Evidentiary Spectacle and the Trial of Michael Jackson

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start of the 2005 Michael Jackson trial on charges of child sexual abuse and abduction. The film, an ersatz blend of ''serious documentary'' and ''true crime.
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS

VOLUME 17

NUMBER 4

(DECEMBER 2007)

The Face of Ruin: Evidentiary Spectacle and the Trial of Michael Jackson Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg

The Michael Jackson trial represented a spectacular and, indeed, macabre event on a global scale. The trial keyed into a number of contemporaneous cultural anxieties and fascinations. These include: a seemingly inexhaustible popular craving for celebrity, excess and scandal; the totalising proliferation of surveillance culture; the ‘‘corruption’’ of jurisprudence itself through the televisualisation of criminal trials (most notably that of OJ Simpson); the mediatised proliferation of ‘‘paedophilia’’; and, perhaps most profoundly, Michael Jackson himself as a figure of rupture and ruin. This paper focuses on the British television documentary, Michael Jackson’s Boys , which was aired in the United Kingdom one week prior to the start of the 2005 Michael Jackson trial on charges of child sexual abuse and abduction. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the trial. This is followed by an explication of our social semiotic approach to the analysis of the film, including a discussion of our theoretical tools. We then provide a summary of the key terms and storylines set out in Michael Jackson’s Boys . In the main body of the paper, we explore three arising themes that are embedded and emblematised in this instance. The first of these themes is the intense cultural fascination with Michael Jackson as a monstrous figure. A second theme concerns the nature of evidence and the cultural production of the evidentiary. The third theme is the proliferation of cruelty realism as a subgenre of televisual representation that has infiltrated wider arenas of social practice. Keywords evidence

Michael Jackson; television; documentary; jurisprudence; realism;

Introduction This paper focuses on the British television documentary Michael Jackson’s Boys (Littleboy 2005), which was aired in the United Kingdom one week prior to the start of the 2005 Michael Jackson trial on charges of child sexual abuse and abduction. The film, an ersatz blend of ‘‘serious documentary’’ and ‘‘true crime scandal’’, provides a supposed history of Jackson’s ‘‘obsession with boys’’. Its ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online/07/040441-18 # 2007 Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg DOI: 10.1080/10350330701637049

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central premise is not only that Michael Jackson was ‘‘obviously guilty’’ of the acts with which he had been charged, but that his ‘‘crimes’’ were long-standing and had been both facilitated and hidden by his extreme celebrity. The film paralleled and referenced the imminent court proceedings through an explicitly ‘‘evidential’’ discourse, and indeed was highly prejudicial given this, and its timing.1 It also took its place in an already pervasively established climate of prurient ‘‘documentary’’ fascination with Michael Jackson.2 We begin below with a brief discussion of the trial*/the immediate touchstone for this particular film. This is followed by an explication of our social semiotic approach to the analysis of the film, including a discussion of our theoretical tools. We then provide a summary of the key terms and storylines set out in Michael Jackson’s Boys. In the main body of the paper, we explore three arising themes that, we shall argue, are embedded and emblematised in this instance. The first of these themes is the intense cultural fascination with Michael Jackson as a monstrous figure. A second theme concerns the nature of evidence and the cultural production of the evidentiary. The third theme is the proliferation of cruelty realism 3 as a subgenre of televisual representation that has infiltrated wider arenas of social practice. In undertaking this analysis it is not our intention to ‘‘re-try’’ Michael Jackson or to make determinations based on an analysis of an evidentially charged piece of popular representation about the veracity or not of the claims made within it.4 Rather, we are interested in the intersecting and inter-acting dynamics of the industries of culture on the one hand, and justice on the other. Our interest in Michael Jackson’s Boys is precisely this conjunction of themes and the explicit location of its spectacle on the terrain of the legalistic and evidentiary.

The Trial The Michael Jackson trial5 represented a spectacular, even macabre, event on a global scale. An inordinate number of column inches of both ‘‘serious’’ and tabloid newsprint across the world featured the events leading up to the trial, 1. The film was not aired in the USA, but was available via the Web. 2. Michael Jackson has long been standard fodder for scandal magazines such as the National Enquirer. A list of some of the plethora of television documentaries made about or containing interviews with Michael Jackson since 1983 is provided online (http://members.aol.com/staritems/ michaeljackson.htm). 3. See our earlier discussion of the cruelty realist genre, as articulated on the Jerry Springer Show, in Epstein and Steinberg (2003). 4. Michael Jackson was acquited of all charges. This does not disprove (or authenticate) the documentary’s a priori assumption of his guilt. 5. In the Michael Jackson trial, there were 10 charges: a count of conspiracy to abduct, falsely imprison and extort the accuser and his family; four counts of molestation (that Jackson ‘‘willfully, unlawfully and lewdly committed a lewd and lascivious act upon the accuser with the intent of arousing, appealing to, and ratifying the lust, passions, and sexual desires of himself and the accuser’’); a count of an attempt to commit a lewd act (that there was an attempt ‘‘to have the accuser commit a lewd act upon Jackson’s body with the intent of arousal’’); and four counts of the felony of giving alcohol to a child ‘‘to enable and assist him to commit child molestation’’ (Abrams 2005).

