This Is It

Remarkable, rare glimpses of the tortured souls behind the fame and self-delusion we're well aware of

By Erik Nelson

"This Is It" and "Elvis: That's the Way It Is"

Topics:The Perfect Double Bill, Film Salon, Dvd reviews, Michael Jackson, This Is It, Bruce Springsteen, Movies

British director Peter Hall once said of another British Peter, one named Sellers, “It’s not enough in this business to have talent. You have to have the talent to handle the talent.”

This dark art of handling the talent and dealing with deification is the tie that binds this week’s Double Bill, which would be today’s release of “This Is It,” and its doppelgänger, the 1970 documentary “Elvis: That’s the Way It Is.” Obviously, it does not take any particular genius to point out connections between Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley. Haunted relationship with parent, incomprehensible musical genius, pet chimps, oh yeah, Lisa Marie, to count off just four of the easiest ones.

But this one-sided Death Match between legend and life is what ultimately tied these men together. Elvis and Jackson brought an impermeable membrane of fame and self-delusion with them that kept the real world outside their experience. Both “This Is It” and “The Way It Is” shoot through that membrane, and those rare glimpses of the tortured soul inside are what give the films their real power.

This “splendid isolation,” in the words of Warren Zevon, made the end of their careers a slow-motion bus wreck — and we were all bozos on that same bus.

“To me,” wrote Bruce Springsteen the week Elvis died, “he was as big as the whole country itself, as big as the whole dream. He just embodied the essence of it and he was in mortal combat with the thing.”

From about that moment on, Springsteen consciously crafted that growth industry called his career on Elvis’ shaky foundation. The lessons he has articulated over and over again in both song and interviews are his attempts to try to live outside that bubble of fame. But it isn’t easy. In a recent small book by Big Man Clarence Clemons, the only truly insightful and honestly disillusioning images that emerge are Springsteen’s private jets flying from concert to concert, and the alpha celebrity decorum of who sits just where along the way. And, oh yeah, a second jet for the wife and her entourage. And special planes dispatched for the likes of Brian Williams. But, as Clemons (actually, probably, his hack ghostwriter) points out, Springsteen does make a point of personally greeting everybody in all rows, on every flight, so, it’s a start.

I guess.

Springsteen’s talent has been very comprehensible, and his career arc tightly controlled. Bob Dylan’s talent belongs more in the incomprehensible category, and he has somehow made it work for him. For the last 20 years, Dylan has conducted a bold experiment in hiding in plain sight, called the “Never Ending Tour.” Night after night, Dylan appears in State Fairgrounds and minor league stadiums in minor league towns, and at night, according to at least one local police report, roams the streets in hooded sweatshirts, searching for Dylan knows what.

Nobody is more closely guarded than Dylan both on- and offstage, in all senses of that word, but somehow, he stays connected to his muse, and it, somehow, to him. If anything, one of his many particular geniuses has been turning the very act of retreating from legend into accelerant for its fire. It’s only in the last 20 years where Dylan finally carries the burden he promised he would heft in the notes to his second album. “I don’t carry myself yet the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves. I hope to be able to someday, but they’re older people.”

Bob Dylan made that legend thing work for him, and only went a little crazy along the way. But as we all know, Elvis and Jackson went big-time crazy, and if you know where to look, you can see in these two films just where — and maybe, why.

While Elvis was in mortal combat with some kind of dream of America, Michael Jackson became the poster boy for an even more devolved America, one where self-delusion, narcissism and grotesque materialism are somehow mistaken for canny career management. He even had the spectacular bankruptcy thing going for him, with the promise of an impending bailout, if he could pull off that one last desperate deal.

Which leads us to this week’s release of “This Is It” — a film swept off the cutting-room floor of Jackson’s last hurrah, and last rehearsals.

