Jackson inside the hyperbaric oxygen chamber in 1986
ladylee1979
Posts: 257
On 16 September 1986, a photograph of Michael Jackson, then aged 28 and long embarked on the regal phase of his solo career, appeared on the front page of the National Enquirer. It showed the singer in a striped shirt, dark trousers and white socks, lying on his back with his eyes closed in a hyperbaric chamber of the type used to treat victims of serious burns, embolisms and carbon monoxide poisoning. Such a machine typically consists of a steel and glass or Perspex cylinder inside which the patient is sealed while pure oxygen, under considerable pressure, floods damaged flesh, thus preserving circulation and maintaining tissues essential to the healing process. In Jackson's case, it was claimed, he had become convinced that regular inundation with oxygen could prolong his life by up to 150 years, and so had taken to sleeping in the apparatus, which he had had installed at his home.
Within days, this report crossed the world, and may be said to mark Jackson's definitive transformation in the public mind from shy, mercurial talent into a mysterious eccentric with prodigious whims and, in the end, ruinous obsessions. But the story of the "oxygen tent" was a sham, invented by Jackson himself with various associates who were tasked with adding lurid detail. His manager Frank DiLeo, for example, fretted convincingly to the press: "That damn machine is too dangerous. What if something goes wrong with the oxygen?"It seems Jackson had first seen a hyperbaric chamber two years earlier at Brotman Medical Center, California, where he had been treated after his hair caught fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in Los Angeles. His injuries were by no means grave enough to warrant time in the chamber, but his doctors' explanation of its uses had intrigued him, and he subsequently told his manager he would like to buy one. DiLeo scoffed at the supposed life-preserving qualities of the device (which would have cost $200,000) and managed to dissuade him; Jackson decided instead he simply wanted to be photographed inside it. When pictures of his visit to the hospital for that purpose made their way to the National Enquirer, Jackson seems to have seen an opportunity to make himself appear more enigmatic in the public mind. It was a curious change in attitude, considering his previous anguished responses to rumours about his personal life: his alleged homosexuality, his supposed decision to have a sex change in the late 70s and the initial media reports that his obvious recourse to plastic surgery was spurred by a desire to look like his mentor Diana Ross. Whatever led Jackson to court notoriety now, the ruse certainly worked; it prompted just the first and perhaps least disturbing of the many bizarre stories that would emerge about him in the years to come.
Though it was not true, the "oxygen tent" story now seems to presage so much about Jackson's decline that it is hard not to read the im'age that accompanied it as an emblem of his eventual predicament: reclusive, ailing and unable to reverse his toxic reputation for eccentricity and worse. For the young man in the photograph – whose skin is still brown, whose face has changed since his early 20s but not yet taken on the inhuman aspect of his middle age, whose dancer's body is not yet emaciated – already resembles nothing so much as a sacred or royal corpse.
Here he lies as if in state, awaiting his mourners and a dignified interment. Jackson, who was fanatical in his devotion to the works of Walt Disney, may well have had Sleeping Beauty in mind as he slipped playfully into his crystal bed, or perhaps Disney himself, who was falsely rumoured to have been cryogenically frozen after his death in 1966. There is even a hint of the embalmed body of Lenin, immured in its monument in Red Square, for ever signifying to those who file by it the passing away of a collective dream.
It is easy to be morbid and metaphorical about the unfeigned death of Michael Jackson, on 25 June 2009. In the days that followed, media speculation was inevitably concerned with the state of his body: a body that, in life, had perhaps been subject to more intimate and detailed conjecture than that of any other modern celebrity. Attention shifted swiftly from the immediate cause of death to the ghastly physical condition Jackson had attained in the last years of his life, so that while there was assuredly a story to be unearthed about the drugs that apparently killed him, the physician who might have administered them and the aides who enabled the whole affair, it seemed that what the media most relished was the adjacent story of skin, hair, bone and gristle. It was as if Jackson were recently martyred and his relics now to be disposed as so many discrete reminders of the sanctified whole he had once been. Tabloid readers were told his emaciation was due to his eating "just one meagre meal a day". It was said he had lost most of his hair and wore a wig that covered the remaining "peach fuzz". Bruising on his legs and cuts to his back suggested recent falls. Journalists now spoke of his physical frailty with all the enthusiasm they had once brought to his eccentric behaviour, only this time with an added piety about the tragic pass to which the King of Pop had come.
