Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 1
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White Weddings: New Media Archives and the Transformations of Michael Jackson’s Thriller / Lisa Patti
Abstract: This article investigates the circulation and transformation of Michael Jackson’s star image within new media archives through an analysis of a series of re-enactments of his 1982 Thriller video. Focusing in particular on the viral success of the “original Thriller Wedding Video” on YouTube – one of several Thriller re-enactments staged at wedding receptions and circulated widely online – I examine the consequences of the erasure in these wedding videos of both the horror film mise-en-scène of Thriller and the racial and sexual indeterminacy of Jackson’s performance. I argue that Jackson’s 3D remake of the Thriller video, produced for inclusion in his planned London concert series, restores his star image as the central element of the performance and recuperates the racial and sexual indeterminacy of his original performance while cannily appropriating the image of white brides as elements of the video’s mise-en-scène.
The event and the archive
<1> When I saw Michael Jackson's This Is It in the theater, I was presented with a laminated This Is It "concert pass" attached to a black This Is It lanyard – a replica of the backstage passes distributed at concerts. One side of the pass features a silhouette of Jackson filled with a Technicolor collage of still images of Jackson striking iconic poses featured in the film. Like the majority of shots in the film it advertises, this collage restores Jackson's long-tarnished celebrity aura by placing his performing body in a spectacular mise-en-scène and framing his body in long and medium shots that obscure the uncanny surgical transformations of his face. Set against a sky blue background with a swatch of ethereal light emanating from his body, this digitized Jackson – with spotlights where his face should be – merges technological and celestial splendor into one body. In this image, Jackson is the anti-Garbo, his stardom emerging not from his face but from his body. [1]
<2> The title of the film, "Michael Jackson's This Is It," hovers just above this image with a brief tagline: "Discover the man you never knew." The cinematic event announced with this obvious, ominous invitation was indeed a discovery. The opportunity to watch Jackson preparing for his planned concert tour – choreographing each dance with the cast of young dancers born after the choreographic innovations of Thriller, editing the 3-D re-make of Thriller and the other short films produced for the cinematic layer of the multimedia This is It performance, and interacting with the massive set constructed for the performance – enabled fans from the Thriller generation, myself included, to experience the original awe inspired by Jackson’s bodily virtuosity. As many reviews of the film have remarked, This is It foregrounds Michael's perfectionism and professionalism, offering the ideal antidote to the toxic coverage of Jackson's scandalous personal life by showcasing Michael at work – not performing but practicing. [2] This is the man we never knew.
<3> The back of the concert pass I received at the theater invited me to own this glimpse of the formerly hidden star: "Own the entertainment event of a lifetime! Michael Jackson's This Is It. Loaded with Never-Before-Seen Extras on DVD & Blu-ray! Go to sonystyle.com/thisisit to learn more and reserve your copy now!" Many months before the DVD was released, Columbia Pictures was promoting (with a series of exclamation points) the Sony release of the DVD version of the film I had just paid to see in a theater. While a cynical reading of this transmedia promotional strategy might bristle at the brazenness of the "free gift" I was given at the ticket counter – an advertisement that I was supposed to wear in order to promote both the theatrical release and the DVD release of the film to others – I remember feeling certain that I would in fact buy the DVD when it was released, in part because I shared Sony's assertion that the film was an event (its status as a stand-in for the concert event heightening the authenticity of this claim) and in part because I was genuinely eager to see the "never-before-seen extras" that the DVD promised to include. I wanted to know more about the man I never knew.