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the details of evidence given at it, speculations on the persona and identity of Michael Jackson himself, and the ‘‘histories’’ of his friendships with young boys over many years. Web-based material on the subject is virtually inestimable and continues to proliferate.6 Equally, international cable and free-to-air television channels broadcast a plethora of programmes, of which Michael Jackson’s Boys was only one. As with the 1995 OJ Simpson case, Jackson’s trial operated both as circus and as iconic event. Both cases were embedded in and emerged from similar collisions of the complex machineries of international celebrity and scandal with institutions of policing, legal and court practices. And in both cases, all of these were explicitly played out in the context of already fraught racial and sexual politics, not limited to the USA.7 The trial keyed into and recycled a number of contemporaneous cultural anxieties and fascinations. First was a seemingly inexhaustible popular craving for celebrity, excess and scandal. Journalistic and academic commentators alike have analysed: the emergent, radically transformed and globalised character of fame; its in many ways unprecedented cultural capital; the escalating complexity of its social and economic apparatus; and the ‘‘ideological work [both demonised and idealised] performed by the famous’’.8 A second context-setting arena for the trial was the proliferation of what has become a surveillance culture.9 The pervasive normalisation of surveillant practices in everyday life has influenced not only new genres of representation (the huge expansion of ‘‘constructed reality’’ in the media,10 for example), but has become a site of profound desire, not just of anxiety. For instance, surveillance acts as a source of entertainment and economic capital (both for its purveyors and some of its objects), as well as a violation of civil rights.11 It is perceived equally as a source of safety (e.g. CCTV cameras in ‘‘dangerous areas’’) as it is as a breach of privacy. 6. The Internet was (and is) overrun with websites, chat and news pages about Michael Jackson. A Google search using the words ‘‘Michael Jackson Trial’’ produced over 19 million sites. 7. Other significant precedents include the advent of actual court trials on US (and internationally syndicated) TV (e.g. Judge Judy), as well as the causes celebre´s of the Anita HillClarence Thomas hearings in 1991 and the ClintonLewinsky House Judiciary Committee hearings of the late 1990s. 8. This phrase is taken from Joshua Gamson’s blurb for Marshall (1997). See also Rojek (2001), Elliott (1998), and Kear and Steinberg (1999). 9. See, for example Lyon, (1994, 2003) and commentaries in the journal Surveillance and Society. There is also a plethora of journalistic commentary easily accessed through even a cursory web search. 10. In ‘‘constructed reality’’ television, participants volunteer to place themselves under continuous camera surveillance, including in the most intimate situations. Why people put themselves in such a situation is complex and may involve the desire for fame or a reactivation of lapsed fame (a realistic outcome for many: ‘‘stars’’ from Big Brother, Celebrity Big Brother, etc.), or a more psychoanalytically inflected desire for intersubjective recognition, or for help with what they feel is a serious problem (e.g. The House of the Tiny Tearaways, Supernanny). 11. See, for example, the American Civil Liberties Union’s fact sheet on the Patriot Act 2001 (American Civil Liberties Union 2003), which notes the various ways in which the Act enables unprecedented (secret) surveillance on citizens and foreign nationals in the USA. Consider also the 2006 wiretapping scandal with respect to the no-warrant wiretapping programme introduced by the National Security Agency of the US Government and used on US citizens. This theme has historically been explored in popular culture, for example in Orwell’s (1949) iconic novel 1984, and in films such as The Conversation (1974), Ed TV (1999) and Enemy of the State (1998).

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A third contextualising arena for the trial has been the increasing televisualisation of real-life policing, legal and court processes. The OJ Simpson trial represented for many the over-determined consequence of not only the importation of trials into entertainment (and vice versa ), but also of forms of entertainment that take place on such a scale.12 It has, arguably, always been a tension in the US court system (and other similar systems) that trials are public, not least because this sits uncomfortably with the premise that one is innocent until proven guilty. Accusations can be damaging to a person’s reputation and social standing even if that person is found innocent.13 With the OJ Simpson trial, and then again in the case of Michael Jackson, this tension was exponentially magnified and globalised. Fourthly, the Jackson trial resonated with profound anxieties that have attended ‘‘paedophilia’’,14 its mediatised proliferation, not least in internet-based child pornography, and enacted through highly publicised ‘‘raids’’ on personal computers. Finally, there was the iconic and characteristic popular representation of Michael Jackson himself as a figure of rupture and ruin. Jackson’s troubling ambiguities of gender, sexuality, race and age had significant reverberations with the dysphoric ‘‘underside’’ of postmodern bodies. The selfimmolating transfigurations of plastic surgery apparent in changes in Michael Jackson’s physiognomy had been, for some time, an object of continual and cruel fascination.15

Social Semiotics and Michael Jackson’s Boys For the purposes of this paper, we draw on two aspects of social semiotic analysis. First we are interested in what might be termed the materiality of signification . By this we mean that significations (i.e. the cultural meanings attached to signs and symbols) emerge out of concrete, institutional as well as everyday practices. They involve the exercise of agency and they are located in a nexus of political, economic and social power. Consequently, discourse is more than ‘‘just language’’ or ‘‘just text’’; discourses are always also practices, and 12. See, for example, Cohn and Dow (1998) and Williams (2002). 13. On the other hand, of course, it can be argued that the public character of trials protects the accused from corruption of court procedures and violation of their rights to due process. 14. The term ‘‘paedophilia’’ has re-emerged as the dominant term of reference for the sexual abuse of children. We use the term here with considerable discomfort because its connotation is one of individualised pathology and monstrosity. This negates the scale and normative character of child sexual abuse, which cannot be adequately explained as a form mental illness or individual perversion. Rather, as innumerable commentators have argued more persuasively, the scale of sexual abuse of children reflects a pervasive social problem embedded in unequal relations of, inter alia, gender, sexuality and age. However, common-sense anxieties have been mobilised chiefly around this notion. And it is this notion that is at the centre of this particular film. 15. Indeed, a dedicated documentary entitled Michael Jackson’s Face (Humphreys 2002) was re-aired during the same period as Michael Jackson’s Boys. There are inestimable commentaries on Michael Jackson’s face, skin and body crossing a range of mediatised genres from newsprint to television, to radio and the Internet. See Go ´mez-Barris and Gray (2006) for a discussion of the ways in which this indeterminacy is played out in the Martin Bashir 2003 television interview with Michael Jackson.