To be clear, this film was originally conceived of as a home movie, financed by Jackson personally. Had things gone differently, an abbreviated version might have appeared as a supplement on some future holo-hagiographic 3-D monolith box set commemorating Jackson’s 10th year onstage at the Luxor in Vegas. And like so many DVD supplements, there is a cheap, offhand quality to the production.

But what keeps this “This Is It” from being a shameless exercise in commercial necrophilia is the sheer joy of watching a performer, if not at the top of his game, in the bullpen warming up. Based on the performances here, Jackson had it until the end. Just what “it” was remains open to debate, and this movie does not help the discussion.

Throughout the two hours, Jackson stands alone, surrounded by indifferent technicians, a puppet being put through his paces by the Geppetto of his own ego. Many of the production numbers look as if they were choreographed by Albert Speer, and the fascist architecture of the proceedings don’t shed much light on their creator.

It helps that much of Jackson’s dialogue is subtitled, for he seems to be speaking a private language. “I’m trying to adjust to the inner ears,” whispers Jackson at one point, “with the love — L.O.V.E. It’s not easy, though.”

Tell me about it.

Director Kenny Ortega cajoles Jackson like a toddler being coaxed to eat his broccoli. Jackson is clearly phoning it in, but one is often reminded, what a phone.

One such moment occurs at the end of “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” where Jackson takes off at the end of a duet with an anonymous background singer. This sequence is intimate, sexy, and we see Jackson momentarily possessed by the music and his muse. But then, the song ends, and Jackson crashes back to Earth, clearly angry at being led to this kind of self-revelation. You see for an aching moment the raw talent that Jackson had all the way to the end, and then, the door slamming shut on it.

Which brings us to our second feature.

“Elvis: That’s the Way It Is (Special Edition)” was shot in the summer of 1970 and reworked by TCM for this 2001 rerelease. It is perhaps the best surreal evocation of the ’70s since “Zodiac,” except, of course, this is a documentary. Shot by the great Lucian Ballard, it brings you as close to the real Elvis as you want to go.

The film begins with some more tantalizing rehearsals. The musicians look at Elvis like the borderline hysteric family looked at demon child Billy Mumy in that great “Twilight Zone” episode. It feels like everyone always laughs a millisecond too late at his jokes, and you can feel his entourage praying that they too don’t get wished into that cornfield. Why is it not at all surprising that Rod Serling’s opening narration from this “Twilight Zone” episode was sampled in 2001 for a song called “Threatened” — by Michael Jackson? In one particularly gruesome sequence, Elvis has an onstage water fight with members of the Memphis Mafia. When Elvis, in a flash of feigned anger, picks up a mike stand, as if to impale them with it, you get the idea that this, in fact, could happen.

It is clear that Elvis just had nowhere to go, no one to talk to about the hellhounds on his trail. Every conversation is a transaction, and Elvis knows it. The striking thing is how little is different backstage from onstage. Same jokey nervousness, same nonchalant diffidence to his musical gifts. Elvis was always on, and could just never get off. In all of the footage, he can’t stop moving, looking for distraction from the Sisyphean task of just being himself. One can see his genius emerging like the chest buster from “Alien,” and at times, Elvis looks as shocked at the results.

At least Bruce Springsteen can get it off his chest with Brian Williams.

But there are compensating musical treasures. Where Elvis is all looseness and evasiveness, lead guitarist James Burton is all paisley precision, spitting out chicken-licking’ licks and anchoring the proceedings like the Country Gentlemen he is. “Play it, James,” Elvis regally commands, and Burton does just that, brilliantly. When they swing into an impromptu medley of “Little Sister” sliding into “Get Back,” one wishes that the Beatles, instead of breaking up that same summer, had dropped by this rehearsal studio instead.

They might have changed their minds.

When we move to Las Vegas for the pre-show rehearsals, you can feel the dingy surroundings and smell the fossilized cigarette smoke in the carpets of the “International Hotel” where the show had to go on.