<4> The bonus features on the This is It DVD alas don't reveal anything new about Jackson. The surprisingly bare DVD presents only a few peripheral "featurettes" – slim documentaries about the production from the points of view of various producers, costumer designers, dancers, and other miscellaneous personnel. I had wanted to see at the very least the final cuts of the 3D Thriller video and the Smooth Criminal video (with Jackson interacting with Humphrey Bogart in a digital encounter on screen). The DVD, however, withholds all of the videos made for the concert and the additional one hundred hours of recorded rehearsal footage. The archival riches that the director Kenny Ortega and the Jackson estate now hold may reach us in maximally profitable fragments over the next many years, the event of a lifetime released ever so slowly over the course of my lifetime. While the cultural and economic value of issuing "new and improved" and "special" and "collector's" editions of This Is It in the future may in part explain the archival stinginess of this DVD, my encounter with the film itself on DVD suggests an alternative explanation. Viewing the film at home on a small screen, I noticed that the film is essentially a compilation of bonus features – interviews with the director, performers, and crew; behind-the-scenes tours of the set; performance outtakes; and other standard bonus feature material. The theatrical presentation of This Is It as an event yields to the domestic presentation of This Is It as an archive of extras. This first edition of the DVD may have resisted the opportunity to add more archival material about the man I never knew because the producers determined that the material was too valuable or because the producers determined that the material was too redundant.
<5> Recent scholarship has examined the importance of DVD bonus features as archival additions, critically framing the featured film for cinephiles and fans and providing access to previously unavailable material from various phases of the production process. [3] Once a remote and exclusive scholarly venue, the archive has, in the form of the DVD, become both public and popular. The disappointment I have registered in response to the archival omissions of the This Is It DVD, in particular the exclusion of the final cut of the 3D Thriller video – stems in part from the expectations generated by the proliferation of archival material related to Jackson and his star image online. Jackson’s YouTube channel, for example, includes a rich selection of the music videos he produced throughout his career and links to fanmade videos that appropriate and remake his videos. Focusing on the circulation of various versions of the Thriller video both on Jackson’s channel and on the general YouTube site, I will compare below the archival austerity of the This Is It DVD to the archival abundance of YouTube, tracing the transformations of the Thriller video and of Jackson’s star image through each iteration of the video and considering the stability of his star image in its archival afterlife.
Thrilling
<6> The zombie dance in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video remains one of the most iconic performances of Jackson’s career. Shot in 1982 on 35mm film, Thriller, a 13 minute ‘short film’ (Jackson’s preferred description for his music videos) mapped a new course for MTV in its early years and exposed new points of contact between and among the music, television, and film industries. Most critics concur that the popularity of Thriller (the video and the album) will remain unequalled because listening and viewing publics are now fragmented into niche audiences: the proliferation of venues and formats for media distribution has made the global saturation of Thriller (and of Michael Jackson’s star image) a phenomenon of the previous media generation. The same set of proliferating venues and formats has, however, also made possible the coexistence of multiple versions of the Thriller video on YouTube where a single search will lead a viewer to both the controversial re-enactment of the Thriller zombie dance sequence by the inmates at a prison in the Philippines (CPDRC) and the re-enactment of the same dance sequence by the wedding party at an American wedding reception (one of many similar wedding performances), to name only two examples from an expanding roster of Thriller remakes. [4] In this essay, I examine the ways in which the dislocations of race, gender, and mise-en-scène that define these Thriller remakes inform Jackson's legacy as a star.
<7> Thriller is over thirteen minutes long – its running time supporting Jackson’s claim that the video was a short film rather than merely a music video – and its length indeed makes possible a more well-developed narrative structure than one typically finds in music videos. [5] The opening sequence, in which Jackson plays a high school student who asks his date to “be his girl” only moments before he transforms into a werewolf, is revealed as a film within the film, projected on a large screen in a single-screen downtown theatre where Jackson and his date are spectators. I mention the layered structure of the video’s narrative (which includes two additional distinct layers of narrative action) in order to foreground the cinematic ambition of the video and its insistent self-location within the history of Hollywood horror films. The lyrics of the song and the video’s narrative play with the twin frisson generated by the horror film mise-en-scène and the sexual overture that both interrupts it and emanates from it. [6] The zombie dance sequence that has been imitated in the YouTube videos I examine in this essay occupies a relatively short segment of the video, with the zombies emerging from their graves at the 6:33 mark, Jackson transforming into a zombie and beginning the dance at the 8:02 mark, the lyrics reentering the video after a long absence at the 9:41 mark, and the sequence ending at the 10:37 mark. In isolating this sequence from the context of the video’s layered narrative structure, the wedding videos (and other re-enactments) eliminate the explicit and sustained references to the horror film genre and its narrative protocols and the seduction scenarios that frame the zombie dance sequence.