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indeed practices that are multiple and contestatory. In his influential article ‘‘What is Cultural Studies Anyway’’, Richard Johnson (1986) proposed the notion of a circuit of culture to describe the intersecting agencies and processes involved in the production of meaning.16 This is a useful tool for understanding meaning as a social semiotic phenomenon (as opposed, for example, to an epiphenomenal effect*/‘‘ideology’’*/of social and economic structures). Judith Butler (1993a) has taken up this latter notion in her theory of materialisation. In Bodies that Matter, she argues that discourses (e.g. ‘‘femininity’’) are effects and sources both of everyday (re)iterations or performativities. That is, meanings become reified and real-ised through repetitive performance and everyday acts.17 This leads us to our second point. We are interested in theorising the interface of signification and social practice specifically on the intersecting terrains of popular culture and jurisprudence. Jurisprudence here refers, in part, to a set of normative values, expressed and reified in legislation and in common law.18 It also involves the convergence of many institutions, for example, courts, law, policing, forensics, and many actors, including experts, accused, victims, juries, lawyers, judges, witnesses, court reporters, and so on. These relationships and convergences produce contested discourses of justice, due process, and what counts as evidence. Media-ted meanings also play a significant part in this context. Wider common-senses concerning jurisprudential values (e.g. ‘‘crime’’, ‘‘guilt’’ or ‘‘innocence’’, plausible victims or perpetrators) emerge from and are crystallised through film, television, print reportage and electronic media. Institutional recognition of these interconnections is manifested in the concern that juries might be tainted by exposure to extensive media coverage of a trial in which they are involved. By their very timing, as well as their subject matter (persons involved as well as substantive issues at stake), Michael Jackson’s Boys and the Michael Jackson trial were directly entwined in a circuit of signification. At stake in this context was the relationship between the culture industry 19 on the one hand, and what might be termed the justice industry on the other. As we argue here, the generic conventions and repertoires in play in Michael Jackson’s Boys emblematise and refer to the imbrication of culture and justice as social semiotic practices and 16. The circuit of culture proposes key points in the production of meaning. These are: texts, readings, everyday life, production. To theorise any one of these points is to consider it in relation to the others. One can start at any point of the circuit and go in any direction. Between each point there are a series of processes such as the selection, evaluation and exclusion of meanings, and so on. This notion has been taken up and built on by many others. See, for example, the Glasgow Media Group (Miller et al. 1997) and Hall and du Gay (1997). 17. So femininity, for example, is not a ‘‘fact’’ or a foundational artefact of nature that pre-exists and determines lives. Rather it becomes a reality, it is materialised, out of its repeated performance. Performance, in the sense that Butler (1990, 1993a) describes, makes meanings real (i.e. institutionalised, socially embedded and concretely embodied). 18. Common law refers to the body of knowledge that emerges through a history of precedent in court cases. 19. See Adorno (1991).

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artefacts. In what follows, we undertake a close analysis of the signification repertoires of Michael Jackson’s Boys. In doing so, we use an expanded notion of what constitutes the semiotic field. Typically, semiotic analyses of film and television tend to emphasise visual conventions and aspects of genre, plot and characterisation. Here we consider an additional range of repertoires: discursive (i.e. bodies of knowledge as well as linguistic), narrative, and what might be termed aural . In the latter instance, we take up the use of sound (and soundtrack) as emotion cues. We are concerned here with the structures and production of feeling as an integral part not only of a semiotic field, but of its social, material(ising) character.20

Michael Jackson’s Boys As noted above, Michael Jackson’s Boys was broadcast in Britain immediately prior to the start of Jackson’s trial. It was one of a plethora of news and documentary comment (both condemnatory and celebratory) aired on television about Jackson’s personal history and career. All of this reportage could be taken as prejudicial, although those rehearsing legalistically styled claims about Jackson’s guilt were most clearly ‘‘over the line’’.21 This particular documentary was screened on Channel 4, which has a broadcasting profile as a ‘‘serious’’, ‘‘alternative’’ station (notwithstanding that it is commercial television) with a remit for socially responsible (often interpreted as socially progressive) broadcasting.22 Michael Jackson’s Boys was the third documentary film directed by Helen Littleboy, the second of which, Michael Jackson: The Boy He Paid Off , had much the same tabloid construction, storyline and content as Michael Jackson’s Boys .

