Celebrating Invincible, Part 4: Threatened!!!

Willa:  This week we’re looking at “Threatened,” a very unusual horror story told from the point of view of the monster, who’s trying to figure out why everyone is so frightened of him.

“Threatened” begins with an introduction by Rod Serling, but it’s more philosophical and psychological than frightening. As Serling says, “Tonight’s story is somewhat unique and calls for a different kind of introduction.” He goes on to say, “A monster has arrived in the village,” a typical scenario in horror movies, but then tells us, “The major ingredient of any recipe for fear is the unknown.” So instead of encouraging us to feel fear, as horror movies typically do, he’s asking us to step back and analyze that fear. He concludes the intro with “Oh yes, I did forget something, didn’t I? I forgot to introduce you to the monster,” and we immediately hear Jackson’s voice singing, “You’re fearing me.” Suddenly we realize that he’s the monster. And he’s trying to get inside our heads and understand us.

Joie:  It’s very interesting you should describe the monster that way because that is not the feeling I get from this song at all. It is absolutely told from the monster’s point of view but, I don’t believe he’s clueless as to why everyone is frightened. Just the opposite, actually. He knows why they’re afraid and he likes it. Not only does the monster know exactly what he’s doing but, he enjoys doing it. He is obviously having great fun scaring all of the people.

You should be watching me, you should feel threatened.
While you sleep, while you creep, you should be threatened.
Every time your lady speaks, she speaks to me, threatened.
Half of me you’ll never be, so you should feel threatened by me.

It’s as if he’s celebrating, reveling in the effect he has on those around him. He is something to behold and he knows it and he is taunting those who look down on him and mock him. They are jealous of his beauty, his talent, his power and he throws it in their faces. “You’re fearing me, ’cause you know I’m a beast,” he sings. It’s the kind of trash talking that you hear from sports fans and others about to go into battle on any given court, field, board game or boardroom.

Willa:  Well, Joie, I agree that he was certainly “something to behold!” And I agree this song has a defiant, in-your-face edge to it – “trash talking” is a good description. And it may be that in some ways he enjoyed people’s fearful response to him. But I also think he sees that fear as really dangerous, and he’s trying to understand where that fear comes from.

To me, this is another one of those songs that is directly addressing the current circumstances of his life. The media and a fairly large percentage of the population are treating him like a monster, and he’s exploring the reasons why. As the title suggests, he thinks people see him as a monster because they feel “threatened” by him, but why? What exactly is so threatening to so many people? What are they so scared of?

This to me is the crucial question at the center of “Threatened,” and the answers he suggests are fascinating. I tend to think people were threatened by the way he blurred boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality, but he points to a different source – and he has good reasons. After all, the frenzied media criticism started before he really began transgressing those boundaries. He released “Leave Me Alone,” a funny but defiant response to the media hysteria, in 1989 when his skin was still fairly dark.

Also one of his heroes, Charlie Chaplin, was demonized in the press just like he was – Charlie Chaplin was treated like a monster, a “moral leper,” for more than 30 years – yet Chaplin wasn’t challenging the same kinds of social boundaries Michael Jackson was. We see a similar demonization of Elvis, and Barry Gibb, and Barbra Streisand, and Britney Spears. In fact, we see this sort of mob mentality occurring fairly regularly throughout our history where the press and the public turn against a popular performer in really vicious ways, and I think Michael Jackson is using “Threatened” to both push back against that mob mentality as well as try to understand it.

As we see in the lyrics you cited, he suggests there are deep psychological reasons for these ugly witch hunts, including feelings of inadequacy and jealousy. After all, he’s a sex symbol – “Every time your lady speaks, she speaks to me, threatened” – and a very talented, very handsome, very successful rock star – “Half of me you’ll never be, so you should feel threatened by me.” He’s also a celebrity, and his fame has made him so much larger than life that no one else can measure up, so now there’s an impulse to knock him off his pedestal and cut him down to size.