Shot across six nights, the performance footage is a Groundhog Day’s nightmare of the same songs, same fans, same jokes. Here we stand by helplessly as Elvis, as described in some other lyrics of Zevon, throws it all away for that “porcelain monkey,” and his face on Velveteen. There is a viscous quality in the film, like you are trapped in the amber with Elvis, and after about an hour, you just want to get out of there. At one juncture, during “Love Me Tender,” as Elvis leaves the stage and walks deep in the ballroom it feels like nothing so much as watching grainy footage of a Bigfoot sighting.

Watching him kiss one bouffant fan after another, on the lips, you truly get a feeling of what hell must be like. At one point, one hysterical, crying fan almost swallows Elvis alive. He pulls back in shock and discomfort, but then, moves to yet another predatory encounter. And another.

Six nights, and then, 600 more nights, until it all ran down.

It is clear from both of these films that Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley were getting everything they wanted, and nothing they truly needed.

As William Carlos Williams so famously wrote, “The purest products of America go crazy.”

That was the lecture.

These films would be the lab.

Got any fly-on-the-wall-of-musical-train-wreck “Double Bill” ideas for “This Is It”? That Wilco film, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart?” “Don’t Look Back,” or better, a bootleg of Dylan’s 1966 surreal masterpiece, “Eat The Document”? Kirk Douglas IS a chin-dimpled Bix Biederbecke in “Young Man With a Horn”? Do tell!

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Kenny Ortega's moving documentary expands the unsolvable mystery of Michael Jackson

By Stephanie Zacharek

A still from "This Is It"

Topics:This Is It, Michael Jackson, Movies

In the days and weeks after Michael Jackson’s death last June, I was less surprised by the extensive public outpouring of grief over this sudden and painful pop-culture loss than I was by the surly presence of those who carped that the response was just “too much.” The latter group seemed to consist largely but not exclusively of past-middle-aged white guys dressed in figurative, if not literal, Buffalo Springfield T-shirts. Jackson wasn’t that great, or that important, they grumbled. Other camps also derided what they saw as the media’s Jackson grief overkill, holding his death (an apple) up against, say, the war in Afghanistan (an obvious orange), before launching into a screed along the lines of “If the media spent even one-quarter as much time focusing on the important stories …”

But Jackson’s death itself — not the media’s subsequent coverage of the estate haggling or the custody hearings, or the endless parade of “insiders” talking to Larry King — was an important story, albeit the kind of story whose importance grows, not recedes, as time passes. I say that because watching Kenny Ortega’s would-be concert documentary “This Is It,” a chronicle of the ambitious comeback concert Jackson was planning at the time of his death, I realized that I still don’t know exactly what Jackson’s death — or, for that matter, his life — means. Like Elvis Presley before him, Jackson was unknowable in life and even more mysterious after death. “This Is It” is a scrapbook of rehearsal footage, a small window into how this extraordinarily gifted and troubled man thought and worked. Watching it, I saw him from some new angles — painful as well as celebratory — and I realized that this isn’t it: This, as with Elvis’ posthumous career, is only the beginning.

Ortega, a longtime choreographer who’d worked with Jackson in designing his ’90s tours, was deep in the process of rehearsing the “This Is It” tour when Jackson died. The footage Ortega has compiled here was originally intended for Jackson’s personal archives, which makes it far more intimate than a strict, made-for-public-consumption “making of” documentary would be. The picture is a visual and aural sketchpad, alternately frustrating and enlightening, because we get enough of a sense of the scope of the spectacle Jackson had in mind; the spectacle itself can exist only in our imaginations. The concert would begin with the lowering of a giant “light man,” a reflective robot on whose body would be projected snippets of 20th century greatness: a rocket blasting off, a close-up of the young Elizabeth Taylor (one of Jackson’s closest friends, and a fellow icon).

