makes perfect sense psychologically: though we can’t see the images appearing before her on screen, they presumably depict her own rape and murder — or rather, that of the 1950s character she portrayed in the intro.
Through these sounds and images, Thriller evokes and amplifies some of the most deeply entrenched fears white American men and women have projected onto black men for decades. But then those fears and suspicions are disproved and held up for scrutiny. Michael isn’t a beast, a monster, a sexual predator. As Michael himself says, that’s “only a movie” that’s been created to enflame (largely white) imaginations, as we see when the camera shifts to the audience in the movie theater. And importantly, Michael is laughing at it. In fact, he seems to relish the power he has to provoke white fears. As he tells his girlfriend in the theater, “I’m enjoying this!” and he truly seems to be. Through these scenes, Jackson suggests that these stories of black men as beasts and rapists aren’t true but nevertheless have a powerful effect on white America’s collective imagination. And he plays on that tension in the scenes that follow.
After Michael and his girlfriend leave the movie theater, she begins to relax … and so do we as an audience. Once again they walk along a deserted street, just as their 1950s selves did when their car ran out of gas, only this time they’re in an urban setting. The mood is playful as he teases her for being scared by the werewolf movie, and he sings about all the strange and fantastic stories people frighten themselves with — that there’s a “beast about to strike” and “demons closing in on every side.” He even acts them out for her: he pantomimes walking stiff-legged like Frankenstein’s monster, and he grabs the back of her neck as he sings of “the creature creeping up behind.” She laughs because she knows these are only spooky stories.
But then the pattern repeats itself. The mood suddenly shifts as Michael and his girlfriend find themselves alone on an urban street, surrounded by a gang of scary-looking men. This was a very real fear for many white American suburbanites, especially in the 1970s and 80s — a time of intense concern about urban decay and gang violence. (Jackson explicitly addressed those concerns in three films from the 1980s: Beat It, Bad, and The Way You Make Me Feel.) However, closer inspection of this fearsome “gang” reveals they are not men but zombies.
Like the girlfriend, we as an audience are forced to confront those terrors once again. Is it possible that some of those horror stories Michael has been laughing at are actually true? After all, zombies really do seem to be “closing in on every side.” His girlfriend clings to him as the zombies inch closer, but then she realizes to her horror that he’s become one of them. In fact, he’s their alpha. He leads the other zombies in a ghoulish dance (shifting back briefly to Michael during the chorus as he sings with obvious double entendre, “Girl, I could thrill you more than any ghoul could ever dare try”) and then leads them toward her as she tries to escape. She runs away and hides in an abandoned house, but they break in and advance on her in a very menacing way — just as Willie Horton later broke into the home of his victim and menaced her. So once again Michael appears in the role of a sexual predator about to attack a young woman, and once again the worst fears of white America are vividly enacted on screen.
But again those fears are punctured and deflated. His girlfriend screams as zombie Michael grabs her throat … but wait, he isn’t really a zombie. She wakes to see the sweet Michael she knows and loves. Once again he’s the cute young black man who took her to the movies, the same young man who chided her (and us, his audience) for believing all those stories we’ve been told over the years — stories that include vivid accounts of black men as beasts and sexual predators. It’s happened again. She’s let her fears run amok and imagined he was a monster, and again he gently mocks her (and us) for believing those false narratives. As he asks with a laugh, “What’s the problem?” She smiles as she realizes it was all “just imagination,” and we as an audience feel a sense of relief as well. He offers to take her home, and she snuggles against him as they prepare to leave. Once again her fears have proven to be unfounded.
But then Michael turns to face the camera, and we as an audience see something his girlfriend doesn’t: his face has the devilish grin and slitty eyes of a monster. Vincent Price laughs maniacally in the background as we confront that grinning face. We seem to have caught Michael in the process of transforming once again, and we’re left to wonder: what will he become this time? The camera slowly zooms in for a close-up of those frightening eyes as the credits begin to roll.
So is Michael really becoming a monster in the closing scene of Thriller? Or is this just another illusion? By rapidly oscillating between these contradictory narratives and holding them in tension, Thriller forces us to question our own reactions and interpretive process. The question isn’t so much whether Michael is a werewolf, a zombie, or simply a nice young man out on a date. Rather, it’s how do we as viewers decide what he is? How do we interpret him? When he turns to face us at the end and we see him caught in that liminal space between narratives — his arm protectively around his girlfriend, his eyes yellow and cat-like, an unsettling grin on his face — do we simply assume he’s becoming a beast once more? Or has the process of watching Thriller led us to approach the act of interpretation (of interpreting him in particular) in a more nuanced, more sophisticated way?
