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So. That happened. The bizarre spectacle of Michael Jackson's funeral was everywhere yesterday, and the most talked-about moment was when Michael's daughter, Paris Jackson, went up on stage and told the world, "Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so much." Her Aunt Janet softly urged her forward and said, "speak up." Though I don't doubt Paris's emotion was genuine, the thing felt creepily staged. By the family's account, Paris wanted to say something at the memorial. But that doesn't mean the Jackson family should have let her.
I'm all for public grieving, and for Paris to have spoken at a family funeral would have been entirely appropriate and I'm sure cathartic. But having her grieve in front of the entire world felt incredibly exploitative. The only other public funeral in recent years of this magnitude was the death of Princess Diana in 1997. Her sons, William and Harry, were largely left alone by the press. They did not mourn their mother in public until a decade after her passing, when they were ages 22 and 25. The Jackson kids are going to face enough scrutiny for the rest of their lives. To allow this child to put herself out there in this manner just seemed wrong. Video is below.
Photograph of the Jackson family by Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images.
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Jessica, though there were plenty of things to be creeped out by during the Michael Jackson memorial service yesterday, for me Paris Jackson’s short and tearful tribute to her father didn’t number among them. In fact (along with Brooke Shields’ speech and Jermaine Jackson’s vocally unsure but heartbreaking performance of “Smile”), Paris' appearance struck me as one of the day’s few uncreepy moments. Given that Paris and her brothers have been made to wear Halloween masks in public for most of their lives, I can understand why it might have been meaningful for her to step forward in public with her own face on.
Far ickier was the whitewashing of Jackson family dysfunction in the speech of Al Sharpton (has he ever said anything more demonstrably untrue than “wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy”?) and in that horrid occasional poem by Maya Angelou, read by Queen Latifah. In addition to being just an atrocious piece of doggerel (“now that our bright and shining star could slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind …”), Angelou’s poem was awash in pious falsehoods: “Despite the anguish of life, he was sheathed in mother love and family love …” Obviously a funeral is not the place to probe old wounds, but give me a break. Joe Jackson’s ruthless careerism, and the allegations of abuse leveled by several of his children, are well known, and if Katherine Jackson really let all that happen, she must be a world-class enabler. (Joe’s self-defense is chillingly clueless: "I never beat him … I whipped him with a stick and a belt.”) In the looming custody battle between the Jacksons and her biological mother Debbie Rowe, Paris will need all the poise and courage she showed at the podium yesterday.
Photograph of Al Sharpton by Mario Anzuoni-Pool/Getty Images.
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Sorry Dana, but I’m with Jess on Paris. The contrasts contained in the moment of her speech, to be really eloquent about it, freaked me the eff out. Here’s a young girl, a daughter, having a genuine, raw moment of grief and she’s surrounded by a bunch of… actors. Her authenticity was matched in pitch only by the performativeness in the people surrounding her, these totally dysfunctional family members putting on a show of solidarity, projecting protectiveness with their shoulders, but wholly aware they were making a YouTube moment with their minds. Janet Jackson done up like Jackie O, specifically, made me feel like I was watching some David Lynch dream sequence likely to give me nightmares.
While watching the funeral it also occurred to me that the saga of Michael Jackson’s death has followed the exact same arc as his life: What began as wholesome, heartfelt, feel-good celebration of talent and music has transformed at break neck speed into a twisted, creepy kind of mass denial about the dark side of celebrity. This whole thing has gone pear shaped, fast.
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Jessica, I saw nothing cruel or exploitative about allowing Paris Jackson to speak about her dad and I’m inclined to believe the Jackson family didn’t force her to do so. According to several news reports, Janet Jackson was slated to speak but let Paris speak instead because she wanted to say something about her father. I watched the whole thing and found the memorial to be tasteful and well-executed, not the bizarre spectacle you describe.
Perhaps after seeing such an outpouring of emotion for her dad, Paris was moved to be more than a just a front row spectator. I'm glad she got that moment. Hopefully it will serve as an emotional touchstone for her and not as a source of deep pain and embarrassment when she’s grown up and looks back on that widely broadcasted day. Maybe she’ll be reminded that despite all the things, good and bad, that have been said and written about her dad, regardless of the media’s obsession with his bizarre and tragic life and the public’s schizophrenic fascination and repulsion toward him, at the end of the day she was the one person who reminded everyone else that he was a human being. That he was her dad and he loved her, and as importantly, that she loved him too. On that stage, her love for him seemed pure and simple. There were probably not many people in MJ’s orbit that the same could be said of with any certainty. Paris and her siblings gave MJ something that not even his most committed fans could give him and that his clearly dysfunctional family never gave him, but he seemed to always crave — unconditional love. As heartbreaking as her moment on stage was to watch, Paris was able to profoundly humanize MJ with just 26 words and in a way that no one else could.