It was his ruined nose that was most often invoked as a symbol of Jackson's general decay. The nose, one was reminded, had been reshaped up to a dozen times, and as a result either of excessive surgery or botched operations, it had started to die before its owner. For some years it had been conjectured that the tip of Jackson's elfin nose was in fact a prosthesis; without it, asserted a Vanity Fair article, the singer looked "like a mummy with two nostril holes". Formerly close associates of Jackson's denied the most gruesome claims, but admitted that the nose had to be augmented in public; the process of attachment was painful and humiliating, and so he sometimes left off the prosthetic tip and wore a surgical mask instead. Now, in death, his nose continued to fascinate; it functioned often in press reports to instance the horror inside which Jackson had lived for decades, and ghoulish rumours circulated on the internet about the tip of the nose having come off as the dead or dying man was taken to hospital.
The fate of Jackson's face was perhaps the aspect of his oddity that, while he was alive, attracted the most comment and least sympathy – that is, of course, apart from the accusations of child sexual abuse that twice almost destroyed him – and his nose was the reductio ad absurdum of his long and obsessive relationship with plastic surgery. But how did Jackson arrive at this extreme point of delusive self-fashioning? What does it mean to have so vigilantly remade yourself that you end up excising or abrading parts of yourself, irreparably? And then to have salved the remaining, agonised "I" with analgesics and even (as it seems he did) powerful anaesthetics? How much of a self can one reasonably say such a person has left? And what filled that void, in Jackson's case, if not the desires and fears of his public, who were just as morbidly fixated, just as addicted to the cycle of gruesome failure, just as hypochondriacal in their way as the celebrated body they worshipped and then, in time, turned away from, appalled?
To understand Jackson's hypochondria, we have to go back at least as far as his early adolescence, when the child star's ordinary teenage self-consciousness about his appearance seems to have taken a pathological turn. As it was for Warhol, bad skin was the first of Jackson's problems; his acne was covered up on stage with make-up, but off stage he was increasingly aware of the reactions of fans, journalists and others to his complexion. In conversation he avoided eye contact, and grew so fretful about the problem he was reluctant to leave the Jackson family home. As an adult he would recall: "I became subconsciously scarred by this. I got very shy and became embarrassed to meet people. The effect on me was so bad that it messed up my whole personality." Along with his acne, he worried that his skin was too dark. But most of all, from the age of 13, he worried about his nose.
The Jackson family did not make it easy to overcome his fears, according to one biographer; among his brothers, Michael was nicknamed "Big Nose", and his famously tyrannical father Joseph laughed at his son's self-consciousness, insisting he had inherited his own magnificent nose. For Michael, it seems, this was precisely the problem; as soon as he was able, he tried to separate himself personally and professionally from his father.
Jackson had his first rhinoplasty in 1979. In the spring of that year, he fell and injured his nose while on stage, and took the opportunity to have it "fixed". Some months later, he claimed to his family that another surgeon, Dr Steven Hoefflin, who would carry out much of the subsequent work on Jackson's face, had recommended a second operation due to his continued breathing problems while singing. (Much later, when confronted in interviews about his surgery, Jackson would proffer the same explanation for the few procedures he admitted to having had.) It was after this second nose job in 1981, when the change in his appearance could no longer be put down to the sharpening of his features in early adulthood, that speculation began about what, or who, Jackson was hoping to look like. He had been close to Diana Ross since childhood and now, it was pointed out, he was starting to look like her. Jackson strenuously denied the claim. A third nose job is rumoured to have followed in 1984 and a fourth two years later; at the same time, a cleft was added to his chin. It was around this time, according to one of his biographers, that Jackson admitted to one of his household: "I do want to be perfect. I look in the mirror, and I just want to change, and be better… I'm a work in progress."
He submitted to several further operations in the late 80s and early 90s, each one leaving the nose narrower and more upturned, until the skin or cartilage could take no more trauma. One biographer has it that the eventual wreckage was the result of a failed effort to add more cartilage to the already cartoonishly pointed tip. If change was what he desired, Jackson had definitively changed, and there was nothing more to be done.
