Waiting for Thriller

Mild spoilers for the movie, Michael, and failed flight plans both follow¹.

Before I ever watched MTV, I listened to it on the radio.

MTV was once simulcast via stereo, because TV speakers were absolute garbage.

The simulcast was supposed to work only via direct cable connection to your stereo receiver. But if you lived in the right location and balanced the radio dial very carefully at 90.9 FM, you could pull in MTV audio over the air, wafting out from leaky cable infrastructure.

(How did we know this? I have no idea, other than the Word On The Street was uncannily valuable in the pre-internet days. Kids just knew things, like MTV broadcast frequencies and that E.T. Atari cartridges were buried in the desert.)

My grandparents, who lived just on the other side of my block, had a “cable box” before we did. That meant 36 glorious channels, not 12. World-changing.

Amongst those channels was MTV.

The height of video entertainment status, an all-powerful Jerrold Electronics unit, circa early 1980s

We didn't yet have that glorious box at my house when Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video came out.

But I had a plan. A flight plan.

I would place my bike in driveway launch position², and listen to MTV on a terrible clock radio that used radioactive materials to light the clock hands at night. The minute “Thriller” came on the radio, I planned to take flight, blasting off to my grandparent’s house to watch.

(I don’t think I cleared this plan with Mission Control³, either.)

I waited, I listened, and I heard lots of 80s music through a speaker with the acoustical characteristics of a Campbell’s Tomato Soup can.

But the timing for launch never worked out. That’s for the best. My Lawrence Welk-loving grandparents would have been mortified by the sight of me roaring into their home and commandeering their television, only to watch zombified Michael cavort around and crotch-grab.

After numerous aborted launch attempts, I eventually saw the video at my friend’s house. “Thriller” was worth the wait.

So is the movie Michael, which grants more access than even the cable box could, taking us through Michael’s youngest days in the Jackson 5 up to the 1988 tour for Bad.

There are so many milestone cultural moments this movie had to hit. And that’s why time sometimes moves faster in this film than in Marty McFly’s DeLorean.

The early Jackson 5 performances. The “Billie Jean” moonwalk at the Motown 25th anniversary celebration. The “Beat It” and “Thriller” videos. The disastrous Pepsi commercial. One after another, the film drops you right back in.⁴

One huge moment was absent: the making of the “We Are The World” video.

Sure, depicting all those stars would be a casting, licensing, and ego-management nightmare⁵. But it was a song Jackson co-wrote, and an assembly of stars that only his gravity well could have attracted. It would have been fun to see. That’s one miss, as was Janet’s total absence.

Michael isn’t all familiar and fun memories.

The film overuses the theme of Joe Jackson as a physically abusive father and domineering business manager. And yet, somehow, still underplays the impact. We get hints of the belt whippings. We see Joe push the boys, Michael especially, to exhaustion. But occasional belt whippings and a heavy business hand undersell what the Jackson kids reportedly endured.

Jafaar Jackson, Michael’s nephew and Jermaine’s son, is getting loads of well-earned publicity for his spot-on portrayal of adult Michael. He is Michael in this movie. And Juliano Krue Valdi radiates as the younger, Jackson 5-era Michael as well. Emotionally, physically, and musically, Valdi did a tremendous job. Talent, charisma, heart. That kid kills it.

A question: is Mike Myers federally obligated to play a boisterous record executive in every music biopic?⁶ Myers does a fine job here in spot duty as CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff, much as he did as a record exec in Bohemian Rhapsody.⁷

The “Human Nature” concert scene, depicted during the 1985 Victory Tour with the Jacksons, is magnificent. It’s probably the movie’s strongest musical spectacle, taking us through the song in full. Jaafar’s dancing and likeness is incredible. The scene is similar to this performance, from the Bad tour in Wembley Stadium in 1988:

All these iconic moments, painstakingly recreated … well, that’s mainlined Gen X nostalgia crack.

And that’s why people love this movie. The music, the memories, brought back to life. Michael is idealized in this film, but that positioning gives the viewer an empathetic figure to root for as he completes his hero’s journey to creative freedom and independence.

I think that’s why critics savaged this movie: it wasn’t honest and gritty enough. But gritty was never the goal.

It was strange watching this film, being back now in my hometown, where I first experienced many of these moments. There I was, at the same geographic coordinates I populated in the 1980s, and yet, I live in a completely different universe now than the one onscreen.

That juxtaposition of place and time wove a feeling of melancholy through the fun and nostalgia. The 1980s were a cool time. An era long gone. As the talented Northern Michigan writer O.W. Root often tweets, “The world you grew up in no longer exists.”

Still, it was good to be there in the 80s. And good to be back, just for a little while.

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1. I mean, it’s a biopic. How much can it be spoiled?

2. Handlebars facing the road.

3. My parents.

4. Or, of course, maybe you’re in those moments for the first time, like my daughters were. They loved it.

5. As was the real thing, no doubt.

6. I would support this legislation.

7. “Six minutes is forever!“