<8> My analysis of Thriller and its amateur descendants draws on the art historian Kobena Mercer's early analysis of Jackson's unique star appeal. In 1986, several years after Jackson’s Thriller was released, Mercer published an unsettlingly prescient reading of Jackson’s performance and its horror film mise-en-scène. In Thriller, a video enmeshed in a metacritical examination of both the morbidity and the artifice of the horror genre, Jackson unveils a new persona, a cinematic character at once innocent and monstrous and a multimedia star at once black and white, masculine and feminine. As Mercer notes, "The cute child dressed in gaudy flower-power gear and sporting a huge 'Afro' hairstyle ha[d] become, as a young adult, a paragon of racial and sexual ambiguity" (301). Mercer links Jackson's new transracial and androgynous persona to the figure of the zombie featured in the central dance sequence in the film. In Thriller, the zombie becomes a cinematic emblem of "asexuality or anti-sexuality, suggesting the sense of neutral eroticism in Jackson’s style as dancer." Mercer observes, "[T]he dance sequence can be read as cryptic writing on this 'sexual vagueness' of Jackson’s body in movement, in counterpoint to the androgyny of his image. The dance breaks loose from the narrative and Michael’s body comes alive in movement, a rave from the grave"(311-312.) Mercer diagnoses the public fascination with Jackson’s extratextual eccentricities and the ways in which his performance as a dancer offers the spectator passing relief from that fascination. Many of Jackson’s obituaries celebrate his dancing as the only dimension of his life as a performer and a person that remained unassailable; while his vocal recordings and performances were, post-Thriller, uneven at best, and his personal life was devastated by both the scandals surrounding his alleged sexual abuse of children and his apparent obsession with surgical self-transformation, in the months before his death he was dancing during rehearsals for his planned London concert series with the grace and skill that made Thriller such a sensation. Mercer suggests that the zombie dance sequence within the video "can be seen as a commentary on the notion that as a star Jackson only 'comes alive' when he is on stage performing. The living dead invoke an existential liminality which corresponds to both the sexual indeterminacy of Jackson's dance and [his allegedly] morbid lifestyle"(312)
<9> Given the importance of the Thriller video to the construction of Jackson's evolving star image, the enduring popularity of the video isn't surprising, but the recent forms of engagement the video has generated are. Of the many Thriller videos available online, one of the most widely circulated is the "original Thriller wedding dance" organized by the groom, Brian Lundmark, for his 2006 wedding in Norman, Oklahoma. According to the commentary on Lundmark’s personal website (www.rockwoodcomic.com/), his bride asked him to arrange the performance for her as a wedding present, and he agreed to teach the dance sequence to their large wedding party by circulating DVD copies of the original Jackson video with the dance sequence slowed down. Set in an unadorned reception hall with very low ceilings and beige walls, the video showcases (through a clumsily held video camera) the wedding party’s amateur rendition of the zombie dance, their inexpert performance managing to capture (one imagines inadvertently) the signature stiffness of zombie movements through their own rigid movements. In this video, the groom emerges as a star. Situated at the front and in the center of the group, he is the only performer who seems to have completely memorized the dance; and he performs with unrestrained enthusiasm and confidence. As both the star and the producer of this video, Lundmark skillfully harnesses the potential of viral video circulation by linking the YouTube video to his personal website (a showcase for the comic strip he writes) and converts that site into both a marketing venue for his comics and a portal for updates about the circulation of the wedding video. The site includes links to coverage of the video on national television programs like Good Morning America and Nightline, where his video serves as the leading example of the emerging phenomenon of using a wedding as a location for the production of a new form of internet stardom, consolidated through the visibility and circulation of celebrity rather than through the labor and talent of stardom. [7]