Among the meagre references Freud makes to hypochondria, one instance concerns a patient who had become obsessed by the condition of his nose. Sergei Pankejeff, a Russian aristocrat whom Freud called the Wolf Man, is better known in the history of psychoanalysis for a dream he recounted in which his bedroom was invaded by a pack of white wolves, a dream Freud interprets as having to do with his witnessing his parents having sex as a young boy. In 1926, Freud referred the Wolf Man to an American colleague, Ruth Mack Brunswick; Pankejeff was suffering, Freud said, "from a hypochondriacal idée fixe concerning a scar on his nose". Brunswick diagnosed castration anxiety, but Pankejeff is now routinely presented as an example instead of body dysmorphic disorder: a state of anxiety regarding an imagined body defect, accompanied by time-consuming rituals of self-examination and reclusive behaviour.
It was often claimed while he was alive that Jackson suffered from body dysmorphia: the surgery, apparent skin whitening and dramatic weight loss were evidence of a distorted perception of his own physical being, and he was incapable of knowing when to stop. It is a plausible surmise. Apart from his nose, it was Jackson's skin that seemed to cause him most concern. In some ways, the bleaching of his skin is a more vexed topic than the history of his nose jobs, because it raises more starkly the question of his attitude to being black. For more than 25 years, the opinion was regularly canvassed that he simply wanted to be white, though his eventual pallor suggested he aimed to go further than that, to become racially as well as sexually indeterminate – androgyny having long been essential to his image – and even vanish altogether. (We might recall Warhol's "best American invention – to be able to disappear".) Biographers have unearthed ex-employees who talk of skin-bleaching creams being delivered to Jackson's home in industrial quantities, and a rumour persists of his having once burned his scrotum with a whitening product. Jackson himself maintained the change in the colour of his skin was due to illness, and it seems he was indeed diagnosed in 1986 with vitiligo, a physically harmless but chronic and distressing condition in which pigment is lost in patches that appear spontaneously and at random anywhere on the body. In 1993, Jackson announced in an interview he had the disease, and claimed that his chosen treatment involved removing pigment from the rest of his body to achieve a uniform appearance. His dermatologist, Dr Arnold Klein, has said that around the same time Jackson had also been diagnosed with discoid lupus, an auto-immune disease that causes skin lesions, loss of pigment and permanent alopecia. It also requires that the skin be kept out of the sun – Jackson often appeared in public with an umbrella.
If it is the case that Jackson suffered from this disfiguring combination of diseases, we may imagine the effect on a young man who was already super-sensitive about his appearance – and who, in an interview with Rolling Stone, claimed to be so jealous of his privacy he was "just like a haemophiliac who can't afford to be scratched". At the same time, we have to acknowledge that sensitivity became part of Jackson's public persona. What one critic has called his "demented self-pity" was expressed in elaborate prophylaxis against the outside world: the gloves, masks and umbrella-wielding entourage may have protected his ailing body, but they also seemed to be deployed with theatrical self-consciousness. (In this regard, he did seem to know when he had gone too far: for a time he planned a Perspex barrier that would shield him from his audience in concert, but eventually abandoned the idea.)
The same is true, surely, of the emotional susceptibility Jackson claimed at every turn of his long artistic, financial and legal troubles; he paraded his sensitivity towards the plight of "the children" (an indeterminate mass whom he seemed to invoke at every chance) in numerous songs and public statements, all the while insisting he had never himself had a proper childhood so ought to be indulged, in middle age, as he acted out his puerile fantasies. At the same time, there was a strain of grisly and fearless physical curiosity in his character. He was rumoured to take a robust interest in the techniques of major surgery and to attend operating theatres at UCLA Medical Center. He seems even to have had a freakish sense of humour about his reputation: the story of his wishing to buy the remains of Joseph Merrick, the so-called "Elephant Man", in 1987, appears to have been concocted by Jackson himself. And in 1999, in what seemed a knowing reference to his growing strangeness, he announced his intention to play the title role in a forthcoming film, The Nightmare Of Edgar Allan Poe.
