If you weren’t paying close attention, you might think of “The Way You Make Me Feel” as one of Michael Jackson’s weaker, less interesting music video films. However, this video has always interested me much more than the song alone. Everything Michael Jackson did as an adult came back to an exploration of himself, of course, as a symbol for many concepts–celebrity, masculinity, gender, race, beauty–and this video is dear to me for all of that.
Beyond Michael’s personal mirror, I see the film and its choreography as a hymn to gender fluidity and a melodramatic reenactment of traditional masculinity as a performance and the chasing/conquest of women by men as performance for other people rather than for the actual pleasure of the man or woman involved in the chase. His seduction is really a show-off to the admiring dudes watching in awe.
This is complicated by his appearance and, for that matter, Tatiana Thumbtzen’s appearance. The song appeared on Bad, which means the year was 1987. The 80s could be called the decade of the Supermodel. Who were the icons of feminine beauty back then? Elle Macpherson, Christy Turlington, Claudia Schiffer, Linda Evangelista, Christie Brinkley, Helena Christensen, Cindy Crawford. Compared to the constantly changing almost faceless cast of female fashion models today, those women were icons, superstars, and compared to the bony, starved, androgynous body type preferred by the industry today, those women were buxom, curvy, sensuously fleshy. Compared to those women, the late 80s standard of the feminine, Tatiana Thumbtzen is downright hard, sinewy, broad-shouldered, boyish…in a word, androgynous.
Sublimated gender and androgyny are some of Michael Jackson’s most consistently explored topics and this video is a nine and a half minute visual dissertation on them. Michael is the protagonist in the video and is clearly the least traditionally masculine in appearance, surrounded by loud, posturing men, some fat, some big and imposing, some tattooed and sporting unkempt facial hair, swaggering and engaging in ghetto male rituals of playacting violence with one another. The older man advises Michael to stop trying so hard to act like that kind of man, to admit that he doesn’t want to be that kind of man, that kind of person, and to “just be himself.” The group of hoodlums teases Michael, saying he doesn’t know anything about women (implying: he knows nothing about being a man; implying: being a man is being an aggressive hoodlum), and then we get our first close shot of Michael’s face.
And it’s a strikingly delicate, pretty face, with smooth, light, even skin, eyeshadow and eyeliner. A tendril of wavy hair fallen in front of one eye. It’s almost viscerally shocking, how much more “feminine” he looks compared to the group of tough guys we were just watching, how much prettier he is than the girl he’s supposed to be pursuing, how much more delicate and frail he looks than her, strutting by with her wide shoulders and bare, well-formed arms. She passes him and we linger on his face as he takes a deep breath, his chest heaving like a woman in a Victorian novel. Something builds in him. Just past the three minute mark, it escapes in a yell, teeth bared like an animal: “Hey!”
When he turns, he has swapped gender cues again, he’s a man, he’s going to show you that he’s a man, baring his teeth, curling his lip like Elvis, emphasizing his jaw. His pivot is not womanly, it’s stiff and tense, like a gunslinger at dawn after ten paces, deeply reminiscent of scenes from Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon A Time in the West” and other such classics. To reinforce that old Western movie image, we get a quick cut to Michael’s hand as though he might pull out a weapon but it’s just a trick; his fingers explode in the vague shape of a gun. We smile; don’t we?
Only after all this does the song actually start. There’s no need to analyze in depth the choreography that we know so intimately by now, but the one important thing about it in this case is how crudely sexual it is, in diametric opposition to the lyrics he’s singing. Take, for instance, the sequence just before the five minute mark, where he exhorts the woman to “kiss me baby and tell me twice that you’re the one for me.” These lyrics seem sweet and childlike in their simplicity, something the boy next door would say–yet he grimaces through them at the head of a menacing crowd of men, while pantomiming a vigorous grinding with his hands and thrusting hips. The woman, momentarily disgusted, shakes her head and runs away. The action seems designed to obtain this result from nearly any woman, but the actions are not for the woman–they never are. The acts are for the benefit of the men watching, who had fallen into step with Michael and become satisfied that he is a real man.
He pulls away from the crowd to chase her and again the lyrics and dance moves flip, opposing each other. He catches up with her and proceeds to shuffle, hop and point in some cross between Bob Fosse, hiphop and ballet styles of dance, showing off his precise, elegant, dare I say feminine, moves, occasionally thrusting his pelvis to remind us of his cock, while singing that he’ll work all day to buy her things (like a man should, right?). Around 6:15 he breaks into a hip-jutting runway model walk. This sequence is like putting gender in a blender. And in the end, he gets the girl.
No, it’s not his biggest budget number, it doesn’t have the best story or the coolest costumes and graphics. It’s not the technological achievement that “Scream” or “Black or White” was, nor the smash hit that “Thriller” was. But taken in the context of the artists’ life and oeuvre, it is a fascinating music video, that’s for damned sure.