<10> The performance – an enthusiastic and competent but far from polished imitation of the original – doesn’t invite critique. Its intention is charm, not perfection. The inspiration for the bride’s request, however, does invite critical attention. The online description of the video explains that she was moved to include this performance in her wedding reception not because of nostalgia for her childhood affection for the Jackson video (as I had at first assumed) but because she had seen a similar re-enactment featured in the 2004 Jennifer Garner romantic comedy 13 Going on 30 in which Garner’s body is inhabited by the spirit of a thirteen-year-old girl. Perhaps a closer reading of what on the surface appears to be an unexceptional and generic romantic comedy would yield a rich analysis of the relationship between this tale of female bodily confusion and Jackson’s own bodily metamorphosis, both within the Thriller dance sequence and in his lived existence as a body reaching ever more visually discomfiting extremes of racial and sexual indeterminacy. For now, I’m struck by the sheer existence of this unexpected intertext. When faced with the recent evidence of the international penetration of Jackson’s star image, I wouldn’t expect that Jennifer Garner would be necessary as a point of entry to Thriller. I wouldn’t expect that Michael Jackson is transmitted to an audience via anyone; but for this white bride, a white American actress led her to recreate at her wedding a legendary parody of B horror movies performed by an African-American man who challenged the coherence of race, gender, and sexuality as indices of identity both within and beyond that performance.
<11> The intertextual connections (and dislocations) between and among these Thriller videos points to the suppression of Jackson as star by the performers in their remakes of the very performance that consolidated his stardom for their generation. When Jennifer Garner's character in 13 Going on 30 (a 13 year old girl trapped in the body of her future 30 year old self) initiates an impromptu re-enactment of the zombie dance during a chic (but stuffy) corporate party hosted by a Glamour-esque women's fashion magazine in downtown Manhattan, her energetic and unselfconscious performance inspires the other thirtysomething party guests to join her and round out the required cast of zombie extras. The performance awakens a dead party, inspiring a crowd of white employees and guests to join Garner in her impromptu performance. The stiffness that characterizes the performances of everyone but the groom in the wedding video here marks Garner’s performance, an extension of the awkward bodily expressions of her character throughout the film, the direct result of an adult body being inhabited by an adolescent spirit. Once again, this awkwardness brings a certain realism to the performance, for reasons completely disconnected from the original Thriller video and its horror film predecessors. 13 Going on 30 links the joy in the performance to the shared nostalgia for childhood in general rather than a shared nostalgia as fans of Jackson and his video. In fact, the Garner character begins the dance at the party in order to reignite a failed adolescent romance with the boy who has now re-entered her life as a man. In 13 Going on 30, Thriller thus serves as a point of entry into nostalgia for both the pop cultural atmosphere of the early 1980s and the relative simplicity of heterosexual romance during adolescence. The racial and sexual ambiguity that Mercer identifies as the key aesthetic lures in the original Thriller video disappear in the 13 Going on 30 performance, the horror film mise-en-scène replaced by a generic urban interior and the star replaced by a white woman returning to her youth rather than emerging from it.
<12> The wedding video cites 13 Going on 30 rather than Thriller as its source text, and the wedding party's performance intensifies these dislocations. Staged as a flash-mob-style spontaneous eruption during a wedding reception attended exclusively by white guests, the zombie dance in this instance not only effaces the racial and sexual ambiguity in Jackson's performance but also binds it to the broader performance of the wedding itself – a rite of romantic passage reserved in Oklahoma for straight couples and witnessed in this video by an exclusively white audience.
