Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask, Part 3: Ghosts
Lisha: Hello again, Willa and Harriet! So after our last two posts on minstrelsy and how Michael Jackson engages with that history in his work – last week we covered the onstage “Billie Jean” dance routine in Motown 25 and the panther dance coda in Black or White – I can hardly wait to talk with you again about one of my all-time favorite musical topics, Michael Jackson’s Ghosts.
Harriet, in your book you describe this 39-minute musical short film as deceptively “comic … fun and light,” because a closer reading actually reveals a “profoundly serious” and “formidable work of art.” I couldn’t agree more! I remember when I first discovered Ghosts, I watched it obsessively, over and over again. Even before I began to analyze it, the complexity just grabbed me and made me want to know more. It really did a number on me! I think it is one of the most overlooked works in the entire history of music video and short films.
Willa: I agree completely, Lisha. I had the same experience of watching Ghosts over and over. It just gripped me. I had this feeling that it meant so much more than I was able to understand at first, and I kept watching it again and again, trying to puzzle it out. So I was eager to read your analysis, Harriet, and I was fascinated that you approach Ghosts as pushing back against “Wacko Jacko” and in fact the whole history of blackface minstrelsy. Is that right?
Harriet: Hello both! Yes, I certainly read Ghosts as a creative response to “Wacko Jacko,” and I’m sure I’m not alone in that interpretation! But the more specific way I approach this is by examining the film in the historical context of the Black minstrel tradition. This was the tradition of blackface minstrelsy as it was enacted by Black performers and which in many ways was a “push back” against the broader minstrel tradition.
Lisha: That’s such an important distinction to understand. In part one of our discussion, we went into some detail on blackface minstrelsy, which you defined as “the staged caricature of Black people by White actors and dancers.” It’s essentially a White racial fantasy that denies any form of Black self-representation. But Black minstrelsy, or minstrelsy as performed by Black artists, works quite differently.
Harriet: Yes. So to provide a little context, Black performers largely began appearing in minstrelsy from 1865, following the conclusion of the Civil War – nearly forty years after the tradition’s inception. But rather than be able to finally represent themselves on their own terms, as the price for being involved, Black performers had to adhere to minstrelsy’s traditional racist caricatures. Black performers became immensely popular among White audiences for doing this because they were able to “prove” minstrelsy’s caricatures to be “true.”
Despite these constrictions, however, Black performers found ways to covertly challenge and rebel against them. This was by means of various creative techniques rooted in the strategies of survival known to African American culture since the beginnings of slavery: it was about playing a game of compliance and pretense that Black Americans knew all too well. This allowed for a concealed counterculture to develop and thrive in Black minstrelsy, meaning it could speak to its Black performers and Black audiences in very different ways to Whites.
Lisha: This is such a fascinating topic, Harriet. A couple of the key concepts you define so precisely in the book are really helpful here: double consciousness and double parody. Would you like to elaborate on this a bit?
Harriet: Of course. “Double consciousness” was a term coined in 1903 by the sociologist and Civil Rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. It describes the sensation for Black Americans of seeing oneself through the eyes of Whites (or through “the revelation of the other world” as Du Bois writes) and of the burden and conflict inherent in that. This is so pertinent to Black minstrelsy because Black minstrels really dramatized this sensation: they were forced to play White-constructed versions of themselves – in fact, they literally had to embody them – whilst being their real selves with their own needs and desires for expression and self-representation.
“Double parody” is one key strategy that Black minstrels learned as a way to critique the caricatures they played. This was a sort of extreme exaggeration – a parody of a parody – which meant they could play the roles ironically, with a wink in the eye, as well as push the plausibility of those roles to breaking point in a relatively safe way.
Lisha: These two concepts really helped me understand the big picture of what’s going on in Ghosts. In the opening scene of the film, we see a depiction of “Normal Valley” and a group of townspeople who aggressively confront Michael Jackson’s character, the Maestro, about being different … from “Someplace Else,” according to the plaque outside his home. But the Maestro is keenly aware of the townspeople’s false perceptions and seems to understand it as a group projection that doesn’t really have anything to do with him. To me this perfectly sums up the concept of double consciousness.
As the Maestro begins acting out all the townspeople’s fantasies about him, specifically about being “scary” – again their perception, not his own point of view – he does it in the most exaggerated and mind-blowing ways! He makes a game out of acting out these distorted projections in order to expose them. Is that what we mean by double parody?
