Underrated MOTM (Special Edition): The Truman Show (1998)

(Despite being a huge fan of his music and dancing, I didn't plan on posting anything about Michael Jackson here for the very reasons that I'll mention, namely my unease about celebrity (and especially non-celebrity) idolization. All I had in mind was a Perfect Song, Perfect Scene clip as a tribute, but on second and third thoughts I ended up with this additional post. Plus my girlfriend wanted me to write something about MJ, and I was ultimately happy to oblige.)

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With three Oscar nominations and solid 95 RT and 90 MC ratings, one of the things June's Underrated Movie of the Month (MOTM) is not is underrated; many people consider it one of the greatest movies of the 90's. But let's just nevermind that this month, especially since "underrated" is always defined by me anyway. The truth of the matter is that I've been voluntarily and involuntarily caught up in the Michael Jackson madness since last week, and now, just as the media coverage graduates from somber commiseration to sickening commercialization, my thoughts have led me to choose here between The Jacksons: An American Dream and The Truman Show. I ended up choosing the latter, but first I have to reflect on the former.

If you were to ask me I wouldn't have had any idea what year it was when I watched The Jacksons: An American Dream. I remember it as an engrossing mini-series about a pop star that I saw all over the TV and radio, and whose songs ("Heal the World") we sang at school. I would have been about 11 years old when it aired in 1992, old enough to become a fan of the then-current "Dangerous" album, but too young to understand the background of the Jackson family and the influence of their music. Disturbingly, what I remembered the most from The Jacksons: An American Dream is this scene, in which Joe Jackson instructs Marlon to "Go! Outside! Get a switch!". Whether that incident of abuse was dramatized doesn't matter at this point; both Joe and Michael admitted that abuse occurred during the famous children's formative years.

My reaction to that scene may not have immediately changed my impression of Michael Jackson, but as the years went by I gradually realized that this man's life was a complete construction, and the public's confusion about him was probably not nearly as bewildering as the isolated confusion he must have been experiencing in his own head. At least to me, then, his physical changes and bizarre behavior made perfect sense.

He didn't understand and perhaps wanted to escape his own identity, so he changed his appearance. He never - literally, never - had a childhood, so he tried to relive those fantasies as an adult (not that he might have understood what that meant), even if not always in the most appropriate ways (not that he understood what that meant either). "The public at large has yet to really understand the pressures of childhood celebrity, which, while exciting, always exacts a very heavy price," he said in 2000. "More than anything, I wished to be a normal little boy. I wanted to build tree houses and go to roller-skating parties. But very early on, this became impossible."

At the end of the day, I think Michael Jackson never had any idea of who he really was. Sure, he understood his status as a pop culture icon, but he never really knew who he was as a human, what his identity was comprised of and how it related to the identities of others. Even other childhood celebrities get the relief of a drug-addled teenage meltdown or a quickly faded career. Not so Jackson - his relief away from the spotlight only came when he was in his 40's, far too late for him to discover himself.

I don't think he was Norma Desmond-crazy and I don't think he was a perverted child molester. I think, aside from being unquestionably and unconditionally the greatest all-around entertainer and pop icon in my lifetime (and undoubtedly the very last of his kind), Jackson was relegated to being a moonwalking, talking, pop culture commodity. We made him, bought him, sold him, abused him (know the background on "Billie Jean"?), scolded him, celebrated him, provoked him, and in many cases, literally bowed down and worshiped him:

Watching that clip, is it any surprise that his self-awareness, and thus individual identity, was on a completely different level than the rest of us? How would you feel if complete strangers reacted to you like that? Like Truman Burbank, the main character of The Truman Show, Michael Jackson was not just a marketable product, but a literal source of life for millions of his fans. We were much more dependent on him than he ever was on us; it's as if we drained the humanity from him like leeches. I mean really, watch the last minute of the above video (truth be told, I haven't been able to sit through the whole thing yet - it's just too insane). Sadly, this phenomenon continues with the increasing popularity of conflict-based "reality" television shows - truly The Truman Show brought to life.

Last year I called The Siege "eerily, presciently ahead of its time", and the same came be said for The Truman Show, which was also released in 1998, just two years before "Survivor" would fatefully change television programming forever (or at least what appears to be forever). As Christof (Ed Harris) explains in the freaky opening to The Truman Show, "While the world he inhabits is in some respects counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn't always Shakespeare, but it's genuine. It's a life."

Maybe the most disturbing aspect of this analogy, then, is that unlike Truman, Michael Jackson was a real person, and a real person that could always see Christof's control booth and the cameras in his face. He knew that his life was a show, and there was nothing he could do about it other than fight back in song, earlier (1987) with the frustrated pleas of "Leave Me Alone", and later (1995) with the angry hysterics of "Scream".

Or, just as likely, maybe he didn't realize that his life was a show. Never having experienced any other life situation (unlike the Beatles, and Elvis, and Madonna, and every other larger-than-life star), he has to be literally the only person outside of a royal family to live his entire life, from age 5 on, as a prominent international celebrity.

You can ignore everything I've already written here and understand my Michael Jackson-as-Truman Burbank analogy really easily by watching the following five-minute interview on the set of the classic "Beat It" music video. In it, a 24 year-old Jackson admits that he never really went to school and, when pressed, answers that he doesn't really have any "close personal friends" outside of Quincy Jones and Diana Ross. Clearly, he has no concept of any normal social relation to people outside of his family.

