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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 Michael Jackson; television; documentary; jurisprudence; realism;
evidence
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
SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 17 NUMBER 4 (DECEMBER 2007)
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 trial
5
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).
442 D. EPSTEIN AND D. L. STEINBERG
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 complex-
ity 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.),oramore
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).
EVIDENTIARY SPECTACLE AND THE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIAL 443
A third contextualising arena for the trial has been the increasing televisua-
lisation 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 self-
immolating 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.
444 D. EPSTEIN AND D. L. STEINBERG
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, mean-
ings 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).
EVIDENTIARY SPECTACLE AND THE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIAL 445
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) broad-
casting.
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.
446 D. EPSTEIN AND D. L. STEINBERG
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.
EVIDENTIARY SPECTACLE AND THE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIAL 447
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 meta-
narrative 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.
448 D. EPSTEIN AND D. L. STEINBERG
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.
EVIDENTIARY SPECTACLE AND THE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIAL 449
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 representa-
tion, 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
field
29
already imbued with common-senses anchored in the categorical power-
relations 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/homo-
sexual, 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.
450 D. EPSTEIN AND D. L. STEINBERG
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
EVIDENTIARY SPECTACLE AND THE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIAL 451
just part of Michael’s act’’ and designed to cover his secret affections for boys
30
),
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’ ’’.
452 D. EPSTEIN AND D. L. STEINBERG
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.
Erection/hole (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.
EVIDENTIARY SPECTACLE AND THE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIAL 453
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 endanger-
ment, is not logically inter-referential with the first-hand testimonial discussion
that is documented.
Boy in Bath Sequence
.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
454 D. EPSTEIN AND D. L. STEINBERG
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).
EVIDENTIARY SPECTACLE AND THE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIAL 455
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 common-
senses 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 permis-
sive 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 porno-
graphic 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
456 D. EPSTEIN AND D. L. STEINBERG
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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