<13> Whether or not anyone who watches the wedding dance measures the distance between this Thriller and Jackson's, the soundtrack of cheers from the wedding guests in the video and the long list of congratulatory comments from strangers online suggest that many viewers are thrilled. The "official" version of the wedding dance on YouTube has been viewed over twelve million times and appears on Jackson’s own online media archive (where a link to the wedding video is posted as one of his "favorites.") Sites like http://thrilltheworld.com guarantee that this surge of Thriller re-enactments will continue. The site is devoted to teaching "the world" the Thriller dance sequence. It includes detailed instructional videos for would-be zombie dancers and organizes an annual global Thriller dance, in which over 20,000 registered dancers perform the dance sequence simultaneously across the globe. Thrill the World director Ines Markell, a white female dance instructor from Canada, coordinates the online instruction program. Her world-record-setting effort globalizes and neutralizes the mise-en-scène of Jackson’s dance by reducing the performance to its sequenced choreographic elements, removing the provocations of its racial and sexual ambiguity and its macabre setting. Like the wedding remake, Thrill the World isolates the zombie dance in the original video from its darker textual and biographical contexts. The recent release of the film This is It (Kenny Ortega's 2009 feature documentary about his preparations with Jackson for their grand and unrealized multimedia concert series) offers a glimpse of Jackson’s rehearsals for that series of performances and of the 3D cinematic remake of Thriller that Ortega and Jackson were producing for inclusion in the concert series. The clips included in the film reveal that they were taking advantage of immersive 3D technologies to expand the original mise-en-scène of the zombie sequence. My attention immediately turned to one detail of the Thriller production planned for the live performance of the song – the procession of dancing "corpse brides" on the ceiling of the stadium, puppet-like figures draped in gauzy white filaments and hovering ominously in the air over the set. Jackson’s inclusion of the bride as a character in the video remake – and as a multiplying element of the set design in the planned performance – points to the appropriation and decontextualisation of Jackson’s horror film in the contemporary "white wedding."
<14> The remake begins with the word “Thriller” written in blood on the window of a haunted house adjacent to the graveyard from which the new generation of zombies will emerge in a three-dimensional confrontation with the viewer. As a prelude and complement to the corpse brides that will hover over the stage during the concert performance, the video features a procession of zombies that march in a single file directly toward the camera. Among these zombies is a series of female characters, and each of these female characters is dressed as a zombie bride. This costuming combines the styling of the zombies from the original video (a simple and direct homage to generations of Hollywood zombies in their generic ghoulishness) with the predictable styling of the white brides featured in the wedding videos on YouTube, with billowing (and shredded) white wedding dresses and candelabras held in the place of bouquets.
<15> Jackson’s remake of Thriller unites the iconography of the horror film from the original Thriller video with the visual and virtual networks that produced and disseminated the wedding re-enactments, creating a performance that exploits the extravagant possibilities of 3D technologies in order to restore the dance to its generic and aesthetic home – horror. By relocating the zombie dance in a modernized and multidimensional horror film mise-en-scène and introducing the bodiless brides as a dominant visual element in that mise-en-scène, Jackson transports the white brides dancing on YouTube from their reception halls to his theatricalized graveyard. If Jackson had performed Thriller as part of the planned This Is It tour, we would have had the opportunity to watch him dance among a dazzling procession of these floating white brides – ethereal avatars of both the amateur dancers who (directly or indirectly) memorialize Jackson in their wedding performances and the millions of viewers who watch them.
The end of an era
<16> The moment of Thriller wedding videos has reached its end. No new wedding videos have been posted within the past year, securing the status of the Lundmark wedding video as both the original and the most popular video within its micro-genre. The status of this genre as a meme, however, endures. Last season, the television show Glee aired commercials for a Thriller-themed episode during the Super Bowl and aired the episode immediately after the game. During the episode, the glee club and the football team work together to produce a halftime performance that mixes Jackson’s “Thriller” with the song “Heads Will Roll” by the popular band The Yeah Yeah Yeahs in order to enliven what the young characters in the show diagnose as an exhausted performance trend. While the episode introduces “Heads Will Roll” as a way to update an otherwise predictable song choice, the characters in the show elect to preserve the horror film mise-en-scène of the original Thriller video. In fact, like Jackson’s remake, they recreate the precise setting and costumes from the original video (albeit in the center of a high school football field). The star of this performance is the character Artie, who is confined to a wheelchair, a disability that enables him to reimagine Jackson’s bodily performance without imitating it. The Glee re-enactment thus manages to shift the aesthetic and cultural terms of the earlier re-enactments, recreating the original mise-en-scène of the Thriller video while revising the forms of bodily indeterminacy it exposes and celebrates. By importing the aesthetic and visceral provocations of the original Thriller video to a contemporary setting, the Glee performance serves as the ideal coda for this series of Thriller videos.