More importantly, has the process of watching Thriller altered our affective responses to those narratives we witnessed on screen? By repeatedly inflating and then deflating the fears white America projects onto him and other young black men, Jackson performs a type of exorcism in Thriller. He calls forth feelings that white Americans tend to repress — in this case, physical sensations evoked by the story of the black sexual predator, sensations encrypted in white Americans through centuries of cultural conditioning — but then he releases those unruly emotions and provides a degree of catharsis. So by the time those slitty cat-like eyes appear at the end of the film, they evoke a response that’s hard to explain: there’s still an element of fear, but there’s also an unexpected delight. Over the course of Thriller we’ve come to relish Michael’s transformations. (At least, I know I have.) Ironically, Michael seems most alive when he’s undead — not when he’s that repressed young man in the opening scenes, but when he’s a zombie who dances and draws others into his dance as well. There is excitement and true joy at the possibility that he will break free of conventional constraints, transform, and dance once more.
But more than that, there’s joy in the very ambiguity of him, in our inability to fully contain him. The final message of Thriller is not that Michael is sexually innocent. While the film does challenge the racist assumption that he’s a beast or monster and forces us as an audience to question the tired narrative of black men as sexual predators — and more than that, to distrust our own affective responses to that narrative — it also resists putting him back in the position of the repressed young man we see at the beginning of the film. He’s obviously so much more than that. Instead, by the end of the film we’ve discovered a wonderfully untamed creative excess in Michael that we can’t capture or fully describe, and we’re encouraged to relish rather than fear that excess.
Black or White
Sometime after the release of Thriller there began to be whispers, gradually increasing in volume, that Jackson’s appearance was changing: specifically, that his skin was becoming lighter and his nose thinner. It is now well documented (by photographs, doctors, family, and friends, as well as his autopsy report) that Jackson suffered from two autoimmune diseases — vitiligo and discoid lupus — that affected the color of his skin (vitiligo) as well as his skin’s ability to heal (lupus). White patches first appeared on his right cheek, neck, and hands, and then gradually increased in size and number until his entire body was affected.
This encroaching depigmentation once again placed Jackson in an extremely complicated cultural position. He was the most celebrated black man in the world — or more precisely, a man celebrated in large part because he was black and successful, and therefore a vivid symbol that the U.S. was perhaps moving beyond the racism of the past — and now his skin was literally turning white. As with Thriller, Jackson used his art to explore his difficult situation, and as with Thriller, his artistic response functions in ways that reflect his audiences’ anxieties back at them, and then fundamentally alters those emotions.
It’s instructive at this point to stop a moment and look at another artist in a somewhat similar situation. As a child Andy Warhol suffered from Sydenham’s chorea, an autoimmune disorder that causes repetitive involuntary movements. He also developed other autoimmune symptoms, including large white patches of depigmentation on his cheeks, chin, and neck. These patches were pronounced enough that other neighborhood children began calling him “Spot,” and this condition persisted into adulthood. For example, patches of depigmentation are clearly visible in photos of Warhol from the 1950s.
Vito Giallo, a gallery manager who exhibited Warhol’s work in the mid-1950s and later worked as his assistant, described his condition in a 2001 documentary, Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture: “He had a skin problem. I mean, it was very obvious.” Giallo explained that Warhol “couldn’t go out in the sun” because the depigmented areas were sensitive to sunlight, causing “blotches” to appear. According to Giallo, Warhol was very self-conscious about his skin condition: “He was painfully shy because of that.”
Warhol was embarrassed about his nose as well, which he thought was too red and “bulbous.” In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he remembered, “Even the people in my family called me Andy, the red-nosed Warhola.” Joan Fenton, an art editor who gave Warhol one of his first commercial assignments, talked about his discomfort with his nose in The Complete Picture and implied she considered it a trivial issue compared with his loss of pigmentation:
He had white hair and white skin — very pale, pale, pale. But evidently the thing that bothered him was his nose! I mean, the fact that he should go and have cosmetic surgery and be worried about his nose, when his appearance was really not ordinary.