For the last quarter-century of his life, Jackson's relationship with his body was by turns a matter of morbid public knowledge and pure mystery. He revealed certain facts about his illnesses and was disbelieved; he foisted absurd stories on the press and found they were swallowed whole; even as he became more reclusive, he found it increasingly difficult to control the images and information about his body that breached the cordon sanitaire of immense wealth and professional security. The one story that seemed unambiguous, because he had admitted to it in 1993, concerned his dependence on prescription drugs and, in particular, painkillers. His acquaintance with opiates may have begun after the Pepsi accident; as footage of the incident reveals, the burns to his scalp were extensive. Following the first allegations of sexual abuse in the early 90s, he began to rely on analgesics and tranquillisers to cope with the stress. Four years later, his song Morphine was a haunted memoir of his adventures with the pharmacopoeia. Accounts of his last years are no doubt rife with the exaggerations of special interests, but it seems incontrovertible that his drug use was prolonged and serious, even to the extent of having himself anaesthetised in a desperate effort to find relief from his chronic insomnia. It is this sort of detail, which emerged in the days following his death, that perhaps best enables us to understand how it felt to be Michael Jackson: to have vanished so far inside a world of pain (whether real or imagined) that anaesthesia seemed the only alternative.
According to a religious-political convention that prevailed in slightly different versions from the Roman republic to the Renaissance, the body of a monarch existed on two planes: actual and ideological; biological and emblematic. The doctrine of "the king's two bodies" required that at his death the monarch should be accorded two funerals: one for the bodily remains, the other for the idea, or spiritual element, of his kingship, which was represented by a wax effigy burned in its turn once the king "himself" had been interred. In fact, most versions of the tradition considered the two bodies equally authentic: the effigy or imago was looked on as an emanation of the once-living body rather than its representation. In life as in death, in other words, the king was dual, ambiguous, even paradoxical.
What was the King of Pop – a title, we should recall, Michael Jackson acquired (or rather adopted) only when his career was already in decline – if not a body split in two? The body that performed, the body that his fans adored, was lithe, energised and at the same time impressively controlled in its robotic impersonation of musical or sexual ecstasy. Jackson was never, as a singer or dancer, able fully to let go; his dance moves and vocal tics were stylised copies of gestures and sounds that in the performers who were his models (notably James Brown) had been liberated as well as rigorous, earthy as well as in time. What Jackson projected, for all his mobility and skill, was a set of static tableaux: Michael moonwalking, Michael flicking at his crotch, Michael reduced to his props and (increasingly regal or military) wardrobe. But behind this kingly body was another that was frightened, sick, addicted and hurt. In time, the suffering body emerged into the light and confused us and him about which was the real Michael Jackson, for in his case the real body resembled nothing so much as an artificial imago. We might say that as the music and the musician faded, there was no role left for him to play but that of his own sick and self-tormenting body. In death, he was less talked about for what he had done than for what he had done to himself.
• This is an extract from a previously unpublished chapter of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, by Brian Dillon, published in paperback by Penguin on 6 May at £8.99. Copyright Brian Dillon 2010. To order a copy for £7.99,
Within days, this report crossed the world, and may be said to mark Jackson's definitive transformation in the public mind from shy, mercurial talent into a mysterious eccentric with prodigious whims and, in the end, ruinous obsessions. But the story of the "oxygen tent" was a sham, invented by Jackson himself with various associates who were tasked with adding lurid detail. His manager Frank DiLeo, for example, fretted convincingly to the press: "That damn machine is too dangerous. What if something goes wrong with the oxygen?"It seems Jackson had first seen a hyperbaric chamber two years earlier at Brotman Medical Center, California, where he had been treated after his hair caught fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial in Los Angeles. His injuries were by no means grave enough to warrant time in the chamber, but his doctors' explanation of its uses had intrigued him, and he subsequently told his manager he would like to buy one. DiLeo scoffed at the supposed life-preserving qualities of the device (which would have cost $200,000) and managed to dissuade him; Jackson decided instead he simply wanted to be photographed inside it. When pictures of his visit to the hospital for that purpose made their way to the National Enquirer, Jackson seems to have seen an opportunity to make himself appear more enigmatic in the public mind. It was a curious change in attitude, considering his previous anguished responses to rumours about his personal life: his alleged homosexuality, his supposed decision to have a sex change in the late 70s and the initial media reports that his obvious recourse to plastic surgery was spurred by a desire to look like his mentor Diana Ross. Whatever led Jackson to court notoriety now, the ruse certainly worked; it prompted just the first and perhaps least disturbing of the many bizarre stories that would emerge about him in the years to come.
