This is It: a film about the extinction of Michael Jackson

There's still time to see the extended run of This Is It , the Michael Jackson documentary that has risen, in popularity and acclaim, every day since it opened last Tuesday, at midnight.

I went to a critics' screening: In such screenings, the critics sit as still as stones in the back, laughing quietly, now and then, at obscure matters – “He looks pale, but Harry Muller's colour timing may be off!"

One lush scene involves the decimation of a rain forest, which many tsk tsk'd: Horrifying, however is the unspoken truth, that this is a film about Michael Jackson's extinction.

Outside, hard-core fans were lined up in full regalia. When we left, several of them, and rightfully so, sneered at our utter lack of glamour and style. In my defence, I wore a gold and black MJ T-shirt, and applauded and sobbed openly during the screening.

The movie made $101-million (U.S.) worldwide so far, roughly what the poor man would have made doing 50 gruelling shows for notoriously demanding English audiences.

Directed by Kenny Ortega, the film has received great accolades, but this posthumous acclaim is tempered by the fact that Jackson lived, for the last two years of his life, in Las Vegas; ignored and despised, he would not have been able to mount a show in the same Los Angeles arena he rehearsed in, and was eventually exhibited in: a corpse in a golden coffin.

The reactionary observations of willfully obtuse film critics aside – the kind who call films like Chocolat “Delicious!" – This Is It is both a great film and a good barometric reading of the changing public sentiment toward Jackson, so long the main attraction in the media's vile freak show.

As This Is It continues to garner excellent and emotionally charged reviews, reviews that recall Maya Angelou's commemorative poem that states, again and again, incredulously, “We had him."

Everywhere one looks, it seems, an entire town (on Sunday it was the Aberdeenshire town of Huntly) is performing the Thriller dance en masse; conducting a séance; or starting a bidding war over the same Ed Hardy bulldog pants Jackson wears so well during one rehearsal.

And this sort of fame will last for years until many of us will not be able to believe, as Angelou predicted, that we had him and let him go.

Hopefully, the first fever of kitsch (the busts, costumes and decorative plates) and early days grief will break, and more measured, scholarly work will emerge about Jackson's artistry.

Seeing This Is It is a deeply affective experience: Seeing Jackson alive and powerful is made particularly potent by virtue of his tragic demise, of course, and the relentless rumours about his physical condition near the end. The tabloids would have us believe he had turned into one of the ghouls he created in the 1996 short film Ghosts ; his biographer, Ian Halperin, one of Jackson's best defenders, would attempt to persuade us that this elegant man was dressing, after midnight, in little frocks, and carrying on seamy liaisons with construction workers in filthy hotel rooms.

In other words, things were so bad for Jackson, less than six months ago, that to be described in Halperin's exposé as a thrift-store drag queen, carrying on in a rat-infested motel and squealing (the often-quoted) “The King of Pop wants to lick your lollipop!" was a valiant defence of the man's character.

This Is It not only disabuses us of the wretched image we shared, of the nose-less, Oxycodone-jacking mutant who was said to have wandered listlessly through his rehearsals, the film focuses, critically, on the artistry behind Jackson's music and dancing.

As boring as references to his chimpanzee Bubbles and hyperbaric chambers are, more boring is the popular notion that Jackson, who, in spite of naming his children after his great-grandfather, an Alabama plantation slave, was a self-hating black man who metamorphosed into a white woman.

White intellectuals love nothing more than to posture, in a Black Like Me

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