A FATE THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY: THE CASE OF JOE JACKSON BY SHELDON TAYLOR

 

 

After watching Michael eight hours ago, I have come away feeling that this film will propel Michael Jackson's legacy further into the stratosphere of perpetual exploration and discovery. Two words describe Jafar Jackson's portrayal of his legendary uncle: encapsulated perfection.  At age 29, Jafar resides in a chronological sweet spot parallel to his late uncle: for the decade of Jackson's entire twenties, his solo and group career would explode into a higher gear. 

Not only does Jafar capture Jackson's soft-spoken autonomy, drive, work ethic, and dynamic onstage performances---he also brings Jackson's lapses of insecurity, doubt, and familial burdens to life that jump off the screen.

While Michael does an excellent job at exploring the infrastructure Jackson's solo success was built on: a powerful record label with deep pockets, a crack legal team, and an experimental and supportive producer---fans well-versed in Jackson's history may take issue with the creative license, uneven historic timelines, and chronological musical sequencing: to play devil's advocate---Michael deftly avoids copying the 1992 miniseries. The film stands firmly on its own as a timeless music biopic parallel to 1993's Tina Turner biopic, What's Love Got To Do With It.

Both films have a kinship that goes beyond their mercurial depictions of Jackson and Turner. They also include masterful portrayals of Ike Turner and Joe Jackson by Laurence Fishburne and Colman Domingo. Born three years and two hours (geographically) apart---Ike and Joe are kindred spirits born in the Deep South in the twenties and thirties, raised by male parental figures rationing out discipline with an aggressive hand. Both inherit a detached coldness as adults with a fierce desire to control their inner sanctums. 

 Ike---sexually abused by adult women as a child---uses sex and brazen physical force (singer and sexual abuser survivor Lou Rawls would do the same) to ensure that his personal/professional universe revolves around him. During a 2008 Ebony interview ("The Last Days of Ike Turner"), Ike reflected on his turbulent past: "That's probably why every relationship I was in was surrounded by sex. Sex was power to me."

Michael finds Joe leaning on intimidation to rule his roost: Menacing glares. A hair-trigger temper. When Katherine (gracefully played by Nia Long) defends Michael's decision to fire Joe as his manager, Joe hovers over her like a cobra ready to strike — an exchange that sparks conversation between them when Michael is over. As I pulled off, a final indictment from the couple lingers: speculation that Joe may have also been abusive to his wife. 

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in Gary, Indiana, the city was saturated with blue-collar Joe Jackson-types: products of the Great Migration. Stoic and sleep-deprived, they were mighty enough to pull regular double shifts but often not strong enough to foster nurturing relationships with their children. 

I've seen Joe's icy detachment between father and son when visiting friends. I've witnessed friends' carefree demeanor morph into mental anguish when their mother arrived from work, wielding displaced aggression from the door as her children ran for cover or cowered in fear. On one occasion, she savagely beat her oldest, sending him out of the house shirtless and barefoot, evoking biblical scripture ( "spare the rod, spoil the child") and southern "home training," both rooted in post-traumatic slave disorder. Children were "seen, not heard." Submission was a way of life. 

Nearly a generation removed from the commonplace physical discipline of my time, Joe's ease with the belt still felt unverving. Watching young Michael select a belt for his beating as his bedroom door closed seemed downright torturous. Coupled with his depiction as a domineering and coercive dollar-chasing manager of a family act, Domingo's portrayal is Oscar-worthy. If he wins, it will either evoke celebration of his artistic mastery or spark grumbles of systemic typecasting- the kind leveled at Denzel Washington's Academy Award-winning portrayal in Training Day.

Joe's gifts lay in his stewardship and instincts. When he moved the family west in 1970, his forceful protection of his children ensured they wouldn't succumb to the era's fatal drug culture, claiming the lives of rock luminaries (Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons, Brian Jones) all by  the average age of  27. 

Under Joe's watch, the Jackson Five never suffered the fate of their 50s predecessors Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers-- exploited and cast aside. He plucked his sons from a declining Chicago record industry, ensuring they wouldn't be a regional big fish in a small pond. Bypassing a prime TV performance to ensure national exposure, he steered them to Motown, and when the label's machine became too creatively stifling, he took the group to CBS, negotiating creative control for the group and a solo deal for Michael. 

When the Jackson Five were in career limbo and dismissed as bubble gum soul has-beens, Joe retooled the act, adding other Jackson siblings to create a self-contained Vegas family act. He helped secure a summer television series. He steered sister Janet towards a recording career. During her 2022 television documentary series, she returned to Gary and wept with gratitude for Joe's guiding the family away from their bleak surroundings to unpredictable success.

For all of Joe's managerial instincts and forward thinking, his presence was a source of conflict at Motown or with the management team of DeMann and Wesiner, whom he hired to co-manage his sons. That conflict would eventually result in his sons terminating his services. Joe's shortsightedness was evident in his criticism of  Quincy Jones ("Qwancy ain't no damn producer. I know a producer who could have made that record for twenty-five thousand")

Domingo's Joe is a perfect foil to Jafar's Michael. Their onscreen tug-of-war is a match made in heaven. There is a downside: in this era, biopics (and documentaries) inform as well as entertain, leaving a literal mental imprint that's unerasable. Just as Otis Williams from 1998's Temptations television miniseries lives on not as a guiding force of a talented group prone to dysfunction---but as a less talented and jealous group member defined by scene-stealing lines---Joe Jackson's fate may live on in villainous infamy, destined to rest between well-deserved or demonization.