Michael Jackson is a person who represents mystery and the bizarre. A man who is a musical and dancing genius and yet cannot publicly save his image if his life dependent on it. Starting from when he attempted to make a point about race by using his body to cross the skin color barrier which ultimately led to so much plastic surgery abuse that his nose fell off during a live performance. But this is all the modern Michael. The first Michael, we will call him Michael 1.0 who was black represented Masculinity and specifically through the Thriller music video, Kobena Mercer points out a lot of interesting points to illustrate this comparison.
To start, one of the most interesting aspects of the music video is that fact thats its style is not a typical video featuring the band or artist who are playing the song with their instruments and something happening. This is way more of a short film where things happen to Jackson who is playing a character as well as the lead singing star. The ability to do the video in this style is most likely only because of the success of the previous singles and the huge following to Jackson, because as Mercer says, at this point, Jackson does not need to prove himself, so he can afford to explore something creatively. This leads to furthering his success because the video got noticed for being such a critical success, as well as a commercial one. This political power and financial security is one of the many ways Jackson gets to show off his masculinity. Since typically, its always about how much money and power one has, at least in the land of Scarface, which gets used to this day for people to compare themselves to measure their personal Success.
Visually speaking, the video has very specific elements which can directly be seen as the measurement of manliness. First, MJ is taking out a girl on a date (weird if he did that today) and makes her go to a scary movie, which is typically an adrenaline risque macishmomove for a guy to take a girl out to. The irony is that he is starring in the film which he turns into a werewolf, a form of dog which usually a dog is paired with a masculine symbol, the same as a cat is symbolic for femininity. She clearly is not having a good time which MJ takes pleasure in,but after she walks out of the film, he comforts her because he can admit when he is wrong, like a real man. He then turns into a zombie, where he is able to show off his amazing dancing and scare her even more.
Of course, the director, John Landis, is the same director who did American Werewolf in London and used the same impressive make up special effects created in that film for this video, which helped win its critical success.
But where is MJ Today, well like the rest of the family, money is turning out to be a problem and he is losing his infamous creepy Never Land Ranch. Ironic? What does this tell us on masculinity? Seeing as that cinema is one of the biggest creators of ideologies, why do stars like MJ fall, and some fall ever so hard. I think that says something for men being the way they are, which is the tough strong person who is pretends to be unemotional yet on the inside deals with issues of the contrary all the time, a perfect relationship to the actor or star for their displaying of incredibleness sometimes only leads to failure.
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