Structuring Narratives The substance of the documentary is the sequential telling of the story of Michael Jackson’s ‘‘suspect’’ and ‘‘serial’’ relationships with boys over the course of his career. Each vignette is structured in the same way. It begins with a close-up of a pixelled rendition of Michael Jackson’s mug-shot taken at his arrest for child sexual abuse. This is a particularly harsh image, which emphasises the radical distortions of feature and skin, accentuated by heavy make-up, which are by now 20. See Epstein and Steinberg (2003) for a discussion of feeling structures and aurality in televisual culture as articulated on the Jerry Springer Show. 21. Indeed, if Jackson had been on trial in Britain, the declaration of a mistrial would have been probable as a result of the screening of the film. 22. It is distinguishable from the more tabloidesque and populist Channel 5, and the regionally orientated ITV, both of which are also commercial stations, and in direct competition with the public, non-commercial BBC stations. Channel 4 embodies much of the Reithian notion of broadcasting as a public utility and right. See Holtz-Bacha and Norris (2001) for a discussion of the distinctive history of British broadcasting and the Reithian tradition.

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iconically associated with Jackson’s physical degeneration over a career of some 40 years.23 An insinuating voice-over then introduces each new ‘‘special friend’’ as the camera zooms in to the central pixel of Michael Jackson’s pupil, which is ‘‘revealed’’ as the image of the boy to be discussed. This constantly repeated visual trope of a paedophilic gaze is central to the entire representational economy of the film. Each story follows the same narrative sequence, which can be summarised in the following stages: 1 Jackson’s own psychological problems (evidenced in his body as well as his increasing eccentricity and excess of success, and particularly the ‘‘loss of his own childhood’’) lead him to fixate on a ‘‘young and beautiful’’ male fan and/ or child star. 2 Jackson proceeds to develop a personal relationship with the boy in which he lavishes ‘‘undue’’ attention, ‘‘inappropriately’’ expensive gifts, and imposes himself intimately (in some cases by inviting the boy to stay overnight, and to sleep in the same bed). 3 When the boy reaches a certain age, he is ‘‘too old’’ and is abandoned by Jackson. 4 Jackson moves on to the next boy. This story is told and retold in the language of ‘‘grooming’’, and the heavy implication is always that Jackson’s relationship with the boys*/regardless of sustained claims to the contrary by Jackson, and indeed the boys themselves*/is sexual.24 Thus the framing premise is not only that Jackson is guilty but, indeed, that it would not be possible to prove otherwise. This is elaborated through a constant contradictory assertion that what is being told is at once a secret history and, at the same time, a very publicly documented one. Surrounding this central storyline of the serial predatory paedophile are several other framing narratives that are interspersed and told in tandem. One, as already noted, is a narrative concerning Jackson’s scarred and robbed childhood that led him to become a damaged, demanding and ‘‘perverted’’ adult. Another tells a story of Jackson’s rise to superstardom, but is framed with the connotation of illegitimacy*/not because he has no talent, but rather because of the excesses of talent and reward that came his way. This storyline emphasises the reasons for his ‘‘getting away with his crimes’’ for so long. Two narratives come together here: a general story about the nature of celebrity and

23. Furthermore, for British viewers at least, this pixelled version of the face cannot but call to mind the portrait of Myra Hindley, who, along with her lover, Ian Brady, had serially murdered a large number of children on the Yorkshire Moors. This portrait by Marcus Harvey was made up of children’s hand prints. 24. The boys used phrases such as ‘‘he’s just a very loving lovely guy’’, and referred to his willingness to play and the enormous fun they had. It is, of course, the case that children’s denial of sexual abuse does not mean that children have not been victimised. However, denial is also not evidence that there was sexual abuse.

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excess (and the way that fame corrupts not just a famous person, but the culture around the person), and an edifying story of one man’s particular corruption. A fourth line of narrative presents a chronicle of failed attempts to heterosexualise Michael Jackson. This is constituted both as a history of Jackson’s own ‘‘fraudulent’’ posturings as heterosexual as well as the ‘‘failed’’ efforts of his family and team to assimilate him to a ‘‘normal’’ masculinity. Implicit here is yet another storyline, one that was already pervasively ‘‘out there’’ in the culture, of Jackson’s progressive and dangerous ruin through the pursuit of ambiguity, played out in terms of race, age and gender. Framing all of these narrative forms and sequences is an overarching metanarrative of the Shakespearean tragic hero. Jackson emerges as a Macbeth figure: a man of immense talent, promise and acclaim who is brought down by his own fatal flaws and ambition. Michael Jackson’s Boys is, in this sense, presented as an edifying myth of hubris, greed and destruction.25

Genre and Bricolage Michael Jackson’s Boys is a bricolage of visual and aural repertoires that reference and cross over generic forms, many on the terrain of realism. These include real-crime documentary, fictional crime shows, constructed reality shows, horror movies, pornography, television news and reportage, and music video. In terms of ‘‘real crime’’, Michael Jackson’s Boys presents embedded cameras at purported ‘‘scenes of crimes’’. It conducts police-styled interviews with key players (‘‘victims’’, ‘‘witnesses’’). It reconstructs ‘‘criminal events’’ with actors and alleged victims. And it solicits forensic commentary and judgement from ‘‘experts’’. The visual conventions of fictional crime shows such as CSI are also in play, notably in the use of dark, menacing lighting in the staging of scenes with the boys, ‘‘location’’ shots of ‘‘mean streets’’, and so on. There is an intertextual crossover of horror, thriller and pornography genres, characterised by: the pixelled mug-shot sequence described earlier; extensive use of what could be described as ‘‘fear-music’’ for the soundtrack; and a number of Hitchcockian intercuts of water, bath scenes and nude bodies and body parts of anonymous boys. Additionally, actual television news footage and commentary from news archives about Michael Jackson and his family are included, as well as clips from Michael Jackson’s music videos. There are also scenes taken from talk shows and a confessional idiom that characterises the talk show genre. Finally, there is the use of a generic documentary-film voice-over, itself an intertextual convention that appears across the range of realist and reality programming.26 This voice-over is arguably at the heart of what 25. Jackson also embodies Dorian Gray, the modern counterpart to this tragic figure. The twist in this instance is that the portrait of his ‘‘corruption’’ can be seen in his living face. His corrupt unconscious thus becomes externalised. 26. For example, the Oprah Winfrey Show presents mini-documentaries as a way of setting up studio discussion. Big Brother-type shows often use a live-commentator voice-over.

