I’ve been struggling to figure out what to write about the Michael Jackson interview rebroadcast on 20/20 Thursday night. On the surface it reminds me of the Anne Heche interview: wacky celebrity shows us all how truly wacky they really are.
But unlike Anne, who we could chuckle and shake our heads at and move on, this is sad, tragic, disturbing, and not at all funny. Jackson is the physical embodiment of our obsessions with race, celebrity, wealth, and outward appearance. And what’s truly tragic is how he is passing the scars of his terrible childhood on to his own children, all the while thinking he is doing the opposite. Those kids don’t deserve to pay for their father’s illness and pain.
You would think a person regularly beating as part of performing as a child would do anything but be a performer as an adult.
* regularly being beaten – oops
and you would think that – but then MJ makes you wrong.