How My Girlfriend Killed and Resurrected Michael Jackson

My girlfriend was helping clean my room today when she received a phone call from her sister. Gasping, my girlfriend relayed the message, "Kevin, oh my god, Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson just died!"

"Michael Jackson? Who's Ferra Faucet?"

"The girl from Charlie's Angels. Well, she'd been struggling with cancer for a while. But Michael Jackson! How did he die?" she asked her sister.

"Probably his face caved in," said I.

"Ooh," she continued into the phone, "it's giving me chills thinking about it."

I made a spooky sound and started singing the chorus of "Thriller."

As it turned out, of course, Michael Jackson died from cardiac arrest. But that's not the point. The question is, why did this news so surprise us? Why did we care?

I really wouldn't say "care" is the word to describe my own sentiment, but in a sense it's appropriate. Even though I prefer to distance myself from pop culture (or do my best to delude myself), I can't feign total indifference. Jackson's "ripe" age of fifty is not excuse enough for my surprise, though. I think my girlfriend, were she more particular in her analysis of the situation, would have qualified Jackson's death (as a result of his stressful life, and dependence on plastic surgeons and who-knows-how-many drugs) in the same manner as she did Fawcett's: "Well, he'd been struggling with himself for a while." Yes -- Jackson was certainly not "well", that we cannot deny (this un-wellness was at least half of his never-ending allure). Nevertheless, some part of me, if even but a small thrill-based part inevitable of this media-powered culture, did care -- probably not for Michael Jackson himself, of course, but for the news. I "enjoyed" the news -- not in a sadistic sense, but in the "ooh, news!" sense: the sense in which we're all guilty of enjoying news. This is no crime: news is news, not the people it represents. It is virtual, and most of its content, like popstars and homicides and wars in Iraq, never exist to us beyond those virtual media within our lifetimes. That is why Michael Jackson is not dead.

I have never met Michael Jackson, nor even seen him "live" and "in person" (not that either experience would have done much to make him more "real" to me); I have only met him virtually. I have met his music, his iconography, and undoubtedly, his indelible mark on culture. In short, I am well-acquainted with all the parts of him that will not die; the parts for which he has always been, and will remain, best known. His physical death...so what? I think you'd agree it would be much more shocking to learn that all of his records (not just his music albums, but literally all records of him) had suddenly disappeared off the face of the planet. Of course, in such a scenario this news would be hypothetically impossible to learn, for the scenario would mean that my memories of him would disappear as well. "Michael Jackson is dead"...what does that mean when he's still moonwalking in all of our heads, where he's always lived best?

A moment ago, my girlfriend, who was watching Access Hollywood (or some such drivel), which was covering the Farrah Fawcett story, said, "Oh, maybe he didn't actually die. There's nothing about him."

Suddenly Michael Jackson was alive again, come back from the dead like one of his own dancing zombies (what spooky foreshadowing that music video was!). But then she changed the channel to the news:

"Oh, look, he is dead."

Et voila -- "Michael Jackson" was dead all over again! With a word, the news anchor murdered the body of Michael Jackson, and with another word, my girlfriend put him back in the grave again for me -- that is, with 100% certainty.

But "killed" who or what, exactly? As I've been saying, a small aspect thereof, obviously. This is extremely ironic, because Jackson's physical body is one of the biggest icons by which we know him, of course, but the continued existence of this actual body (oh, by the way, which body? Michael has enjoyed several.) has little to do with its continued existence in actuality. The millions of images of Jackson, both visual and auditory, and the millions of copies of each of those images, ensure that Jackson -- barring a geological passage of time, a strange international totalitarianism, or global destruction -- will, for all practical purposes, never "die." You can say that Michael Jackson, just as everyone does, had a personal side that no one ever completely knew, or ever will know -- so yes, that part, like his mortal physical body, is dead. But the Michael Jackson as we knew him is, after all, how he was best known, as that is how the majority of people knew him. The only person who knew Jackson's "actual" "self" was Jackson himself, and to some extent the relatively few people who "really" knew him. Thus the "majority" of what Michael Jackson was is still alive and well -- better than ever, even. (This death will market many posthumous albums, books, tribute acts, and biopics, spreading Michael even further, and earning many people lots of money at the same time.) In the years of tomorrow, you and I will listen to Michael Jackson, watch Michael Jackson, and talk about Michael Jackson in much the same manner as we did when he was still alive. People will make money off him in much the same manner as they did. He is alive.

To mourn the death of Jackson's body now is as absurd as mourning the death of his African skin and facial features. (Oh wait, we did mourn it. We disapproved of it -- and disbelieved his claims of vitilligo. Was that what our disapproval was really about? Our disorienting disattachment from a familiar, more temporally consistent, "normally" classifiable identity?) Jackson's "body" has died several times before. All of ours do, actually. Old people mourn their younger bodies -- and go to many lengths to get them back. Many young people mourn their current bodies, envying celebrity bodies. Everyone laughs or cries at their old selves, beliefs, fashions. Celebrity bodies change in the same way, only in more extreme degrees -- botox, plastic surgery, face lifts, image changes. Of all celebrities, Michael Jackson simply stands as one of the most explicitly changing ones. His death, in a sense, is simply one last plastic surgery -- this is the absolution Jackson always sought. No more burden of body image, of melting nose. At best, Jackson is in the Roman Catholic Heaven right now, dancing up a storm and screwing all the altar boys he wants. At worst, he's still alive down here as a billion images -- and that's much more than any of us will ever achieve, despite our fancies. If we sympathize him, we do so as we do a character in a work of fiction, not a real human being. He is an image, always has been foremost -- let him remain so. Surely that is why his death is, like Elvis Presley's (who "lives" as well), so "shocking", so "hard to believe." Because all you've ever done is "believe" in him. He is not dead in your mind -- not by far -- and that is where he has always lived.

In conclusion, I'll leave you to ponder the following riddle: Where (and what) is Osama bin Laden?