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constitutes a ‘‘documentary form’’: that is, the standpoint of an omniscient, usually unseen, narrator whose role is a combination of interpretation and plot movement in the service of ‘‘fact/truth’’-telling.

Ruin and Signification Three modes of semiotic signification are articulated through these framing narrations and genre forms: these are discursive, visual and aural. They are deployed as tropes (repeated and metonymically invoked signs that contain and direct preferred readings) and as signification sequences (juxtaposed and ordered signifiers). In the analysis that follows, we emphasise several themes: the ruined body; imminent (immanent) danger, the ruinous act; and the cultural signification of the evidentiary.

Ruined Body People were starting to ask serious questions about what the King of Pop was doing with all these little boys. (Voice-over in Michael Jackson’s Boys , Littleboy 2005)

There are a number of thematic strands threaded through Michael Jackson’s Boys that, taken together, consolidate the person of Michael Jackson as an emblem of ruin. These include the imagery of object desire (obsession with boys)*/what might be termed ‘‘object dysphoria ’’ (desire as the repudiation of the self) and notions of imminent (and immanent) danger generally ascribed to bodies in a racialised and homophobic interpretive field. Michael Jackson as the embodiment not only of ‘‘unnatural’’ desire, but specifically of ‘‘paedophilic’’ desire, is explicitly framed through a language of ‘‘obsession’’. Throughout the film this word is constantly repeated in the voice-over narration and in ‘‘expert’’ and ‘‘witness’’ testimony. This is reinforced through the use of other insinuating language as in the above quote. This, in tandem with invocations of ‘‘obsession’’, brings together notions of corruption and desire as a monstrous inner to explain Jackson as a monstrous Other. Each of the boys discussed is introduced with a possessive caption and dates (e.g. ‘‘Terry: Michael’s Boy 1979/81’’). The juxtaposition of first names (given that Jackson is an adult of considerable profile and power) with specific dates, all framed by what might be termed a ‘‘paedophilic possessive’’ (the boy ‘‘belongs’’ to Jackson), implicitly references and explicitly visualises the serial-predator narrative. Repeatedly asserted visual tropes referencing or graphically reproducing child pornography (shots of anonymous nude boys and their body parts) appearing throughout the documentary solidify all of these associations.

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Signifiers of Jackson’s object dysphoria are also rife. At the centre of these is the pixelled mug-shot, which as we noted earlier frames each new vignette and the documentary as a whole. This shot by itself graphically references Jackson’s physiognomic ruin as a result of excessive and destructive body modification. It is, indeed, an instantly recognisable ‘‘after image’’, and a point of prurient fascination, of a process that has been photographically documented to the extent of global cultural inundation over the entirety of Jackson’s career. Other dysphoric signifiers emerge through the use of ‘‘monster images’’ from Jackson’s Thriller video as well as through the narrative of failed heterosexual masculinity and the continually repeated statement that Jackson’s family was getting ‘‘worried’’ about him in this context. The language of dysphoria was also attached to Jackson’s ‘‘lost and damaged childhood’’ (and his desire to recover it) as well as through shots of an adult bedroom (putatively Jackson’s) filled with children’s toys, and of the children’s paradise of his Neverland estate. And haunting the whole is the well-rehearsed aura of racial dysphoria now inextricably associated with Jackson*/his claims (which are seldom seen as credible) to be suffering from a pigment destroying illness, and the bathos and threat of his apparent and (inevitably) doomed attempts to ‘‘pass’’. As many commentators have suggested,27 liminality in the face of racial categories has been subject to the most extreme of cultural repudiation. In popular representation, the indeterminate figure on the borders of race, particularly when perceived as making an illegitimate bid for privilege, has been constructed as tragic at best and degenerate, evil and corrupting at worst.28 Jackson’s embodied ruin, and its continuously imaged reassertion in Michael Jackson’s Boys , inevitably invokes these associations.

Imminent (Immanent) Danger In Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising , Judith Butler (1993b) argues that the preferred meanings of particular signs are embedded in an interpretive field29 already imbued with common-senses anchored in the categorical powerrelations of a culture. In effect she argues that notions of immanent and imminent danger are foundational to the interpretive field surrounding black male bodies. This could be extended to notions of danger (who is dangerous and who is endangered) that attach to bodies in ways complexly defined by politics of sexuality, gender and age, among others. As already noted, Michael Jackson has emerged as a border figure precisely on a terrain of immanent and imminent danger ascribed to a number of border-crossing bodies: heterosexual/homosexual, black/white, adult/child, male/female. The languages of dysphoria and 27. See, for example, hooks (1982), Davis (1983) and Hill Collins (1990). 28. For further discussion, see Gilman (1991). 29. In fact, she discusses this as ‘‘visual field’’ specifically in reference to signification and the video footage of the beating of Rodney King. Here we extend her concept to include other forms of signification in addition to the visual.