Not surprisingly, he casually admits, "I get afraid of...well, I don't know people...I get afraid of people sometimes. It's a whole other life that I - I haven't really experienced that. Like friendship is a thing I'm just beginning to learn about. I was raised on the stage, and that's where I'm comfortable. And everything else is like foreign to me. I'm just beginning to know and learn about people, friendship, things like that."

(Addendum: Well, this is really unbelievable. I honestly had no notion of this fact beforehand, but just now, after having finished and revised this entire post, I poked around the internet to see how many other millions of bloggers focused on the Truman-Jackson connection. There were many, if not nearly as many as I thought.

But what really shocked me was the discovery of an unconfirmed quote, supposedly made in 2002 and supposedly made by The Truman Show director Peter Weir: "You watch The Truman Show and, I mean, Jim Carrey did a fantastic job, but Michael Jackson is Truman. He’s who I based him on and he is the nearest thing to Truman. And Michael Jackson, he is also the real life Victor in Simone. He had a talent and all he wanted was to share this and bring people happiness and escapism through entertainment. And people turn it around, they make it about the individual rather than the creation. It is the actual films, the actual music - that’s what it’s all about… People lose sight of this and the media make it all about the celebrity.”)

Underrated MOTM: The Mosquito Coast (1986)

The Underrated Movie of the Month (MOTM) for March has never received enough attention for my satisfaction. Few critics championed The Mosquito Coast when it was released at Thanksgiving in 1986, and its poor box-office showing led to a quick trip to the shelves of your local video store. (I bet it was one of the last to be converted to DVD, too.) Too bad, because it's an underappreciated movie, a profound story, and an important notch on the career belts of its cast members.

Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and last year's The Walker) adapted Paul Theroux's 1982 novel of the same name, but critics predictably pounced on the effort. "Most of its contents are still there, but they have no particular cumulative impact," said the NYT's Vincent Canby. I haven't read the book, but the screenplay worked quite well for me. I have to say, I don't think it's entirely unfair for critics to always compare a movie and its original source, but it would be nice if they would focus on the movie when they're focusing on the movie. Last year's The Kite Runner, a great film on its own, was never given a fair chance by critics because of the ridiculous expectations that accompanied it. I digress. The criticisms of The Mosquito Coast weren't just about the adaptation anyway. Roger Ebert called it "the type of bore [that] you will not tolerate," the Washington Post had two (?) critics rip it (Rita Kempley and Paul Attanasio), and TIME's Richard Schickel simply asked, "How does a director of Peter Weir's caliber make a miscalculation of this magnitude?"

Fine, it's not a classic, but there's still much to appreciate about this "compelling little movie." For starters, it's an intriguing story: Allie Fox is an unappreciated inventor and an intensely patriotic American - so much so that if he can't live in his America, he's not going to live in any America. Most of us would hop over to Canada, but Fox is not the type to ease into anything, and he wants to get as far away from American culture as possible:

"We eat when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty. We buy what we don't need and throw away everything that's useful. Why sell a man what he wants? Sell him what he doesn't need. Pretend he's got eight legs and two stomachs and money to burn. It's wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. "

Packing up his wife and two kids, the increasingly unpredictable Fox moves his stead to the jungles of the Mosquito Coast of Honduras. He hires some locals and creates an impressive, self-sufficient compound on a river that even includes an ice factory ("Fat Boy"). The family lives comfortably for a short time, but Fox, who now has a God complex, is tragically unprepared for the circumstances - a rising water level, armed bandits and an intrusive missionary. As his family begins to turn on him and his creation is destroyed in various ways, Fox loses control on the way to his tragic end. Paradise Lost.

In addition to this rich narrative, The Mosquito Coast features beautiful cinematography (it was filmed in Belize), a well-suited score, and searing performances. It's no wonder Harrison Ford considers this his favorite film - he's never played a character as dark as Allie Fox. Having rolled out three Star Wars and two Indiana Jones in the nine years before this, he was probably desperate for a "real" character. A year earlier he received his first (and last!) Oscar nomination for Witness, but in my opinion he doesn't carry that film as well as he does The Mosquito Coast.

Of course, his supporting cast here would be the envy of most actors: future Oscar-winner Helen Mirren (The Queen) and the tragically promising River Phoenix, who earlier that year had also starred in Stand By Me. Two years later he would receive an Oscar nod for Running on Empty. The next year, 1989, he would be chosen by Ford to play a young Indy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He last wowed critics in 1991's My Private Idaho, and in 1994, just 8 years after The Mosquito Coast, he was dead of a drug overdose. Young actors are often venerated after untimely deaths, but Phoenix, like Heath Ledger, was truly a unique talent.

And what of director Peter Weir? The year prior he had directed Ford in Witness, earning him his first of four Oscar nominations for Best Director (Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World). He has not directed anything since 2003 (Commander) and neither of his next two projects sound promising to me. Ford, in the meantime, is busy again with Indy after several misfires in a row (Hollywood Homicide, K-19: The Widowmaker, Firewall). Unfortunately, it seems he never found another role like Allie Fox, which some still consider his best-ever performance.

As I've already conceded, The Mosquito Coast doesn't deserve a place on the shelf of Hollywood classics. This trailer is ridiculous (they all were in the 80's) and completely misleading, and the film probably doesn't match the poignancy of the book. However, if you can look past that and appreciate its many positive aspects, you'll find an interesting character study and thought-provoking lessons on religion, family, and the American Dream.