Harriet: Yes. So in Ghosts we see Michael Jackson acutely aware of his own false image of “Wacko Jacko,” and he weaves a narrative that acts as a kind of allegory of it as a way to challenge it indirectly. This is the heart of the film’s double consciousness: the film dramatizes the struggle between a perceived public image and the real person beneath it. Michael Jackson’s character, the Maestro, is perceived as scary and weird. When he is confronted by the townspeople, who want to drive him out of town, he then commences a kind of game, as you describe, Lisha, in which he takes their perceptions of him and then pushes them to their extreme. It’s a double parody, you’re right, that over the course of the film shifts the location of control and power and, in the end, helps the townspeople see the Maestro quite differently.
Willa: This idea of double parody is so interesting, Harriet, and it seems crucial to understanding Ghosts – what makes it so revolutionary, yet so grounded in traditions of Black American art. I recently went back and reread The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism by Henry Louis Gates Jr, and he talks about how Black American literature speaks with a “double voice” – conveying different meanings to different audiences at the same time.
So when you talked earlier about how Black artists would perform blackface with “a wink in the eye,” most Black audience members back then would have instantly recognized that “wink” simply through the daily experience of living life with a “double consciousness” – of constantly negotiating the difference between what the dominant White culture told them was true and what they themselves experienced as true. So they would see that wink and interpret the performance one way – as “a parody of a parody,” as you just mentioned – while most White audiences would not see the wink and simply accept it as a typical blackface performance.
Gates suggests that this “double voice” (the “double parody” as you call it, or “signifying” as he calls it) is a natural outgrowth of African American folktales – especially trickster tales – and other cultural traditions such as banter and a playful use of language. So it seems that the double parody you see in Ghosts is squarely within Black American artistic traditions. It places Michael Jackson and his work within a long, powerful lineage, and it cautions us not to take anything we see in Ghosts strictly at face value.
Harriet: That’s it, Willa. What you describe really helps us appreciate how we are able to view Michael Jackson as a descendant of the Black minstrel tradition not as a theoretical stretch but rather, as you say, the logical continuation of “a long, powerful lineage.”
Willa: Exactly. And it puts the lie to any idea that Michael Jackson was trying to abandon his Black heritage – what you call “the story of racial betrayal.” This narrative wasn’t true of his music, his dance, his short films, or his face, but it was repeated over and over again by critics, especially White critics. And as you explore in your book, he engages with some of these false narratives in unexpected ways.
For example, in Ghosts he directly addresses the cultural anxiety that he is “scary” because he is different, that he is a threat to children, even the ridiculous “Wacko Jacko”-type stories that his face was “disintegrating” (to quote Martin Bashir) and his nose was falling off. But he does it through a double parody, as you say, exaggerating those stories to an outrageous extreme.
Harriet: That’s right. One recurring focus of Ghosts is the Maestro’s face, which he plays around with and then dramatically contorts and reimagines with the use of computer-generated imagery. This is part of the Maestro’s game of double parody that realizes the townspeople’s worst perceptions about him as scary and weird.
In the context of “Wacko Jacko” and Michael Jackson’s response to that image – that is, the film’s broader narrative – this focus on the face and how he plays with it works in much the same way. Michael Jackson’s face became the focal point of his caricature and subject of the most preposterous and hostile stories. So Michael Jackson here is giving us what we want – he is offering up our own fantasies about him – but then takes this to new extremes.
Willa: Yes, and as you say in your book, through that exaggeration he “transforms that image” of his face “to destabilize it.” Because of this instability, the villagers begin to question their perceptions of the Maestro’s face, as well as their perceptions of the Maestro more generally and all their fearful stories about him. This parallels how Michael Jackson turned the narrative of “Wacko Jacko” against itself, exaggerating it and using it “as a tool for its own dismantling,” as you say in your book. We see this playing out in precise detail in Ghosts through the extreme images of the Maestro’s face.
Lisha: It’s astonishing to me how directly Michael Jackson confronts all the tabloid noise about his face, something so personal that has been ridiculed so publicly. At first, the Maestro is quite playful about it, joking and making a game of trying to make a scary face. But the mood abruptly shifts when the special effects come in and it starts getting rather serious and emotionally complicated. He’s not kidding around. At one point he literally rips his face off his skull and hands it to the Mayor! It’s like he takes all the savage critique about his face and exaggerates it beyond your wildest imagination, until the townspeople and the Mayor are truly shocked and horrified and disoriented. It’s no longer just a game!