Though it was not true, the "oxygen tent" story now seems to presage so much about Jackson's decline that it is hard not to read the im'age that accompanied it as an emblem of his eventual predicament: reclusive, ailing and unable to reverse his toxic reputation for eccentricity and worse. For the young man in the photograph – whose skin is still brown, whose face has changed since his early 20s but not yet taken on the inhuman aspect of his middle age, whose dancer's body is not yet emaciated – already resembles nothing so much as a sacred or royal corpse.
Here he lies as if in state, awaiting his mourners and a dignified interment. Jackson, who was fanatical in his devotion to the works of Walt Disney, may well have had Sleeping Beauty in mind as he slipped playfully into his crystal bed, or perhaps Disney himself, who was falsely rumoured to have been cryogenically frozen after his death in 1966. There is even a hint of the embalmed body of Lenin, immured in its monument in Red Square, for ever signifying to those who file by it the passing away of a collective dream.
It is easy to be morbid and metaphorical about the unfeigned death of Michael Jackson, on 25 June 2009. In the days that followed, media speculation was inevitably concerned with the state of his body: a body that, in life, had perhaps been subject to more intimate and detailed conjecture than that of any other modern celebrity. Attention shifted swiftly from the immediate cause of death to the ghastly physical condition Jackson had attained in the last years of his life, so that while there was assuredly a story to be unearthed about the drugs that apparently killed him, the physician who might have administered them and the aides who enabled the whole affair, it seemed that what the media most relished was the adjacent story of skin, hair, bone and gristle. It was as if Jackson were recently martyred and his relics now to be disposed as so many discrete reminders of the sanctified whole he had once been. Tabloid readers were told his emaciation was due to his eating "just one meagre meal a day". It was said he had lost most of his hair and wore a wig that covered the remaining "peach fuzz". Bruising on his legs and cuts to his back suggested recent falls. Journalists now spoke of his physical frailty with all the enthusiasm they had once brought to his eccentric behaviour, only this time with an added piety about the tragic pass to which the King of Pop had come.
It was his ruined nose that was most often invoked as a symbol of Jackson's general decay. The nose, one was reminded, had been reshaped up to a dozen times, and as a result either of excessive surgery or botched operations, it had started to die before its owner. For some years it had been conjectured that the tip of Jackson's elfin nose was in fact a prosthesis; without it, asserted a Vanity Fair article, the singer looked "like a mummy with two nostril holes". Formerly close associates of Jackson's denied the most gruesome claims, but admitted that the nose had to be augmented in public; the process of attachment was painful and humiliating, and so he sometimes left off the prosthetic tip and wore a surgical mask instead. Now, in death, his nose continued to fascinate; it functioned often in press reports to instance the horror inside which Jackson had lived for decades, and ghoulish rumours circulated on the internet about the tip of the nose having come off as the dead or dying man was taken to hospital.
The fate of Jackson's face was perhaps the aspect of his oddity that, while he was alive, attracted the most comment and least sympathy – that is, of course, apart from the accusations of child sexual abuse that twice almost destroyed him – and his nose was the reductio ad absurdum of his long and obsessive relationship with plastic surgery. But how did Jackson arrive at this extreme point of delusive self-fashioning? What does it mean to have so vigilantly remade yourself that you end up excising or abrading parts of yourself, irreparably? And then to have salved the remaining, agonised "I" with analgesics and even (as it seems he did) powerful anaesthetics? How much of a self can one reasonably say such a person has left? And what filled that void, in Jackson's case, if not the desires and fears of his public, who were just as morbidly fixated, just as addicted to the cycle of gruesome failure, just as hypochondriacal in their way as the celebrated body they worshipped and then, in time, turned away from, appalled?
