He Wasn't Supposed to Die!
A London Daily Telegraph article gives a list of 100 facts about Michael Jackson. One fun fact: The fictional character he was trying to imitate with his continuous body modifications was Peter Pan.
Thinking about the way he's looked over the years, I think he had succeeded in doing that, and also in fulfilling to the most humanly possible degree his Peter Pan Syndrome. Becoming a wealthy artist made him capable of following his own fantasy, while simultaneously creating a mythology about himself all over the world — over which, by the way, he had much less control.
And myths never die.
The guy was in pretty good shape physically, despite general fallout from multiple bad cosmetic surgeries and pharmaceuticals to sustain such errors. Beyond the strange anime expression achievement, he looked nowhere near any other "normal" human 50-year-old male that I can think of. His nose eventually resembled the two-dimensional, upturned Disney character feature, and his eyes, facial shape and hair the stereotypical Japanese anime super-heroes: elegantly elongated, effeminate and seductive androgynous creatures, who always break everybody's heart and save everyone's day, even as underdogs. (They also typically have extreme round eyes and very white skin - both very un-Asian traits.)
His body stayed lithe and adolescent, regardless of substances employed to keep in that condition. In the same way, models who are under high pressure to maintain within the body type employ any available scientific and empirical methods to continue resembling the highly abstract and idealized form of that particular esthetic. It also doesn't have much of a basis in real life — hence its popularity: Nobody really looks like that, and to be born with some of those culturally idealized traits, or to be able to modify one's self into them creates the high-prized specialness of the Holy Freak.
In his world he achieved a level of perfection: matching the flawed human to the ideal. In the art milieu, several artists have worked with this concept, most notably Orlan: using cosmetic surgery on herself — and creating performance out of the actual surgeries — as a means to resemble her own esthetic ideals. This differs from Hollywood actors, or general public even, who undergo cosmetic procedures to visually fit the esthetics of the market, or of the current powerbase.
In this respect Jackson was the ultimate performance artist, making his body integral part of his world spectacle, and setting no limits on his private life in order to achieve this personal artistic vision most completely.
He actually was able to remain the eternal teenager, psychically as well as physically. That would be a guess confirmed somewhat by the level of friendships — or even relationships —with young boys he was able to maintain for a long time under wraps.There are two distinct popular schools of thought on this, after his latest scandal-riddled news revelations: one that he is Jackson, the reincarnation of the Archangel Michael (there really was a cult who believed that to be true) — the one who does good for all the children by spreading his message in world-wide unification through catchy music and dance, as he also once claimed; and the other that he is an evil clone of Jackson who took over and monstrously transformed him into an unintelligible, freakish child-molesting tycoon, who in his older years could no longer control himself privately nor publicly. In fact, the more he sought to embrace world causes relevant to children in order to more plainly demonstrate his heartfelt innocence, the more it registered as a strident media ploy to cover up plausibly unlawful activities. His wealth did not help him there. His predicament of dabbling in possibly the last taboo topic of our iconoclastic times —as well as one of the most understudied — did not beg positive media attention with a ten-foot-pole. When he was mentioned, it had to be with an automatic built-in attachment of condemning clause.
So, were these little boys — whose claims against Jackson made him the permanent defiler and scarrer of their innocence — truly the future victims of life-long PTSD and therefore unable to live a functional life because of their intoxicated sleepovers with some rich famous freak,or were they just lucky to have shared some kind of intimacy with one of the greatest pop music geniuses of our time in the weird way he knew how to be intimate?
Depends on which planet you're on.
