Comebacking

There’s a whole sub-genre of modern entertainment to ponder — “the comeback” — when watching This Is It, Michael Jackson’s posthumous razzle-dazzle in the guise of rehearsal footage for an upcoming (but destined never to be) tour.

In the comeback, we usually get to see a musical legend (or Hollywood diva) battered and bruised by the slings and arrows of misfortune, whether of their own making or the world’s, climb back up onstage to prove their incandescence. We’ve seen it with Elvis Presley (whose 1968 “comeback special” for TV was a sly way of reconnecting with his own ghosts, mastering them, teaching them to rock again — only to dress them up in sequins and send them off to Vegas shortly thereafter.)

Dylan came back again and again — sometimes as a rocker, other times as a born again Christian, then of late as an eerie warbler of critically acclaimed albums marching through a ghostly American history. Leonard Cohen also came back last year, after his manager reportedly swindled him blind, to stage a series of concerts and sing his back catalogue like no other.

Then there’s the Edith Piaf comeback: a series of concerts in 1959 at the Paris Olympia where, after years of morphine and alcohol addiction, she took the stage again to move people to tears (dramatized in the Oscar winner La Vie en Rose).

I was thinking of Edith Piaf while watching This Is It. Michael, wearing a big-shouldered jacket that looks like it was designed for Mickey (or Minnie) Mouse crossed with Ziggy Stardust, stands midstage to discuss production details with director Kenny Ortega. With his halting, lilting voice, curled locks and perpetual sunglasses, he gives off an aura of some 1940s Hollywood dame, I just couldn’t decide which one. There’s a little Nora Desmond in the way he occupies space, something a co-musician calls “Michael’s world.” He does resemble Piaf a bit, a much taller Piaf, or maybe he has simply absorbed the whole “comeback” morphology and all that it entails.

There’s a sense of something at stake in Jackson’s rehearsals. Indeed, there was: Jackson’s fortune had drastically sunk by the time he was preparing for this tour. He had spent a decade in artistic (if not pharmacological) coma until rousing himself, at age 50, to make the comeback. It’s a story as old as Hollywood, one ingrained in American music.

Make no mistake: Michael Jackson was a great artist, a great performer — when he could be bothered. My wife and I saw him perform in Manila and, though we could tell he was lip-synching through part of the performance, it was clear that production and dance were the real deal for Jackson. To appreciate MJ, you have to appreciate a long history of dance, most of it coming from Hollywood musicals, the Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire and Judy Garland production numbers; also apparent is that Jackson always had soul, and understood funk (the instrumental break in Got to Be Starting Something during This Is It — where Jackson instructs his guitarist to make the solo even funkier — proves it). It’s just that all these things shared equal space in Michael’s world with kitsch, sentimentality, showbiz mawkishness.

Also an understandable amount of hostility. MJ’s hand gestures while dancing are usually thought to be an assimilation of street moves — the crotch grab, the dismissive hand flick. He employs these during lines from songs that touch, angrily it seems, on his public image. And for a guy who sings about “The Man in the Mirror” and “Heal the World,” there’s a lot of machine-gun imagery and proto-fascistic footage of marching dancers in This Is It.

It’s perhaps unfair to judge Jackson’s comeback bid from a series of rehearsals that necessarily show the performer holding back. At one point, he complains that he has to “save his voice,” even though a squadron of adoring dancers are front of stage, egging him on. Despite this, he does a smoking duet with female singer Judith Hill on I Just Can’t Stop Losing You, trading phrases, reaching down for the soul interjections. It’s the real deal.

Lavish production numbers are featured on computer screens, including thousands of CGI-duplicated dancer/soldiers in They Don’t Care About Us and elaborate green-screen segments where the singer shares space with Hollywood icons Rita Hayworth and Humphrey Bogart. But this just underscores the fact that we never see the final production numbers performed onstage — the CGI effects are simply intercut with rehearsal footage of Jackson and his dancers.

MJ seems to possess his own vocabulary, something the hired musicians seem bemused over at times. He stops one number to tell the keyboardist to “simmer” longer, and simplify his lines: “Let it bathe in the moonlight.” This advice puzzles the keyboardist, Mo Pleasure, who says, “I totally get what you’re sayin’, I’m just adding the booty.” This makes MJ do a double-take; he smiles and says, “That’s funny. ‘Adding the booty...’” But you wonder how close the guy came to getting fired. The keyboardist shrugs and tells the other band members, “Okay, let’s see what we got, simmer-wise...”

“Sizzle” is another MJ favorite. He uses this word to stretch a routine longer — past the simmer point, seemingly.

Another word Michael invokes a lot is “shine,” as in “This is your time to shine,” a gesture he confers upon female guitarist Orianthi Panagaris, telling her to hit the highest notes during her solo in Black or White.

Like a classic Hollywood diva, or Barbara Streisand, he uses the word “love” a lot, tossing it around in his midst as though only he has the power to dispense it. This may be true. Jackson, in fact, is the moneymaker here. Like any diva, or any black entertainer in American history, he probably learned early on where to draw the line on rebellious performers or collaborators. But there is, too, a generosity about letting them, um, “shine” during rehearsals, something not all bandleaders allow. (Onstage in the ‘80s, during another “comeback,” Lou Reed would famously walk over to his guitarist Robert Quine’s amps and turn down his volume mid-solo when he thought it should end.)

Jackson himself declared this tour would be the last one, something perhaps to shore up his battered and blemished legacy. It feels more like a behind-the-scenes eulogy, and though we get glimpses of what made Jackson an artist and a steely performer, it leaves us wondering why, ultimately, he decided to hit the road again. After the brouhaha over his death, you also wonder why Jackson’s estate, AEG and Sony (which paid $60 million for the rehearsal footage and has easily recouped this through overseas ticket sales) decided to release This Is It. There’s an eerily prophetic bit of CGI during the Thriller number, where thousands of ghouls straight from the boneyard are shown ascending to the sky, arms wide, like a Dali painting. This is superimposed over a shot of Jackson standing onstage, arms also outstretched. The effect is less Christ-like than one might expect.