Michael Jackson

I've been urged to post something about the MJ verdict, and other than shouts of "Free! Free At Last!" -- by which I mean me, personally, free at last from this ongoing psychodrama (hopefully), all I could think of doing was digging this out of the crates, from a paper I gave last year at the Sylvester Conference:

"Associating Garbo’s platonic ideality with a specific transcendence of gender, Barthes wrote of a “face … almost sexually undefined, without however leaving one in doubt.” In doubt of what, we might ask? Not in doubt of her femininity, surely, but not simply. We are also not left in doubt of her presence, of her signature; we do not doubt that, despite its lack of sexual definition it is still her face, still the face of Garbo. Barthes even detected in this sculptural face the traces of self-fashioning: “sharper than a mask,” he wrote, it evinced “a kind of voluntary and therefore human relation between the curve of the nostrils and the arch of the eyebrows.”

A face “set in plaster,” “almost sexually undefined,” with eyes like “two faintly tremulous wounds,” an almost “voluntary” “curve of the nostrils.” Turning from this description to the present, the afterimage burning in our eyes is of course the face of Michael Jackson. And indeed, the mass hysteria his presence caused when he performed live during the eighties testifies that Barthes was premature in declaring the moment past when “the human face … plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy.” Barthes compared Garbo’s eyes to Charlie Chaplin’s, a figure whose universal appeal Michael Jackson has sought to match and exceed. Writing in the early years of rock’n’roll, Barthes might have been able to see musicians taking over the divine presence of film stars, but he did not.

But a caution is in order. My juxtaposition of Garbo and Jackson is not meant to support the common and I think mistaken view that Jackson has sought to transform his face into that of a white woman. What he has attempted is more complex than that; he has sought to transform his face into itself by condensing its signification into the monovalence of an icon. If we attend to his shifting self-presentations as carefully as we do to the tabloid and television assault on them, we see not a steadily decomposing face — emblematized in a sunken, missing nose — but rather a face steadily reduced to two and then just one all-seeing eye, a look distilled to its postmodern essence: the corporate logo. In an effort to reinvent the monumental authority of the sacred icon in a post-secular culture, Jackson has rendered his face into a brand as recognizable his famous glowing socks and glove. If he cannot, as Garbo could, preserve this mystique from our ever more powerfully enabled urge “to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness,” that fact may indicate that the transition Barthes prematurely announced in 1957 has indeed now arrived."