To understand Jackson's hypochondria, we have to go back at least as far as his early adolescence, when the child star's ordinary teenage self-consciousness about his appearance seems to have taken a pathological turn. As it was for Warhol, bad skin was the first of Jackson's problems; his acne was covered up on stage with make-up, but off stage he was increasingly aware of the reactions of fans, journalists and others to his complexion. In conversation he avoided eye contact, and grew so fretful about the problem he was reluctant to leave the Jackson family home. As an adult he would recall: "I became subconsciously scarred by this. I got very shy and became embarrassed to meet people. The effect on me was so bad that it messed up my whole personality." Along with his acne, he worried that his skin was too dark. But most of all, from the age of 13, he worried about his nose.
The Jackson family did not make it easy to overcome his fears, according to one biographer; among his brothers, Michael was nicknamed "Big Nose", and his famously tyrannical father Joseph laughed at his son's self-consciousness, insisting he had inherited his own magnificent nose. For Michael, it seems, this was precisely the problem; as soon as he was able, he tried to separate himself personally and professionally from his father.
Jackson had his first rhinoplasty in 1979. In the spring of that year, he fell and injured his nose while on stage, and took the opportunity to have it "fixed". Some months later, he claimed to his family that another surgeon, Dr Steven Hoefflin, who would carry out much of the subsequent work on Jackson's face, had recommended a second operation due to his continued breathing problems while singing. (Much later, when confronted in interviews about his surgery, Jackson would proffer the same explanation for the few procedures he admitted to having had.) It was after this second nose job in 1981, when the change in his appearance could no longer be put down to the sharpening of his features in early adulthood, that speculation began about what, or who, Jackson was hoping to look like. He had been close to Diana Ross since childhood and now, it was pointed out, he was starting to look like her. Jackson strenuously denied the claim. A third nose job is rumoured to have followed in 1984 and a fourth two years later; at the same time, a cleft was added to his chin. It was around this time, according to one of his biographers, that Jackson admitted to one of his household: "I do want to be perfect. I look in the mirror, and I just want to change, and be better… I'm a work in progress."
He submitted to several further operations in the late 80s and early 90s, each one leaving the nose narrower and more upturned, until the skin or cartilage could take no more trauma. One biographer has it that the eventual wreckage was the result of a failed effort to add more cartilage to the already cartoonishly pointed tip. If change was what he desired, Jackson had definitively changed, and there was nothing more to be done.
Among the meagre references Freud makes to hypochondria, one instance concerns a patient who had become obsessed by the condition of his nose. Sergei Pankejeff, a Russian aristocrat whom Freud called the Wolf Man, is better known in the history of psychoanalysis for a dream he recounted in which his bedroom was invaded by a pack of white wolves, a dream Freud interprets as having to do with his witnessing his parents having sex as a young boy. In 1926, Freud referred the Wolf Man to an American colleague, Ruth Mack Brunswick; Pankejeff was suffering, Freud said, "from a hypochondriacal idée fixe concerning a scar on his nose". Brunswick diagnosed castration anxiety, but Pankejeff is now routinely presented as an example instead of body dysmorphic disorder: a state of anxiety regarding an imagined body defect, accompanied by time-consuming rituals of self-examination and reclusive behaviour.
It was often claimed while he was alive that Jackson suffered from body dysmorphia: the surgery, apparent skin whitening and dramatic weight loss were evidence of a distorted perception of his own physical being, and he was incapable of knowing when to stop. It is a plausible surmise. Apart from his nose, it was Jackson's skin that seemed to cause him most concern. In some ways, the bleaching of his skin is a more vexed topic than the history of his nose jobs, because it raises more starkly the question of his attitude to being black. For more than 25 years, the opinion was regularly canvassed that he simply wanted to be white, though his eventual pallor suggested he aimed to go further than that, to become racially as well as sexually indeterminate – androgyny having long been essential to his image – and even vanish altogether. (We might recall Warhol's "best American invention – to be able to disappear".) Biographers have unearthed ex-employees who talk of skin-bleaching creams being delivered to Jackson's home in industrial quantities, and a rumour persists of his having once burned his scrotum with a whitening product. Jackson himself maintained the change in the colour of his skin was due to illness, and it seems he was indeed diagnosed in 1986 with vitiligo, a physically harmless but chronic and distressing condition in which pigment is lost in patches that appear spontaneously and at random anywhere on the body. In 1993, Jackson announced in an interview he had the disease, and claimed that his chosen treatment involved removing pigment from the rest of his body to achieve a uniform appearance. His dermatologist, Dr Arnold Klein, has said that around the same time Jackson had also been diagnosed with discoid lupus, an auto-immune disease that causes skin lesions, loss of pigment and permanent alopecia. It also requires that the skin be kept out of the sun – Jackson often appeared in public with an umbrella.