The unusual appearance of Warhol’s skin and nose, along with the uneven pigmentation of his hair and premature hair loss, were a source of deep discomfort for Warhol early in his career — something he initially tried to overcome through hats, dye, hairpieces, and plastic surgery.
However, as Warhol matured as an artist, he stopped trying to hide his “not ordinary” appearance and instead moved in the opposite direction, experimenting with his look, accentuating his differences, and incorporating his unusual appearance into his aesthetic. He fashioned outlandish wigs in unnatural colors — often two-toned, light above and dark below, highlighting his uneven pigmentation — and even framed some of his wigs to emphasize that they were part of his art. Gerard Malanga, who worked closely with Warhol from 1963 to 1970, described this new look as a conscious creation, a type of artistic persona:
He was fully aware that, because of the strangeness of his looks … he had to reinvent himself — create a persona for himself.… And it was the kind of persona that intuitively he realized the media would pick up on.
So while Warhol’s “not ordinary” appearance had once been a source of shame, something he tried to hide, Warhol at some point took the bold step of accentuating and highlighting his unusual look, made it cool, and — even more significantly — made it a central feature of his art.
Throughout his career, Warhol forced critics to question the boundaries defining art. For example, he challenged the separation between commercial art and high art, between pop culture and the world of art galleries and museums. He created screen prints of Campbell soup cans, celebrities, and tabloid photographs and placed them on gallery walls; stacked boxes of Brillo laundry soap and called it sculpture; experimented with avant-garde films that ran for hours and contained no plot or dialog; and created promo graphics for the experimental music group The Velvet Underground, including album covers and music videos. Many critics wondered aloud not only if his work was meaningful, but if it was even art.
His public appearance, particularly his face and hair, began to perform a similar function, confounding not only accepted standards of what is attractive or desirable — or even whether a face should be attractive and desirable — but also popular notions of how to read a face: as identification (personal identity, gender identity, ethnic identity), as symbol, as promotion, as icon, as brand, as art. Warhol’s face distinguished him from others in the New York art scene and announced that he was a different kind of artist, one who expanded the realm of art well beyond gallery walls.
Jackson and Warhol first met on January 31, 1977, when a 49-year-old Andy Warhol arranged an interview with an 18-year-old Michael Jackson. Warhol’s diary entry for that day suggests that neither artist knew very much about the other or his work: “The whole situation was funny because … I didn’t know anything about Michael Jackson, really, and he didn’t know anything about me — he thought I was a poet or something like that.” In a subsequent article published in Warhol’s Interview magazine, Warhol writes that Jackson told him, “You know who I always see you with? … Alfred Hitchcock. I thought you were brothers or something.” From these snippets of conversation, it seems obvious that, at this point, Warhol and Jackson knew very little about each other.
However, Warhol and Jackson began to run into each other fairly frequently at Studio 54, although it’s not clear that they talked much. They both tended to be rather shy in public, and while both loved the atmosphere of Studio 54, they also preferred hanging out in the DJ’s booth and observing rather than participating in the wild scene before them.
Remarkably, at some point during the time that Jackson was getting to know Warhol, he began to develop his own problems with skin depigmentation, just like Warhol. Dr. Richard Strick is a dermatologist hired by the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s office in 1993 to review Jackson’s medical records and examine him. In an interview after Jackson died, Strick reported that “Jackson had a disease, vitiligo, in which the pigment is lost. And attempts had been made to bring the pigment back, which were unsuccessful.”
Strick also stated that Jackson suffered from lupus. This was first discovered during treatment after his scalp was burned in a 1984 accident. As his nurse and second wife, Debbie Rowe, explained during the 2013 AEG trial, Jackson had numerous reconstructive surgeries on his scalp, and several of these procedures failed and had to be repeated — an excruciating process — because his skin either did not heal or created excessive, painful scarring. Jackson developed similar problems following rhinoplasty. Excessive internal scarring following surgery for a broken nose made breathing difficult and impaired his singing. In a 2003 documentary, Jackson said additional surgery “helped me breathe better so I can hit higher notes.” According to Strick, lupus caused problems with the skin on the surface of his nose as well:
Lupus … had destroyed part of the skin of his nose. And his nasal surgeries and all were really reconstructive to try and look normal.… The first one was to try and reconstruct from some scar tissue and destruction that had happened at the skin there, and it didn’t work out very well. And all subsequent attempts, I believe, were attempts to still make it right.… I think he was trying to look like a normal guy as best that he could.