Yes, allowing her to speak was risky but prohibiting her from speaking could have hurt her too. Children are much more resilient than we give them credit for. When my mother died last fall, my little niece and nephew spoke at her memorial service. My niece was 9, my nephew 13. I was afraid they would fall apart but instead they spoke lovingly and in surprisingly great detail about how their grandmother touched their lives. It was very cathartic for them and for us adults too. I know that’s not the same as being on stage in front of 20,000 people and hundreds of television cameras, but my point is that speaking allowed my niece and nephew to take part in the celebration of my mother’s life and helped them to understand that that her death was part of the cycle of life and was not something to fear or despair inconsolably over but something to accept and understand. Children are often sidelined at funerals and memorials because adults want to protect their feelings. As a kid, I was always very scared and sad at funerals. I felt like I an outsider at a very adult ritual of grief and regret.
Now that MJ is gone, I think it’s possible for his kids to eventually have somewhat normal lives—albeit not in the short term and not during the next few years of custody and other legal battles expected over his estate—absent of round-the-clock paparazzi and outside the constant glare of the media spotlight. That is if their guardians protect them and they don’t grow up to be scandal-prone musicians, movie stars, attention-seeking children of once famous parents or, heaven forbid, freakish media magnets like their father.
Photograph of Paris Jackson at her father's memorial service by Mark Terrill-Pool/Getty Images.
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Whew Willa, you offer some tricky psychoanalysis here. None of us can say what the Jacksons were thinking on that stage with Paris, or what they were trying to project to the YouTube audience. What we can safely say is that despite being a dysfunctional family, they are clearly a family in grief. I think it’s unfair to try to interpret their intentions. Would it have been better, or more believable, if they had not embraced Paris and just stood off to the side and whispered to her to suck it up? Is it really that implausible that with Michael now gone they would want to surround his children in a protective cocoon? To pass the love they felt for him—and yes, even dysfunctional families can show and feel love—on to his children? Only a heartless person could have resisted the urge to hug that child at that moment.
As for Janet’s supposed nod to Jackie O, come on. Is it the sole domain of Jackie O to project a certain sartorial sensibility when grieving? I recall Jackie O wearing a black veil at JFK’s funeral, not a very hip black beret. What exactly was so nightmarish about Janet’s outfit? What female star hasn’t dressed glamorously for a widely televised funeral? Call her outfit cliché maybe, but when you point to it as an example of Janet’s inauthentic nature you're on shaky ground. Janet and her sisters didn’t look any different than lots of rich, glamorous women attending a rich and glamorous funeral. (And by the way, hats, all kinds of hats, are a staple of black funerals.) What should Janet have worn? The outfit from her wardrobe malfunction moment during the halftime show at the XXVIII Super Bowl?
There was no mass denial about the dark side of celebrity at the memorial service; everyone present and the millions watching on television knew full well that MJ was very much a victim of his celebrity and and his upbringing. Berry Gordy for one (no exemplar of high ethical standards himself) made a gentle reference to "sad times and questionable decisions on his part." Still, after nearly two weeks of non-stop coverage of MJ’s death and countless stories dissecting every dark corner of his life, is a memorial service attended by those who loved and admired him really the place for critiques about how he lived his life? I have yet to see such a memorial for any famous person, or non-famous person for that matter. It’s pretty well accepted that funerals and memorials are occasions where the deceased is celebrated, not picked apart for his failings. The survivors usually focus on the good and leave the bad stuff for another day. I sure hope my family and friends follow this tradition when I’m gone and not treat my departure as some sort of collective analysis of all that was wrong with me. That would surely bum out my spirit.
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So between Marjorie and an e-mail from a friend, I'm going to recant a bit about Paris Jackson speaking at her father's funeral. I can’t take back that on a gut level I found the entire spectacle off-putting, but I ought to have reminded myself that being in the limelight can be tough, especially when you're having real feelings. What's genuine seems staged, what's staged is supposed to be genuine, it's hard to parse the difference, and the difference hardly matters. When grieving, no one should have to concern herself with what other people think, even if the “other people” number 30 million.
As my friend, whose mother died when she was 14, said in an e-mail taking me to task for not being more generous to Paris Jackson:
From the point of view of someone who did speak at the funeral of her parent, I can tell you that I honestly felt that if I hadn't said something, if I had just remained silent and let everyone else do the talking, I would have done a disservice to my mother. Everyone keeps saying they "Feel so sorry for the children," but one of the groups who actually benefits from seeing Paris talk is other kids who’ve lost their parents, getting to watch a peer grieve and go through what they’re going through. There is something comforting about watching another member of that club—a club no one wants to join, but one that offers a lot of succor to those who are in it.
It’s the ultimate trump card, and I, for one, can’t argue with it.
