The Face of Ruin: Evidentiary Spectacle and the Trial of Michael Jackson

Abstract

The Michael Jackson trial represented a spectacular and, indeed, macabre event on a global scale. The trial keyed into a number of contemporaneous cultural anxieties and fascinations. These include: a seemingly inexhaustible popular craving for celebrity, excess and scandal; the totalising proliferation of surveillance culture; the “corruption” of jurisprudence itself through the televisualisation of criminal trials (most notably that of OJ Simpson); the mediatised proliferation of “paedophilia”; and, perhaps most profoundly, Michael Jackson himself as a figure of rupture and ruin. This paper focuses on the British television documentary, Michael Jackson's Boys, which was aired in the United Kingdom one week prior to the start of the 2005 Michael Jackson trial on charges of child sexual abuse and abduction. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the trial. This is followed by an explication of our social semiotic approach to the analysis of the film, including a discussion of our theoretical tools. We then provide a summary of the key terms and storylines set out in Michael Jackson's Boys. In the main body of the paper, we explore three arising themes that are embedded and emblematised in this instance. The first of these themes is the intense cultural fascination with Michael Jackson as a monstrous figure. A second theme concerns the nature of evidence and the cultural production of the evidentiary. The third theme is the proliferation of cruelty realism as a subgenre of televisual representation that has infiltrated wider arenas of social practice.

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