If it is the case that Jackson suffered from this disfiguring combination of diseases, we may imagine the effect on a young man who was already super-sensitive about his appearance – and who, in an interview with Rolling Stone, claimed to be so jealous of his privacy he was "just like a haemophiliac who can't afford to be scratched". At the same time, we have to acknowledge that sensitivity became part of Jackson's public persona. What one critic has called his "demented self-pity" was expressed in elaborate prophylaxis against the outside world: the gloves, masks and umbrella-wielding entourage may have protected his ailing body, but they also seemed to be deployed with theatrical self-consciousness. (In this regard, he did seem to know when he had gone too far: for a time he planned a Perspex barrier that would shield him from his audience in concert, but eventually abandoned the idea.)
The same is true, surely, of the emotional susceptibility Jackson claimed at every turn of his long artistic, financial and legal troubles; he paraded his sensitivity towards the plight of "the children" (an indeterminate mass whom he seemed to invoke at every chance) in numerous songs and public statements, all the while insisting he had never himself had a proper childhood so ought to be indulged, in middle age, as he acted out his puerile fantasies. At the same time, there was a strain of grisly and fearless physical curiosity in his character. He was rumoured to take a robust interest in the techniques of major surgery and to attend operating theatres at UCLA Medical Center. He seems even to have had a freakish sense of humour about his reputation: the story of his wishing to buy the remains of Joseph Merrick, the so-called "Elephant Man", in 1987, appears to have been concocted by Jackson himself. And in 1999, in what seemed a knowing reference to his growing strangeness, he announced his intention to play the title role in a forthcoming film, The Nightmare Of Edgar Allan Poe.
For the last quarter-century of his life, Jackson's relationship with his body was by turns a matter of morbid public knowledge and pure mystery. He revealed certain facts about his illnesses and was disbelieved; he foisted absurd stories on the press and found they were swallowed whole; even as he became more reclusive, he found it increasingly difficult to control the images and information about his body that breached the cordon sanitaire of immense wealth and professional security. The one story that seemed unambiguous, because he had admitted to it in 1993, concerned his dependence on prescription drugs and, in particular, painkillers. His acquaintance with opiates may have begun after the Pepsi accident; as footage of the incident reveals, the burns to his scalp were extensive. Following the first allegations of sexual abuse in the early 90s, he began to rely on analgesics and tranquillisers to cope with the stress. Four years later, his song Morphine was a haunted memoir of his adventures with the pharmacopoeia. Accounts of his last years are no doubt rife with the exaggerations of special interests, but it seems incontrovertible that his drug use was prolonged and serious, even to the extent of having himself anaesthetised in a desperate effort to find relief from his chronic insomnia. It is this sort of detail, which emerged in the days following his death, that perhaps best enables us to understand how it felt to be Michael Jackson: to have vanished so far inside a world of pain (whether real or imagined) that anaesthesia seemed the only alternative.
According to a religious-political convention that prevailed in slightly different versions from the Roman republic to the Renaissance, the body of a monarch existed on two planes: actual and ideological; biological and emblematic. The doctrine of "the king's two bodies" required that at his death the monarch should be accorded two funerals: one for the bodily remains, the other for the idea, or spiritual element, of his kingship, which was represented by a wax effigy burned in its turn once the king "himself" had been interred. In fact, most versions of the tradition considered the two bodies equally authentic: the effigy or imago was looked on as an emanation of the once-living body rather than its representation. In life as in death, in other words, the king was dual, ambiguous, even paradoxical.