Harriet: Exactly. It’s a great manipulation of his own caricature to make it work in different ways – ways that promote us to question that caricature, the basis for it, and its consequences. At other moments, he swaps the parody and terror for pathos. This is notable, of course, in the “death” scene when his face literally falls away and turns to dust as the climax to the townspeople’s hostilities.
Lisha: That’s such a pivotal moment in the film. The Maestro falls to the ground and begins bashing his own face into the floor until it starts to crumble and disintegrate. Eventually his whole body turns to dust. There is a sense of shock and grief amongst the townspeople about what just happened – true sadness and remorse that the Maestro is gone forever. Everyone is forced to rethink what went wrong and why it should never have come to this.
Harriet: And in the context of Michael Jackson’s real life – or the context of his caricature and the hostility it represented – it’s a pretty unflinching scene. It’s death by “Wacko Jacko,” or to borrow a term from Joseph Vogel, death by “cultural abuse.”
Lisha: Exactly! Well said.
Harriet: This strategy of turning comedy into pathos reminds me of the great Black blackface Vaudevillian Bert Williams and his approach to the traditional minstrel caricature. At the turn of the twentieth century, Williams was renowned for his winning comic blackface persona. But as it evolved, that persona became one increasingly of pathos. While pathos was in itself nothing new to minstrelsy (audiences could always at once laugh at and pity traditional minstrel caricatures), Williams was able to universalize that pathos. This was in such a way as to bring a humanity to the role he played, subtly shifting his role from caricature to human. This feels very pertinent to the moments in Ghosts where we are allowed to see glimmers of the Maestro’s vulnerability and pain.
Lisha: I wholeheartedly agree. And there is a detail you mention about the Mayor’s character which really explodes this into a much bigger context than just Michael Jackson’s star persona. I think many of us assumed the Mayor is roughly based on Tom Sneddon, the Santa Barbara district attorney who investigated Michael Jackson in 1993 and 2003. But the Mayor’s character is not physically modeled after Tom Sneddon at all, is he?
Harriet: It appears not. It seems pretty clear that the Mayor is inspired by Tom Sneddon. But physically, the Mayor looks nothing like Sneddon, you’re right. Instead, as others have recognized, he looks almost exactly like Henry Clarence Strider, the Mississippi county sheriff who frustrated the Emmett Till murder trial. Emmett Till was the 14-year-old boy from Chicago who, in 1955, was brutally lynched in Mississippi for purportedly whistling at a White woman at a grocery store, if indeed he even did that. His White killers were later acquitted.
Willa: Yes, Raven Woods (who’s from Alabama and knows a lot about the Emmett Till case) wrote a really insightful blog post about this a number of years ago. Unfortunately, that post is no longer available, but here are some comparison photos she posted on the platform formerly known as Twitter:
Lisha: In these comparison photos the shape of the nose is a big giveaway, isn’t it? Exactly like Strider’s! So interesting in that Michael Jackson’s nose has been such a big media fascination.
Willa: That’s true. And here’s a tweet posted by andjustice4some comparing the Mayor with a drawing of Strider:
The similarities between the Mayor and Strider are really striking: their face and body shape (including nose shape, as you mentioned, Lisha), hair style and hair color, clothes, and glasses are all the same. Another interesting detail is that in behind-the-scenes footage of the filming of Ghosts, there’s a scene about 6:40 minutes in where Jackson is getting into character as the Mayor and he tries out a Southern accent, which Strider had and Sneddon didn’t.
Harriet: Oh wow, Willa, I’d never picked up on his accent in that clip!
Willa: Well, I can understand that because he dropped it in the final version of the film: the Mayor in Ghosts doesn’t have a Southern accent. But the fact that Michael Jackson used that accent while figuring out how to play the Mayor suggests a Southern origin, just like Strider. Taken all together, I think the evidence is pretty compelling that many significant aspects of the Mayor were based on Strider – not just his appearance but his character and beliefs also.
Harriet: Totally. It seems that this is a covert way that Michael Jackson racializes this story. To me, it is a subtle way of suggesting that “Wacko Jacko” and its consequences (namely, how the accusations of child molestation were treated and pursued by Sneddon) were to some degree racially motivated. It places “Wacko Jacko” in a long historical narrative of prejudice and misrepresentation and of the justice system not working favorably for Black citizens. It’s a damning message, but one that is surreptitiously made.
Willa: I agree completely. I think it’s important in this context that Michael Jackson apparently felt that Sneddon’s obsession with him was racially motivated as well.