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of perverse and perverted desire (threaded throughout the film, but also already established in the interpretive field surrounding it) cement uncomfortable slippages ascribed to Jackson in relation to these binaries. The use of non sequitur imagery (i.e. imagery that has no direct relationship to Michael Jackson) is a key arena of semiotic technique deployed to signify embodied danger. For example, less than two minutes into the film, immediately after the opening credits, there is a shot of a merry-go-round that blurs and melts into a lurid colour negative while calliope music is played. This imagery not only graphically references the Stephen King horror movie It , but by virtue of its positioning sets up the feeling structure of the entire documentary. Danger, dislocation and fear are also signified throughout the film by the soundtrack. This includes stock forms of horror/thriller music (the calliope music in the It sequence as well as other musical sequences typical of the genre). Jackson’s own music is also used, typically juxtaposed with lurid and disturbing visual imagery or narrative. It is in this context that we see the innumerable shots, as noted above, of explicitly eroticised imagery of nude boys, as well as shots that suggest abduction or stalking. In all of the ‘‘porn/abduction’’ shots, the boys are anonymous, either stock footage taken from elsewhere or footage staged for the purpose of the documentary. None have any direct relationship to Jackson. In one typical sequence, staged as a ‘‘crime reconstruction’’, we see a white boy in the back seat of a car; the lighting is dark and there is the suggestion of bars in the shadow; the boy is looking out and back over his shoulder as he is driven away by an unseen driver. Attending this sequence is the voiced testimony of Jackson’s ‘‘old school friend’’ (as stated in the caption) stating his opinion (the content of which did not refer to the visuals) that Jackson, as he remembered him, had been a very lonely person. The composure of the visual sequence is a familiar one from innumerable television dramas and film. The footage of an anonymous boy intensifies the feeling of not only of generic threat, but specifically of a threat to a vulnerable body. This semiotic economy works against the possibility that the boy can be read as an image of loneliness who can be a stand in for Jackson. Instead, the construction of the innocent boy as endangered body invokes Jackson, without the necessity of visualising him as dangerous body. That the boy is white alludes graphically to an interpretive field in which it is already understood that black masculinities threaten white vulnerabilities. Danger is also signified on the terrain of Jackson’s ‘‘adult’’ desire. For example, a significant section of the documentary focuses on the production of Jackson’s ‘‘The Way You Make Me Feel’’ video, discussed in connection with his ‘‘failed heterosexuality’’. Clips from the video in which Jackson evidences sexual heat with his female dancer are set against a musical and video storyline of (hetero)sexual predation. In interview with Tatiana, the dancer, she comments: ‘‘That was the first video where the public saw Michael for the first time as a believable heterosexual male’’. Leaving aside, for the moment, that this too was a story of Jackson’s failure (the voice-over tells us that this ‘‘chemistry was all

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just part of Michael’s act’’ and designed to cover his secret affections for boys30), here we see an image of danger that references, at one and the same time, cliche ´s of legitimate predation and danger generically attached to ‘‘successful’’ masculine heterosexuality set against the racialised overtones of hypersexual illegitimacy attached to black male bodies.

Ruinous Acts The question of danger does not simply accrue to collections of imagery, language or sound. Meanings are generated also through complex associations and sequencing of these repertoires. The leap from Jackson as ruined to ruinous body emerges powerfully in the articulation of the notion of his dysphoric embodiment to a continuous semiology of dangerous action. Below we examine four further sequences that are emblematic of the gestalt of frames to moving picture. These are what we have termed: the ‘‘pixel*/reverse pixel’’ sequence, the ‘‘penetration’’ sequence, the ‘‘recumbent boy’’ sequence and the ‘‘boy in bath’’ sequence.

Pixel*Reverse Pixel Sequence /

Above we described the pixel sequence (the zoom from mug-shot to boys’ faces) that frames each new story of Jackson’s ‘‘special friendship’’. This shot is also presented in reverse. At the start of the film, we see photographs of boys arrayed in a grid. The photographs, typical head-and-shoulders school shots, and their arrangement, reference other such grids: police grids, for example, of missing (abducted, maybe murdered) children. The camera then zooms out to resolve to the pixelled mug shot of Jackson’s face. In one direction is the attribution of a paedophilic gaze to Jackson; it is his eye that hones in on (and contains) specific boys, and all boys. In the other direction the sequence suggests something about the erotically charged victimhood of the boys themselves. The zoom is an action shot, signifying movements and acts in space and time, of feelings exchanged and in dynamic tension. The connotations of crime accrue to both sides of the sequence, blurring the boundaries between the prurient gazer and the pruriently gazed upon. The climate of danger and violation is graphically set in the interplay of the pixel shots. They reference both scale and sequentiality, and build a sense of escalating crime that both prefaces and fills out each vignette, cuing them to add up to something not only more than what is told there*/but indeed in contrast to what is told. For example, in the story of Emanuel Lewis, well known as a child actor at the time of his friendship with Jackson, the now adult Lewis 30. The entire sequence is introduced with the voice-over comment: ‘‘In private, Michael had already moved on to his next ‘special friend’, but for his record buying public, he was determined to portray himself as a heterosexual predator with the video for his latest hit, ‘The Way You Make me Feel’ ’’.