What was the King of Pop – a title, we should recall, Michael Jackson acquired (or rather adopted) only when his career was already in decline – if not a body split in two? The body that performed, the body that his fans adored, was lithe, energised and at the same time impressively controlled in its robotic impersonation of musical or sexual ecstasy. Jackson was never, as a singer or dancer, able fully to let go; his dance moves and vocal tics were stylised copies of gestures and sounds that in the performers who were his models (notably James Brown) had been liberated as well as rigorous, earthy as well as in time. What Jackson projected, for all his mobility and skill, was a set of static tableaux: Michael moonwalking, Michael flicking at his crotch, Michael reduced to his props and (increasingly regal or military) wardrobe. But behind this kingly body was another that was frightened, sick, addicted and hurt. In time, the suffering body emerged into the light and confused us and him about which was the real Michael Jackson, for in his case the real body resembled nothing so much as an artificial imago. We might say that as the music and the musician faded, there was no role left for him to play but that of his own sick and self-tormenting body. In death, he was less talked about for what he had done than for what he had done to himself.
• This is an extract from a previously unpublished chapter of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, by Brian Dillon, published in paperback by Penguin on 6 May at £8.99. Copyright Brian Dillon 2010. To order a copy for £7.99,
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What is most disturbing about this story about Michael Jackson is this: why was nobody able to help him with his problems? No real person he could trust? No friend he had a personal friendship with without being on his payroll? That would be the most sad thing and I think if he had real frieds they should come forward and tell their story.
That is what I think also, maybe somewhere in 2008 or late 2008.
but who could really confirm when they were done ??? the only people that could actually give us a much clearer picture are the staff at the staples center...... they were the only other people there..........
I swear...People will believe anything if it's spelled correctly.
Exactly, but I feel that This Is It was made before 2009 but ofcourse I or we can't confirm that. <!-- s
I second that.
Not many people could get that close to Michael Jackson to obtain this kind of info so a vast majority of it is based on pure speculation. Also I'm not sure on what basis Brian Dillon thinks he can write about this sort of thing, he's a Phd grad in English - I studied English for a large part of my degree it doesn't give me the right to psycho-analise anyone. He's not much better than a journalist really.
but what about that "fan""person" who was under or outside the staplescenter filming the THis is it rehersals ?
[youtube:3twl707u]
There's a very important connection here:
<!-- m -->http://exploringthehoax.wordpress.com/2 ... w-bizarre/<!-- m -->
which further links to:
<!-- m -->http://exploringthehoax.wordpress.com/2 ... h-by-coke/<!-- m -->
LOL! penguin dance... LOL! sorry! <!-- s
God bless you for your beautiful writing that truly captures the essence and the talent that I see in our beloved MJ. Thank God for writers like yourself who uses their God-given talents for eloquence and for inspiring the world towards L.O.V.E xxxx You are right! <!-- s:) -->:)<!-- s:) --> Every new, precious detail that emerges about MJ shows me how magical he is! I am humbled by his artistic genius that God uses to inspire me to be more that I even thought I could be!
First of all, I want to thank everyone for all the beautiful comments and the love that each one of you give to our beloved Michael. Once again, I could not read all of the story because of all the lies in this story. I am very hurt by this story. I personally do not know how to deal with all the injustice that MJ has endured in this world. It makes me cry every day. MJ is such a gift from God to me. I told my mum tonight how I love how MJ believes that he is Peter Pan and told this statement to Bashir in the documentary. MJ is pure magic. I hope that this writer understands how much MJ means to so many people across the globe. Writers and the tabloids can continue to re-hash all the lies until the end of time. It will not effect me because I love MJ with all my heart. MJ, you are my special blanket of love, and you are my baby. I love you the most, MJ. xxxxx God bless all of you on this forum. You guys are the love that shines in the darkness of this world. xxxx
Nice post!God bless you Darkchild <!-- s;) -->;)<!-- s;) -->
God bless you for your beautiful writing that truly captures the essence and the talent that I see in our beloved MJ. Thank God for writers like yourself who uses their God-given talents for eloquence and for inspiring the world towards L.O.V.E xxxx You are right! <!-- s:) -->:)<!-- s:) --> Every new, precious detail that emerges about MJ shows me how magical he is! I am humbled by his artistic genius that God uses to inspire me to be more that I even thought I could be!
OH BUT I FORGOT, THAT IS APART OF THE HOAX TOO
OH NO GOD IS SENDING LIGHTNING!
Bit harsh. I think people are entitled to throw ideas in if they think its significant or want to gage people's thoughts. Also its kinda a waste of time to be on a forum dedicated to investigating a hoax death if you think that person is in fact dead.