Harriet: Exactly!
Willa: Matt Fiddes, who provided security for him off and on for around a decade, said in a recent interview that Michael Jackson thought Sneddon’s pursuit of the Chandler case “was because of racism.” (Fiddes discusses this at around the 1:06:10 mark.) By the way, thank you for sharing this interview with me, Harriet! I really enjoyed hearing his stories and memories. It has some inaccuracies – Jordan Chandler hasn’t publicly refuted the 1993 allegations, other than what he said to some college friends, and James Safechuck wasn’t a witness in the 2005 trial – but it has some important and really interesting insights.
And I agree completely that linking the Mayor with Strider radically expands the scope and meaning of Ghosts. It suggests that this isn’t just a protest against how the police targeted Michael Jackson himself in 1993 and 2005 (as many critics have read it). Instead, it’s challenging the long history of police (such as Strider) and the legal system more generally reacting from a place of racial bias that supports White supremacy.
Lisha: I feel like this fits with another subtle way that Michael Jackson “expands the scope and meaning of Ghosts,” which has to do with zombie ghosts who dance with the Maestro. They are all dressed in very baroque European style clothing. The Maestro himself wears the ruffled shirt and is referred to as Maestro, the Italian word for master that we use in music to acknowledge artistic mastery or genius. I’m wondering if this is another way of covertly racializing the story? For me, it points to the European underpinnings of how we think about music and art in the West and how Michael Jackson finds himself living with that history in a big way.
Willa: That’s interesting, Lisha – specially since not just art but the history of slavery and racism in America has European underpinnings.
Harriet: I think the ghosts that accompany the Maestro, and how they are presented and perform together, is really fascinating. To me, they evoke much of the aesthetic and spirit of “John Canoe,” a form of nineteenth-century street theater that enslaved people performed during Christmas holidays and other controlled festivities. For John Canoe, slaves put on whiteface by dusting their faces and hair with flour and dressed in a make-shift European grand style to imitate Whites (and it was therefore an inverted prototype to blackface minstrelsy!). There would usually be a “King” who would lead a troupe of musicians, dancers, and other dramatic characters to their enslaver’s house or to other dwellings inhabited by Whites where they would perform a “rough” play and dance in exchange for money or food.
John Canoe was a festival of controlled misrule in which enslaved people could momentarily rebel against, or invert, power. And as part of that – and this really connects to what you suggest, Lisha – in their guise as Whites, these performers rewrote traditional ideas about European art. For their music, they blew cow horns, rattled chains, banged pots and pans, shouted and yelled, while their dances were rowdy and boisterous. According to Dale Cockrell’s Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World, one observer in 1849 wrote of the music of one such troupe as “noise” and an “ear-splitting din,” while the dance “kept up … all conceivable distortions of body and limbs.”
Willa: That’s so interesting, Harriet! I hadn’t heard of that before. It’s like an American version of medieval Carnival, where everything was turned topsy turvy for a day. There were parades, with people walking backwards or sitting backwards on a donkey or walking on their hands. Others wore their underwear on top of their clothes, or put their pants on their head and their shirt on their legs. And servants feasted at the dining table and dressed in a parody of fine clothes, while lords and ladies dressed in rags.
Some historians see Carnival as really transgressive – a way for medieval servants to challenge the social order by acting out different roles. Others see it as reinforcing the social order – a way for the lower classes to blow off steam without really changing anything. How do you see John Canoe? And why do you think Michael Jackson would visually quote it in Ghosts?
Harriet: I’m not convinced that the performance of the Maestro with the ghosts is necessarily an intentional visual quote of John Canoe, though the dusty faces and costumes beautifully evoke aspects of it. I see it rather as another example of the lineage we spoke of earlier: a lineage of finding ways to speak up against the powerful or dominant society and of doing that in creatively agile ways.
Willa: Oh, I see what you’re saying.
Harriet: One way the ghosts and Maestro achieve that here is the way in which, in the spirit of John Canoe, they challenge traditional European notions of what constitutes music and dance.
Lisha: Yes. I’m thinking there is something quite revealing in this imagery about what might have haunted Michael Jackson himself. Americans imported European music to the continent and made it the standard by which all things musical were judged. The notion of European musical superiority is so deeply embedded in the culture that it is actually kind of hard to recognize all the implications of that.