This suggests that by 1993, when Strick examined him, Jackson had had numerous surgeries on his nose — more than he himself wished to have. Importantly, Strick classifies these repeated nasal surgeries as “reconstructive,” not elective.
When the symptoms of Jackson’s medical conditions first appeared, he apparently felt self-conscious and tried to cover them. Karen Faye, a makeup artist who worked with Jackson from 1982 to 2009, alluded to his embarrassment while describing the progression of his vitiligo:
It started happening relatively early. He even was trying to hide it from me. He tried to hide it for quite a while…. In the beginning I tried to cover the light spots to match the darker part of his skin, but then it became so extensive that we had to … make the transition to him being the lighter shade that he is.
So as Faye makes clear, initially Jackson was embarrassed about the depigmentation of his skin and “tried to hide it for quite a while,” just as Warhol had.
However, at some point Jackson gradually accepted this mark of difference and even began to accentuate it, first out of necessity but later as something more: as part of his art. In other words, at some point, Jackson — like Warhol — began to conceive of his face as an avenue of artistic expression. Jackson’s long-time dermatologist, Dr. Arnold Klein, confirmed numerous times that Jackson suffered from both lupus and vitiligo. However, he also said that Jackson himself described his face as art: “You have to understand. It’s hard to … understand this, but he really viewed his face as a work of art, an ongoing work of art.” While some interpret this rather simplistically to mean that Jackson wanted his face to be beautiful, the evidence suggests that Jackson had something far more significant — and far more transgressive — in mind.
Jackson provides intriguing hints about how to interpret his face in his 1995 short film Scream. The lyrics of “Scream” protest the many ways he was misinterpreted by the press and the public, and the film extends that protest by suggesting that the harsh criticism he encountered was caused in part by an inability to understand his art. While Jackson repeatedly sings, “Stop pressuring me,” his character in the video enters a futuristic gallery and considers three works of art. Importantly, the first is a photograph of Andy Warhol’s face — not one of Warhol’s screen prints or other works easily recognizable as art, but a large-format photo of Warhol’s face, placed in a frame on a modular easel in a space-age art gallery. In this way, Jackson subtly suggests in Scream that Warhol’s face is itself a work of art — that it should be viewed and interpreted as art — and more than that, that it is a new, futuristic kind of art.
The way Jackson introduces the Warhol photograph is important as well. After entering the gallery, Jackson’s character leans forward, focusing attention on his face, which is rendered black-and-white in the film. He then pushes a remote control, which shifts the image on screen from a view of his own face to the black-and-white photograph of Warhol’s face, juxtaposing the two. Jackson’s character then pushes the remote again, and the Warhol photo morphs into a second work of art: an abstract painting by Jackson Pollock, whose first name is significant in this context. It emphasizes the self-referential nature of the works Jackson has selected to include in Scream, and it functions like an arrow, telling us which way to look as we interpret the adjacent images.
Soon after, Jackson’s character clicks his remote again, and the Pollack abstract transforms into a third work of art, The Son of Man. In this surrealist portrait by René Magritte, the subject’s face is hidden by an apple — and in Scream the painting has been cropped to focus the audience’s attention even more on the subject’s present/absent face. Our inability to see the subject’s face suggests mystification (just as there was mystification surrounding Jackson’s frequently masked and hidden face) but there are other implications as well. For example, the apple is stylized and floating in space. Clearly, it is not real. In fact, the composition of the painting forces us to acknowledge the constructedness of the image: that it is a painting of an apple, not a real apple. (This is a recurring theme in Magritte’s work. See, for example, his painting The Treachery of Images, where he painted a pipe and then wrote beneath it “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” emphasizing that we must distinguish between an artistic representation of an object and the object itself.) The result is that when we look at The Son of Man, we see a still life — a work of art — where we expect to see a face. This is significant when considered in connection with Warhol and Jackson: as with The Son of Man, when we look at their faces we encounter art as well.
