Presenting Michael Jackson™

Abstract

Presenting Michael Jackson™ explicates the marketed product that parades as a man we think we know well because he has grown up on stage, in front of documenting cameras. Such screened coverage belies the calculations that Michael Jackson™ entails. To discuss them, the essay compares Michael's notorious, late and pajama-sporting arrival to his trial in March 2005 and the November 1991 debut of the short film Black or White to consider Michael the man's hand in the public dissembling of the icon so many once thought so safe. In that Michael Jackson™ is always seemingly on the verge of collapse, the essay finds an opportunity to assess the popular possibilities for poststructuralist thinking, namely the Derridean deconstruction that makes possible queer theory methodology. The kind of play that remains when reading Michael's life-as-career illustrates the enchanting reach that Derrida's “theatre of the countersignature” can have when staged by an actor who commands still a global audience. Surveillance awaits a curiosity Michael continues to deliver with such precision.

Keywords:

• Poststructuralism
• queer theory
• Jacques Derrida
• Michael Jackson