Michael Jackson once proclaimed to a reporter, “I am Peter Pan”, in a statement that, more than any lengthy biography or documentary, perfectly encapsulated the brilliant and troubled life of this century’s greatest entertainer. He first started performing at the tender age of five and soon joined his older siblings in what became known as the Jackson 5, and by the time he was eleven, Michael’s group had already gained a significant national following. The group, which Michael now led, was signed by Motown Records in 1968, where his career would start its skyrocketing ascent but where his maturity would forever be frozen.
Michael would then live the rest of his life with the confused mindset of an eleven-year-old living in an adult body. He frequently lamented his lack of a childhood, a childhood that he felt was lost to the rigors of his father’s strict discipline and the toils of performing and touring, and so he made it his lifelong mission to recapture what he thought was the glory of youth. His eccentric plastic surgeries, which earned him the derisive nickname “Wacko Jacko”, were really a series of conflicted attempts to preserve his youth but simultaneously look more masculine. He sang about adult themes of love, sex, and violence, but he sang them with the high, pure voice of a prepubescent child. He named his ranch Neverland, after Peter Pan’s imaginary home where children never grow old, where he installed roller coaster rides, a ferris wheel, and a petting zoo, and where he invited thousands of young children, many with terminal illnesses, to come to play with him.
Michael said that he felt comfortable with children because they were his “peers” and their innocence offered him respite from the complicated turmoil of the real world. Michael laughed and cried with them, sang along to Disney movies together, and joined them in sleepovers, the activity he said he most regretted not having as a child. Of course Michael never realized that “playing” with an adult has different connotations than “playing” with a child. He never felt a need to hide any of his activities with children because he thought they were innocuous, but in the exceedingly adult world of modern media, he was sadly transformed into a monstrous child molester. During his most recent courtroom battle, a psychologist who profiled him concluded that Michael’s mindset had in fact regressed to that of a ten-year-old, and it’s no wonder then, that even after he was cleared of all ten charges against him in 2005, this ten-year-old walked away very visibly shaken, frail, and hurt.
During this time, he developed addictions to painkillers such as morphine, the substance that is suspected to have caused his cardiac arrest several days ago. This time around, the media, in perhaps one of its most hypocritical displays ever, lauded him as an eccentric but absolutely wonderful individual whose faults they almost entirely ignored. His death is sad not just because we’ve lost, with no exaggeration, the greatest musician the world has ever known – it is sad because it was us who tortured this exceedingly kind and generous man to his premature grave. During his 2005 trial, Michael’s lawyer described him as being “idealistic and naïve”, but is that so bad? With his money, he donated tens of millions of dollars to charities for children and animals; with his music, especially in his later songs like “We Are the World”, “Black or White”, and “Earth Song”, he preached the powers of love, imagination, and unity. If only we had listened, he might still be here with us today, but instead the world has become that much darker without his brilliance.
The first of his songs that comes to my mind now is not a Thriller classic nor a Jackson 5 single, but “Will You Be There”, the theme from the movie Free Willy. It’s about a young boy Jesse, about ten years old, who frees a captive orca Willy from his selfish, manipulating managers. I can see Michael Jackson in that role, as an artless but determined child who challenged the conventions of the adult world, who tried, in his own small but significant way, to make the world slightly less hateful, slightly more caring. But whereas Jesse’s idealistic naiveté allowed him to succeed, Michael’s might have led to his downfall. So I’d like to imagine Michael Jackson as Willy instead – a force of nature imprisoned by a cruel society during his stay with us, relegated to be an amusement park attraction – now swimming freely in the great ocean beyond.
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