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states categorically and full front to camera: ‘‘If you ask me did anything untoward happen, the answer to that question, to your question, is hell no’’. Similar statements are made by all of the boys presented in the film who were asked to discuss their relationship with Michael Jackson. Such denials do not necessarily mean that Michael Jackson is innocent. What is significant here is that a semiological climate of prurience and criminality is constituted out of allusion rather than facts (whatever those are). This has a repudiative effect on the evidentiary standing of the testimony offered by the boys who were involved with Jackson. Their denial of abuse is effectively recast as (further) evidence of crime. The pixel sequences also construct Jackson’s relationship to each boy, and to boys generally, as encapsulated, decontextualised and secretive*/that is, in an illicit space only they occupy. This is a central representational trope, as well as a borne-out experience, of child sexual abuse. In this context, the connotations of secrecy and isolation reinforce (and are reinforced by) the significations elsewhere of child abduction. Such connotations, too, are in contrast not only to the testimony of the boys in question, but indeed to the narration itself. Emanuel Lewis, for example, is pictured in archival news footage with Jackson and Brooke Shields at the Grammy awards. Other boys (their parents, and the narration) tell us that Jackson in fact developed close relationships with whole families, and in one case a particularly close and confiding friendship with a boy’s mother.31 However the framing trope of illicit secrecy means that these can only be plausibly read as a strategies for grooming the boy. Together, the pixel sequences produce an interpretive grain , a set of preferred meanings, that become consolidated not only despite their dislocation from the substantive material presented, but precisely because of that dislocation.

Erectionhole (Sodomy) Sequence // Recumbent Boy Sequence /

.

. .

zoom from a blurred landscape into close up, which gradually resolves itself into a flesh-like hole cut to shot of erect structure in shadow in a landscape cut to shot of erect structure, this time through the window of a moving car, carrying a boy passenger and shot as if from the boy’s point of view

This visual sequence is striking for a number of reasons. First, in the flow of discussion within the documentary, it first appeared to us as a non sequitur ; it did not correspond with the actual narrative being articulated at that point. However, the quick-cut and phallic imagery struck us forcibly and led us to carefully map the sequence frame by frame. This enabled us to distil out what the images actually were and the obvious and non-specific connotations of 31. This, to the extent that the boy’s father became jealous and tape-recorded the conversations between Jackson and his wife.

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penetration and genitalia that they invoked. After many painstaking viewings we were able to determine that the image was not of a bodily orifice but a rend in fabric that was arranged in folds surrounding a hole, suggestive of a vagina or anus. It is in the context of the larger flow in which this sequence appears that more specific meanings, particularly those attached to danger, emerge. For example, the placement of this sequence is notable, appearing, as it does, after the ‘‘abduction sequence’’ (described above) and immediately before an extended sequence that features a lingering pornographic gaze on a young male body. This latter ‘‘recumbent boy’’ sequence consists of a camera slowly panning up the torso of a nude young boy who is lying supine on a bed, his eyes closed and his arm flung over his head. The entire pose is suggestive of post-coital abandon. The covers of the bed are thrown back and the shot is taken through an open door of what appears to be a down-market hotel bedroom. The ‘‘erection/hole’’ sequence, within this flow, is transformed. It is not plausible to read it as a generalised (positive or even humorous) reference to the erotic. Nor is it plausible to read it as a reference to heterosexual sex. Given the larger context, this sequence both takes on and reinforces prurient connotations of danger. Here again, the immanent and imminent are specifically encoded as a homosexual and ‘‘paedophilic’’ rape, either about to happen (the ‘‘abduction’’) or having just occurred (the recumbent boy). Again it is notable that the inter-referentiality of these sequences, which operate together to support a narrative of endangerment, is not logically inter-referential with the first-hand testimonial discussion that is documented.

Boy in Bath Sequence . . .

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. . .

black screen; cut to frame showing plump lips in profile and silhouette; cut to black and white still of Michael Jackson’s face from news footage (voice-in background on topic of Jackson’s relationship to boys) On voice-over of the word ‘‘boys’’, cut to shot of a boy sleeping, point of view above the bed, with the boy’s face turned to the pillow in profile. cut to still image of Jackson’s ruined face. Black screen. cut to shot of naked boy in a bath: point of view behind and above him. In shot is one shoulder, the bent leg, the upper arm and the bath water.

This pointedly pornographic sequence appears almost immediately after the ‘‘recumbent boy’’ sequence. As with the others, it elides the eroticisation of boys themselves with the gaze of their would-be abuser. Imminence and immanence are both invoked here: the former, in the point-of-view shot in which the camera is at adult height; its approach is from behind and the angle is downward on a nude boy, situated in the iconic trope of sexual vulnerability*/a bath. All of these

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imply a threat of immediate and violent harm of a sexual nature. As a virtual cliche ´ in the semiology of plausible victim and likely victimiser, the bath sequence functions as metaphor of immanence embedded in Jackson’s own perverse nature. The sequence moreover appears to have been filmed with a hand-held camera, a characteristic trope of ‘‘home-movie’’ footage, which references child pornography generically as the production of secretive men, preying on children in private domestic spaces. Such footage also references illicit home movies found by police in raids on suspected child abusers and later used in evidence for their prosecution. Implicit in this sequence is the implication that Jackson is the camera operator and that the footage is primary and prima facie evidence of his abuse.