But the big story of the twentieth century musically is African American music: forms like jazz, rhythm and blues, rock-n-roll, and even country music that Beyoncé is currently bringing awareness to. This music follows a very different logic than the Austro-German musical canon that we have internalized as the “great” music of the past. The most obvious difference is the prioritization of rhythm and timbre over melody and harmony. So it is amusing to see the Maestro dancing with European ghosts of the past – “the family” as he calls it – in such a rhythmic and noisy way.
Willa: Wow, Lisha, that’s such an interesting way to see this!
Harriet: It feels like they’re staging a protest!
Lisha: It’s quite the political statement! But in a very covert, subtle way that demonstrates the important cultural and political work that music can do.
Harriet: It really does.
Lisha: Harriet, you suggest that the climax of this short film is the mirror scene, when the Mayor is forced to reckon with all the ugly accusations he has hurled at the Maestro by looking into a mirror and instead seeing them in himself. A kind of role reversal. This is another place where I feel like the story could be subtly racialized. We see that all the ugliness the Mayor projects onto the Maestro is actually the ugliness he has denied within himself. And I think that could be read not just as a personal projection of himself, but as a collective one as well.
Willa: Yes, the mirror scene is such a crucial moment, especially for the villagers (the onscreen audience) and us as viewers (the offscreen audience). But it’s important to note that the Mayor isn’t transformed.
Lisha: That’s right. Instead, his sense of self is completely shattered. He leaves the scene both literally and figuratively. However, the villagers remain.
Willa: That’s true, the villagers remain though the Mayor is gone, but I think this is an important pivot point in Michael Jackson’s body of films. In his early films, he is always able to connect with his adversaries through music and dance and change their attitudes – think Beat It or Bad or The Way You Make Me Feel. But the abuse allegations seem to have shown him that some adversaries simply can’t be swayed. So here the Mayor is banished rather than redeemed. And the bar managers in You Rock My World aren’t transformed either. Instead, the protagonist (accidentally) burns the place down.
Lisha: Excellent point!
Harriet: It is! That’s a really interesting observation, Willa. In the closing scenes the Mayor is banished and the focus becomes the townspeople. It’s as if Michael Jackson is saying that it’s not the villainous Tom Sneddons or Clarence Striders of the world that really matter, but the rest of us – the likes of you and me and those who show the promise of a more open mind. And this allows the film to find its happy ending.
Willa: Oh, I like that interpretation!
Lisha: I do too! Beautifully said. Perhaps the Mayor’s animosity is too deeply ingrained for him to be reachable, but we see a complete turnaround in the townspeople who had originally sided with the Mayor.
I think if we learn anything from minstrelsy and how it relates to the “Wacko Jacko” hysteria, it’s that psychological projection isn’t just an individual phenomenon. It’s also a collective group process that stereotypes Others in ways that reveal more about those engaging in the projection than those they target. The ugliness the Mayor sees in the Maestro is actually a deeply buried reflection of himself. But he is unaware of his own menacing traits until forced to take a look in the mirror. The same is true of collective group projections, like racism.
Willa: That’s such a key point, Lisha, and really underscores why the mirror scene is so important.
Harriet: It’s another example of how Michael Jackson as the Maestro challenges us. How, over the course of the film, he plays with our perceptions, offers insight into his world, and invites us to take a look at ourselves. These are at once powerful and gracious strategies. And in the narrative of the film itself, these strategies reap their rewards as the townspeople see the Maestro in the end as not so scary after all.
Willa: Exactly! But the Maestro hasn’t gained their acceptance by changing himself to fit in and become one of the “Nice Regular People” who inhabits Normal Valley. Instead, they have changed – their attitudes towards the Maestro and towards Otherness more generally have changed – which is huge. It’s like Ghosts provides a blueprint for fighting prejudice.
Harriet: It really does!
Willa: Harriet, thank you again for joining us. I feel like I’ve learned a lot these last few weeks – and have a lot more to think about! And Lisha, it’s always a pleasure to talk with you too!
Lisha: I enjoyed it so much!
Harriet: Me too! Thank you to you both for helping me explore some of the ideas in my book.
Lisha: Harriet, can you tell us again about the publisher’s discount being offered to our readers who would like to purchase a copy of your book?
Harriet: Of course. As discussed in part one, readers can get a 30 percent discount on the second edition of Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask on the Routledge website using promotion code MJBM30.
Willa: Wonderful! Thanks again, Harriet. It’s been such a pleasure talking with you!
Posted on June 20, 2024, in Michael Jackson and tagged Ghosts, Harriet Manning, Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask, Michael Jackaon, Blackface, Emmett Till. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment.
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