Joie:  Willa, while I can agree that this song is addressing the usual monsters in Michael’s own experiences, I really don’t think that he’s trying to figure them out at all. That’s not what’s going on here. I don’t believe he is suggesting any kind of reasons for the fear and I don’t believe he’s even asking the question ‘why are you afraid.’ Instead, I feel he’s telling us that he already knows exactly what’s going on. He knows why they’re afraid. And not only is he telling them that he understands it, but he’s letting them know that they’re right. They have good reason to fear him. “I’ve got a spell on you,” he sings. Then he says this:

Your worst nightmare, it’s me I’m everywhere
In one blink I’ll disappear, and then I’ll come back to haunt you

He’s letting them know that he’s not going away. They should feel threatened because they can’t get rid of him. He’s unstoppable. They’ve tried their best – Sneddon, Dimond, the Chandlers, the tabloids – they’ve all tried their best to bring him down and they may have knocked him off his game for a minute but, he’s not done. They didn’t finish him off and now he’s back, better than ever. They can’t silence him, they can’t control him, they can’t reach him… they can’t break him. So, essentially, he is ending this album on the very same triumphant note that he began it on:  by telling all those who tried to stop him that, after all of their efforts and all that he’s been through, he’s still here. They “can’t believe it, …can’t conceive it.” But it is the very reason why they should feel threatened.

The chours of “Threatened” that I cited earlier is the same sort of defiant battle cry that we saw in the opening lines of “Unbreakable.”

Now I’m just wondering, why you think
That you can get to me, with anything
Seems like you’d know by now
When and how, I get down
and with all that I’ve been through, I’m still around

It is the exact same message, just different words. In essence, with Invincible, he has just taken the listener on a journey that has now come full circle. This message – that he is still standing, “steady laughin’, while surfacing” – is so important to him that he felt the need to repeat it at the end of the album. Just to make sure we got it, in case we missed it the first time around:

You should be watching me, you should feel threatened

He sounds glorious on this song, as if he is having the best time recording these vocals. As I said before, it almost sounds as if he is celebrating, and the menacing tone of his voice on this track is laced ever so slightly with pure joy. He clearly enjoys the role of the monster on this song and he’s having fun with it. And I believe he sounds joyful because he is defiantly reminding us that he is still here and his art and his ideas – his love – will forever be unbreakable. They can knock him off that pedestal and try to cut him down to size but, it will never really work. He’s not going away and they should be afraid of that. “Half of me you’ll never be, so you should feel threatened by me.”

Willa:  Wow, Joie, this is so intriguing to me. When we first started tossing around the idea of doing a post on “Threatened” and we each said how much we loved it, I just assumed we saw it the same way and loved it for the same reasons. I can’t believe we saw this song so differently. I really do love “Threatened” – it’s one of my favorite songs on Invincible – but I would never have said it was glorious or joyful or celebratory. But I have to say, I’ve been listening to it a lot lately, and I’m starting to come around to your way of thinking. Before, I was so focused on how horrible it must be to have everyone think you’re a monster, I just couldn’t imagine anything joyful about it. But you’re right, that’s also a pretty powerful position to be in, and he does seem to be “reveling” in that power, as you said earlier. He’s definitely flexing his muscles on this song, and he’s enjoying it. Wow, you’ve really expanded the way I think about this song, and that is so interesting to me.

I still see “Threatened” as an insightful psychological study, though, which is what drew me to this song in the first place. I think he’s exploring the reasons why this ugly mob mentality erupts every so often against popular performers, and the reasons he identifies are fascinating and have to do with the nature of celebrity itself, and that weird double-vision of celebrities being both very familiar to us and yet essentially unknown. You know, the scariest horror movies aren’t about monsters from outer space; they’re about someone or something trusted and familiar becoming alien and scary. The father in The Shining goes insane and attacks his own family. The parents in The Omen are murdered by a son who isn’t really their son. The daughter in The Exorcist is possessed by demons and becomes unknowable. The mother in Rosemary’s Baby discovers her baby is devil spawn. The scariest monsters aren’t Godzilla and King Kong – they’re a favorite doll or teddy bear or the family dog or a parent or child or trusted neighbor when they turn murderous and attack the ones who love them and trust them most.