You don’t open a show that way if you have a tiny ego. And “This Is It” shows us an artist who knew exactly what he wanted: Jackson is polite to his backup dancers and singers and tries to help them when necessary. But mostly, he keeps himself at a remove, appreciative of their efforts but unwilling, or unable, to connect with them. We see him outlining the moves for “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”: He glides and pops, dips and bobs, with gazelle-like grace. He’s less elastic than he was in his youth, but what he’s lost in rubberiness he’s gained in elegance: Now, more than ever, it makes sense that Fred Astaire went out of his way to send kudos the first time he saw Jackson’s moonwalk. And as Jackson dances, he roughs out the song’s words, dropping lines here and there — he needs to conserve his voice even as he’s working out the moves. And so when he sings, “Too high to get over,” we wait for the next line, knowing exactly what it is, though it never comes: Jackson must concentrate instead on the dancing, leaving an unfinished song in our heads.

“This Is It” is a documentary about process; in that respect, it has something in common with Jonathan Demme’s marvelous Talking Heads concert film “Stop Making Sense,” although it’s far less perfectly formed — by necessity, we have to fill in many of the blanks ourselves. It is also, largely, a movie about dance, and about what dancers say with their bodies that can’t be said in words. That’s most evident, and most heartbreaking, in the rehearsal footage for the Jackson 5-era “The Love You Save.” Jackson isn’t the same dancer he was at age 10, of course, but that dancer — driven, disciplined but also joyous — still lives inside him, which requires us to hold two disparate images in our heads at once: That of the adorable, amazing, exuberant kid that many of us, now in our 40s, grew up loving, and that of the strange, middle-aged stick-figure puppet man, with those too-fine, too-pale altered features.

The “Love You Save” segment is particularly rending because it’s so wonderful, so exhilarating, to watch. But Jackson’s relaxed determination in the making of that dance tells us something else: That as he aged his dancing, which in his boyhood may have been an outright expression of joy, became more about an idea of joy — about the idea of his audience’s pleasure as opposed to his own. That’s not to say Jackson didn’t take pleasure in dancing, in the way people who are good at what they do take pleasure in their work. But in between the lines of “This Is It” we can see Jackson as a man who couldn’t afford to have a sense of humor about himself; perhaps he had to work at feeling even joy. At one point, as he’s trying to convey to a sound engineer the kind of sound he wants, the engineer gently explains that he needs Jackson’s help in achieving just the right sound, that Jackson needs to tell him if he wants “a little more booty in it.” Jackson is so fixated on the work at hand that the technician’s joke sails right by. Then it catches him, and he chuckles softly: “Heh heh — that’s funny,” he says, as if he’s explaining the gag to himself.

But Jackson was in no way just a humble little guy. There’s a “Sshh — genius at work!” quality to “This Is It,” and for good reason. Not just anyone could survive being Michael Jackson — not even, as we’ve seen, Michael Jackson. As just one example of his infinitely reflective hall-of-mirrors influence, consider this: For spring 2009, the extremely upscale French fashion house Balmain showed a collection of beautiful, sharp-shouldered, braid-decorated jackets clearly evocative of Jackson’s trademark ’80s style. Seeing Jackson in a similar jacket early in the film, I wondered if he’d ever bought one of the superelegant, superexpenpensive Balmain versions for himself. Sure enough, in later footage Jackson shows up wearing two different variations on Balmain’s distinctive pagoda-shaped shoulder, a marvelous and playful example of the inspiration wrapped up in the inspired.

Michael Jackson belongs to everyone: to French high fashion; to the 20-something young woman I overheard in my neighborhood the day after his death, saying to her friend, “I just can’t believe he’s gone,” as if she were speaking of a family member; even to the Buffalo Springfield guys, though they claim to have no use for him. In the years to come, people — fans, music critics, naysayers — will continue to debate what Michael Jackson really means, and who he really was. We’ll never really know, and even this revelatory, moving documentary is just an evanescent record. Jackson’s mystery deepens, even as it dissolves between our fingers.