Importantly, all three of these works are conjured up by Jackson’s character using his remote control, implying that these works were intentionally selected by Jackson himself. In addition, all three are viewed in an art gallery, emphasizing that they should be approached as art. Taken together, these three works force us to question our assumptions about art and interpretation while also subtly introducing the concept of faces-as-art. They also direct our attention to Warhol and Jackson specifically: two pioneers in this new genre of faces-as-art.
It’s important to note, however, that while Warhol and Jackson both experimented with their public faces as a new and unexpected art form, they approached this experiment from a very different aesthetic. For example, Warhol’s art always had a touch of irony that blunted the impact of his social critique, allowing viewers to approach his work as something of a joke — and to feel that they could be in on the joke too, if they were cool enough. Jackson never did that. He never undercut his art with irony or let his audience off the hook in that way. Instead, the sincerity of his art forces us to confront and grapple with our own reactions.
In addition, while both artists steadfastly refused to explain their work, Warhol’s face nevertheless announced itself as art in a way that Jackson’s never did. No one was really sure what Jackson’s face meant, and he refused to say — at least, not directly. In fact, the worrisome question of how to interpret Jackson’s face was an essential element of its artistic and cultural power. Through his face-as-art, Jackson exposed a gaping wound in America’s collective psyche and sparked a decades-long conversation about race that functioned as a kind of national talk therapy.
Reaction to Jackson’s face varied considerably from one demographic to another. For example, white critics tended to treat his changing appearance with a mix of condescension and disgust, even hostility — reactions that unmask their sense of racial privilege. By contrast, black writers often mentioned feelings of embarrassment or shame, sometimes mixed with a sense of betrayal or, conversely, an uncomfortably close identification. In a 2015 article, “Michael Jackson and the Pain behind the Mirror,” Jackson photographer Todd Gray described how, for him, this disturbing identification led to a kind of self-revelation:
[A]s I looked at other photographs I’d made of Michael and saw how his hair, nose, and skin color had gradually transformed, I thought to myself that, indeed, his racial self-loathing was becoming apparent. It was at this same moment that I began to understand my own racial self-hatred.
For each of us as viewers, our specific reactions to Jackson’s evolving appearance tell us something important about how we perceive and interpret race, and how we situate ourselves relative to racial privilege.
This underscores the biggest difference between Jackson and Warhol’s work with faces as art: Jackson’s evolving appearance transgressed racial boundaries while Warhol’s did not. That fact alone may explain why critics and the public at large responded so differently to Jackson’s face-as-art compared with Warhol’s. Racial divisions are guarded so vigilantly in the U.S. that Jackson’s bold transgression of those boundaries created a cataclysm that’s still felt today. In fact, it’s hard to express the full audacity of what Jackson did. By the mid-1980s, he was arguably the most famous person in the world, and then — with the whole world watching — he gradually altered the physical signifiers of his race right before our astonished eyes. It was unbelievable, a phenomenon so astounding that people simply could not comprehend what was happening. By shifting the racial signifiers evident in his face and breaching the boundary between “black” and “white,” Jackson revealed that a seemingly absolute barrier was much more permeable than it seemed. The cultural implications of that revelation are profound and far reaching.
In his 1991 film Black or White, Jackson suggests he was well aware of the racial implications of his changing face, and that the cultural uproar it provoked was, to some extent, intentional: an artistic decision. Black or White consists of three main sections — a short intro, the music video itself, and an edgy dream ballet often referred to as the “panther dance” — followed by a quick coda that evokes the intro, setting up a circular structure. The film begins with a young white boy playing air guitar to Jackson’s music, until his father angrily tells him to stop “wasting your time with this garbage.” Soon after, a blast of sound sends the father flying around the globe to Africa. He is about to be tutored not only about music — specifically the rhythmic roots of American popular music — but also about the intersection of race and art. And we as an audience are about to be schooled as well.
As the father, still in his armchair, lands with a thud on an African plain, the music video portion of the film begins. The first thing the father sees is a group of African tribesmen whose painted faces combine “black” and “white” in complex geometries, clearly announcing that their faces are a site of art. However, their faces are not art in the dilettante sense of pretty pictures, though the designs on their faces are aesthetically striking. Rather, this is art of a different kind. It is startling, unsettling, even menacing — art that challenges the perceptions and expectations not only of the suburban white father on screen, but of us as an audience as well.