Michael Jackson was so familiar to us in so many ways. Perhaps most important was his incredible capacity for empathizing with an audience. Over and over, people talk about this deep connection they felt with him. When he sang, you felt like he knew what you were thinking and feeling, and was expressing your own thoughts and emotions back to you. As he sings in “Threatened,” “I’ve got a spell on you,” and he did have a spell on us. We were spellbound by everything he did. And he wasn’t just a celebrity; he was a celebrity who grew up in front of us. We felt like we’d known him since he was a boy. So he seemed very familiar in that sense also.

Plus, he was such a celebrity and so incredibly well known, so there was that kind of familiarity also. As he goes on to sing in “Threatened,” “it’s me, I’m everywhere.” And it’s true, he was everywhere, and he still is. His face, his music, his dance moves, his glove and fedora, his whole iconography – it’s truly amazing, his influence is everywhere. I was watching a Schoolhouse Rock video with my son the other day, the one called “Dollars and Sense,” and suddenly the cartoon character moonwalks past a music store. He’s even in Schoolhouse Rock. You can’t escape him, just like you can’t escape the zombies in a horror flick.

Joie:  Oh, Schoolhouse Rock! I used to love those things. But exactly! That’s the point I was trying to make here. We can’t escape him because he is everywhere. Just like he tells us in this song,  “Your worst nightmare, it’s me I’m everywhere / In one blink I’ll disappear, and then I’ll come back to haunt you.” He knows that his influence is inescapable; he knows that no matter what they try to do to him, they will never be able to fully escape him and so, he taunts them with his words:   “You should be watching me, you should feel threatened.”

Willa:  I agree. But then he grew up and changed, and some people began to wonder if we really knew him as well as we thought. There began to be that deep, unspeakable fear of the familiar becoming alien and “threatening.” Then a man accused him of molesting his son, and that fear exploded. And as he tells us in “Threatened,” we can’t escape that fear because it’s not coming from him, it’s coming from us – it’s within us, within our own minds. It’s “the dark thoughts” inside our own heads:

You’re fearing me, ’cause you know I’m a beast
Watching you when you sleep
When you’re in bed, I’m underneath
You’re trapped in halls, and my face is the walls
I’m the floor when you fall
And when you scream it’s ’cause of me
I’m the living dead, the dark thoughts in your head
I heard just what you said
That’s why you’ve got to be threatened by me

This song just takes my breath away. It seems so brilliant to me on so many levels, with deep psychological insights, especially in the way it captures that complicated mix of fear and familiarity people felt for him.

But before we started talking, Joie, I’d never thought about that fear as a potentially powerful force for him – something he could use to move us in deep psychological ways – and that complicates this all still further. I’ve come to agree with you, it does sound like he’s reveling in that power, and for me that just opens up a whole new way of seeing this song. Wow.

Joie:  Well, Willa, you’ve made some great points about the familiar becoming scary and threatening and I find that all very fascinating. But for me, “Threatened” has always been one of my favorite songs on the Invincible album and from the very first time I heard it, I have always felt that this was a song of triumph and victory. A song of revelry or rejoicing. It’s an exhibition of sorts. ‘Look at me, I am here and I am magnificent!’ That’s the message I get from this song. That is what I hear every time I listen to it. And again, to me, it is a reaffirmation of the very same message we hear on the first song on the album. And to some that may seem like a bit of an ego trip or a bold statement for someone to make but, we’re talking about Michael Jackson here. The very same artist who floated a 32-ft. statue of himself down the Thames River to promote an album. That stunt certainly got people talking, and I imagine that “Threatened” was probably intended to do the same thing.

In his much-anticipated book, Man in the Music: The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson, Joe Vogel tells us that Michael had intended on making a horror-themed short film for this song complete with cutting edge special effects but, of course that was scrapped when Sony pulled promotion. So, we’ll never know what he had in store for us with this one but, I’m sure like the song itself, it would have been something glorious.