<17> Michael Jackson’s Thriller survives in multiple archival forms, from its inclusion on a bonus DVD bundled with the 25th anniversary edition of the Thriller album on CD to its central position on Jackson’s official YouTube channel. The various re-enactments of the video that I have examined reveal the importance of new media networks like YouTube to the circulation of the Thriller video, as these networks form an alternative archive in which the amateur re-enactments occupy the same exhibition space as the Jackson videos. The racial and sexual indeterminacy that Mercer observes in Thriller vanishes in the Thriller re-enactments, suppressed by the generic nostalgia of intertexts like 13 Going on 30. In the 3D remake of Thriller, however, Jackson drew from these re-enactments to resuscitate his original video. In the video, he transforms the image of the white bride into a corpse, locating the white bride in the mise-en-scène of the horror film. While the corpse brides are visually dazzling, they are also extras, merely fleeting elements within a vast procession of zombies and other creatures rendered in both two and three dimensions. Jackson’s most striking act of restoration in the 3D remake is his reclamation of his status as the video’s star.
Notes
[1] According to Roland Barthes, in Garbo’s face, “[S]omething sharper than a mask is looming: a kind of voluntary and therefore human relation between the curve of the nostrils and the arch of the eyebrows: a rare, individual function relating two regions of the face. A mask is but a sum of lines; a face, on the contrary, is above all their thematic harmony” (651). Given the frequency with which Jackson’s face was described by others as a mask, the obscuring of his face in the lanyard image in favor of a kaleidoscopic array of photographs that extends throughout his body underscores the location of Jackson’s stardom in his body.
[2] For example, Roger Ebert writes, “His choreography, built from such precise, abrupt and perfectly-timed movements, is exhausting, but he never shows a sign of tiring. His movements are so well synchronized with the other dancers on stage, who are much younger and highly-trained, that he seems one with them. This is a man in such command of his physical instrument that he makes spinning in place seem as natural as blinking his eye.”
[3] See, for example, John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Jonathan Gray, Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts (New York: New York University Press, 2010); and Barbara Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
[4] The CPDRC video and other Thriller re-enactment videos are easily accessible on YouTube where a simple keyword search will yield an expanding archive of related videos, including Jackson’s original music video.
[5] For an extensive analysis of music video narrative structures, see Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
[6] The following passage from “Thriller” captures this play between the two forms of thrills circulating in the song:
They're out to get you
There's demons closing in on every side
They will possess you
Unless you change that number on your dial
Now is the time
For you and I to cuddle close together, yeah
All through the night
I'll save you from the terror on the screen
I'll make you see
That this is thriller
Thriller night
'Cause I can thrill you more
Than any ghoul would ever dare try
(Thriller)
(Thriller night)
So let me hold you tight
And share a
(Killer, chiller)
(Thriller here tonight)
[7] For a recent discussion of the distinction between stardom and celebrity, see Barry King, “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form,” (in The Velvet Light Trap 65 [2010]: 7-19.)
Works Cited
13 Going on 30. Dir. Gary Winick. Perf. Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo. Revolution Studios, 2004.
Barthes, Roland. “The Face of Garbo.” In Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 650-651.
Ebert, Roger. “This Is It.” Chicago Sun-Times. 27 October 2009. 20 October 2011, <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/>.
Mercer, Kobena. “Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s Thriller.” In Christine Gledhill, ed. Stardom: Industry of Desire. London: Routledge, 1992. 300-315.
This Is It. Dir. Kenny Ortega. Perf. Michael Jackson. Columbia Pictures, 2009.
Thriller. Dir. John Landis. Perf. Michael Jackson, Ola Ray, Vincent Price. Optimum Productions, 1982.
An earlier version of this article appeared as "Thrilling" in Celebrity Studies, 1:2 (2010).
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