Immediately after the father’s crash landing, Jackson joins the group of dancers, and his face is a work of art as well. Like the other dancers, his face is a blend of black and white, but in a subtler way than theirs: in his face, the features traditionally used to signify race are in a state of flux. Jackson’s face therefore confuses the signifiers used to distinguish “black” from “white” and, more than that, it demonstrates that it’s possible to dissolve those distinctions. Because of this implicit message and the challenge it poses to centuries of discrimination based on those racial signifiers, his face — while beautiful — is perhaps the most threatening one of all.
As the African tribesmen circle around Jackson, their painted faces situate him within a long tradition of faces-as-art — a tradition that stretches back to Africa before the slave trade began. This allusion to the history of faces-as-art is repeated a minute later when Jackson dances with a group of American Indians, including a man whose upper face has been painted a deep red. Many tribes have a tradition of face painting — often using red, white, and black paint — and this dancer’s facial art fits well within that history. However, the specific composition of his facial painting suggests other interpretations as well, particularly when viewed alongside the faces of the African dancers who preceded him.
Like their faces, his face has been visually split in two, but while their faces were divided vertically, his face has been divided horizontally by a jagged white line. Below the line, his face is its natural skin color, while above the line his face has been painted an exaggerated red — a shade that conjures up 18th and 19th Century illustrations of American Indians by white artists, along with other stereotypes white Americans have imposed onto indigenous populations. In this way, his face paint implies a kind of split consciousness created by colonialism and the racial partitioning that followed, with the stereotypes imposed on him represented above the white line, and a less mediated self visible below that white line.
The music video segment of the film ends with the famous morphing sequence, where one beautiful face transitions into another: a Pacific Islander shifts before our eyes into Tyra Banks, a model who identifies as black, who then shifts into a pale woman with long red hair, who transforms into a dark-skinned man with a beard and dreadlocks, and so on. The way these faces seamlessly morph from one to another calls into question the perceived differences between them, as well as the rather arbitrary boundary markers used to distinguish between race and gender. It seems significant that the music video portion of the film begins and ends with faces — specifically, with an examination of faces-as-art and the mutability of faces.
This is the point when Jackson performs the panther dance, a passionate cry against racial prejudice. It begins with a black panther unexpectedly walking backstage as the morphing sequence wraps up filming. The panther growls at a statue of George Washington (a slaveowner as well as a founding father) and then descends a flight of stairs, perhaps suggesting a descent into the subconscious. The panther transforms into Jackson, who then performs one of the most expressive dances of his career without any music — just ambient sounds. Over the course of the dance, Jackson explores and takes full possession of his body while protesting the cultural forces at work to divide him from himself. Ultimately, he rips his shirt open and baptizes his newly reclaimed body, and in the process he flings water on a glowing sign for the “Royal Arms Hotel” — a thinly veiled reference to colonialism — causing it to explode in a shower of sparks. The panther dance ends with the complete destruction of the “Royal Arms,” suggesting the revolutionary power of this act of bodily reclamation, and then Jackson transforms once again into a growling black panther.
The panther dance was so threatening to the estimated 500 million people who watched the film’s premiere, not to mention the squeamish MTV executives who quailed before the resulting public outcry, that it was rather brutally excised from the film and rarely seen afterwards. The important takeaway here is that these repeated allusions to faces-as-art in Black or White do not exist in isolation. Rather, they are integral to one of Jackson’s most overtly political films — a film that takes on the issue of racial prejudice in ways that are both breathtakingly bold yet at times so subtle they’re difficult to perceive, much less understand.
A 10-second coda following the panther dance lightens the mood with a bit of humor, but it has serious implications as well. Specifically, it shows another rebellious white son — in this case, Bart Simpson — dancing to Jackson’s music despite his father’s orders to “Turn off that noise!” This final coda evokes the film’s opening scene and suggests a recurring pattern of young white boys inspired by a charismatic black artist to rebel against the established social order — specifically, the worldview represented by their suburban white fathers.
Note: This essay is the second of a four-part series. Part 1 takes an extended look at white fear of black men, particularly the centuries-old narrative of black men as sexual predators, to provide a historical context for Jackson’s art. Part 3 looks at the child sexual abuse allegations against Jackson, which in effect turned him into a global emblem of a black sexual predator — the very narrative he had worked to subvert.