Truth and the Idiom of the Evidentiary Pratibha Parmar (1987) has argued that the documentary genre is distinguished by its privileged capital as truth. This places Michael Jackson’s Boys , at least putatively, in the terrain not only of realist representation, but also of the real. This capital is extended through a structuring idiom of the evidentiary. The film is not simply constituted as a ‘‘factual’’ history of Michael Jackson’s life or a ‘‘factually’’ informed commentary on Michael Jackson’s character. It is styled as testimony with explicit reference to a court trial. This is visually invoked through footage of Jackson’s arrest, the official police mug-shot that attended it, and in an extended repertoire of forensic evidence hunting, and interviews with boys or witnesses or experts sometimes staged as police interrogations.32 This is a documentary in which Michael Jackson is explicitly ‘‘on trial’’. Given this construction, it is interesting to consider the ways in which evidence is invoked to support the (a priori ) finding of guilt. As we note above, there are radical disjunctions between the first-person testimonies of the primary players (the boys and Jackson himself), all of whom explicitly and repeatedly disavow that Jackson had abused the boys. What is offered as definitive are commentaries by ‘‘expert’’ witnesses. These include a psychologist (who never met Jackson), a tabloid journalist, and two former household employees, husband and wife, whom Jackson had fired. A web search revealed that the husband, Philip Lemarque, had run a hard-core pornographic website,33 however this is not stated in the documentary. Indeed, the only actual evidence of victimisation in Michael Jackson’s Boys is that deployed by the documentary maker in visual sequences that are unequivocally child pornography. ‘‘Proof’’ of guilt and innocence, of dangerous acts and of means, motive and opportunity, 32. On of these interviews, for example, has the boy (now man) sitting at a scarred table in a stark room attended by his lawyer. He is wearing a wool cap pulled low over his forehead. It could be a scene from Law and Order. 33. See http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0404051lemarque1.html; INTERNET (accessed 4 June 2006).

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are all accomplished through a regime of innuendo, hearsay and speculation transformed into an evidentiary semiology of revealed truth.

Conclusion In this paper we have undertaken an extended semiological analysis of Michael Jackson’s Boys and examined key aspects of the materiality of signification within it. In so doing, we have raised a number of important questions. First is the question of what counts as evidence both as an object of justice and as a semiological effect. Second is the question of bodily ambiguity and its continuing articulation with legalistic notions of guilt and innocence. And, finally, we have considered what might be usefully understood as a new culture of realism , which is most strongly emblematised in constructed reality programming but which emanates from a conjunction of earlier forms of documentary capital and more recent sensibilities that interlink prurience, surveillance and pleasure. In the light of this, we would like to return to the question of social semiotics. What is the relationship between the representational moment of Michael Jackson’s Boys and its semiotic economy to the cultural and social milieu in which it was produced? At the most immediate level, this documentary had no apparent effect on the outcome of the trial. While presumed and found guilty in Michael Jackson’s Boys , Michael Jackson was acquitted in his actual trial. However, as we have shown, the representational economies surrounding and emblematised in Michael Jackson’s Boys are both semiotic and social. One form that this takes is in the reiteration of common-senses (racialised, gendered, sexualised, etc.) deeply embedded in the everyday and institutional practices of the wider culture. Here we refer not just to the ‘‘local’’ cultures of California/ Hollywood, or of the USA, but also to a globalised culture industry. The commonsenses deployed here include evidentiary and demonising discourses that construct plausible perpetrators and victims, ‘‘crime’’ and ‘‘justice’’. They also constitute signifiers of imminent and immanent danger attached to bodies that ‘‘slip’’ outside and between conventional social categories, and which are themselves foundationally embedded in deep social and cultural inequalities. In this sense, it was not just Michael Jackson who was ‘‘tried’’ and ‘‘found guilty’’ by the documentary, but the very possibility of bodily liminality and social fluidity. Michael Jackson’s Boys also evidences the simultaneous semiotic and social power of documentary privilege . Here the evidentiary idiom serves to legitimate a reiterated stigmatisation of already stigmatised social groups (allegedly personified by Jackson). More perniciously, the documentary created a permissive space in which is was possible to screen pornographic film of young boys on prime time television, while attributing the film-maker’s agency and pornographic gaze on to Jackson. In other words, the child pornography of the documentary is reclassified as evidence through the generic structures and narrative tropes discussed above. Thus, even as juries may be required to witness

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otherwise ‘‘obscene’’ materials as part of the procedures of a trial, the viewers of Michael Jackson’s Boys were analogously positioned as captive witness in the service of documentary ‘‘justice’’ and claims to truth. Michael Jackson’s Boys would seem, then, to both borrow and emblematise the power of documentary privilege as it articulates with what is, by now, an all too familiar surveillant voyeurism. This is a voyeurism that offers cruelty as ‘‘real’’ and legitimates prurience and malicious speculation by virtue of its realism. None of the arguments we have made here are proof of Jackson’s innocence, or indeed guilt. Rather, what they do evidence is the profound imbrication of justice and culture industries and the repertoires and discursive practices that accrue to each. The actuality of a trial articulates in both overt and subtle ways with the idiom of a trial. Both constitute notions of ‘‘real crime’’ attached to ‘‘real bodies’’ in ‘‘real time’’. Both reiterate and reconstitute notions of what counts as evidence, what constitutes due process (or compromises it) and how the ‘‘doing’’ of justice is inextricable from its spectacle. Debbie Epstein, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, UK Deborah Lynn Steinberg, University of Warwick, UK

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